Every Labor Day weekend we go to Camp Bethel, an incredible, rustic camp in the Blue Ridge Mountains. A friend of mine's husband is the Camp Director, and the family camp weekends for Memorial and Labor Day are the best value in camping in Virginia and are a huge amount of fun. Cabins rent for $16 a night and sleep as many as 16 people on bunk beds, and tent camping is only $5. You can make reservations for meals in the Ark Dining Hall, and there's a super new Swiss chef working at the camp now who makes extremely varied and tasty brunches (we haven't gone to other meals...). Things are definitely no frills here in general--bluegrass and gospel live music on stage at night, hayrides behind a tractor back into the fields and mountains behind the main camp, a barrel train (featured on the front of my blog), fishing in a stocked pond, a spring-fed, freezing cold swimming pool, and a very accessible camp area for biking, walking, and just hanging out. It's the kind of place where, for the most part, you can even feel pretty good about a 4 year old travelling around on wheels or foot with friends.

Family weekend is also an opportunity for everyone to pitch in to help close down parts of the camp for the winter. On Labor Day morning, there is always a polar bear swim as a final goodbye to the swimming pool for the season. If you ask me, though, it's always a polar bear swim at Camp Bethel, since the water coming from the spring is freeeeezing! It's definitely not for rarified specimens like myself who prefer 94 degree therapy pools! This was Frances after her swim this morning. She switched from polar bear to wannabee lifeguard after about 5 minutes.


One of the greatest pleasures of camp is catching salamanders in the main pond. Within 5 minutes, Frances had three of them in her net. I don't know what it is about this age, but suddenly my girl who used to love pink tutus is fascinated with trying to convince people that she is actually a boy. Now that I remember, "Tom-person" is the term that she used today to describe herself. Her proudest moment this weekend was when a boy at the lake asked her, "Are you a boy or a girl?" She was so thrilled that she immediately rushed back to our campsite to change into more obviously girl clothes so she could go say, "Ha ha." Hmmm.





Normally we camp in a field across from the camp's heifer barn. This year we might have experienced the same exciting birth of a calf as we did last year, but we decided to stay in a cabin with some friends. This is the Whispering Pines, and it is basically a room with nothing but 14 beds. We pulled mattresses down onto the floor for the adults, but we had a huge slumber party with 9 kids and 5 adults packed in. Here's our group's goofy photo. Rutledge had a total blast, since he had a whole group of boys to play with, and Frances had a girl posse of 8 and 9 year old girls. They spent the entire weekend riding bikes, fishing, and having adventures. Rachel, pregnant and in pink in the middle, was one of my LLL co-Leaders in Roanoke when we lived there. Wendy, on the left, attended meetings. And Amy is a homeschooling friend of Rachel's.


I set up the tent anyway because Rutledge couldn't decide if he wanted to sleep inside or outside, so we flitted back and forth between both for a while before I put my foot down and said we were definitely sleeping indoors and we couldn't waffle any more. It was rather pleasant to only set up a 3 person tent instead of our regular 9 person one!


This is my favorite camp building, the House of Pillars. In the front is a bunk room that can be rented in the off-season and serves as a camp cabin during the summer. But the main room is a huge, cooled room for conferences and events. Usually we have a movie night there during our camp time, and my first time at Camp Bethel was for a conference, so I have fond memories of time spent there. Plus it's just a cool looking place.

Tomorrow marks the official end of summer and start of the school year. Rutledge starts preschool in the morning. At the very last minute, I decided not to send him to the school we had originally planned and out of the woodwork came an opportunity to put him in a home preschool in a nearby neighborhood. What is great is that it's only 5 minutes away, the preschool has only 10 kids, and it's 3 days a week, which works out perfectly for me. We went to visit today, and he'll have his first day tomorrow. I have a good feeling that this is going to be a super experience for him. The rest of the gang, of course, will be buckling down just a bit and getting some work done in the morning before heading out to art class in the afternoon. Here's to another great year of learning and fun!

Well, I suppose in some ways this is officially the last day of summer. It's funny, but as fall came, suddenly it just felt like fall. It was as if September on the calendar sent a message to the weather saying, "Get a little cooler, and drop one leaf to let us know that this won't last forever." And so it did. And as always, as with so many things in life, it's hard to say when the 'last time' was for some things. The pool--I have a feeling we went for the last time...whenever it was we last went.... The outdoor pools close after Labor Day, and since we are going to be out of town over the weekend, it's doubtful we'll go back. And with a busy day and evenings getting toward the 60s, maybe people don't want to swim outside right now. Lucky for us, we have a beautiful indoor pool right down the street and an aquatic sport and lifestyle to keep us using it. But still, there's something about parting ways with those lazy days at the pool (or the not so lazy swim team days...) that just says a change is happening.

