Lovelihood

The Boy brought home from school a wealth of knowledge of cranberries and their cultivation, and what I took to be a rigid garland of the boggy fruits and Cheerio spacers. I've been told that it is a birdfeeder, so I guess the squirrels will have their shot at it soon.

The Mr. and Bear hijacked a Boy-requested photo-shoot of the newly constructed Lego thing that he didn't have the time to work on while we were in Colorado for Thanksgiving. So, pretty much, nothing's in focus.

I'm not saying that Colorado isn't sometimes a stunning and beautiful place, too stark and grand for capture with a camera phone through the window of the car driving you to the airport. I'm just saying that home is always better.

It was in Boulder that The Mr. And I shared our first home together, a sweet space on the upper floor of a building that seemed to have been a corner shop in quainter times. Every few years we cruise by and point it out to the kids who feign interst for the five seconds they're willing to break eye contact from their iPads and then we move on to a nice stroll on Pearl Street.

The Boy found a new chess-versary (that's chess+adversary) in his oldest cousin this evening in between bouts at the Wii and manic/epic iPad battles. After an attempted stalemate , The Boy rallied back to a much lauded win. Totally awesome.

The standard three-seat configuration of airplanes and the four-person configuration of our family makes for a generally unrestful travel experience. And today I was the single row parent. But for the first time in 5- plus years -- maybe it was the kids' natural good-natured ness, maybe it was our abundance of electronic devices -- I was able to work on my own project in semi-peace. And air travel suddenly became a lot less painful.

The kids and I haven't been on a plane for a couple years, our last trip with babe in arms nearly doing me in completely. To psych ourselves up for tomorrow's big travel day, we charged and loaded up every personal electronic device we own, and, on the less highly-technical end of the spectrum, I packed up the fancy crayons purchased just for our re-introduction to air travel.