An Ode To the Durability of Children

My cameras all ran out of batteries today and so I ended up using Elijah's phone to take some pictures. When I went to download my pictures this evening I found a whole bunch of pictures Elijah had taken over the span of our journey. It was fascinating to see the kids in all these different moments along the way. They have grown so much in the last month, and suffered their parents' whims so often. I wanted to post this series of pictures together as a reflection of the many moments throughout this journey in which our kids have shown strength and patience as well as humor.

Their last night in their room before we moved out. Sleeping on the floor in an otherwise empty bedroom.

We've had a lot of moments of waiting with the piles of luggage. This was in Sacramento at our second hotel.

Waiting for food in a weird little town in Nevada. The food took one and a half hours and when it finally came it was inedible. But the kids had fun with the anti-aircraft gun display near by. They had already been on the road for seven hours at this point.

Playing in the park in Santa Fe in the rain. Hannah's leggings are totally wet but the air is so warm she refused to wear her sweater.

They ran around in this park until after dark. Eli made friends with some kids in a nice family that were also there to hear the music.

Izzy was having a hard time that day. He kept getting really angry with Eli. But he and I were the members of the family the most interested in the music. He told me that the singer was very good.

One of the many hikes that started out with a lot of complaining and ended up with happy tired children. This one is in the hills above Santa Fe.

Izzy quietly reading to Hannah on the floor in Texas.

Hannah found a stage for her dramatic presence while waiting in the rain for our table to be ready. The kids have gotten really good at waiting for a table at restaurants.

Everywhere we go our friends and family are doing interesting things the kids get to learn about. This is Mary on her donkey Brownie.

Many of the places we go Eli introduces himself to children around us and strikes up friendships.

Here he is making friends with some kids who just moved to Texas from Louisiana.

There's been a lot of waiting, and a lot of telling the kids to behave and be quiet. This was a precious moment when they all followed that instruction. Waiting in the rain for the trailer to get hitched onto the minivan so that we can get ready to drive to New Orleans.

Some days we took too long to get to dinner.

Even the silly displays in hotels are interesting when they have guns or authentic costumes. This was a Civil War canon in the lobby of a Hilton just north of Atlanta. The kids have learned a lot about history in the last month.

Swimming pools have been one of the greatest treats of our road trip. The kids love to get to a place and find there is a pool. Hannah is already starting to swim as a result of all the practice.

No matter where we go Hannah likes to charm the people around her. Those feet belong to a guy who was sitting next to us in a coffee house. She went right up to him and started to ask him about his work. We are starting to work on boundaries a bit more.

It's a good thing the boys like each other so much. They have spent so much time together lately they sometimes forget anyone else is there. The imagination game is in constant full swing. Here I believe they were developing plans for piracy.

The best stuff is not always the stuff we expect. It's been amazing to look at the country with children as our companions. Everything looks different when you have to take them into consideration.

The boys got to talk on the phone with their friends during this meal. They were in high spirits. It's been a long haul and they have had to spend most of the time with just their family. These kids are social and not used to being trapped with just us. An interesting side effect to the road trip is that they are mostly in the adult world much of the time.

Hannah gets pretty tired during our adventures, and we have had some struggles with tantrums, but when it really counts she's a hardy little girl and a real sport about it all.

Somewhere Near Galveston

Our last afternoon in Texas the kids and I headed out to find Galveston Bay. We drove east until we found the water, and then looked for a place to stop. There was a shrimp shack style restaurant right by the water, so we parked the minivan and went in.

We asked to sit on the patio outside even though it was hot and muggy. The waitress brought us hush puppies instead of bread. I made all the kids try at least a bite. Only Izzy ate a whole one.

Eli ordered catfish and Izzy got popcorn shrimp. Then we sat and watched the oil tankers, one after another, float by on their way to Houston. They were massive and timed perfectly so that just as one started to be far away another entered our view.

The whole sky-line of the bay was industrial, with refineries and cranes in the distance in whatever direction we looked. Later when we started driving to Louisiana we passed by the other side of some of the same cranes and could see the point where we had sat far across Galveston Bay the other direction.

While we were eating a cool green lizard with a bright red gullet ran past us. Eli made me take a picture. He kept shouting the type of lizard he thought it was, but I can't remember what he said. He has a really good memory for that sort of thing.

When we returned to our hotel room we learned that tropical storm Issac was headed in past Haiti towards Florida. We wondered if the storm clouds we were seeing all day had anything to do with that storm, or if it was just a coincidence.

Houston, we have a playground

Space Center Houston is an edutainment complex that ajoins the Johnson Space Center in Houston, an enormous NASA campus where we learned that 14K rocket scientists and other NASA types are hard at work analyzing the suitability of moon soil for agriculture and planning a trip to Mars. Armed with a strong recommendation from Priscilla Hobbs, PhD (my advice: pay attention to any recommendations you get from anyone who wrote their dissertation about disneyland, at least when its about museums and such), we decided to take advantage of the time difference to hit the space center on a week day. I'd  roll into the office a little later than usual, but lunch time in Houston is 10am in San Jose.

Driving in on the nasa parkway, I tried to explain to the kids that we would be visiting the mission control for the Apollo missions, where 50 years ago humans were for the first time in history escaping the bounds of the earth and starting to explore the solar system. Add explaining Apollo missions to kids to the list where there's room for improvement.

Everyone assured us that we needed to go straight to the Tram when we walked into the center, as tours might get cancelled if the rain set in. So we jumped on a Tram right away, and were soon riding through a NASA campus to a windowless building where we would get to explore the mission control room where all the Apollo missions had been controlled (There's got to be a better verb for this).

