Siblings at the fair! Precious to see Lake’s arm around Lady Kitty on the roller coaster! Summer fun times with Nana and Baba are coming to a close today. We can’t thank Nana and Baba enough for the gift of all these perfect days and memorable experiences together. ❤️
Camp NanaBaba also included as a finalé… a Robin Hood production. Lake made his own guitar and ran back and forth through Nottingham Forest beachfront. Nana played the ocarina from the attic along with the hats and cape. Nana reported, “The kids looked so great.” As an addendum, Lake did a Robin Hood archery show and shot both arrows about 25’. Great work thespians! Bravo! Bravo!
Coming into the final week of NanaBaba Summer Camp at the Lake. Has this Summer whizzed by for you too? A review of some of their fun exploits with photos by Nana. A perfect Summer at the Lake with lots of cousin time and full of NanaBaba activities… it’s all that Lake hoped for. And Lady Kitty was along for the ride… and to beginning to learn how to swim! Well done team, all around!
Looks like these four are having plenty of good fun! NanaBaba Camp Activities are in full swing! Look at that swimming train… and Lady Kitty says, “I do it!”
Well done! Thank you to grandparents extraordinaire, NanaBaba!
It really doesn’t get more Summertime siblings than this photo by Nana. Due to the extreme graciousness and seemingly boundless energy of NanaBaba, the kids get to enjoy a Summer of freedom at the lake place. This is their dream as well as a lifetime dream of mine especially to have my daughter spend her Summer there at the age of two. I was also two when my older brother and I spent a month at the lake cabin alone with our grandparents for the first time. It became a annual tradition for the next 13 years and built many warm memories, and remains my happy place.
There’s nothing quite like the love between grandparents and grandchildren. ❤️
Many many thanks to Lynn and Duane for carrying the tradition torch and hosting Lake and Lady Kitty for their best Summer experience! So special!
These kids came back to the lower 48 today! We had a short and sweet meeting at the airport. They were dressed in fleece jackets and had to quickly adjust for the heat! Bye bye cold rainy Alaska— hello heat wave!
After spending a week with Lady Kitty glued to him, Michael said, “now I know what it’s like to be you, Tolle!” As far as appendages go, she’s a really lovely one.
Then he continued, “I’ve had plenty of time to observe her this week I’ve concluded… she’s a lot like you, Tolle.”
“Oh?” Of course I want to hear more. To me she’s confident, funny, strong, grounded, keenly observant, and pragmatic.
“She likes to hold hands.”
Yes she does! And with that quick turnaround the kids are off to The Lake with NanaBabaa!
A perfect moment, I’m glad I spent it with you!
Lake and Lady Kitty are with Michael in Alaska while I hold down the home-front. Specifically they’re in Ketchikan visiting Michael’s sister Kendra, her husband Simon, (who’s from Liverpool), and their two boys who are a bit older than Lake. They’re a lovely family, funny and relaxed and there are toys everywhere. Lake has been looking forward to this cousin time for weeks. (And Michael his sister time). It’s a wonderful scene.
Lady Kitty reports on air travel. Plane. Uh. Up. Down. Up. Down. Uh. (They encountered turbulence.) As they deplane immediately Michael senses there is less going on in the air. Notes of ocean and trees on the breeze are noticeable.
Michael needs earplugs so a trip to the store is in order. Lady Kitty beelines to the shoe aisle. She starts trying on shoes.
Uh. Too big. Uh. She opens boxes, evaluates and tries different pairs on.
She takes the pink sparkly boots she walked in wearing and lines them up on the shelf. She’s found the perfect new pair instead. She’s ready to go. The whole takes 15 minutes.
“We bought her the shoes. We had to.”
This weekend Lady Kitty astounded us with the sweetest proclamation.
“I wuv you, Mama,” she said, quite out of the blue.
Lady Kitty had clearly been working up to this, and she looked absolutely chuffed with her success.
“I wuv you, Mama,” she said again. Then stood back to bask in the glory of what she knew would be a well received statement. She was not wrong. I was ecstatic. Soooo in love. Not even having the Duchess of Cambridge wear my navy Alessandra Rich polka dot dress to Wimbledon on Sunday felt better (and that was pretty exciting). Not even in the same league.
