Air travel boot camp

Its the last week before we leave for South Africa FOR A WHOLE MONTH.  If you are a thief, reading this, don't get too excited.  Josh will wait two weeks to join us and then we have a house-sitter.  Actually, I should term them a chicken sitter since our house is pretty self-reliant and even our cat could be cared for by a person with a light touch with the cat-food, a self-filling water bowl and a few minutes of silent communion.

Its funny, going away.  For ages it seems a great idea.

"We are going away!"

We imagine the thrill of traveling, of being somewhere new, if not exotic.  We have a heart full of unexamined expectations about what we will do and share while There.  But There is just an Other onto which we can project our dreams and soon enough we have to face the reality that its connected to HERE and involves TRAVEL WITH CHILDREN (on which subject tomes have been written).  We have to prepare to leave our home and miss our friends.  We have to buy gifts (that say what we mean to say) and  pack cabin luggage to support the needs and interests of children on long flights.

Suddenly, I have to transform into Long Haul Flight Ninja Mama!  She can go without sleep!  She can creep over sleeping passengers standing only on hand-rests, carrying a toddler who needs to pee at 10am in pitch darkness.  She can wipe a bottom in a 2 foot square airplane toilet which has a 72:1 person ratio (imagine having 72 people in your home for 17 hours and all sharing your bathroom.  Gross!).  She can eat breakfast at midnight and drink polluted water in great quantities and do unspeakably entertaining things with a monkey puppet.

Our flights are something like this:

Seattle - Washington Dulles (5+ Hours)

2.5 hour layover.

Washington, DC ----> Johannesburg (17.5 hours with refueling in Dakar after 9 hours).

2 hour Layover

Jbg ----> Durban  (1 hour)

That is roughly 23.5 hours in the air plus about 5 in airports.  Every time I look at those numbers I rush off and buy another pen / pad, book.  Eventually that is going to impact my stated aim for this trip, my ethos for travel circa 2010:

TRAVEL LIGHT

So far, hand luggage alone includes:

2 Apple Macbook pros
2 digital cameras
1 iPad
2 Pillow pet stuffed animal pillows (for the kids to SLEEP ON ALL THE TIME because THEY WILL SLEEP A LOT)
My book(s)
Frost's book(s)
Wren's book (s)
A drawing book
Pens
A small bag of lego
Scrabble pieces
Snack bags
Spare pants for both boys (because food accidents happen EVERY TRIP)
Play dough
Toiletries

I am not taking a stroller or an on-plane carseat.

Anyway, I have to run to fetch Frost from Warhammer Academy (where he is making a Vampire Count army with a skeleton hoarde (clearly, he was named Frost to thrive in this underworld of geek gamers, everyone looks up when I call his name).

I just wanted to let you know we are still here and I am just chasing my tail and planning and doing laundry and watering the garden because IT WILL MISS ME.  I promise blogs and blogs of our travels.  I have even joined Boingo so I have wi-fi access at airports.

New Camera

I hope you see an improvement in picture quality soon. This is the first uploaded picture with my new point and shoot lumix LX3.

It is Wren, being my subject for a depth of field exploration.  You can click it to see better quality.  

Swimming Lessons

Frost and Wren are doing swimming lessons this week. It is Wren's first swimming lesson attempt and it has been tempestuous. Honestly, I wouldn't have signed him up at all but for the fact that Frost likes swimming and learns a lot each year. I thought it would be easy to have both boys doing swimming while I read my book.

Of course, its not working out at all as I expected. Instead, I lie on the wet cement by the pool, cajoling and reassuring Wren that his draconian preschool swimming teacher is not going to "take me to the deep" or "make him into an upside starfish" on Day 1 or "get water ups 'is nose!" [Day 3]

She has done all these things. She's really clueless. The worst of it is that she acts as if its his obligation to do the various exercises and routines she has on her little waterproof board and does not invoke any joy in him. None. Its all:

COME HERE AND KICK AT THE WALL

NOW COME AND DIP YOUR EAR IN

NOW HUM AND PUT YOUR FACE IN

NOW COME INTO THE DEEP AND BE A MONKEY ON THE WALL

Seriously, Josh could program an iPod to be a better swim instructor. We could bob it around in one of those waterproof Pelican cases Scott recommended for my camera. I bet Wren would warm to it.

Its going well here: "Put your ear in like this"

"Now I am going to pretend I am a shark and drag you around the pool a bit. You just hang there in my jaws."

