travelogue: excursions (juneau)

day 5: juneau, alaska

so eleven 30-ton humpback whales synchronized swimming is a pretty tough thing to top, but we figured out how to do it: our five-glacier flightseeing tour on a seaplane, culminating in an incredible wild-caught fresh local salmon feast at the taku lodge. amazing scenery, incredible food, topped up with a close-up black bear sighting ... how could this possibly be my life???

i don't even like salmon, but the stuff we had at taku lodge was delicious. if that's what salmon tasted like in "real life," i'd eat it every day. grammie and my husband and i ate like pigs and soaked it all in.

the trusty seaplane that carried us over the amazing scenery

dorky johnsmom on a seaplane

mountains below

one of five glaciers we saw (on the left)

the amazingly gorgeous braided taku river

our lunchtime view from taku lodge - the aptly named taku glacier

moosehead overlooking our
lunch seats

enjoying some russian tea -
tea, oj, lemonade, cloves - mmmm

a wild black bear hanging around
the lodge

john was with gigi and great-grandpa again while we were on this excursion, and according to all reports, they had a blast as well.

Comments

i'm furberizing my baby

ok, let's get this straight right off the bat: i don't know if i am literally following dr. furber's methods of sleep training. there are so many versions out there. but saying we're furberizing john is WAY more fun than saying that i'm letting him cry his little lungs out in an attempt to teach him to sleep on his own. it's night two of our efforts. he went right to sleep last night, which was great. and he slept for 5.25 hours (!!!!) before waking up at 2:30 a.m. when he woke up crying, i let him cry for 5 minutes before going in to soothe him. (the soothing barely works at all, by the way, but it's what i'm supposed to do ...) then i let him cry for 10 more minutes before going in to soothe him again. next on the agenda was a 15 minute stretch of crying - but he fell asleep after 8 minutes. so a sum total of 22 minutes of crying. not too bad for night two. i've heard night three can be the worst ... so we'll hold on to our hats tonight. mean

on lullabies

i am not a singer. if you've sat behind me in church, you know this to be true. (and i'm sorry.) a musician, yes. a singer no. and yet i find myself singing to john almost nonstop. and the beauty is, he seems to actually like it! (there's no accounting for taste. he also thinks i'm the most beautiful woman in the world. i'm no ogre, but i'm certainly not winning any beauty contests outside of my son's brain!) and actually, i've written some lullabies for john that are pretty nice. and it made me think: did your parents sing to you? do you remember what they sang, and better yet, if you have kids, do you sing the same songs to them? reply in the comments!

home

annapolis rock 1988 thirty years ago, my family moved from denton, tx, to a tiny rural town in the mountains of maryland. i remember being sad as we sold our things (we were packing everything into two old cars to drive north) and actually crying over the sale of our washing machine. transition does strange things to kids' emotions. yet i remember arriving, excited, into this strange green mountainous place, and i remember even more anticipation as we found a home ("the old taylor place") and got ready for school to start at smithsburg elementary. third grade -- the same grade john starts this school year. i remember meeting my first friend on a dusty dirt road - the "alley" that ran behind the high school tennis courts and athletic fields from our home just at the town's outskirts to her home just outside downtown. (if you've never known a small town downtown, that's probably hard to envision). it was an amazing place to be a child. 199

john's mom works

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