Posts elsewhere

Last year, I ran a vacation blog, separate from this one, so that I can control who sees this blog.

Just in time for my next trip, I am reviving that blog and I've posted a bunch of videos over there.

Check them out!

Girl crazy

One night, our conversation started this way:
Mommy, I want Monkey to be a girl.

Monkey, if you haven't met it before, is my son's most treasured stuffed animal, the one that has been his favorite since infancy. Monkey occasionally served as my son's alter ego as well, so he has always been a boy. Until now.

Why? I asked
Because I want him to be my girlfriend.

Before that moment, that term had never entered my son's vocabulary.
Sure, there was the 2-year-old girl that used to strong-arm my boy and hug him till his face turned blue. But we never called her a girlfriend.

Slowly, the context for the new vocabulary word came out.

Christian (a boy at his school who is sometimes his best friend) has a girlfriend.
Oh, I see.

I paused.

So do you have a girlfriend?
Yes, Monkey!
No, I meant one at school.
Oh, yes.
And what is her name?
Alyssa.

I ponder this new milestone in my son's life then I hear him giggling, as he hugs Monkey.
Now I have two girlfriends. Now I have two girlfriends.

I might worry if he was about 11 years older. At the moment, I'm taking this as a new little experiment in playground relationships.

Techie boy

It really amazes me sometimes how adept my 4-year-old is with technology.

He manages a mouse with ease when he peruses his favorite Lego and Bob the Builder websites.

He loves taking digital photos and expects the instant gratification of seeing the image. One day I'll have to tell him about the wait time with film.

He adores my Ipod and regularly asks for his favorite music.

The other day, he opened up my cell phone and shouted out loud: "Sprint!"

I was a little confused because I don't remember ever telling him what the cell phone company was. Apparently my husband didn't either.

However, the little boy is a beginning reader. So I guess it's possible he could have sounded out the letters and figured that out for himself.

I asked the techboy how he knew the name of the cell phone company.
He laughed and ran away.

Great expectations

I love vacations. Yearn for them. Can't wait for them to happen.
I really do look forward to them.
But now my son has outdone me in that department.
Because he is already packed for our trip to Utah, one month before we go.

We're going to attend a wedding, but the trip is really turning into a big reunion for my mother-in-law's side of the family. The really cool part, for my son's sake, is that the three of us, my mother-in-law, and one of his favorite cousins will be there.

Many a conversation over the past few weeks has revolved around this trip.
And as the anticipation has been building, my son has become impatient.

He recently got a new backpack, a darling Winnie the Pooh multicolored dream that perfectly fits his 4-year-old body. About a week ago, he started setting aside a few things.
3 favorite books
his favorite shirt
some of his best toy cars
and three of his favorite stuffed animals
Everything got packed away and zipped up for the trip.

"This is what I'm taking to Utah," he explained.

OK, I told him, but we're not going yet.

Then he asked why not now, and why don't we have tickets for today, and how long do we have to wait. It's tough to explain what a month really means.

I tried to talk him out of unpacking but he wouldn't have it.
I have tried every day, in vain.

We walked over to our main calendar and I explained how each box with a number represents one day. I pointed to today's box. Then I turned the page to show him our departure date. I made him count the days in between but the information did not compute.

So we have the daily question: "Is today the day we go to Utah?"
He is learning to deal with disappointment.
I'd like to think he's learning patience.
But the bag is staying packed.

Back from boot camp

I had been looking forward to this week for months - a one-week journalism fellowship that promised training on topics that I want to cover and great field trips. I hoped for a mini vacation - Tai Chi in the morning, some lectures, nice meals and maybe a few drinks in the evening with the other journalists.

What I got was boot camp.

It was an intense five days running 12-14 hours each day, with so many speakers and PowerPoint presentations that my mind was saturated. Plus, we hiked, rain or shine, took a 3-hour canoe trip and made a last trudge through a wall of mosquitoes.

We stayed in dorms, and I had a vivid flashback to the cinder-block halls of my alma mater. I originally named this blog post "Back to School." That was before everything started.

7 a.m. breakfast. 8 a.m. speaker. 9 a.m. speaker. 10 a.m. speaker. 11 a.m. speaker. 12 noon lunch with speaker. 1 p.m. speaker. 2 p.m. bus ride to a three-hour hike. 6 p.m. dinner with two speakers who droned on and on.
There were no breaks so a trip to the bathroom meant missing part of the PowerPoint. Climatology, biology
coral reef, exotic leaf
litigation, adaptation, mitigation
construction, destruction, nutrient absorption
Learning by immersion, but drowning in information.
And suffering an acute case of PowerPoint fatigue.

Luckily, most of the speakers were worthwhile and the information was great.

And most of the people were marvelous.

As we became acquainted, we would find common interests, and conversational threads would emerge. Jokes would circulate. Soon, there was a sarcastic banter that we all fed into and gorged upon. The women, and my roommates and I especially, bonded. The group dynamic was developing.

We'd go from the sublime to the ridiculous. One afternoon was devoted to the main farming industry blamed for the environmental woes. Their propaganda was in full force and we challenged the spin. Then one of the farmers dragged us to his fields, shouting for an hour his stream of consciousness that threaded together obscure farming facts, his experience, his reasoning, his passion, and even more spin. He gave us more hyperbole than we could ever imagine, starting out:
"If I was God, I would plant sugar cane in the Everglades agricultural area."

One of my friends later joked that she sent her significant other a text message:
"We've been hijacked. Send reinforcements."

But, mostly, we got to revel in the great outdoors - the reason why most of us are environmental journalists in the first place. The marvelous canoe trip, the exploration of a wildlife refuge.

Nature got in the way. The night we wanted to find a nesting Loggerhead sea turtle, Tropical Storm Barry passed through Florida. We stood in the driving wind and rain, shouting to each other to keep up the conversation, watching the bizarre blue-green light flashes (lightning or a transformer fire?), before finally giving up at midnight. We trudged back to the bus, but we weren't disappointed. The storm kicked up our adrenaline and we laughed all the way home.

A few trips had to get changed around, but no matter. We tried to make the best of it that we could. At least most of us did. You can never have a large group with at least one curmudgeon, and in a herd of journalists, there were more than a few.

Our last trip, to me, offered the most irony. After a week of hearing all the terrible consequences of what happened when they drained Florida's river of grass, we hiked through the most vicious wall of mosquitoes. For a moment, I thought about why they may have been so desperate, back in the day, to drain the damn swamp.

But we survived the torture together and in the end, it made us better journalists, with newfound knowledge about the environment.

And it made us friends.