And would you believe it, but we've been doing "school" for 10 days now and are 5 days behind in grammar? But that's more of summer for you and a hazard of starting before public schoolers go back. I hate to make the kids miss out on playing baseball at the playing fields with their new friends, to say no when someone from swim team calls and wants to come over. Summer is short, and friendships are important, especially developing new ones while the new friends are still wild and free.

This also marks the final day of our Learning RX program. Well, not quite. Walter's new trainer had a family emergency, so he wasn't able to do his last training day yesterday, but today we set up his end of program testing anyway. He's in there right now, and I'm trying to stay calm and unworried. It is what it is, and I'm glad that we gave it all we had. I can't say for sure right now what effects it has had (hard to say anything when your life is made up mostly of swimming, throwing baseballs, playing video games, and camping), but I know that I'm happy that we aren't wondering What If this was something that would help his memory and concentration. So I guess the results are still unfolding.

In the meantime, Walter has finished all but 2 of the 168 levels of Brainware Safari, a program that is designed to take 12 weeks and where you aren't necessarily supposed to finish the levels, but to progress. Walter had gone thruogh 120 in the first week, and even though there are some others that have been challenging, he has come up with innovative and smart ways to work on the tough ones, things I might not have thought of. He's only been at it about 5 weeks, and one of those weeks we were out of town and he didn't have any time to work on it, and other weeks he has been below the recommended 5 hours a week because we've put his time and energy into LearningRX instead. So I'm really proud of him!

In midst of this good, we've also had some icky stuff going on. Our saltwater tank is on a dying spree. This week alone we have lost first our beautiful yellow tang, then our royal gramma, and now the new orange-eyed angel fish. I had been blaming the new fish for the other deaths, but when we found him on the bottom, being taken apart by hermit crabs, we figured he might not have been an aggressor but perhaps a disease vector. Or just the latest victim of whatever is wrong with the tank in general. I took the corpse in for a credit this morning and also took in some water to be tested, but everything is coming out fine for now. I don't know what to make of it. The fish aren't showing any obvious signs of illness--no spots or parts falling apart, so we can't make a diagnosis. For now, we're vaguely chalking it up to stress from the tank move and lowered immune systems and an illness. I just hope that Nemo and the cardinal, Edward, don't succumb. It's worrisome to say the least. A hobby is no fun when everything is dead.

Sometimes simpler is just better.

This seems to be the lesson that I've learned from reading Betsy-Tacy with Frances. The book is old, and it feels that way. It simply lacks the intrigue, intensity, and self-focused issues that are so common in children's books today. No trailer parks, 12-step meetings, mothers in rehab who didn't tell that's why they left. These are just simple stories about two little girls, 5 or 6 years old in the first book, who go for picnics up the hill near their house, who care for each other when there is sadness in the family, and who think of imaginative ways to spend their days.

I didn't realize Frances was so interested. It turns out to have been not only interesting, but inspiring. First, yesterday she woke up and announced that she wanted to go calling. "Do people still go calling? Will people know what I'm doing?" she asked. Would they invite her in to sit their living room and sip tea? I told her I doubted that, but that it might be nice to go calling, make some cards to leave to say she had been there, and perhaps bake some cookies to bring to the people she visited. It's unfortunate that most people aren't home on a Thursday morning to receive callers, so she mostly left cookies on doorsteps with a calling card. But she did talk to one person. Both she and Rutledge had worn their finest: she in a tiger striped leotard, fluffy jazz skirt, and knit boa, and he in a cape and sunglasses.

Unfortunately, partway through her calling she decided that maybe it would be even more fun to make a little money with the cookies, and she came home with $2. I was not all happy that she had gone door to door as a saleswoman. So the money had to go back. Then she set up a stand with her cookies, but given the extreme heat and humidity and the early daytime hour when people were at work or shut up in their houses escaping the heat, there were no customers.

Then today she made paper dolls with people she cut from magazines. This was another chapter in the Betsy-Tacy book. The girls cut out families from magazines and then cut out clothes and household items. I remember how much I used to love to do this with the Sears catalog when I was growing up. I'd choose the cutest babies to paste into notebooks that were supposed scrapbooks of my imaginary family, a family filled with boys under 2. Funny how one day our imaginary musings can kind of come true.

