john's mom works

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...

if you look closely, you'll see a very small, fire-engine-pj's-clad boy staring happily at "all the blue airplanes!" this past (long) weekend, our little family headed off to florida to gigi and great grandpa's house for "passover." (it's in quotes because the real passover isn't for months, but our family has always been flexible in scheduling our seder around everyone's schedules, and this year we needed to fit it in before my cousin daniel was off to australia for two years!) we got up eaaarrrllllyy on friday morning, and hustled off to the new orleans airport. (that's right - while everyone else was flooding into the city for the super bowl, we were heading out!) john had been talking about getting on a plane and going to "flordida" for days, so we were all pretty psyched. we had plenty of extra time at the airport, so john enjoyed watching all the airplanes just outside the windows at the gate. he ran around an...

john and cousin b draw dinosaurs together i didn't really set out for it to be this way, but i appear to have taken a bit of a holiday blogging hiatus. so here we are mid-january, and i never even mentioned our christmas (awesome) or new years (festive). in a nutshell, we all got awesome presents from santa and our family, john got spoiled rotten, we celebrated new years with bestest buds from in- and out- of town. then we worked for a week and went on a little family road trip! i use the word little very generously. we drove from baton rouge to visit my husband's brother and his family in north carolina. we left friday after work, leaving town around 8 pm with a little stop at arby's for some last-minute dinner: fast-food in my pjs is my new fave, mom. then we drove ... and drove and drove and drove. or really, to be fair, my husband drove while i alternately entertained john, slept, talked to him to keep him awake ... slept some more ... in any case...

post-cruise: anchorage, alaska after hubbard glacier, we cruised along for the rest of that day. and by early the next morning, it was time: the cruise was over. we deboarded from the lovely millennium and sadly waved farewell. but the good news was, the adventure wasn't over! we still had nearly two full days in anchorage. you see, my grandfather was stationed in anchorage in 1956. my mom actually lived there for about a year as a infant. of course mom has no memories of that time, but we were all pretty excited to see where they used to live, and explore the town that has changed so much since my grandfather's time there. the cruise ship had docked in seward, so we boarded a bus as a family and took the scenic drive to anchorage. you could make the trip in two hours if you hurried - but we didn't. we stopped at a little lodge for a delicious snack on the road, and then at a wildlife preserve for injured and sick wild animals. this is the bear that took t...

day 7: hubbard glacier, alaska so this wasn't technically an excursion - there is nowhere to get out at hubbard glacier. but the ship sails up a narrow channel for a couple of hours, and suddenly at the end is this monstrous beautiful blue glacier. how close a ship can get is different every day and dictated by the coast guard. this day, we got within a half-mile of it. and honestly ... that was plenty close. there are not words to capture the true scale of this crystalline beast. one of my few goals for the trip was achieved this day, too - my husband and i sat in a hot tub and watched the glacier outside. the air was cold (though not arctic) even in the aquadome, the water was hot, and the glacier was truly breathtaking. we even got to watch it calve several times, including one that was so big, the wave it created rocked the entire ship. it's hard to get the scale on these, but they're each at least about 5-8 feet tall, just floating in the sea around the ship. ...

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 pulle...

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 ...

day 4: icy strait point, alaska icy strait point is a completely fictional town. it is not too far from hoonah, an actual small town, but it is in fact an old cannery that the cruise line purchased to use as a docking station for this particular stop.  icy strait point! looks like ... a ... cannery. there's no population at icy strait point. there IS the "world's tallest zip line," but i didn't partake of that. instead, we elected to go whale watching.  when i was a kid, my grandparents used to take our family whale watching off of cape cod, so that is something near and dear to my heart. i was really hoping the whales would put on a good show, especially since john was with us for this excursion. we got on our little whale-watching boat and set out. john and grammie exploring the boat. within literally moments (maybe 5 minutes? maybe less?) we saw a whale off near the shore, splashing and playing. he wasn't super close, but we checke...

as you may know if you've ever been on a cruise, a whole lot of the fun actually takes place off the ship, in the ports, on excursions. and this trip to alaska was jam-packed with adventures, for sure. day 3: ketchikan, alaska our first stop along the way was ketchikan. and ketchikan offered something that caught my eye the instant i saw it advertised: snorkeling. in alaska. did you catch that? who the heck snorkels in alaska? THIS girl! (along with my husband, other-one-n, cousin d, and cousin s - my fellow bad-a travelers and underwater partners in crime.) to answer your question, yes, the water was freezing cold. but the good news is, we didn't feel that at all through these sexy mammajammas: 7mm of neoprene goes a long way to keep a body warm. the whole crew all decked out. don't we look like superheros or x-men or SOMETHING cool? in all seriousness, the wetsuits kept us remarkably comfortable, and we saw some very cool stuff under the 47 degree wa...

i realized as i was posting our amazing pics, that i wasn't fully telling some of the funniest stories. so more pics are forthcoming in the next few days, but here are my favorite johnisms from the journey. other-one-n . my mom's brother has relatively recently (a couple of years) married a wonderful lady and, so she and her two almost-grown kids have become a part of our family. they are awesome. the son shares the same name as my brother. so what is a two-year-old to do, with two people of the same name? well my bro is easy - he's uncle n. and using awesome toddler logic, the other n becomes ... other-one-n. which he (and everyone else) finds endearing and hysterical. so other-one-n stuck, and is pretty much how we referred to him the whole trip. uncle l . my brother has had a very cool girlfriend for years now, so we were very glad she was on the trip with us. in fact, n proposed to her on the ship, so now she'll officially become part of the family! as we...

... after our bus tour, we were dropped off directly at the cruise ship. our luggage had been sent ahead of us, so we weren't lugging anything (ok, so my husband and i each had a small backpack, plus one diaper bag, plus the stroller, plus john ... but compared to the mountains of luggage we brought with us that's NOTHING!) day 1 the first afternoon on the ship was mostly just settling in and exploring. we did have a "muster drill," which is the ship version of a fire drill where you go to the place you would group up for life boats, etc. you're supposed to quietly listen to instructions from the muster crew, but of course john was singing and babbling nonstop. fortunately the crewmembers and fellow cruisers were very understanding. (i did have the thought, god forbid something happens and someone doesn't know what to do because they were too busy listening to john ... but thank god there was no such karma in the air!) one of john's quick favori...