Category Archives: Kids

2024, animals, Fantasy, gardening, History, Kids, Seasons, Uncategorized

Viking Daze

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After all the days of rain, YA and I couldn’t wait to get out into the yard and get dirty.  I decided that it had been too long since I cleaned up the edges of the yard and boulevard along our front sidewalk.  This is a two-part job.  First I run my edger along where I think the sidewalk should be ending.  Second I sit on the sidewalk and pull up the bits that are overgrown. 

So there I was sitting on the sidewalk when a neighbor from up the street, along with her son, stopped to chat.  Since they had their dog, who is on the small size, I stayed on the sidewalk to pet the dog while we talked.  Blake (son) and I talked about llama day, which had happened at the library the week before.  Blake had been to the farm where the llamas come from and knew one of the llamas that was at the library. 

We also talked about school finally being over for the summer and I asked him if he had any plans.  He’s 10 so his short “just camps” answer didn’t surprise me; I followed up with “what kind of camps this year”.   He mentioned a science camp and a viking camp.  I’ll be the first to admit that I don’t know all the kinds of camps there are, but a viking camp seemed different.  I asked if it was a football camp or some kind of history camp.  He laughed and said “BIKING”.  If I’d had any liquid, I probably would have snorted it up on the spot.

When I was a kid you just hung around the neighborhood for the summer and bothered your mother.  Maybe if you knew someone who knew someone you might end up at a vacation bible study camp for a few days.  If kids were doing organized anything, I never knew about it.  So even though Blake will be biking for one of his camps this summer, I love the thought of viking camp.  Not even remotely sure what we would do at viking camp, but I’m positive I would love the outfits!

How did you spend your summers as a kid?  Any camp you WISH you could have gone to?

2024, Family, Kids, Travel, Uncategorized

Amusement Park Blues

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Our daughter phoned the other day to tell me that her friends are shocked and appalled that we never took her to an amusement park when she was little. To make up for this neglect, Daughter and three friends are planning a trip to Disney World next April for Daughter’s birthday.

We live rather a long way from any amusement parks. Even the Cities was kind of far to go just for that. When we traveled, we visited family, and they lived in Minnesota and Wisconsin. There aren’t that many amusement parks in those locations. Summer was for work, summer activities, and gardening. We just weren’t that family that has big summer vacations. Husband remembers being unutterably bored on his family vacations, usually taken by car. My parents drove to Florida when I was about 12, but there was no Disney World then.

Two of the friends going on the April trip did college internships at Disney World, and they are devising elaborate spread sheets for daily schedules and activities. We agreed to atone for our neglect by contributing to lodging expenses, so it is shaping up to be a pretty fun trip.

What kind of vacations did your family go on? Any vacations with friends?

2024, Family, Kids, Music, Uncategorized

Bugle Boy

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Yesterday morning I received the following text from our son:

Your grandson just woke me up with a bugle. I hope you are proud.

I told him I was very proud! Son said he was in the middle of a pleasant dream in which he was eating gelato when the bugle went off .

In March of 2023 our then 4 year old grandson was stranded at our house for three weeks due to weather. While he was here we let him play my father’s bugle. He got a pretty good buzz on the horn. My dad was a bugler in the Army Air Corps. Of course, the bugle went back to South Dakota with him. I hadn’t heard that he was doing much with it until yesterday. I am delighted he woke up his dad with the bugle. That just made my day!

My first instrument was the clarinet. I quickly switched to the bass clarinet and played it all through high school and college. Piano lessons started at age 8. Son was a trombonist. Daughter played piano, French Horn, and violin. Husband has his cello and also had piano lessons as a child. I don’t know what grandson will play, but at least he has a bugle to make great noises with for now.

What were some mischievous things you did as a child? Did you learn to play an instrument?

2024, Family, Health, home, Kids, Uncategorized

Good Gadgets

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Husband and I have noticed over the past year that we are no longer as strong or flexible as we used to be. That has made gardening and housework a lot harder. We just can’t so things as fast as we used to.