Despite the stress of the bad experiences, I insisted Wren stay in the pool if I stayed with him. Thus I stay near and throw the funny toy into the pool for him to catch. He loves that. His whole face lights up. The assistant swim coach is also great (he is in the lower right corner, above) and he is very kind to Wren and lets him wander around in his comfort zone and even gets him to do challenging things in a nice way). Today, Wren did a lot better - stayed in for the whole lesson and even laughed a few times.

He doesn't like the game "Mr Shark, What time is it Mr Shark?" because when the kid shouts "DINNER TIME" he runs away through the water with a look of terror.

I hope he feels better tomorrow.

Frost is doing great breaststroke, tolerable crawl and dives and jumps into the pool with ease. He is doing some semi-prone back floats and can do backstroke legs with almost-backstroke arms. I am very happy with his water safety and confidence.

Good update from cardiology

Wren had his 6 monthly cardiology clinic this afternoon. The clinic visit takes about one and half hours and includes echo, EKG, weight, growth and cardiologist consult. The background to the visit is that Wren's last visit showed a mild progression in the stenosis of his heart and the gradient across his aortic valve was 44. At a score of 50 we need to "talk about intervention". We have these 4-6 monthly clinic visits to decide when he will need the next cath or surgery.

The happy news is that he is stable.

This means he has:

• mild mitral regurgitation,
• mild-moderate mitral stenosis,
• moderate sub-aortic stenosis,
• aortic valve stenosis (the most worrying area now, contributing most to his gradient),
• mild thickening of the left ventricle.

There was good news in one area, an actual improvement. This is the first time we have ever seen an improvement in pressures so I am very happy. The improvement is in the pressures in his lungs. These returned to normal this echo. The implication of raised pulmonary pressures is that his left atrium would be under higher pressure from worsening mitral stenosis.

EKG was normal

Blood pressures

Dr Lewin said that today's echo suggests that Wren's heart and blood flow are growing proportionally with him although he has been growing well.

He is now 16.1 kg (35.5lbs and 63rd percentile), and

40.47 inches (78th percentile)

I am happy that we are finally cleared to travel to South Africa!

Cardiology clinic tomorrow

Birthday party is over. House is still a mess but its Wren's six monthly cardiology clinic tomorrow. Last time he had "moderate" stenosis at various important places (mainly around the aortic and subaortic areas). We are hoping to hear that his mitral valve, heart (thickness), subaortic area and aortic valve are no worse.

Can I hope for better?

He looks so good on the outside, I have almost been out of the 'shadow' for the last 4 months.

Touch wood and all things good. Due to superstition, I have collected sand dollars again.

Shipspotting

Overnight, I have become a connoisseur of marine vessels. The living room has three large windows which look out over Puget Sound and the shipping lane to Tacoma harbor. The hot-tub faces the same way. Ferries criss-cross between the mainland and the island and many small fishing boats spend hours moving slightly here and there in morning and evening.

Its hard not to be curious when you see the size of the container ships passing. They are massive hulks - nothing like the slim, low to the water profile of ships when I last had time to gaze at them. When did container ships grow so large?

Cultivating my obsession, I have found a host of websites set up to follow vessels and learn about them. They include the shipspotters (shipspotting.com), who post photographs of ships they see, the ports themselves (eg. Port of Tacoma) who post vessel schedules and my favorite find, marinetraffic.com which offers a global network tracking vessels via GPS in real time.

Now, when I see a large ship approaching in the distance, I use marinetraffic.com to navigate to my region (on google maps) and can see all the large vessels in the vicinity. For example, I saw a huge hulking container ship approaching, still shrouded by morning mist. On marinetraffic, I saw the ship and clicked on it. There, I could see where it had come from, its destination, a photograph, its name, its registration number, some cargo information and then watch it come into view. Once it passed, I could track it into harbor.

The really cool thing comes when you want to follow your ship. For instance, we saw two huge car transport ships called the Trianon and the Glorious Leader. If you go to the website you can see where they are now [Trianon is in Longview and the Glorious Leader is en route to Yokohama].

I have never been particularly interested in geography but seeing all the ships moving around the world (the English Channel is insane. I wouldn't sleep if I was sailing there) make geography seem more fluid, about the world rather than those pesky puzzle pieces of political borders. Oceans flow together - sure, they have invisible lines and territories in them - but they allow you to look at the shape of the world in a different way.

