We're back and better than ever from our 5-day sojourn to lovely Virginia. Do you like lush green landscapes, flowering redbud, budding dogwood, horses, and low blue mountains all around? Virginia is for you. Charlottesville is especially gorgeous and well-suited to people like me. Free-range grass-fed meats, hand-made cheeses and locavore-oriented friend candidates, lots of lovely shops… ah yes. I was concerned, too, having heard that the south is much more formal in terms of attire. But I found that the women my age and I were all wearing the same uniform: jeans and Dansko closed-back clogs. Thus I felt in my element in all ways.
However, Isaac, shall we say, often had difficulty with the unfamiliarity of it all. I think for him, in his overwhelming world of intense sensory input, change can easily overload the circuits. The result is a black mood so overpowering that it contaminates everyone for a wide radius. Take for example our visit to Monticello, one of the most physically stunning places I've ever seen. And one of the least kid-friendly. Indeed as the day WORE on I came to believe that children are not only unwelcome there, they are LOATHED. Perhaps this is too harsh. But consider our experience… on a cold, rainy, drizzly day, we arrived at about 11:15. We bought our tickets ($48 total, which becomes important later) and were told that the next time to tour the house would be at 1:40. A large 1:40 was stamped on our tickets and this number held us hostage from then on. So… how to kill two and half hours on a rainy day with two kids? We had lunch and wandered around the visitors center a bit. There was, I should say, a wonderful, fun-filled kids Discovery Center with lots of touch and feel things and log cabins to run in and so on. This was closed and locked, taunting us from behind the glass. We struggled through an hour or so just doing nothing and finally decided to take the shuttle bus up to the house. There– glory for adults. The gardens are incredible. I wanted to spend all day studying them. Anyway, suffice it to say that the kids did okay for a while, but for the last hour or so, Isaac was complaining in increasingly emphatic tones and demanding to go home.
I think he honestly had a headache and was cold. But his behavior was so awful… so petulant… so miserable… and meanwhile, Elias was getting more and more tired. He wanted to sleep in my arms. He wanted to nurse! He wanted to take a nap. This went on as Ben and I clung to 1:40 time and held our ground. We had paid $48 and come all the way from Ohio and were not going to go home without seeing the whole point of coming! WE would not let the kids tyranically rule us! Finally in the line waiting, endlessly, for our tour to begin (way past our time I think), Elias started to scream and struggle. Isaac finally crashed and began to scream too in a kind of furious, way-beyond-his-limit way. I tried to get the 28-pound Elias to sleep in my arms. Ben took Isaac back towards the car to protect the other tourists from the wrath. All this while standing in the cold drizzle. Elias began to shout, "Wanna go in the warm house, wanna go in the warm house!" I think expressing the sentiment of all in that line.
Finally we did get inside the house, which was, I should say, spectacular. A treasure trove of wonderful things, guarded by docents who have devoted their lives to protecting said treasures from the grubby masses. And who is grubbier than a two-year-old who has no respect for or understanding of ropes? Thus Elias had to be restrained, refused to sit in the stroller they so kindly gave us (perhaps hoping that we could tie him in) and created a scene on many occasions. Meanwhile, ISaac had managed to pull himself together and joined the tour, and of course actually liked the inventions and the doo-dads, mastodon jaw, the revolving doors and dumbwaiters and the clock that sinks way into the floor. When we were finally freed from the tour, he ran happily from ice house to privy and enjoyed himself, so it seemed.
But I can tell you that when we all finally made it back to the car, I think we shared a profound sense of relief. My advice re Monticello: do not bring the kids, at least not under ten, and go in nice weather.
With the notable exceptions of canoeing and reading Hawkman, Isaac spent a lot of time in a black mood on this trip. A subsequent day I attempted to get us all to a kid-friendly part of the blue ridge mountains, where we could walk up to a look-out point and see the endless vista. We got there, and Isaac would have none of it. And walking up even a kid-friendly path with an unwilling, struggling, screaming child is not my idea of fun. We had to bag it, look at it from the car, and wish only that things had turned out differently.
Now. Back at our cottage, which was tiny and rustic in a 1950s summer camp sort of way, Isaac was a delight. Turns out he loves canoeing, you could say to a fault. When we first arrived, after an 8 hour drive on Monday, we were all rather stressed and tired and the sun was setting, but Isaac set his eyes on the canoe and wanted to get to it at once. Too late, we insisted. This irritated him. The next morning he was up before dawn, wanting to canoe. Too early, we complained. It has to at least be light! This enraged him. When finally the annoying sun came up, it was raining. We would've said, "too wet" but I relented and went canoeing with him as soon as possible. I actually like canoeing myself, and this was a pretty glassy little pond with beavers and a few waterfowl (a domestic-hybrid duck and two Canada geese), so that was fine. Only when I was done canoeing, Isaac had only just begun and Ben and I had to switch. Thus we spent a lot of time, one or the other of us on the water, and then other one tending Elias on shore and holding Lena's leash. (Elias wanted to get into the canoe at one point, and we tried it, but he was terrified and had to come back to shore at once, a shaking, crying mess.)
When not canoeing, Isaac was all about reading Hawkman in his bunkbed. This would've been great, except that he can't read well enough yet to grapple with it. So that meant he had to get a parent to read him Hawkman in his bunkbed. Suffice it to say, Ben and I both spent WAY more time reading Hawkman aloud than we would've liked, and when we were not actually reading it, we were constantly rebuffing a frustrated Isaac. Isaac would ask to read Hawkman roughly 2-3 times for every five-minute span of time… Hawkman is sort of interesting. He's a super hero with mechanical wings and a gravity-defying belt. He uses the weapons of the past to fight the crime of the present, so is always pulling out a mace or an asiatic scimitar. And there's a quaint leit-motif of beautiful white women being made wives/ravaged/sold at slave market by swarthy bad guys (it was written in the 1930s). But still, neither of us wanted to read for hours on end!
It didn't help that it rained a lot. But Thursday was beautiful (the day I attempted to get us out for a hike), and enlivened by the discovery of some other kids on the pond who had found 9 orange newts! And they had constructed a sand and water containment facility to hold the newts for observation. This was a project that Isaac could get into, and I spent a fine couple hours sitting on a bench, chatting with another mom, while our newt-oriented kids got more and more wet and muddy. Happy times!
Ah well… If I had been home for two solid weeks mano a mano with both boys I would have gone insane. So, even though the trip had some arduous points, I'm glad we did it. Ben is now actively looking into the possibility of buying a family canoe and so perhaps we've found a new hobby.