Ohio trip Continued

After the tough drive back from Indiana, I was afraid we'd never get Paul into a car again. Even the little five-minute drive for our play date with Indio was a struggle. Oh...but so worth the ride! Penny and Indio are still funny stuff together. They made music, played at the local water park, defeated some imaginary bad guys who just wouldn't leave Paul alone. It was great! We also got to meet Evan, another second cousin who is about Paul's age. For weeks afterward, Penny has been asking to play again with Indio at the water park.

After another day or two of low-key resting at Aunt Helen's and at Aunt Rose's, we geared up for our next exciting road trip: North to see Mom's sisters. We packed our bags and piled into Amanda's car for the journey after work on Friday. Paul and Penny were pretty quiet all the way there (naps are wonderful like that). But after dinner...hmmm...too well-rested to go to sleep at the usual hour, so we spent a couple of hours in construction through Akron trying to console Paul that the drive would end soon. At last, we pulled in at Aunt Cindy's and the stir crazy gang emerged and explored their new digs. They were a little punchy, but absolutely thrilled with the bunk beds, pink-ness and bounty of toys. 

The next day, Aunt Cindy and Uncle Gary had prior obligations they had to tend to in the morning, but they left us in Aunt Pam's capable care. She quickly had Penny entertained with a number of games on her iPad. We were surprised when Aunt Jayne Joined us as well. Apparently, she recently moved back to Ohio. Now we were in for some good gaming! After a good lunch, Paul went down for a nap and we got a serious game of Scrabble on. By serious, I mean Amanda, Aunt Pam, Aunt Jayne and I played each other in a grueling match of wits, while Aunt Jayne and Aunt Pam played additional opponents on other games remotely. It takes some serious mental power to play that many games simultaneously.

Paul was one content little camper with all the attention he received. He also thoroughly enjoyed the company of even more cousins. Andrea stopped by with her girls on Sunday morning for some excited playing before we headed back to Dayton. Aunt Cindy, as always, was spot on about helping us keep the kids entertained on the way home. We got some essential parting gifts that ended up making our trip home - and our flight - far more bearable. She's totally on top of the grandma thing, that's for sure. The ride home was pretty good - allowed me to contemplate our next big road trip. Dan says he's got a night float shift (several solid weeks of night shift) in October. Since that's not compatible with two rambunctious children, maybe we can take our show on the road again. We'll see.

Ohio "Vacation"

The long hiatus here can be attributed to our superfun trip to Ohio at the end of July. The kids and I ventured out on our own because Dan's schedule no longer permits such luxuries. With no solid plans exactly, we boarded the plane to Ohio to catch up on about a year and a half (or more in some cases) of milestones and excitement.

Dad was nice enough to clear his schedule for several days to generally hang out with us. After picking our little stir-crazy band up from the airport (I'm really glad that Air Force officer didn"t lose it on us after Penny threw a frisbee at him for the third time), we headed over to Aunt Helen's for some serious naps and exploring. Aunt Helen was great about getting the word out that we were home and even hosting folks who wanted to see us while we were in town.

Having recovered from our air travels, we spent several hours the next day at my hometown natural history museum. Now called the Boonshoft Museum of Discovery, they didn't recognize my old t-shirt from when I taught summer camp there. Then I started doing the math...I taught there back in 1996...my students would now be...so they would be too old to be teaching Lore now as a summer gig...gosh, I suppose some of my students could be the staff with their Master's degrees by now. Maybe these would be their kids at the summer camp...gosh, I'm old! I thought about writing a comment card about how my experience at summer camp even longer ago helped lead me down my career path, but alas, no comment cards.

It was pretty awesome seeing how my little hometown museum had grown and generally seemed to be keeping up with the times. There were lots of exhibits on sustainability, something I liked to see based on my recent work. A landfill you could walk through, a sample house with green tech and behaviors, a garbage truck the kids could drive. It was all obviously designed for late primary or middle school kids, but there were some pretty fun things to do in there. Plus, it was interesting to see whom they'd gotten to sponsor each little exhibit. Sponsorship and named spaces ran rampant throughout the museum, but I better understand these days how necessary that is with the cutbacks in public funding. Attendance on the day when we visited also seemed pretty nice, so I felt like my musuem was doing pretty well for itself after all these years. I was sad to go, having been unable to fully explore the "Poop" exhibit and missing the Egyptian mummy somehow, which had led me to contemplate a career as Indiana Jones back in the day. Whew! Narrow escape, that!

Not satisfied to just be home for a couple of weeks and let people visit us, we next packed our bags and Dad drove us over to Indiana for a big Saluke Family Reunion. It had been ages since my Dad and his cousins, aunts and uncles got together. My grandfather lost three of his siblings last year alone, so they figured it was high time to have a reunion. There were games, Saluke family trivia, a scavenger hunt (Penny and Dad won that one), night hikes, food and all kinds of fun.

We were at Spring Mill State Park, a place I vaguely remember from a family reunion in the late Eighties - Uncle Joe playing with a copperhead snake with a stick, a pool that had an underwater passage from the indoor side to the outdoor. I hope Penny keeps one or two memories, like I did from the first reunion. Penny and Paul were pretty much the youngest kids there, but she latched onto some older kids and had a blast playing board games, cleaning up in Uno and running around on the playground. She also appeared to enjoy the Pioneer Village. It was funny because she saw a working mill there and she claims she saw them making sugar (we'd visited sugar mills in Grenada, but she shouldn't remember that). They actually made corn meal.

Speaking of corn meal, the ride home from the reunion was borderline depressing as we passed mile after mile of dehydrated corn fields. We have family that are still farmers in Indiana, so I felt really sad as we drove by fields with dead stalks, ear-less stalks, or even thin ears of corn falling off the stalks. The signs of drought were everywhere. My dad explained some of how farming works today and it seemed terribly challenging for a farmer to minimize losses in such a situation. We had quite a bit of time for the conversation as we took the scenic route home. Ten hours later (we had detoured through Kentucky), we wearily rolled in to Aunt Helen's and I put the kids to bed. I was convinced that Paul would never allow us to put him in a carseat again.

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