Adventures at Sea

Two Sundays ago, it was both "Wife Appreciation Day" and "Talk Like a Pirate Day".  Coincidentally, we already had made thematic plans.  Jason got out of bed in the morning and made a big breakfast including bacon and hash browns (for him) and french toast (for me).  After breakfast, we loaded up the car, strapped our canoe to the roof, and headed to the lake.  "Arr, we be settin' sail."

It was a beautiful day, and there was hardly anyone at the lake.  Seemed perfect.  We got the canoe loaded up with the boys.  Jason suggested that we just take Jonah in his carseat.  This didn't seem like the best idea, but he was so chill in his chair that I went with it.  Jason sat at the front of the canoe to paddle/steer, I sat in the middle with Jonah, and Jackson sat at the other tip. 

Jason pushed us off the dock and as soon as we had cleared land, our yellow canoe became a yellow submarine.  "Arr, we be ship wrecked.  Marooned!" OK, it didn't actually sink.  It just dumped us all overboard.  One of those moments where a fraction of a second seems to take an eternity and yet you are powerless to do anything to help yourself in that eternity.  I fixed my eyes on Jonah who was dumped upside down in the lake, still strapped to his chair.  I quickly grabbed him and stood knee deep in the lake watching Jason pick up Jack and carry him to shore.  Seeing that we were all safe, I laughed.  Guess it was too soon, and Jason let me know just how funny it was NOT.   He went back in the water to rescue our stuff including our camera and his blackberry. 

We hauled everything on shore, dried off the kids, endured humiliation from the 4 groups of cars we saw, and decided to get the little ones home and come back for the canoe.  Jason made all sorts of threats about how he was taking his shotgun out to take care of the canoe.  We've never liked that boat.  It was supposedly a racing canoe, and always felt unsteady.  I'm surprised it had never dumped us out before, but it is a canoe and supposedly its hard to capsize those, right?

It was about 2 in the afternoon when we came home, and Jason went back for the canoe around 4.  He came home empty handed.  Someone had stollen our canoe in the middle of the afternoon in our quiet neighborhood.  Acts of piracy committed against us!  I drove by the lake in the morning to see if it was returned.  Maybe some kids had just taken it out for a ride and left it on shore.  Nope, it was definitely stolen.

We are taking heart in the knowledge that the boat is cursed, and hope Karma sees fit to visit the real pirates soon and often. 

Dinosaur State Park

I've been trying to take the boys on outings Saturday and Sunday mornings. It's good for all of us to get out, plus poor Jason has been working overnights on the weekends, and if we're gone, a.) he has half a chance to catch up on sleep and b.) I don't get annoyed trying to be quiet until 3 in the afternoon. A few weeks ago, we went to the Dinosaur Park in Rocky Hill, CT. This dino park is all about tracks, not bones. They were excavating to build some state building, and the backhoe driver lifted a layer of rocks to reveal the tracks. He knew what they were, notified the authorities, and within 6 months it was declared a state park.

I've been hearing friends say that they went there and had a good time. So far, no one has really described their visit. I'll try to do that here. We took the stroller, with attached Valco stroller board for Jackson to ride on. This was fortuitous. You enter through the gift shop, and the museum is arranged as a loop around the tracks, which are enclosed in a giant auditorium like building with a dino-statue and dino-mural behind. The lights are dim, and playing very loudly is a soundtrack to dino-noises. Jackson was notably frightened and had a death grip on the stroller handles. It's good that he was riding on the stroller board, because I don't believe his feet would've been able to carry him.

 

Shortly after we entered the museum, they started a claymation dino-cartoon. The cashier said it was geared toward little ones, so I brought Jackson to see it with him protesting the whole time (I think he was pretty anxious to get out of there!) I told Jackson we could leave if he hated the movie after it started. He refused to get off of the stroller board, but he had to turn and look over his shoulder to see the movie, and by the end, he had stepped off the board to turn around and sit on it. I'm not sure he ever broke contact with the stroller. The movie itself was unexpected. It was premised on the idea of a book report presentation at school, with some scenes written on a chalk board. Here are a couple of pictures from it, that I took as a visual aid to describe the surrealness of the whole adventure.

Seeing the movie broke the ice a little with Jackson, he didn't leave the stroller, but he was a little more excited to see the rest of the small museum. We did walk quickly along the last stretch—a bridge over the tracks that gets pretty close to the dino-statue.  You can see it in the picture (see the man in silhouette in front of the mural).

The park has extensive trails you can walk on. We didn't because the stroller isn't for offroading, and it was also a really hot day. You can make casts of some of the tracks if you bring your own 5 gallon bucket, ¼ cup of vegetable oil, and 10 pounds of plaster. (Apparently they can't sell a kit for this in the gift shop?!) Or you can buy a little bag of dirt with gemstone fragments and/or fossils and sluice for treasures. We went for this. Jackson would sluice all day if I let him. His technique is to load the trays up with mud, run it under the fountain, and then mound even more dirt on it for the next round. I rescued the arrow head and shiny rocks from the sluice, Jack couldn't care less about the treasure, he's all about the dirt and water.

Jonah slept through the whole trip.