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At the moment am sitting on the back deck of the rental house with sister 1, Farmkid, Nephew 2, and Mom, and there’s a doe standing at the bottom of the porch steps watching us waiting for Nephew 2 to go get her another apple. He threw her all the apple cores we had and her response to having things thrown at her was to immediately assume (correctly) they were food. I’ve never been given begging eyes by a deer.
Farmkid just handed me a note from the tooth fairy. One of her teeth fell out last night, and the note here was from the PA tooth fairy saying a transfer was arranged to her regular fairy.
Oh gosh the deer just went and peed at the edge of the yard. Had never witnessed that before. How magical. Deer pee.
Yesterday we all went and drove up Camelback Mtn and did a little loop hike along it, and then drove to various of the other parking lots on it to read the informational placards. For the hike I of course wore my hiking boots, the only ones I own, which it happens are rather vintage– veterans of the 2018 trip to Kyrgyzstan but before that I know they went to London in 2008 and honestly I think they went to Greece in 1995. I meant to buy new ones and never did, and on this hike the sole started peeling off the heel, and it turns out the foam layer under the outer rubber layer has begun to disintegrate. So it’s time for new hiking boots, and also I hope the hikes we’re going on the rest of this trip aren’t strenuous.
The first day we were here, I had dug out my old Tevas from high school to wear as water shoes into the pond here, which is fairly muddy and gross, and the sole started to peel off both of them so we bought superglue and I’ve repaired them.
“You need new shoes,” my mother said both times, scandalized. I meant to buy myself a bunch of new stuff for this vacation and didn’t get around to it. To be fair I’d replaced the Tevas already, but then tore out the strap of one of the new ones because I bought cheap knockoffs and wore them in rather deep mud.
[Am currently supervising my nephew as he kayaks on the pond. this involves not moving from my post on the back deck, letting my mother and sister oversee breakfast instead. poor me. he has just come in so i’m off the hook but i’m not running inside yet.] [We rented this house specifically because we know the kids are young enough to need supervision in the water but we could tell the water was visible from the house, so the adult on lifeguard duty can also be doing other stuff. Having someone chained to the beach at the whim of the children is a drag, especially if one of the children doesnt’ want to stay on the beach. The pond here is not the most amazing body of water and in drier years probably isn’t really swimmable, but this year it’s perfect.]
Yesterday while eating lunch at Camelback Mountain a spotted lanternfly landed on my mother, who identified it immediately as the unwelcome invasive that was on wanted posters all over the park. She knocked it to the ground and Farmsister immediately killed it. Then one of the children spotted another on the tree next to the table, and it took three of us to bring it down and kill it, and then they saw a third one and did the same.
Mom dutifully called the Report Spotted Lanternflies hotline but was put on hold, so she hung up and completed the online form instead.
All day, every plant we asked Farmsister what it was. (She studied botany as an undergraduate.) And every bird, Mom identified (including, specifically, that this little brown bird was a tree sparrow)– she’s a lifelong birdwatcher and also took a correspondence course on ornithology a couple years back).
We all also looked around at the view every opportunity. (At one scenic overlook Farmsister pointed out urgently to Nephew 1, “That is a cliff edge, child, do not inconvenience me by falling over it,” and clarified later “well of course I’d save him but do you think I would let him forget that for a day of his life?”) We all noted a funny gap in the mountains and later found out that was in fact the Delaware Water Gap, which now we understand why it was called that.
Later, back at home, Farmsister gave the children a stern emphatic lecture not to go out into the yard without shoes, since some previous renters here had broken glass around the firepit and not cleaned it up. “I do not want to have to find out what Pennsylvania’s emergency rooms are like,” she said earnestly.
This is her parenting style in a nutshell, LOL.
On the way back from the morning’s outing, the car with the adults in it (the moms and kids were in one minivan, and then me, Mom, 3, and Dude were in Mom’s jeep) paused to pick up some grocery supplies, at a grocery store called Weis Mart. Mom misheard it and said “Wife Mart?? What kind of place is this???” but alas we did not get any wives at the wife mart. Dude found the tomato paste by overhearing some other shopper comment on having finally found it after scouring the store, and came out very triumphantly with a little can of it. V amusing.
