Mother's Day and Home Alone

Ian reminded me that I needed to get caught up on some blogging.  Given my memory, I can't really afford to not document everything.  So for those of you thinking, "How nice that Keith blogs everything so that we can keep up with the goings on of his incredible life", go ahead and purge that nice little thought from your mind.  You should know that the precipice in the title of this blog is actually my early onset dementia... or maybe that's the wolf and the precipice is enlightenment.  Anyway.  Here are some pictures of things I haven't forgotten yet.

For Mother's Day Sarah had the great idea of renting a cabin at Taughannock.  Fortunately, we brought an expert fire maker along with us.  Cabin number 7 is the place to be.

The hammock was a big hit.

On the first night, our friends Zach and Kristen came by for some grilling action and brought the girls to play.  Of course, three kids means one of them can't get on the stump, right Ian?  At least no one wound up tied to a tree.

So stoked about my fire cooking gear.

Zach rocking the vegetarian grill.

Sarah was inspired to pick up some cedar planks for grilling fish.  We made sauteed cabbage in the dutch oven and plank grilled fish with salt and pepper and mustard.  I'm not bragging when I say that it's the best salmon I've ever had.

Quick, everybody back to the hammock to make weird faces.  I don't remember hearing them discuss the idea of making weird faces in the hammock, but they were really proud of all the pictures.

The next morning Little Man and I got up and made some hash and coffee for breakfast.

Some items needed to be placed on the ground.  The Dude abides.

Sometimes it's hard to wait for breakfast to be served.

Zhora and I got the canoe out on the lake.

Practicing that J-stroke.  We did pretty well despite wind and some speed boat wakes.  We spotted some great birds on our little trip.  First we paddled through some swallows, then saw a heron.  An osprey flew directly toward, then over us at about 20'.  Incredible!  We saw some mallards, a belted kingfisher, and on the way back, a loon!  Not a bad little paddle.

Emmett practiced his best MJ impression.

Happier than she looks, I swear.

Just before the moms showed up Sarah spotted this piliated woodpecker!  We watched him for about 10 minutes.  What a great sighting.

The cabin is so nice.  It's very primitive, and just enough to keep the weather at bay, but it does have a fridge, which is such a luxury.  We were able to stock up on meat to grill and beer to drink.  Keeping a neat camp is important and the hooks Dad threw in the christmas stocking worked out well.

The moms arrived with gifts, laughter, and conversation!  We got right into all of it.

More hammock action.

Grilling corn for the kielbasa stew.  Grilled corn is about the best thing since sliced eggs.

Mother's Day dinner.  Sauteed cabbage and kielbasa stew.

Mother's Day breakfast.  Pancakes!  Emmett and I cooked for everyone.

We wrapped up our visit with a trip to Brookton's Market.  Then the ladies and Emmett were off to Ohio, leaving me to fend for myself for the first time since the duder was born and Jonas passed.  It was super weird.  

As expected, when people found out that I'd have the house to myself, there were a number of "single guy" type comments.  Truth is, I mostly read The Week and went to bed about 9 pm.

Just a couple of WILD and crazy guys!

Hobbs kept me company and hung out while I worked on evals and the like.  Still going strong.  He gave me a big scare when he hid under the couch.  I couldn't find him for a couple minutes, but he eventually popped back out.  That was about the most excitement my week held.

Our friends, Zach and Kristen, are moving.  After hitting up the plant sale at IHS on Sunday, I took a couple house warming gifts over.  On the way there, I spotted a little pond that looked like it needed someone to paddle around on it for a bit.  Nothing terribly exciting, and the pond is really small, but I did get to explore a beaver dam and even saw a beaver swimming around!

Finally, it was time to go reunite with my babies.  We met in Ellicottville and had a nice lunch and a little walk around town.

On Saturday we went to Stewart Park for a birthday party for Ema, a friend from day care.  Aditi was there, too!  We went on swings and rode on the carousel and ran around and ate cake... it was really nice.

