travelogue: excursions (skagway)

day 6: skagway, alaska

we spent the fourth of july in sleepy skagway, alaska, population approximately 800 (not including summertime visitors or 10,000 people from cruise ships that day!). the town featured such festivities as a railroad spike driving contest, a slow bike race, etc. quite the exiting time for a small town!

my husband and i chose to do a bike trip through nearby dyea, a beautiful temperate rain forest opening up on some tidal mud flats between the mountains. dyea used to be a mining town, but when the railroad was built in skagway around 1900, everyone moved from dyea to skagway and left next to nothing but a few relics behind.

we didn't see any wildlife that day, but what breathtaking scenery again - are you tired of hearing that???

the mudflats and mountains and stream and ... gosh. can i go back?

while my husband and i biked, grammie took john on the adventure of HIS lifetime - a dog-sledding excursion. they rode a summer training sled pulled by sled dogs, then got to snuggle and play with puppies and grown up sled dogs as part of their socialization training. i'm not sure who loved it more, john or grammie ... but i know they had a blast, and john came home with a cute little stuffed sled dog he named "snap" after his favorite real-life sled dog of the day. i think my mom has some pictures, and i'll post them later if they turn up!

Comments

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!

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

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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