What 20 Questions Sounds Like in This House

Cassius:  So, so, so, so, guys, I'm an animal that is black and white.

Maceo:  Are you a panda?! ARE YOU A PANDA?! Are you a penguin? A PENGU---

Cassius, beaming: Nope. Nope. No.

Kate:  Wait, guys, we are not using our questions wisely.  You are supposed to narrow down your -- wait, wait! Are you a skunk?!

(More grinning from Cassius).

Nick: Are you a raccoon? 

Cassius:  Nope!

Maceo:  YOU'RE A PENGUIN!  You're a monkey.  Are you a black and white monkey? Where do you live? 

Cassius, starting to hesitate a little more, begins to look confused by his "nopes."

Nick:  Are you a zebra? It's a zebra, right?!

Cassius:  Wait, wait. Guys? Um, can we go back to the beginning?  Can we?

Nick:  Why, Cassius?

Cassius:  So, so, it was a penguin but now it's an orca.  That was a hard one to guess wasn't it?  Guys?

Morning Commute

For Maceo's birthday at the beginning of April, we got him a mountain bike with gears and hand brakes. Mamy and Maurice got him a bell and water bottle, and Grandpa and Grandma Sue got him a brand new helmet. He was ready to go. Of course, Cassius immediately wanted in on the game and decided to learn how to ride. He began to practice on his strider bike which has no pedals and is designed to help kids learn to balance.

Soon after came the Great Brookland Yard Sale, and with Cassius now a master of the balance bike, we found him a $20 pedal bike to ride. He took to it rather quickly, and there's been a lot of talk of biking to school, which is just under a mile away. One Sunday, we tried a practice run. We made it back home an hour and a half later, and someone was tired.

However, we've all been practicing since then, and since I didn't have to be at school until 9:30 the other day, we took off on bikes to try a new route to school that hopefully wouldn't take 50 minutes or so!

Both boys did well. Cassius chattered incessantly, as is his wont, until we reached the big hill that leads to their school. At this point, he got tetchy and began to insist we take the route we'd done the practice attempt on. I put his bike on my bike's saddle, put Cassius on my crossbar, and pushed them all up the hill, finding Maceo at the top! So, it seems Cassius isn't ready yet for the task, but Maceo is. Perhaps next year, we'll all 3 be biking to school!

Friday Observations by Mami

Tuesdays with Mami, where were quite the regular activity a few years ago, have turned into Fridays with Mami in which Mami and Maurice take both boys after their half-day at school concludes at 12:30p.  It's a tender thing to hear a grandparent's observation of how they observe your own children changing and growing since sometimes it can feel as though they are only regressing.  I wanted to capture these from an email Pat sent us after one particular Friday afternoon in March of this year:

Cash is still a baby in many ways, I can fold him into my arms, snuffle his neck and make him to dissolve into giggles of joy. Maceo is getting gangly and grown-up to a degree, but to my delight he is developing a great sense of humor. He really gets jokes.

Today we read a book about Mercy Watson, which I’d read years ago to Shay and Bridget. It’s charming and in it, the pig, Mercy, is comforted by buttered toast — lots of it. Today when we returned from Republic after reading Mercy, Maceo asked for pasta with lots of butter. I asked him if he were Mercy Maceo. He loved it! 

He also has fun with the way the geese gaggle in “Charlotte’s Web” and he and I have talked like geese, though he instigated it. Much of that goes over Cash’s head, and it’s fun to banter with Mace.

Maceo must have spent in all an hour and a half playing with dinosaurs in Fritzie’s yard on Willow, long a favorite stopping place on the way to ice cream/gelato in downtown Takoma. He has them tell stories, talk to one another, duke it out; and he’s been doing this for as long as I can remember. Maybe the last line in "Charlotte’s Web" was written for him: “It’s not often that someone comes along who is a true friend and a good writer…"

Behavior Note for Maceo

I'm just going to leave this right here precisely the way we received it from Yu Ying:

A new note has been added for your child Maceo Manolakos-Loewen: Inappropriate Behavior on Apr 26, 2018 at 12:25 PM. 
Amy Quinn wrote: 

Maceo was involved in an incident today at lunch. This included playing a game called "Smash your butt" and then yelling directly in another student's ear "Bow-wow-wow-wow". The other student was not happy to be included in the 'game'.
Maceo went to the other student and apologized for the yelling.

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Amy Quinn

Location: Lunchroom on April 26, 2018.

Sincerely,
Washington Yu Ying PCS

Maceo Turns Seven

Can I still say we have young kids?  We now have a 7 year old.  Oh, and a 16 year old trapped in a 4 year old's body.  But I want to talk about the 7 year old.  Maceo declared this birthday the "best birthday ever" however I suspect I'll be hearing that until he gets too cool to be around us in his teenage years.  This year, though, he did have the perfect storm of three days of birthday celebrations in a row:  Thursday, April 12th on which we celebrated his actual day o' birth, a day which should be more properly described as "days" o' birth since it took him almost two full days to arrive.  But this is not about me and I am not as bitter about his drawn out arrival as I once was.  So, birthday #1 - two types of cake, day of the dead stacking dolls, and The Most Amazing Stuffed Dinosaur Ever who was promptly named Jolt (as in Jolt the Gigantosaurus) by his starry-eyed owner.  Thanks, Nene, for this amazing gift! 

Birthday Party #2:  The McMurrers were in town on their way through DC to the Carolinas.  Et voila, chocolate mocha homemade cake, more presents, and Maceo is loving life as the birthday boy.

Birthday Party #3.  Saturday.  We invited some of Maceo's classmates and friends from when he was in our neighborhood daycare to our house to play in the backyard, use the newish zipline, and participate in a scavenger hunt across the street at Howard's now-defunct Divinity School.  We like to keep a one-to-one ratio of juice boxes to adult beverages so I'd like to think the adults had fun, too.  Maceo's third and final birthday was in the bag and while I'm no math wizard, three birthdays seems definitely better than one.  I'll be managing expectations for the next birthday for the next 364 days now.  

The Great Spontaneous Spring Break Mini-vacation of 2018

Due to a perfect storm of zero scheduled activities for both adults and children for three days in a row at the tail end of spring break, Nick and I decided to head to the Shenandoah mountains with the kids.  Putting the trip together inside the space of a few hours may be the best vacation planning we've ever done!  We rented a lovely condo in the Wintergreen resort area for two nights.  As an important aside, when we asked the kids at the end of the vacation what their favorite part of the vacation was, they both said "the condo."  As one of the two adults who had to sleep on the pull-out sofa bed, I beg to differ.

We left on a Friday morning and headed west.  Each child was allowed to choose what we listened to in 15 minute intervals.  Maceo, refreshingly, always chose to listen to the Ramona books on Audible.  Cassius, alas, always chose four songs from the Lion King.  Always.  For three days.  The Same Four Songs.

We intended to go to Luray Caverns before checking into our condo however, unbeknownst to us, Luray Caverns is quite the popular tourist venue and the line was just too long for us to justify waiting in in the rain so we continued on in the direction of our condo hoping other slightly less popular caverns would appear en route.  And, they did!  We detoured to the Grand Caverns, the longest set of caverns on the east coast.  The boys were very enchanted upon entering the caverns though, over time, Maceo maintained a very endearing sense of awe and wonder while our youngest slid down a slippery slope of distraction and a compulsive need to talk while our guide was talking.  And only when our guide was talking.

We walked through rooms called The Zoo and The Chapel to name a few.  We saw curtains of limestone (above) and cave bacon - very thin, striated pieces of limestone curtain.

We even saw The Rainbow Room (below) though I can assure you that nature did not create those colored spotlights you see below.

Day One was a success! We arrived at the condo after the caverns trip and the boys promptly passed out from fatigue.  The adults followed shortly thereafter.

Day Two.  The impetus for this spontaneous three-day trip really centers around a Facebook posting from some friends of ours who have a son in Maceo's class.  Last year, they visited Virginia Safari Park and the pictures they posted of their experience were fascinating to us.  Animals poking their heads inside their car, feeding animals from their car, and having parakeets land on their son's head in this large aviary. We saw those pictures last year and said almost in unison, "We must go there!"  So, day two involved a trip to Virginia Safari Park and allow me to say here that it did not disappoint.   

We bought several buckets of food to offer the animals from our car as we wound our way through this 140+ acre park full of roaming llamas, alpacas, watusi (think large cow with ridiculously large, no - Large - horns), Japanese deer, goats, elk, Scottish highland cows, and more just really, really wanting to put their heads in our car and eat from the buckets we were holding on our laps.  Nick's bucket was taken from him within the first 5 minutes by an aggressive bull.  Oh, how we laughed. But, in full candor, it was a nervous laugh.  And the boys were not comfortable with having their windows down yet.  It took us about an hour to wind our way through the park at around 5 miles an hour.  It had some magical moments in which we could almost forget we were in a car and this was a tourist attraction.  The boys were truly delighted.  

Check out this watusi!

After the car tour, we parked and explored the grounds on foot.  We purchased food for the parakeets - birdseed dipped in honey on a popsicle stick - and entered the aviary and promptly were descended upon by hungry parakeets.  Two landed on my hand right away and started eating (adorable!) and the boys nervously laughed as birds swooped down to eat from their hands, too.  

In the spirit of feeding animals, we went next to the giraffe station where, for two obnoxiously priced pieces of romaine lettuce, we could give the giraffe a snack.  Everyone in the family fed the giraffe and everyone was enchanted by its gentle manner, sweet, large eyes, and its sandpaper-rough black tongue.  

Back to the condo for our second and final night in apparently the best condo on earth, though, I repeat, did I mention we slept on a pull-out sofa and that there were some creatures in the wall that scritch-scratched their way around in those walls most of the second night?  We will never speak of this again.  

Day Three.  We check out of the boys newest favorite abode and decide to make one more sweep by Luray Caverns, though this time not to visit the caverns but rather to try out this three-tiered climbing structure that is not intended for the faint of heart.  It consists of a built-in belay system in which you are permanently tethered to the structure at all times as you wind your way through various high balance elements.  On a scale of fearless (10) and "Holy-shit-I'm-going-to-die-up-here!" (0), I'll fairly rate Maceo, Cassius and Nick as 10s and myself as a 1.  The boys loved it, though, and it was wonderful to see them gaining confidence as they climbed higher and tested the more precarious elements in the structure.  

As we drove home to the monotonous repetition of those damned Lion King songs, we just couldn't wait to be king! No, wait, I mean, we reflected on what a fun, spontaneous vacation we had, or, as Cassius would say, a vacation that wasn't "super dumb."  

This is really a thing, y'all!

When the boys have behaved relatively well each day, we let them watch 3 minutes of a video of their choosing before bedtime reading.  This treat has devolved into them instructing us what specific and exact words to put in the search function of YouTube (Momma, write "ginormous stuffed blue leopard chasing a warthog!"). 

I'm not quite sure how we stumbled upon the thing that has captivated them for the last month but I'm here to assure you that it's really a thing, it has a deep base of followers and producers, and I could not be more scared about the state of the interwebs and what interests humans when I watch this stuff.

What is it, you ask?  It's the cult of surprise eggs.  Seemingly relatively sane adults and sometimes kids record themselves opening all different sizes of plastic, playdo-wrapped eggs filled with the trending toys du jour.  The mystique in these videos comes from how quickly or slowly the treasures within the eggs are revealed, how well the person doing the revealing describes the features of the toy itself, and how long said person doing the revealing plays with the unwrapped treasures within the eggs.  Did I mention there is either full-on commentary in which every action the revealer takes is talked about while the suspense builds for the viewers or there is some chirpy, happy music playing and the revealer does no talking.   In no uncertain terms are the kids not captivated.  Maceo and Cassius chatter through each video:  Ooh, Maceo, I think it's going to be Lego Batman! No, no, wait, it's Spiderman - ooooh!

Maceo was so inspired recently, he came up with this.  Just so you can have a taste of the utter entertainment awesomeness that is going on in our house right now.