I kayaked around this little lake and discovered several things, not least of which that I don’t like kayaking. It’s squirrelly and i don’t like having to paddle on both sides, and it was just– wobbly the whole time. I’m much more comfortable in a canoe.
Farmkid took a turn in the kayak. there’s a rock most of the way across the lake that the older niblings all had kayaked to, gotten out and stood on, and then come back. But it was rather a struggle for the youngest one, Other Niece, to do it, and Farmkid’s 18mos younger than her and a far inferior swimmer. So we said, “do not attempt the rock,” and she agreed and then paddled way far out. She made decent headway at first so we let her, but then we noticed she was mostly just going in circles, and we said “why don’t you come back here,” and she agreed but then could not stop going in circles. She’d lost the knack of getting the thing to go straight.
Nephew 2, the most helpful of the crew, had already gone inside and taken his evening shower and come back out, so he was not willing to leap into the pond. But Other Niece was still in her bathing suit, so after a little interlude of too many adults probably trying to coach Farmkid through paddling back when she doesn’t know left from right so shouting “left! left! ok now right!” wasn’t really having much effect (also she’d scootched forward out of the proper seat, so her paddling was spinning the boat much more than it should have), Other Niece leapt into the water, swam out, and towed Farmkid back to shore. Halfway back, Farmkid bailed out of the kayak, and then they both swam back towing it, which was cute. FK only quite recently got good at swimming, but Other Niece was born in a house with an inground pool and so was taught to float in infancy and has been able to swim underwater since she was three. Still, she was very proud of herself for rescuing her cousin.
It was time for bed, and everyone came inside to have dessert and then brush teeth, and that was when Farmkid’s tooth came out, which occasioned much excitement. (Her mother pulled it for her, after it wiggled so much it couldn’t be brushed. There’d been much discussion of this beforehand, of whether it would be all right. FK is far enough in her deciduous-tooth journey that it’s not as scary as it was at first. She’s intermittently a very timid and very brave child and you just never know which you’ll get.
I had some really funny story i was going to tell from the day but now I just can’t remember what it was, alas. I thought if I rambled it’d come back to me, but no dice. Oh the other thing we did is that– well, Nephew 2 stole his mom’s phone to text me last week to ask if I’d bring the leatherworking tools, knowing I had some of my own and thus had inherited Dad’s leather stuff. He wants to learn to do it, himself, and this wasn’t unreasonable except that I was already gone from home and so had to ask Dude to go on a scavenger hunt through the basement. He did well, though, and turned up with most of the supplies needed. Yesterday we cleaned a roll of moldy leather from Dad’s closet, and then used a deer hide I had previously owned and both nephews and I each made a simple wallet I found a pattern for online and hand-drew onto a piece of paper since we don’t have a printer here. (It was like three pieces, the middle of which had a flap that was secured by a strap on one side. Ah it was this one https://www.weaverleathersupply.com/catalog/cp_/shop-by-project/corter-leather/wallets/flap-wallet-with-free-pattern, though I admit I did not watch the video because I don’t watch videos.) I freehanded it onto a piece of paper, checked the size using Dude’s wegman’s shopper’s club card, traced three copies onto the leather, and then let the boys cut their own out, and then used Dad’s stitch-marking wheel, showed them how to use an awl (with a thick bit of scrap leather underneath so as not to damage the table here) to pre-punch the stitching, and then walked them through the concept of saddle-stitching. I didn’t look it up, so my starting method was probably idiosyncratic but I kind of used the method you use in 18th c hand stitching, where you start and then go backwards a bit and cover up the starting tail with no knot.
Anyway that went well, and I still have most of the deer hide left so maybe we’ll do more leatherworking today. Those boys and their dad are planning to go into business making welded/forged/woodworked items, and they want to add leatherworking to their arsenal.
The type A sisters (1 and 4) have not made any Plans for us for today so possibly there’ll be time for like. napping and such. who knows. I haven’t managed to drag Dude into the water at all, though as he can’t swim and you can’t touch bottom in most of this pond he probably won’t care for it that much. (Your picture was not posted)
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