The love did not stop there.
“I wuv you, Bro Bro.”
“ I wuv you, Dada.”
“I wuv you, Mama,” she said it again and again. We were all over the moon! And she was too! She delighted in delighting us. Love is not a sum zero game, she knew.
We love you too, Lady Kitty! We do! We do! A most perfect day, I’m glad I spent it with you!
In the wee hours of this morning we were all piled in high in mama’s fluffy white bed in our Deer Deer pajamas. Lady Kitty had woken up early and I brought her into my bed for Mama Milk and snuggling, then Lake joined us and we were all cuddling, playing around and giggling. Lake sang us this song:
“Lady Kitty is like heaven on the world. Lady Kitty is like heaven in the world. Lady Kitty is like heaven in the world.”
Truth from the mouth of babes. Wishing you a very lovely Summer, with your own glimpses of heaven! A perfect day, I’m glad I spent it with you.
Art Davidson’s 1969 account of the first winter ascent on Denali, Minus 148°, is an incredible tale. An eight man international team, out six weeks; three men summit, and seven make it out alive. On reflection, one of the images that really stands out is when the three climbers summit. It’s night, complete darkness, and they pass an aluminum pole caught in the shine of their headlamps. What’s that doing here, out in the stark nature? Wait, that’s the summit. This is it. We did it. The expression goes, “it’s lonely at the top”, but it’s also sometimes dark and anticlimactic. You think you’re at least in part climbing the mountain for the views, or to see if it can be done. Sometimes there is no view, but it can be done.
If mothering is the mountain, maybe Mother’s Day is the summit; you’re expecting to revel in your accomplishment, take in the view, and feel appreciated. You’re climbing the mountains day-in, day-out every year, but not every mountain nor every summit is the same. Sometimes there is no view, but it can be done.
With physical and emotional strength, determination, companionship, and a whole lot of sacrifice, mountains can be climbed – even in the winter. Mothering is a lot like that.
Except once you get flown in to Kahiltna Glacier, you don’t get to decide if today is a good day to try for the summit.
Every day is a mothering day. Every day you’re trying for the summit, and when you reach your goal, sometimes there’s nothing perceptible there, just the air in front of your face and the twinkle of far-off civilization.
Then, it’s another day, a different day altogether, and you’re on your way down the mountain. There’s still pain, but the sun comes out and you feel the relative warmth and that’s heaven; that’s enough. Davidson describes how on his descent after submitting, he can’t imagine ever needing anything more than feeling the warmth of the sun on his body. A child’s smile can be that sun, and sometimes, simply… the sun is that sun. You find your own moment of meaning, of making the journey worthwhile.
In my experience, Mother’s Days tend to be Do It Yourself (DIY). For Mother’s Day this year I kept up my phenomenal mother’s tradition of gardening and weeding—getting the garden in shape after the spring rains and bursts of sunshine have woken up all the weeds but the earth is still soft and forgiving. Lady Kitty was helping me a bit. She was cheering me on. “Well done, Mama,” she kept saying. (She can say so much now, I can’t even catalogue it all.) When Lake finished playing LEGO, he wandered out to share lovely moments together in the sun. We visited our neighborhood playgrounds where we bumped into and chatted with our neighbors throughout the day.
It’s easy to say, yes, thank you, I’m having a lovely Mother’s Day. It’s harder to say, my mother’s day is hard and underwhelming. My husband is sick, working, or absent. My babysitter got sick, injured, or cancelled. The children are wild animals and I have a headache. But that was the prevalent reality.
We all seemed to be navigating some version of a DIY Monther’s Day. A true Mother’s Day— not an idealized day-off from mothering, that starts with flowers and ends with fireworks, but an actual day spent mothering. DIY Mother’s Day means celebrating the life and the family that you work so hard every day to create and maintain. It means a day spent parenting alone with your children and having it be the best day of your life.
A perfect day, I’m glad I spent it with you.
A Perfect Day . . . 