Her paper dolls ranged from cute to monstrous--little heads on giant bodies, grown women in onesies and snap-up pajamas. Then she used the box that the Rock Band 2 guitar came in to make a house with many rooms and pictures on the walls. I love seeing so much non-battery, imaginative fun, as well as seeing how she makes books her own. Right now we're also living with a giant clubhouse refrigerator box--with a skylight--in the middle of our garage after we had many nights of reading one of my favorite childhood books, _Christina Katerina and the Box_. These are the kinds of days that I wish could go on forever for her, free from self-consciousness, free from outside ideas about what she maybe "should" be doing, and just reveling in being 7.

The boys and I just finished reading _When Zachary Beaver Came to Town_, which was an outstanding book, though I'll admit, just a little too early for Walter and Ollie to really be able to get the most out of it. We and they have been reading more young adult books lately, and there just is a bit of a jump in subject matter that they aren't quite ready for yet in most of them, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, it's just that I can see how much more meaningful and rich some of these books will be at the right time, which isn't quite now. This book deals some with a love interest, but more than that are the themes that layer through the story--loss, betrayal, grace, coming of age, redemption, coming to selflessness, and then there are the obvious Christ figures and the theme of the baptism (by the town drunk), which would be great material for discussing in a literature class.

I'm just really glad that we can still read together, something that I feel strongly about in our family life and as an educational tool. I hear so many places about how one of the best things you can do to help your children intellectually and emotionally is to continue to read long past the time when most parents stop reading to their children, and this has been so true for us. It is just a special time, and not only do we get to share great books together, but we can talk about more challenging topics and I can pick books that I think are going to push them in some way. It allows all of us to reach a little beyond where we might be on our own and it gives us something that we can talk about in common because we've all experienced it together.

In my own reading, I just finished Nic Sheff's _Tweak_. What an intense book. Autobiographical, it is a very unflinching account of his addiction to meth, heroin, cocaine, and a collage of other drugs, both legal and illegal and the incredible challenge of finding lasting recovery. I lost a great amount of sleep staying up because I couldn't put the book down. I cringe a little when I think that originally I picked it up because I thought it might be interesting to Ollie. This is definitely not a book for 11 year olds--male prostitution, sexual addiction, as well as the potentially confusing message about how incredible it feels to shoot up at the same time that the author is describing how his body deteriorates and he can't work or keep relationships with people and ruins his connections with all of the people he cares about. So I'm glad that I chose to read it to myself and then send it right on back to the library. Still, it's one of those books that I know is going to stay with me for a while.

Before this, I finished that darn 3rd Twilight book. Repetitive. So repetitive. I'm wondering how she manages to get 800 pages or whatever of a 4th one when it's a one theme pony, but still, I have to admire how the first book drew me in and had me paying nearly no attention to page numbers, percentage of book read, and all the other extra-literary physical aspects of a book that have always distracted me when I read. I think I'm seeing some changes in my own reading speed as a result of Walter's training--my pace has picked up in a significant way, and I guess I'm more focused or something, but I will notice that 30 pages have gone by without me once looking at a page number lately. I doubt it's just that the books I'm reading are more riveting than in the past. This could be kind of helpful!

Whew! I'm back from a crazy week of camping. Almost a week, I should say. The trip originally was to be 10 days, and I lasted 8. It was a hot, hot time. Although we were in Massachusetts, it was during a heat wave during which heat records were being broken, and this was particularly challenging in a scrub pine forest with a lot of black asphalt down the front of the campsites. We had a great time nonetheless.

Our trip started with almost 12 hours in the car. We hit New York City, or the exterior of it, around 4:30 on a Friday, through no real fault of our own. So we decided to spend the night with our neighbors who recently moved to Madison Connecticut. I'll admit, whenever I get on the Merritt Parkway, I instantly have dreams of picking up everything and moving up there immediately. And Madison...what a dream of a little town. It's about 20 minutes out of New Haven, it's right on the Long Island Sound, it's directly adjacent to a lovely state park with a beach, and the town itself is straight from a movie or novel. It's the quintessential New England coastal town, with an adorable Main Street and shopping district, picturesque boats anchored all along the shore, houses so charming you'd swear they were a movie set, and we were there on the perfect day. Sunny, warm, pleasant for the beach but not too hot, Saturday. It was hard to imagine that anything but perfection ever is the case there. What I heard, however, is that before we came, there had been a month of nearly solid rain, so precious few beach days or outdoor activity days. Still...the place had its best foot forward when I was there and therefore will live in infamy (or just plain famy?) in my head as high on my I'd-move-there-if-I-won-the-lottery list.