When I was in Brookings in early May, I discovered that my daughter in law had neck problems that made it really hard for her to vacuum or do heavy housework. She damaged her neck vertebra last summer. They are both busy enough with their jobs and their son, so I suggested we get them a Roomba or something equivalent to help with the housework. We got a Shark Roomba knockoff, and it works great. They named it Clean Elizabeth. She does a great job keeping their floors clean.

We live where it is really dusty. Husband has allergies to dust. The prospect of moving the mattresses to vacuum under the beds was daunting, so I suggested to Husband that we get our own Clean Elizabeth to clean under the beds and the living room furniture and the dining room buffet. We named her Good Clean Bess. The dog is surprisingly standoffish, allowing Bess to go back and forth and suck up the crud. I was appalled at the dust that came up from under our bed. My only question is when did I get old?

What are your newest or favorite gadgets? How old do you feel these days? What would you want a robot to help you with?

2024, Family, home, Kids, Uncategorized, Words

What’s That ?

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Last Monday I announced to my coworkers on the Youth and Family Team that Husband and I had worked like navvies all weekend getting the garden planted. They had no idea what I meant.

We picked up some handy words and phrases when we lived in Canada that most people here find odd or quaint. Our whole family calls Mail Carriers “Posties”. We phone one another instead of call one another. The sofa is sometimes a chesterfield. People we are annoyed with are jam tarts. Those trying hard to get ahead are keeners.

Just in our family, Spaghetti with olive oil and garlic will forever be called Pasta with Invisible Sauce. A massage at bedtime was always called a backrub scratchrub by our children. A bedtime breakfast was a bowl of cereal before bed.

l grew up with some odd family words for things. My maternal grandmother said that a bottle of soda that had lost its fizz was ausgespielt (all talked out). My mother said that someone who had too much to drink was a little gemutlich. Farts were “little noises from behind”, according to my mother.

What phrases or word usages are specific to your family or place? What words or phrases would you like to introduce into everyday speech or see back into everyday speech?

2024, Business, education, Kids, Uncategorized

Sidewalk Sales

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Photo credit: Ames History Museum

On Sunday, my little neighbors Minnie and Marie came home from errands with their folks and decided to have an “Icee” stand down on the boulevard.  I was weeding in my yard so I got a front row seat to all the proceedings.  First off, “icee” was a misnomer, since they were actually selling those Fla-vor ice pops but they had their signs made so I wasn’t going to quibble.  They also were giving out dog treats free and borrowed one of Guinevere’s bowls so they could have water for dogs as well.

Most of the work for setting this up was done by their folks and then Dad sat up on the driveway with his laptop as they got going.  They were selling the ice pops for $1.00 – a long cry from the 5 cents that was the going rate for a cup of Kool-aid when I was a kid – but that didn’t seem to stop anybody (including yours truly).  Of course, there was also some sampling of their own product as well.  Even on a busy street like ours, a few people actually stopped as they were driving by.  A third neighbor child, Lindsay, joined them for the last hour, although it was clear they were all flagging by then.

Minnie told me that they made $18 and then confided that it was really boring.  They were open for 3 hours total (they took a break for lunch), so that’s 6 ice pops per hour… not terribly rigorous traffic. 

I had several Kool-aid stands when I was a kid.  The house we lived on when I was Minnie’s age was on a corner lot of a fairly busy street.  Like most kid-run stands, my folks paid for the Kool-aid, the sugar, the cups and any other supplies that were used.  One time my father suggested that we kids split the profit with him since he had paid for everything.  Unfortunately this lead to graft and a second set of “books”. He never asked again.

Did you ever sell stuff as a kid?

2024, Family, Food, home, Kids, Uncategorized

Spoiled

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I have no problem admitting that Husband, I, and the dog are spoiled when it comes to food. I started to subscribe to Goumet and Bon Appetit when I was in Middle School. That has certainly skewed my expectations for meals in my home ever since.

The dog is spoiled because he will only eat his kibble if we put a spoonful or so of homemade broth on it. This week it is goat broth. He is a happy boy.

Winnipeg is a foodies paradise, with every sort of ethnic restaurant and grocery store you can imagine. Six years there left me unprepared for spartan western North Dakota and only two chain grocery stores. Fargo, the nearest food mecca is 300 miles away.

