Happy Father's Day

Here's to dads everywhere, especially ours, who is fun to climb on both in and out of the water and who is always so engaged with Will and Owen -- in play, in conversations, in music-making, art projects, and adventure-taking. We're lucky to have him.



We spent our father's day swimming, playing mini golf, riding the train and taking a paddle boat ride at Robin Lake Beach at Callaway. And later we went out to dinner and delivered our homemade cards to Rob. At the end of it all, Will decided that we should have a "Kids Day" too and he's plotting it for "the second day when Uncle Graham is here." Fair enough, I say, so we'll be having an inaugral Kid's Day on July 3. We all have to have fun together, and Will has stipulated that the adults must draw cards for the kids.

Tadpole captives

Yesterday, the boys and I explored Flatrock Park, which is becoming one of our favorite close-to-home settings for little adventures. We started the day with our first mini-rock climbing since Arches.Then donned water shoes and waded in the creek, holding hands together on the slippery rock. Along the way, we observed butterflies, dragon-flies, water striders, hundreds of tadpoles, minnows, lizards, finger-nail-sized frogs, a crawdad, and a skink. We spent some time in the playground, then returned to the creekside rocks for a picnic lunch and used our empty sandwich tupperware to capture two tadpoles, which Will named Brittany and Averett.

Here are a few resources I used to sort out how to help our tadpoles survive past their initial capture in a container full of creek water:

Caring for tadpoles

Aqualand Fact Sheets on tadpoles

How to raise tadpoles

Big Brittany and little Averett are now swimming in a larger makeshift fish bowl munching on lettuce. We'd love to see them to froghood and then set them free back at the park, but we're amateur tadpole keepers, so who knows.

Rainbow socks

Yesterday I brought Owen a pair of shorts and a T-shirt and told him it was time to get dressed. As he often does, he promptly rejected my offering and went back to his room to design his own fashion ensemble. It looked like this.

When I asked Owen if he'd like to wear two white socks that match, he said he liked red and white better. "Because I like every color," he said.

I don't engage in fashion battles except on special occasions, so we went to the park looking funky. Will started this rainbow-sock trend in our house; he also finds it pleasing to the eye to wear different colors. But I'm sure it doesn't help that I'm frequently throwing lone socks in the boys' dressers when I fail to find the match immediately.

Photographing flowers

While we were in Colorado we visited a wholesale nursery, where a friend of my mom's had green houses full of containers just about to be shipped out to the various towns, landscapers and businesses that had ordered them. We gave each of the boys a camera and let them play flower photographers for a while.


Owen took many blurry close-ups of flowers on my mom's camera, while Will collected some crisper shots, like these:

Thank you Louisa!

Colorado in pictures

We're wrapping up our Colorado vacation, where we've enjoyed lots of playing, biking, swimming and hiking and nothing but comfortable sunny days. Here are some highlights:

Owen learns to "swim" at the Glenwood Springs Pool, where the water's so comfortably warm we wound up staying 5 hours.

A concert with Grammy.

Exploring Sweetwater Indian Cave, where some pictographs from Ute Indians who used the cave for storage hundreds of years ago linger, surrounded unfortunately, by plenty of contemporary graffiti.

Owen wasn't sure he wanted to go on a hike until we told him he could bring this flashlight.

Close encounters of the bird kind. This Cassin's finch, which was blind in one eye, got used to us while we were eating dinner outside and gradually Will made his way closer and closer to the bird feeder.

Garden tour next weekend

Today's Ledger-Enquirer includes a story I wrote previewing the 2010 Keep Columbus Beautiful Tour of Gardens. If you're in town next Saturday or Sunday it should be a nice way to spend a few hours of the day. With all the private gardens located on a relatively short stretch of Broadway in downtown Columbus, it will be a pedestrian-friendly tour this year. And proceeds go to the Keep Columbus Beautiful Commission.

Arches in pictures

The boys and I are back from a camping trip with Grammy and Grandpa to Arches National Park in Utah, perhaps my all-time favorite place to go when I was a kid. With climbable rocks in all directions, it is the ultimate natural playground for kids (and adults) -- and it also happens to be one of the most beautiful places on Earth.

To keep young kids safe, it was definitely good to have three adults since our campground was surrounded by climbable rocks and chaseable lizards that beckoned Will and Owen even as we were trying to set up tents and prepare meals.

But the desert wildflowers were in bloom, the snow was still lingering on the mountain peaks in the distance, and we were all captivated by our surroundings. Will was inspired to hike further than he ever has in his life. We let him guide us and he learned to spot the cairns that marked the trails when they were crossing long expanses of rock. The highlight for Owen, who did his share of mild rock climbing, was rolling and tumbling in the sand at Sand Dune Arch. For Will, it was some big-kids-only rock climbing with Grandpa.

Here are some snapshots of the trip: