Sorry for the silence. For the past two and a half weeks, we were traveling in the wilds of Maine.

Well, maybe not the wilds. Not the stumbling-through-the-woods-and-ending-up-in-Canada (or dead) wilds. But we did spend two weeks in the lovely and desolate town of Presque Isle, before slowly wending our way south again.

We’ve been going to this town for about six and a half years now, ever since I was pregnant with my first child. My husband’s company has an office there, and we try not to split up for business trips, so I used to tag along and we stayed at a B&B instead of the convention center near his office. Now having little kids attached to our traveling troupe, we’ve switched our sights to a beautiful campground with a rental house that suits us just fine.

It’s funny how a place can change, even one that seems in some (delightful) ways to be stuck in time.

Back when we were first going up there, if you wanted a meal out there was a staggering array of fast food to choose from, and the darkest lettuce you could get was iceberg.

I don’t know if it’s things moving in a certain direction–pretty much everywhere puts mesclun greens on the salad these days–or us getting to be the teensiest bit more like locals–minus the five month, negative forty degree winters, of course–and discovering hidden spots, or a combination of the two, but we found our way to some really special things this trip.

The Dairy makes its own ice cream and when we arrived during berry season, this included raspberry with actual pieces of fruit, and a delectable, tart taste. They make homemade sundae toppings like peanut butter hot fudge, and put toasted nuts on every one. They whip their own cream, man!

If you stay at the campground, you can take a kayaking trip down the river right out front, and watch bald eagles circling for minutes at a time. The cost is absurdly low compared to trips further south, and the excellently kept two person kayaks are perfect for a child’s first paddling trip.

The nested array of ATV trails are fun if you’re into off roading, but also perfect for long walks amongst vast fields bordered by woods. It’s not the same as hiking up a mountain. There’s no press to get somewhere, to summit or achieve a view. The view is all around you, all the time. You can simply wander, and that’s something that people in places like Presque Isle seem to be better at than, say, New York.

Cafe Sorpreso has come to PI and brought with it homemade soups, sandwiches, and dinner entrees like steak with a sauce of roquefort, cabernet, and shallots.

The Sandwich Shoppe makes everything fresh, Italians and tuna subs, but also whoopie pies and addictive butterscotch rice krispie treats slathered with melted chocolate.

Is there a tension between roquefort sauce and rice krispie treats? We like eating pizza as much as steak and so were happy to find Rosella’s, which also serves a regional specialty, deep fried pickles. But I wonder what will happen to this town, carving out its existence in a valley near New Brunswick, Canada, if restaurants with heavy cutlery and unusually shaped dishes keep migrating to it.

I hope one thing won’t change, and that’s the people of PI. Not only are they friendly and wonderful to us out-of-towners, but they seem to have a startling propensity to stay, generation to generation, in this admittedly tough place to live. (The winters really do hover at forty below for spells.) And that produces something that I thought was becoming lost in this rapidly changing, mesclun green eating world.

Home.

Those of you who were reading the posts from afar know that we really enjoyed our Portland time. My kids turned out to be better than travelers than I’d hoped for. They weathered the time change, the askew schedule, catch-as-catch-can naps, long walks, and occasional periods of being lost (I am not a good map reader…OK, I have a severe disability when it comes to maps). They did fine without separate rooms or their abundance of toys–leading me to wonder whether we have too much damn stuff.

But that’s a separate post, maybe a separate blog.

The purpose of this one is to say that even though I really enjoyed traveling with my children, I’m feeling a little child unfriendly at the moment.

I realize we didn’t go to Disney, or Great Wolf, where everything is about the kids. But in some ways this was harder. The contrast was so extreme.

We’d go out for a nice meal…but we’d go at six to accommodate the kids’ hunger level and bedtime. The twenty minute wait for a table–de rigeur in any even approaching hip spot–was borne only with copious amounts of made up stories. And instead of leisurely perusing the menu, I snatched glimpses at it, then barked an order at the poor waitress who’d only approached for our drinks to prevent an I’m starving meltdown. It was hard to enjoy the delicate wings and forget about peeling the uber fresh prawns! Way too much trouble–I just tore meat off a spare rib bone and thrust it in the direction of both kids, who gulped like hungry dogs. It was hard for me to appreciate the unusual treats at all when I was simultaneously focused on wiping greasy mouths before they slicked a passing customer, making sure drinks sans sippie cups didn’t spill, and extruding bones from fish.

I know, poor me. How lucky I am to get to eat in such a restaurant. To have kids who enjoyed it, the assistance they still require notwithstanding. (We did get lost afterwards though. But my six year old calmly told me not to panic, so even there I have no right to feel so…kid unfriendly.)

Naps have bisected–or even trisected–our days for six years now. I’m used to seeing only half the zoo because we have to rush off for lunch. Or doing a two mile hike instead of a four mile one. For the most part I love these compromises because they place me squarely in the early childhood years, and I really love this time.

I think, after fourteen concentrated days of moving, going, and being on, all while trying to make sure the kids’ needs get met in a totally unfamiliar environment, that I could use a little adult friendly time.

Or maybe it’s just me who needs a nap.

Some people have written to say they’re going to the Portland area with their children, so I thought I’d offer up a few things up to do. This vacation has worked fantastically with kids–there is so much to give you a little taste of adventure, beauty, or excitement, all on a preschool scale (and time table).

We went to the Rose Gardens. Not only are they fragrant and beautiful, but there’s a fountain in which your kids can get wet up to their elbows (or waists if they’re not listening particularly well that day) and an amphitheater where they can run, jump, and gather pebbles for a half hour or so.

Go to the street carts afterwards for lunch. Here we’re eating a Bosnian burek (a veggie pastry) with a pimento dipping sauce, and meatballs for the tamer tastes, but you can get practically any ethnic cuisine your kids desire, from dim sum to Polish sausage, and it will be the best of its kind, eaten outdoors on a motley collection of tables, each unique to its particular cart. Wash your meal down with one from a selection of unusual soda-juices, worth standing on line for even if you’re not buying food from that particular cart. Follow it all with some Two Tarts cookies, whether you eat at the Whole Bowl, which sells them out of jars, or not. Bathrooms can be found in the Governor Hotel building so a sudden “I need to peeee!” is not to be feared.

The science museum could keep you occupied for an hour or a day. Everything is hands-on and there’s even a real submarine to be toured (admission extra, as it is for the IMAX). Your kids can scramble onto berths and sit in the officers lounge to get a feel for what it might be like not to have their own toy-stuffed bedroom.

What I liked best about visiting the Pacific northwest was that we could do things that caused the adults in the group to gasp with wonder, all without totally blowing nap. This is Cannon Beach, and you can see this view with only a brief, child-friendly scramble up from the parking lot. The hour-and-a-half drive there or back is perfect for a car nap.

Then have lunch in town–we ate at Sweet Basil’s where everything is organic, locally sourced, that kind of thing, and delicious, but Cranky Sue’s, which is closed on Wednesdays, also looked wonderful–and don’t miss ice cream here at Osburne’s. Each flavor actually tastes like the ingredients it’s made from, and they do wonderful things like swathe a cake cone in the deepest, richest fudge I’ve ever had.

From town it’s only a short walk to the beach. The surf even in the ocean wasn’t rough the day we visited, but there’s also this fantastic trench where your kids can splash, paddle, and dig safely. Pails purchased cheap in town–you don’t have to lug one on the plane!

After the coast, take to the woods. Only a short drive out of Portland lies the Columbia River Gorge. If you’re from the East, you will scarcely recognize this geography, which consists of mountain-high single rocks, scaly with moss and ridged with trails along death defying dropoffs. But there’s no need to brave one of these with your toddler. The Elowah Falls trails is a relatively easy eight tenths of a mile of ups and downs (don’t be fooled by this shot–not difficult or dangerous at all)

at the end of which you will see…

If you’re in attentive-parenting mode, your kids can scramble around in the pools and fairly close to these spectacular falls. (We were told that rocks sometimes drop from overhead–and that overhead is pretty high, sort of like how a penny can kill ya if it drops from the Empire State Building). There’s a lovely bridge to picnic on and if anyone isn’t tired (ha) the hike continues on for several steep miles and past more falls.

If it’s time to stop motivating, pushing, and urging your kids to try the activities you want them to love as teens and adults, you might want to head over to the sprayground. For five bucks per car your kids (over five) can swim in a roped off patch of lake and younger tykes can get wet beneath a giant, spewing frog and in general look as happy as this.

If your troupe was up for the first hike, you might want to try something slightly tougher. The woods and mountains around Mt. Hood are breathtaking. There’s a mostly ambling trail along a rushing river amidst old growth forest. (That means trees way bigger in diameter than anything in the East, a fact which will go unnoticed by the kiddies since all trees are pretty big to them.)

And there’s even a trail on the snow-capped mountain itself that my three year old was able to do most of. It’s a mile and a half in and ends in a mountainside lake. Awe-inspiring for us Easterners to climb UP to water. The lake is swimmable–or splashable–if you don’t mind a muddy bottom (and what kid does?) The trail is remarkably easy for a peak region like this. And the views are beyond compare.

Really overtired kids can sneak a nap in anywhere, anytime…

After the hike, go see the historic WPA site, Timberline Lodge. They serve a lovely brunch if you want to build your day around that.

And your kids can throw a snowball in July.

Portland is famous for its gardens…even just strolling around the local streets (here we are in Southeast) will provide eye candy for those who love flowers.

We have friends in Seattle so we decided to head out on the under three hour drive. Apparently traffic can sometimes be gnarly but we made it through okay. Our friends were exceedingly gracious and generous hosts, AND have a practically matched set of kids, so it was fun central there. Then we went up in the Space Needle (I didn’t say we were original) and visited the Children’s Museum, which I found to be one of the best of its kind. They have every kind of mock adult activity your child might want to play at, from living in a Japanese house to running a Mexican restaurant. My daughter stated that her heart was breaking when we had to leave, and the vehicle loving soul can drive everything from a firetruck to a city bus.

Blue C Sushi serves sushi and other Japanese delectables on a conveyor belt, which is just plain cool.

And the cupcakes at Trophy were both magnificent and delectable–a combo I’ve never found before, even in NYC.

All in all, this has been a spectacular trip, each one of these activities something I’d love to repeat. We’re leaving tomorrow and I feel nothing but sad. It helps to have uncles who are the best hosts, tourguides, and home-away-from-homes ever, of course. If you want any further info on this or other things Portland, please email me or comment on the blog! And have fun!

No, not the polar ice caps. The children. My children, to be precise. You remember them, right? The dazzling ones who weathered the plane trip far better than mommy did?

A day after that, one found a plastic dog that her daddy didn’t want to buy (since she had just been given a great doll, doll bed, and doll bottle from her uncles the day before) and sobbed for thirty minutes about not getting it. The other heard that I was to go meet a longtime writing buddy who lives in nearby Beaverton and clung to me saying, “No, mommy, please don’t leave,” as if I were in the habit of abandoning him routinely in ship yards.

Travel is hard.

My kids are having a great time, but they miss their house, they miss Tiny Blue Baby (a particularly soft and fuzzy blanket), they miss their toys. They miss the familiar. Maybe melting down is a way of connecting to it.

I love it out here, too. There seems to be an ethic of enjoyment in Portland that many East coasters don’t share. Here life is to be enjoyed. Instead of managing and coping and fighting to get everything done, the people here seem to prioritize stopping to smell the roses.

I don’t miss the familiar the way my kids do, and I wonder why not. I’m content to let my house stand waiting, not to buy my favorite cookies at my favorite market, to skip the daily routines I get such pleasure from.

As adults do we need these lynchpins less? Or am I more just a travel bug–how little I do it notwithstanding–than my particular kids are? Maybe some kids wouldn’t cry for Tiny Blue Baby.

Maybe some wouldn’t melt.

But when mine do, I’ll try to surround them with the familiar in the form of the sound of my voice, the shape of a hug. As long as we have that, we’re always home.

And speaking of my true home, happy birthday to my husband today!

So here we are, all the way across the country. It’s the farthest my kids have ever traveled, and their only time change. They did really well. Even my three year old only moaned for maybe ten minutes about wanting to “det out” at 40,000 feet.

They made it through the first day, catching a few winks in the car and waking up fairly un-cranky, then going to sleep hours past their normal bedtime to get onto local time, enjoying exotic food beforehand. Of course, they’re not always like that, but suffice it to say, for this trip they really rallied.

And still it was hell.

I am not a comfortable flier. I do it rarely–since 9/11 even more rarely still–and this was my first trip with both my kids. When we ran (flew) into turbulence and it lasted the whole first HOUR of the trip and I couldn’t close my eyes and mentally scream, going to my happy place, my happy place, my happy place! and focus on an image of a tropical beach, teal water fizzing on the sand, but instead had to feed my son snacks and say to my daughter, Yes, that sure was a big bump, sweetie! I had a very, very hard time.