Another neat feature is that you can look at a particular port and see all the ships in and around it. As a child I lived in Durban, South Africa. Durban has a large port and it featured in our lives: I sailed my little dinghy in the harbor head, we ate fish and chips nearby, gathered bullet casings from the gun that fired off the start of the yacht races, saw the whaling station in the days when whales were killed and processed at the bluff, saw the QE2 come in and wandered around taking photographs at the docks.

It was common to look out to sea and find a line of ships anchored off the coast, waiting to come into harbor. I remember one year when there were 70 (I seem to remember this?) ships waiting because the Suez Canal was closed from 1967 (when I was an infant) until 1975. Water taxis would ferry the sailors to shore so they didn't have to wait so long at sea. I looked up Durban on the website and it seems to be a busy port - nothing like the Mediterranean or English Channel but many more ships than Tacoma.

Here are my recent ship sightings (I don't like shipspotting.com because they deleted the ship photo I uploaded because it was Of Poor Quality). Dorks.

Wallenius Wilhemsen Trianon

Glorious Leader

Hanjin New Orleans

I've started to wonder about the life of merchant seamen. What is it like being on one of those small ship-icons on the big google map? I want to spy on them further and am looking for more sources. Do seamen on large cargo ships keep blogs?

Morning walk at low tide

Wren and I woke before 7am this morning. It was probably my fault. I can't sleep in bright light and the bedroom upstairs has no curtains so I wake with the dawn a bit after 5am. I managed to doze until 6am and then went downstairs to tussle with the coffee maker.

I really don't do coffee machines.

First, it started beeping at me in a strident way. I had put the water in the jug not the Receptacle - I was hoping it had a pump and would suck the water into the top part. Of course not. Blech.

I moved it to the receptacle.

Then it didn't go and didn't go. It was on some kind of automated timer cycle. I pressed BREW NOW. It started showing a cryptic LED display that looked like a sun rising and settling so I left it a while. I returned and removed the jug to check it but it was empty and it BEEPED AGAIN. Argh. Apparently it was waiting to be told the BREW STRENGTH I required.

There should be a button marked "don't care, maximum quick."

Morning ferry in the mist. I am witness to the fact they go ALL NIGHT

That time around I found the "MUTE" button but Wren had already "woked up" so we decided to go for a walk on the beach which was at the lowest tide for the day.

Low tide

Mid tide (it gets a lot higher)

Wren finds the tidal movements puzzling. When he comes down in the morning he rushes to the window and comments on the sea. Here are some of his observations:

"It is a tsunami. That is what it is." [high tide with ferry wake]

"It is normal again. NOR-MAL." [medium tide]

"It is all NEW! It is monster rocks. Those are monsters but they are sleeping . Be careful bird, you are near the monsters." [low tide with seagulls]

He agreed to come walking with me if we avoided the monster rocks. We did for a while but then I showed him that almost every monster rock had a starfish hiding under it and so we stared to explore. Here, Wren points out two sunstars hiding together under a large weedy rock.

There be sea stars

Another source of amusement were the geoduct and clam siphons. They appear as dimples in the sand at low tide but sometimes can be seen sticking right out. If you touch them, poke them or scoop the sand around a dimple, they can be made to squirt a lot of water as they retract. Once a showed Wren how to spot them he could not be stopped.

A siphon waiting to be touched

POKE!

Here is Wren on our rocky beach. We collected some treasures from the beach, including crab carapaces, clam shells, a dead chiton with some meat still on (Wren suggested we put it in the hot tub) a broken old fashioned coke bottle and some interesting pebbles.

Wren took this picture of me

We walked all the way to Dolphin Point. This is a walk-in community which was the home of Betty Mc Donald (who wrote Miss Piggle Wiggle and The Egg and I). Because it was low tide it was easy to walk along the sandy and rocky shore but it could be tricky or impassable once the water comes in. Dolphin point is very pretty and quixotically Vashon shoreline. Perhaps if Mum comes with us on her visit we can walk all the way to the next access beach at low tide.

The view south from Dolphin Point this morning

Those three pigs

I was reading The Three Little Pigs to Wren at bedtime. Mama pig sends the three little pigs out into the world to seek their fortune. It was the version in the pigs get eaten by the wolf rather than running for refuge to their brother's house. In the final 'scene' the brick-building pig sets a trap for the wolf who falls into a pot of boiling water and "the little pig ate him for dinner".