For the next three days we camped. Notice my conspicuous lack of pictures. That's because Ollie dropped my camera at the Woods Hole Aquarium and broke it. So it's going to take a while to extract what little I had. We stayed at Myles Standish State Forest, right at the mouth of Cape Cod. It's a humongous park that takes about 20-30 minutes to drive across, and it is primarily scrub pine forest, dotted with about 6 ponds. It has me wondering what the difference is between a pond and a lake. Ponds are a very big thing in Massachusetts. I don't know that we label anything on a map of Virginia as a pond. The particular pond our campsite was near was called Charge Pond. It was relatively small--a strong swimmer could easily go across, but it had a cute little roped off swimming area (people were happily swimming all over, though) and a sandy beach, and the water was clear and felt incredible after sweating in the campground. What I found particularly nice was that there were trees around, and you could find a shady spot on the shore and there would be a magical little breeze and the temperature would drop by about 10 degrees when you sat there. The kids, especially Rutledge, found no end of fascination with this swimming hole. We were there for hours a day. Hours and hours. Throwing each other, throwing mud at each other despite numerous warnings, building tunnels through the sand, squeezing the sand until it oozed something that looked like blood, racing each other, knocking each other off rafts, spitting water out of their mouths. Then there were the nightly skit shows around the campfire. They would start out with canned skits of the Girl and Boy Scout type. But then the improv would start. Frances found a medium that was right up her alley. I felt like I needed a shepherd's crook to pull her off the stage after a while! She would spend half the day rounding up girls to participate in her skits and making up sequels to ones from the previous night. The skits these kids made up rarely made sense to adults, but they found them incredibly humorous.

On day 5 of the trip, we decided to go to my friend Nikki's house in Halifax for the night. I was about to have a heat stroke, or at the very least, to start vomiting from the heat. So we had the longest late lunch in the history of lunch at Friendly's and then we went to her house where we had a real dinner and slept in real beds. We were warned that if we went home, it would feel impossible to come back to camping, and sure enough, it was. Now it didn't help that it was 97 degrees the one day and about 95 the next and who knows how hot on the day I threw in the towel, but dealing with the camp stoves and sweltering tents was not a pleasant thought. When more record-breaking heat was expected, as well as two fronts coming from the west that promised some rain and a tropical storm coming up the coast that was supposed to wreck the ideal beach day, I determined that we would be wise to start heading home and try to compose ourselves before the school year starts in about a week or two.

Our trip home was long but somewhat leisurely. We stopped in Mystic, CT to have a look around, and we walked around a bit at Yale. Then we made one final push in the car to get to New Jersey for the night (ack--didn't get to the hotel until 10!). The next morning, we toured Princeton, got ourselves something to eat, and then headed for home, arriving around dinnertime. All in all, it was a great trip, we saw many new places, met some new people, caught up with old friends, and had a whole free weekend to unwind at home as the cherry on top.

Tomorrow is going to be our first day of schoolwork. The public schools don't go back for a little over 2 more weeks, but I'm ready for us to get on track, especially since we're going to South Carolina right after Labor Day. I don't feel completely organized in terms of location of items, but I have things laid out fairly well for at least tomorrow. I think it's going to be challenging combining that agenda with the summer that is still going on and its obligations, but I'm ready for a return to routine. Even if we're not running at full capacity right now, we'll at least be accomplishing something.

My computer is on the blink. Literally blinking with some kind of major problem. My screen is hopping up and down, which is making it very hard to type.

I am off to a wild and crazy camping trip for the next 11 days. I didn't realize how close to Cape Cod the campground is, which I'm suddenly finding very exciting after kind of dreading it for a few months because I was sue we'd be isolated and I'd starve to death.

I doubt that I will be fully GF during this little foray. I have a bunch of things packed, but being in the woods isnt' the easiest place to eat under any circumstances, so I have my doubts. But the canoe is on the car, everything is packed and ready, and we just need to put ourselves in the car in the morning and drive.

Hello!

This is my entry for today. I'm writing with some friend and need to see how it's going to look.