Pot of Gold

We returned yesterday from our traditional bit of October insanity -- a three-day weekend getaway to the northwoods of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, where JoyDad's family has a couple of rustic cabins on a little lake in the back of the beyond. The October trip lets us help take care of closing down the property for the winter, taking the boat and pier out, this time with both JoyDad's brothers and father.

It's about seven hours in the car each way, this three-day weekend of ours, for the privilege of enjoying woodstove heating, cold water from a pump, cold outhouse. Plus this year, we'd been watching the forecast with dismay, as the Weather Channel hour-by-hour showed a greater than forty percent chance of rain for every hour of the dang weekend! I had visions of being cooped up in the cold cabins the entire time with the rain pouring down, trying to entertain two damp-bored-miserable kids.

Shouldn't have worried. Without rain, you don't get this:


And in fact, the rain was on and off, more off than on really. We got to go out in the boat, and Rose & I managed a (success-free) fishing run with the uncles. And while we were out fishing, one of the eagles that nests in the tree on the left of the above photo sailed about overhead, bringing branches to shore up the nest for the winter!

I went for a fine walk in the woods with Rose, and we took another one as a family, without even getting Joy too muddy! Her favorite stim for the weekend was long-stemmed grasses, so she did a lot of dropping to the ground in order to pick the next one. Joy also managed to escape her father's clutches and go walking into the lake at one point, while her sister was playing on the pier.

Lake-walk and all, Joy was a happy camper pretty much the whole time. I think she was relieved at the break from the incessant therapy that she gets subjected to at home. We did a lot of playing on the screen porch during the drippy-er bits of the weekend, and she let me take a whole sequence of photos where she looked right at me and did this:


And this:


I blew bubbles upon bubbles for Joy to pursue and pop, there on the screen porch. Rose got into the action too:


The two sisters enjoyed one another a lot this weekend:


So now it's back to reality, back to a whole lotta laundry, back to the therapy schedule and work and studies (which I ignored totally while up at the lake).

What a priceless getaway, though. Once again. Rain, rainbow, and all.

Elvis Has Left the Campfire

When last I wrote, the Joy-family was off to a weekend's worth of activities, to include a camping adventure with our congregation at a nearby state park. Last year we had a fine success with this annual tent-camping event, Joy's first overnight campout beyond our yard. We did another successful backyard campout on Labor Day weekend, but ended up deciding not to take the tent out this Saturday. JoyDad was feeling under the weather, and for a while I thought I might be taking the girls for the evening on my own.

Fortunately, though, he perked up enough to make the trek to the campground after Joy's afternoon therapy, so the whole family could take part in picnic potluck and campfire conviviality.

Joy sat well at the unfamiliar picnic table and ate, per usual, a wider variety of goodies than her sister did. For entertainment afterward, she found a plastic band from a firewood bundle that she held onto almost all evening, a fine distraction from the fall leaves on the ground that might otherwise have consumed her attention (and that she might have attempted to consume herself in greater numbers than she did!) I spent a nice chunk of time blowing bubbles for her as the dusk was falling, and then when it got too dark to see bubbles, we moved over to the campfire.

Our congregation is big on singing, with four-part a cappella hymns a regular feature of our worship. This translates to lots of lovely harmony on the folksongs around the campfire as well. JoyDad always brings along his guitar to these events; sometimes one or two other people will bring guitars as well, but this year there were three other guitars, two banjos, a ukelele, and a bunch of copies of the folk-song compilation Rise Up Singing.

So at one point between songs, JoyDad inserts a query as to whether there's anything by Elvis in that thar songbook. And our local Elvis impersonator (what, doesn't every congregation have a local Elvis impersonator?) asks JoyDad does he know the opening lick to "Suspicious Minds." And JoyDad, who knows that song forward & backward, swings into the opening bars without a pause. Someone shines a flashlight-spot on our Elvis dude, and we get the entire song, all the moves and facial expressions and rich Elvis voice -- the whole deal. Yours truly, with Joy on my lap, was able to chime in with some of the other gals on the back-up vocals... it was quite the highlight of the evening. Elvis sighting at the campfire, who knew?!



Thank-you. Thank-you-very-much.

Happy Blog-o-versary, JoyMama!

Is this thing still on?

I'm raising my diet, carbonated, caffeinated beverage in a toast to JoyMama! One whole year of bloggy goodness down, many more to go. I've enjoyed being along for the ride, hope y'all have too!

Cheers!

Five Years of Joy

Happy Birthday, Sweet Joy!



May you always see the world through eyes of wide wonder.

We love you.

Product Hits & Misses: Bubbly Edition

It's spring, it's spring!

We had a gorgeous day yesterday. And we started it out with a trip to Target to pick up a replacement for what has become (for us anyway) an indispensible toy. Behold today's first hit, the bubble machine:



Here's a photo from the web of how it looks in the packaging:

Joy got the first of these bubble machines for her birthday at the start of last summer. This year it's called "Amazing Bubbles Bubble Generator"; last year's model was called "Turbo Bubbles Bubble Generator", and both are from a Chinese company called Placo. Cost us about $15 at Target; they only have them during the spring months and into the summer, as far as I can tell. You pour bubble solution into the front of the machine, and then it turns both on and off by means of a single colorful push-button on the top of the machine.

Joy LOVES to turn this thing on and off, and to run around in the resulting stream of bubbles. Yesterday she was actually tracking bubbles and working on popping them, another skill that seems to come and go. The first of the above photos is the one that we use in Joy's PECS book; a highly motivating choice.

Downsides of the toy: it eats lots of bubble solution (make sure you buy an extra gallon of the stuff) and also eats AA batteries of which it takes six. It also comes with a handle on top, but if you try to pick it up with the handle while there's bubble solution in the toy, it will tip and dump out all the solution. Oops. For a cheap plastic toy, it did pretty well, lasting a whole year. Eventually the fan fell off in the back of the machine and there's no way to open the thing up to get to it. Still. You'll notice we ran right out to replace it while the getting was good!

On the MISS side of the equation last year was another battery powered bubble generator called Bubble Bellies: Manely the Lion, by Little Tikes.


Poor Manely. He was a cute idea: you operated him by grabbing a handle on his back and squeezing, which opened his mouth for the bubbles to come out and turned on the fan. Should have been good grip-manipulation practice. But he was too heavy for Joy to turn on and carry around easily, and his handle tended to stick which made him frustrating even if you worked him on a table, and he broke within weeks. Plus he didn't give nearly as good bubbles as the Bubble Generator. Manely = Miss.

So, one more bonus hit before I go today. This one is from Rose.


I first saw these "Multicultural" washable markers from Crayola last fall at Target when I was school-supply shopping for Rose. I passed them over at the time since we were spending so much money already, thinking that I could pick them up as a stocking-stuffer later. But when I went back closer to Christmas, they were nowhere to be found, and I didn't know the right search term (multicultural) to find them online. Suddenly we found them in our local craft-supply store this week. Rose was delighted, and set right in to make a rainbow of people! Wish I'd had this kind of thing back when I was a kid; the standard colors never did justice to skin tones. Heck, I bet my mama wished they had washable markers at all back when I was a kid!

There's your product roundup for the day. JoyMama out.