Wren found the story confusing.

Wren: Why does the Mama pig make them go away?

Me: Because they are grown up.

Wren: Don't send me away.

Me: No, if you are grown up I will give you some bricks.

Wren: No, you must build me a house...

Me: Well, we can build a house together.

Then I started thinking that even when kids are adults, I can't think of many people who send them on their way and say "seek your fortune". Perhaps that is going out of style. Anyway, Wren is not old enough and needed reassurance.

When we came to the part of the wolf being 'eaten' Wren worried about eating the wolf's fur.

Wren: It would be hairy.

Me: Yes, it would.

Wren: The wolf ate the other pigs?

Me: Yes... weird huh? Its like the little pig ate his brothers in the wolf.

Wren: The pigs didn't come out?

We had just read the story of Little Red Riding Hood in which the granny comes out of the wolf when the woodcutter cuts his head off (Wren said that was "Gross, don't show it to me"). It is odd. Perhaps the pigs had already been digested while Granny had been recently eaten.

All in all, it was a disturbing bedtime and I have told Wren that we can get a new book for tomorrow night.

More Joy of Vashon

I am going to be very dull for the next few days. I am just so startlingly happy at this beautiful house we are staying in that I am just going to post and rhapse lyrical about the place while Wren is sitting in the hot tub:

(

he has been there for ages, and yes, I have the temperature down to 99 so I am not concerned for his health. Plus, he stands up all the time. He is playing a game with the non-functional knobs. Sometimes the hot-tub is a space ship that he is driving. "Operation, clear" he says. Other times he presses them and says "WOOKY, WOOKY, WOOKY" which means "the big robot." He loves to make the maximum number of jets and bubbles turn on which generates some foam. That is called "volcano erupting" and we have to hold on in that phase.

)

Last night we all lazed around in it. I was the one who got out first - the kids version of hot-tubbing is too active and creative for me. I require rest, peace, relaxation and a book. Joshua is threatening to take the ipad into the hot-tub and watch a movie.

The house is quite remote from the road although the waterfront is developed and we have a number of neighbors. To reach the house we have to make a rather precipitous decent which is not easy with luggage and food.

Front door of the house

Trail from the back door

View down the trail from the road.

We now need to take a break from this transmission and head inside for lunch.

To Vashon, to Vashon

We're staying on Vashon this week while Frost attends camp here. I booked a house place online and it has turned out to be the most gorgeous waterfront cottage imaginable. Its right on the water - we can walk down some steps to the water which is now high and within yards of our living room window.

Its cosy and quaint, not the usual sterile ikea stuff you often get in rentals, and there is a hot-tub, past a sprawling pink blossomed rose-bush and our 'own' beach at low tide.

We have been taking some joy in ship spotting - watching the huge container ships as they pass on their way to Tacoma harbor. They are close enough to read their names and we have learned that one particularly vast white one [picture tomorrow, if Josh brings my USB camera cable] called the Cronus Leader, was carrying cars.

The view from our numerous windows is like a postcard, or rather, a series of postcards since you would need a super wide angle lens to capture any sense of the 180 degree vista in mauves, pinks and blushes of blue.

Frost brought his metal detector which was a birthday present, and we tried metal detecting on the beach. We found some pieces of metal, some brackets and some rocks that seemed to register. However, in the garden at home Frost found a 1943 nickel which is listed as being one quarter silver. Frost is quite excited and we hope to try some more sites this week.

It is also fun to scan Wren and find the metal staples in his chest from his last OHS. He suggested we scan Joshua and was gratified that Joshua's hip beeped (because of his keys).

Wren is very excited about digging holes when the detector beeps. However, he tends to fling the sand around a lot rather than digging strategically so Frost and I hover anxiously trying to see what 'we' have found. I also bought Wren a small kids metal detector which has located some large lumps of metal (a sinker, a bracket) but does not have the sensitivity of Frosts.

If anyone is interested, I read many reviews before choosing this detector: Tesuro Campadre. It is very light, has a fully adjustable handle (making a nice short pole for kids), is relatively cheap (compared to the better ones which are all $250+) and has a good level of accuracy. Frost is very happy with it so far and says "I have already had fun with it."

Frost says "the ferries look awesome at night." He is on the sixth book in The Last Apprentice Series and has been very quiet this evening.