We have taken to ordering on-line to obtain harder to find cooking ingredients. This Christmas, Husband found a source for all sorts of food from Spain, including wonderful serrano ham, Portuguese linguica, cheeses, chorizo, smoked beef, olives, and Galician sourdough bread partially baked in Galicia and frozen, shipped to the US, then shipped frozen to us. It is lovely bread that we tried, but failed, to reproduce at home. We also order 10 lb hunks of parmesan, olives, and pasta from an Italian importer (the parm lasts for a year and costs less than buying smaller packages in the grocery store) and beans from Rancho Gordo. I also order celeriac by the case from Oregon because we can’t grow it well here and I like to cook with it in soup stock. Daughter just visited the Rogue River Creamery in Southern Oregon and decided we needed 4 lbs of their award winning cheddar and blue cheeses. It will arrive on Wednesday. She and son have similar food attitudes as we have.

I justify all this by noting we don’t travel much, have little to no debt, rarely eat in restaurants, and don’t own a boat, camper, or a lake home. We shall see if living near to Sioux Falls after we retire allows more access to these foods, or if we will still order from afar.

If you lived in the middle of nowhere, and cost was not an issue, what would you order on-line to eat and cook with. Where do you like to find recipes?

2024, animals, Family, home, Kids, Nature, Uncategorized

Fledglings

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For the past several weeks Husband and I didn’t go out of our front door. Some enterprising robins built a nest atop the light that illuminated the stoep, hatched four eggs, and were busily feeding their chicks. We didn’t want to disturb them by going in and out the front door. You can see the nest in the header photo.

We could see the chicks getting bigger, and by Saturday, the last of the chicks was perched on the bench below the nest.

I like the baby tufts on his head. He sat there for a day, then flew off. I hope he has a nice adulthood.

I was always pretty independent and left the nest pretty easily, although with lots of anxiety. So did Husband and our children. I have known a few families in town where the children never manage to leave. In Winnipeg, it was typical for young people to buy their first home on the same block as their parents. That would have been pretty weird, I think, but typical for Canadian society.

What kind of a fledgling were you? Got any good bird stories?

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2024, Family, Kids, Nature

Vicarious Camping

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Today’s post comes to us from Barbara in Winona

Saturday of this Memorial Day weekend, Husband and I went for a walk on a woodland trail at Prairie Island, a few miles from downtown Winona in the Mississippi bottomlands. https://www.prairieislandcampground.com/prairie-island-park 

We brought a picnic lunch to eat afterwards, and Husband suggested we go down by the campground, a mile or so down the road. So at Prairie Island Park, adjacent to the campground, we found a table and were situated in a perfect spot to watch perhaps the last campers arriving and setting up in the remaining grassy spaces.  

We got to see a family of four unload two kids’ bikes, then setting up the screen tent. After biking a bit down the path, the two boys tossed around a football. Another family farther away had put up a net and the teens were playing badminton. Eventually a couple and their toddler returned to their site with fishing poles (though I saw no fish).  

Along the road into the campground, a couple of strollers rolled by powered by older boys, while two dads and another kid on a scooter brought up the rear. I’ll bet the moms were back at the campsite, setting up the “kitchen”. 

It was the best place we could have chosen for our picnic. I’d been sort of lamenting that we had no place to go on this long weekend. But we got to “go camping” in a fashion – vicariously. We watched people do things we’ve done before, just not for a long time. And none of the things I saw are things I want to do at this point – but it was fun to watch other people doing them! 

When was the last time you went camping? 

2024, Family, Kids, Nature, Science, Uncategorized

Cool Rocks

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Our grandson is now 6 and has developed an interest in rocks. I remember my mom getting me a cardboard box that displayed all different kinds of rocks when I was the same age, some polished and all quite colorful and interesting. I had them until our children were in elementary school and they somehow disappeared after that.

Grandson wants to identify and collect every interesting rock he sees. Our son got him some geodes in a rock shop that they had fun opening with a hammer to see the crystals within. Earlier this week I sent Grandson a set of very heavy and colorful polished quartz bookends we had in the basement. It is a win-win for all of us since they are just what Grandson is collecting these days and now we don’t have to find somewhere for them when we move. They also serve a double purpose as bookends.

What did you collect when you were a child?