Labor Day Weekend (After Some Initial Rambling)

Summer just screamed, “AAAAhh! Mette’s trying to eat something like a person!” I looked over in time to see Mette smile mischievously and make a snapping, biting motion towards Summer. Summer screamed again. Mette snapped again. . . . And then contritely apologized when I came rushing in. “No no Mette! Stop scaring Summer. We don’t eat people. Give her loves and tell her sorry.”

And I haven’t gotten over the strangeness that I now occasionally have to ask, “Where’s Hans?”

Off exploring. That’s where he always is. 

I’ve long since had to block the basement stairs, and he seems to regularly recall that there is a cabinet missing its door in the kitchen and just low enough that if he swipes his arm up (confined to his tummy as he still is in his wanderings) he can manage to knock out a slew of canteen-like water bottles that he can then roll under chairs and under counter edges and under dishwashers. Babies seem to take on so much more personality when you can see where they choose to go. The mobility combined with other “older” sorts of things have made him seem such . . . well . . . such an older baby of late. This week, in a day, he mastered sitting up, and holding his bottle; the other day he was looking at Mike and very clearly “yelled” to get Mike’s attention; and twice he slept for 12 plus hours at night. (True, some of my children were doing 12 hour stretches much much earlier than this, but considering I’ve done nothing particular to dissuade his night wakings, it’s a lovely development.)

In other news. We went off to Bear Lake over Labor Day weekend. Between having a newborn, the flood, and lots of Mike’s vacation days having been needed for other things, we’d only been up two times this year! TWO TIMES. So I was feeling extra lonesome for the place and anxious to be there. And so when the weekend went ahead and obligingly gave us possibly the warmest Labor Day we’ve had up there, I was quite happy! (The summer is often very short up there. We’ve had snow there on Memorial Day weekend and then cold jacket-wearing weather by Labor Day many times.) And while I’ve decided once and for all that October truly is my favorite month of the year, and while Mike prefers fall at the cabin himself, summer is what I most long for at Bear Lake.

We kept windows and cabin deck doors open. The days were warm and the nights cool. (We didn’t actually keep all the deck doors open. The kids and Mike were overly fond of the spider-web and frightening, furry spider who was using it that covered part of this door and kept telling me to close it again every time I opened it lest I disturb him.)

(I could not for the life of me figure how to get a clear picture of it. I tried sprinkling water droplets on it to make the web stand out, but I only succeeded in getting the window pane behind the web wet.)

But this was made up for by my getting to keep the door open in the loft that leads to the very tiny deck at the back of our cabin. I like that puny little deck in theory, but we rarely go out there or even open its door as it faces the front of our neighbor’s cabin and is placed in such a way that, when open, it feels oddly like we are staring at one another. This time however the sleeping pad that I put across the open doorway to block Hans from escaping out of it sufficiently obscured our view of our neighbor . . . and his view of us . . . to make leaving it open seem mostly acceptable.

We read some of A Face Like Glass, Mike let me sleep in, and we watched late movies. We went to the beach, ordered pizza, ate lots of treats (one time we ran out of treats during a Bear Lake trip and we nearly all died), and got shakes at Zipz on their last day open for the season. Mike took the older three kids on a long 4-wheeler ride to Peter Sinks (actually, he was uncertain when or if they were officially at Peter Sinks as it wasn’t perfectly clear – which disappointed him), and the younger kids he let ride go-carts at the local . . . go-cart . . . raceway . . . place (I don’t know what one calls it). We fed carp at the marina and arm-wrestled and stacked rocks (pebbles?) in contest on the beach, and, on the way home, when I mentioned how many dead deer we’d seen on the roads, Summer calmly said, “Well there’s some deer that aren’t dead,” and pointed to a herd of cows. It was a lovely trip.