I could go on about other wrinkles with the flight, but basically the pilot flew us safely through, got us back onto the ground, for which I am inordinately grateful. I love Continental airlines. But I really h-n-d’d (my daughter’s spelling and our new family word for “hate” since in school they are taught not to say the word) this experience.

The whole thing raised so many questions in my mind. Like, who are we when we’re vulnerable as parents, two scared, tiny people on this vastly spinning planet, but to our children we must function as gods? How do we cope with fears–which arise in many other respects besides the mostly irrational and relatively rare experience of flying–when we are trying to teach our children to be joyous, confident beings? Can the two states, parent and person, ever be fully reconciled?

Happy and safe travels to us all–even if we’re just staying in one place.

Does anyone here hate fireworks? I know, I must sound positively un-American. I never used to hate fireworks. This new loathing came about for one reason and one reason only.

I have kids.

Two delightfully little and innocent kids who are as scared of fireworks as they are of, I don’t know, say thunder, and who–if they aren’t well enough into that blissfully deep, impenetrable sleep of childhood–are likely to wake up screaming in fear. Since fireworks tend to take place well after bedtime, this throws off the whole night (grown up time), the next morning, and sometimes even…nap.

Probably this doesn’t sound worth mentioning…unless by chance you also have wee ones you’ve worked like the devil to get into a good sleeping rhythm.

In that case, you, like me, might hate a big, loud burst of green and red, too.

So…how was everyone’s fourth

It’s momentous enough that I’ll take a break from writing the story of, well, my writing, and just muse a little about my six year old (who’s a story teller in her own right…but she can blog about that).

We gave her an extra year of pre-K, not for any of the usual reasons, like wanting her to have time to mature socially or progress in skill level, but because she’s a kid who makes great use of free time and I didn’t want to fill all of it up so soon with lessons and structure.

When we get home from preschool, she goes right to her room, and begins making up stories. She uses china animals or figurines as characters and book illustrations as scene set ups and it’s as if the story just explodes out of her, dialogue, metaphor, and all, pent up for the prior two and a half hours of school.

Example: “Darling, what’s wrong?” said her mother. “You’re pale as a lima bean!”

There are adult writers I know who would get that wrong, overdo it, say “gasped” instead of “said.” I think she’s got the knack. But of course, I am her mother.

Anyway, now it’s time for kindergarten, and she got a lottery placement at a nearby charter school, which I suspect will foster more of this side of her. But she has an awful lot of sweet little friends going to the neighborhood school, so that feels compelling, too.

Many of those friends were at the party we had today. It was a princess party and Belle came. It was amazing to see how the kids reacted to this obviously costumed actress. “You’re beautiful!” gasped one. (See? Even I used “gasped.”) And when Belle asked, “And who fell in love with the Beast?” all the kids said as one, “You did!”

This wasn’t about suspending disbelief. The children had no disbelief.

The illusion, so fractured and thin to my adult eyes, was as good as reality for these six year olds.

After Belle left–not in a chariot but in a Chevy Lumina–we had a cookout and a castle cake. That was the magic part for me. Friends and family, sitting around, laughing and eating and watching our little girl grow up.

Oh, was it bittersweet. Both my kids attend a co-op, and I had the blind luck to be working today, her last in the classroom. (Tomorrow is kindergarten orientation and Thursday a class picnic.) She’s had the same fantastic teacher for two years, and over that time I’ve heard this Laurie Berkner song “Goodnight” played, and it always makes me tear up. I asked the teacher for it today during circle time. Sophie was sitting in my lap as the roomful of kids sung (and me too). I was thinking, Until she has kids of her own, she will never experience this sort of bittersweetness. The sense of finitude, the beauty of what we’ve had, and knowing that it just can’t continue forever.  But then Sophie looked up at me and said, “I think I’m going to cry.” She buried her face in my neck, and I felt it grow damp, although she hid her tears away as big kids learn to do–a mixed accomplishment if ever there was one. I think she did know on some level. Maybe no more than thinking about how much fun she’s had at this school, and that she won’t be back, but then the “ever” sort of snuck in. What does “not ever again” mean to a five year old? What does it mean to us?

“That’s my Daughter” by Loudon Wainwright came on WFUV as we drove home and that about did me in.

But I didn’t hide my tears.

Just turned around (at a red light) and let my eyes shine as I reached for her hand.