And then we went for our first family ride of the season.  A great day!

Getting out there

Alright.  Catching up now.  Our winter has been pretty weird; lots of ups and downs, some rain, some snow, some more rain.  We've had days in the 60s butted up to days with highs in the 20s.  Anyway, I guess that's the new normal.  We've been trying to get out a lot and enjoy whatever mother nature and post industrial society have to offer.  Emmett's growing like a weed.  He weighs close to 20 lbs now, which is super light if you're doing reps of bicep curls, but gets heavy fast on a hike.  We are determined to have camping be a part of our normal family routine, so we've been acclimating to the family hikes, planning, talking about it, and picking places to go, both near and far.

On New Years Day Sarah went into work for a spell, so Emmett and Jonas and I ran some errands and visited some parks together.  This is Buttermilk State Park at the South end of town.  Jonas was a little stiff that day, so we didn't do any big hikes, but we wandered around, looked at botanical and geological features of the park and discussed the benefits of public land. 

The Chopper and I have a few routines.  One of them is lighting the fire when it goes out.  He gets super excited about it.  So do I.  I had to stop waving my arms and jumping up and down to take this picture.

Another of the Earth's elements that The Dude likes is water.  We're all but done with our first round of swim lessons.  He can fall of the wall, hang onto the wall, dunk under water, almost float on his back by himself, and generally get along in a contented fashion in the pool.  Hoping to have him doing the front crawl by canoe season.

Swimming makes us nappy.

This amazing piece of artwork was done by Zhora... all on her own.  The kid has good taste.  Also, note that she ALWAYS puts the colours of the rainbow in the correct order.

This is from a walk at Taughannock a couple weeks ago.  We were on our way out to Pat's.  It was a bit overcast and not great for pictures, but the river and the falls never disappoint.  

Little man in the back saver.  We don't use it often as we both enjoy carrying him, but on longer walks where the path will permit, Bugger gets a buggie.

My beautiful wife contemplating the tangled bank.

Not even the majesty of nature competes with the Mama

Sarah took some shots of the ice encrusted branches.

Sarah swears that the drooling means he's thinking.

We took a trip Long Pond State Forest to scope out the camping.  We plan for this to be our first canoe trip.  The water is too hard to canoe on right now, but Jonas enjoyed making doggie snow angels.

We walked out about 50 yards before a loud cracking sound sent us scurrying back to terra ferma.  There were a bunch of people out in the middle of the lake ice fishing, so I'm sure it was safe.  Still, the idea of us all crashing through the ice together seemed an unreasonable event for the day.

Sarah has some great pictures of Emmett's first swing experience from Stewart Park.  I think she posted them on Viber.  This is from the merry go round.

I've wanted to do this (above) ever since seeing this (below).

The kid finally learned to hold his head up and grew big enough to keep his face above the pack.  Took him long enough.  Good thing I'm patient.

Holy cow!  This is from four days ago!  I'm caught up.  Of course, I had to leave our about 36,000 pictures of EmC Harrington, but hopefully there's enough here to give you the idea.  Some day, I'll put all the photos together like a flip book and we'll watch an animation of his life.

On Sunday, last, I texted all four of the people I know, excluding Vinnie because he lives in Boston, and Nathan because he lives in Ohio, and invited them to bring their clones to the local cemetery for some sweet sledding action.  It was a pretty good plan.  Above, Zhora, Nora, and Charlotte share a ride.

The big race.  Zach cheated, as usual.  Jevon appears to be putting on the brakes here.  It was Mag's first time sledding, so maybe they were taking it easy.  More likely, Jevon didn't want to appear to care as much as Zach obviously did about the win.

Trudging back up the hill to the full gang.  Note that Zach has taken up the ubiquitous standing sledding posture.

Jevon went for a more informal approach.

A second trip out with The Barnacle Baby.  This time Arlo came along with us.  I always knew where he was because The Dude's head and body would swivel around to watch him.

That is, until Big Baby fell asleep.

Next up: Grammy and Pop come to visit.