The control room we visited is now a shrine to the Apollo and Space Shuttle missions that were launched there. I was totally floored.

Hannah was bored out of her mind. She did take one picture of the room:

But honestly, she wasn't impressed, and proceeded to take a series of pictures of her leg and the chair in front of her. For example:

And she was incredibly well behaved while she did this too.

Next, we got to walk down a gallery above a giant warehouse filled with mockups of all the different places an Astronaut could end up: A full replica of the space station, a soyuz capsule, the front section of the space shuttle, the robot arm on the space station, and a bunch of prototypes of stuff that isn't in space yet. Here's a rover that may go to space someday:

I think Izzy took this picture? The last stop on the tour was a Saturn V rocket, which is much bigger than you could possibly imagine:

The full rocket is laid out in a giant warehouse, each section separated so that you can see how the stages worked. This is the tail section, bigger than all our houses put together, which would use its fuel in about 2 minutes to get the rocket up the first part of its ascent from Earth's gravity well. The rocket that powered it for the 250K trip to the moon was tiny compared to the five monsters shown here.

The best part of the tram ride? The family on the bench behind us. You can see Eli breaking the ice in the tram:

New to Houston from Baton Rouge, and with kids in the right age range (10 & 7), Eli & Izzy were quickly having trouble noticing trivial things like 300' rockets to talk about Spiderman and other superheroes with their new friends. All the kids agreed that it was high time to get back to the Center where a giant playground was waiting. After the usual arguments on the merits of eating when a really good playground is waiting, the children disappeared into  a three story maze featuring giant slides, guns that fired three inch foam balls, and a more educational video games than you could shake a stick at. For a few minutes, I even had a grown up conversation in the bleachers provided for the parents to rest while the kids played.

Hannah was kind enough to periodically run past me so that I could reassure myself of her well being. I gave her the camera for a while to document what is by far the coolest playground I've ever seen. Here's one of her photos:

I guess you had to be there? ( web site: http://www.spacecenter.org/KidsSpacePlace.html)

When we got back to the hotel so that I could start my work day, Eli and Izzy were begging to go back, so I think the visit was successful. And today, Eli told the owner of an ice cream shop that he'd like to be an Astronaut. Which he would be awesome at.

Neil Armstrong passed away today. Two days ago we were watching video of him walking on the moon, and sitting in the control room he was talking to when he said "Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

Don't Forget the Alamo

After spending a good part of an afternoon at the Texas State Museum it seemed like a necessary second step to take the boys to the Alamo and show them the actual site where the event that took up a large section of the museum had actually taken place. San Antonio was very trailer unfriendly. After circling downtown, looking without luck for a place to park, and since Hannah had fallen asleep in the process, Elijah decided to drop the boys and I off on the curb and drive around town while doing a meeting. So only three of us got to visit the Alamo.

The Alamo

What's left of the original fort is not very big. It took us only a short while to see the main building. We then went wandering the grounds. We were tempted to go into the Daughters of the Republic of Texas' Research Library. But we didn't think they would believe us that two small boys legitimately wanted to do research about the battles of the Texas revolution. We decided we would brave the librarians of research libraries in Washington DC rather than start in San Antonio where they might be more likely to be self important about their job.

So we moved on to some of the outdoor exhibits.

A Spanish Cannon

Izzy, "I got it! I got the pigeon!"

An Exhibit Izzy Took a Picture Of

Izzy Taking the Picture

Izzy Really Wanted to Take This Picture of the Well

I Took This Picture of the Tree Over the Well, It Was So Big and Beautiful

It was really hot this morning in San Antonio and Eli started to get very grumpy. Luckily we found a small museum off from the main buildings that housed artifacts relating to the battle. This included a lot of weapons, which really cheered Eli up. He was especially excited about the swords. Izzy was interested in the replicas of Spanish soldier uniforms.

Now the boys will always remember the Alamo. Tee hee.

Silly Boys!

Now we are off to Houston to see the Space Center.

Riding A Horse Of Course

Where else but Texas should a child first learn to ride a horse? Mary has a donkeys, miniature horses, ponies, and full sized horses on her ranch. She offered to teach the kids how to ride. She got out her two Hafling horses Nomad and Lola. Lola had an injured leg so she was just there to keep Nomad company while he worked.

First the kids learned how to brush down the horses.

Brushing Lola

Brushing Nomad

A Very Hard Job For Such a Small Girl

Then saddle them.

Mary Explains How You Attach A Saddle

Eli Pensively Waiting To Ride

Finally Eli got to ride.

Eli Getting Seated On the Horse

Hannah Really Wants a Turn

Eli Learning How to Look and Steer At the Same Time

Mary Explains the Theories of Holding the Reigns

OK Eli, Tell Him Where You Want Him To Go

The day had been hot. The horses had been brought out around sunset and as the air cooled the rest of the animals, both dogs and horses, on the ranch got restless and started acting out. Nomad became nervous and so we had to cut Izzy's turn short.

Izzy Gets On Nomad

Nomad Is Not Listening So Izzy's A Little Nervous

The next morning the kids got a second chance to ride the horses, this time with a bareback saddle.

Eli Has An Easier Time Finding His Seat Bareback

He's Starting To Get More Comfortable

Everyone got a turn including Hannah. Thank you Mary for being such a great horse riding teacher!

Hannah Gets Her Turn Finally, She Loved It