Early yesterday morning Troy’s dad Gaylyn passed away in his sleep.   We will miss his ornery laugh, as seen in the many photographs below.  And though when I first met my future father-in-law I thought a practical joke was being played on me, so unrelated father and son seemed, here’s a long ago picture to prove where Troy got his good looks …

And from September 1969, one of my all-time favorites, of the excited parents-to-be of my favorite person …

And here are some photos of Huck’s first few years with Gaylyn. Unfortunately Huck doesn’t remember his grandpa the way we always will, full of life and jokes and always the laughter.

Rest in Peace, Grandpa.

Sometimes Troy and I aren’t 100 percent convinced Huck is our child, what with his academic leanings and love for Katy Perry.  More and more often, though, I am seeing a lot of resemblance between father and son, and that’s what these stories are going to be about.  The other day Huck dressed himself in long white socks and fancy dress shoes that are much too small for his ever growing feet.  The rest of his outfit was a tie dye shirt and a pair of cargo shorts.  I was pretty mortified by this ensemble but tried not to care, and as we headed to the subway for a museum trip downtown he exclaimed, “My feet feel terrible but at least I look good!”   And suddenly I saw why so many people think he looks like his dad.

Huck is extremely into Kidz Bop music these days and because I’m not, I let him use our iPod and speakers which instantly turned him into a teenager who likes to hang out in his room listening to music (and choreographing dances). Sometimes when we’re out and about I let him carry the iPod in his pocket and listen to the music with headphones. Just like Pappy T, Huck cannot, will not be silent as he walks along singing pretty loudly to the words that only he can hear.  Best of all, Troy has been learning some of the songs on guitar so the two of them can totally nerd-out with their public performances of Katy Perry’s “Firework,” Flo Rida’s “Club Can’t Even Handle Me Right Now,” and Maroon 5′s “Moves Like Jagger.”  Sometimes both wearing swim suits, often with choreography.

One of the ways Huck is like his sweet mother (and friend Michael Arthur) is that we all like to put on jammies the second we get home, even if only for an hour.  Huck’s favorite pajamas is a pair of brown plaid old-man-like bottoms with my orange Harvest Festival ladies t-shirt.  Over the last few years these pajama pants have gotten a lot of wear and tear, and when we noticed a big rip in one of the knees a while back I suggested getting rid of them.  Huck begged me to get them patched, and so we took them to the neighborhood tailor and $8 later they were good as new.  Until last week when the other knee developed a large hole and Huck decided he would like to use his spending money to repair them.  The tailor smiled as I handed them back to him and explained the situation, and this morning Huck proudly took some dollar bills out of his duct tape wallet to pay for them.  The cost of fixing these pants has far outweighed the dollar I paid for them at our church’s thrift sale a few years ago.   And while Troy didn’t go to this extreme when his multi-colored plaid old-man-like jammie bottoms developed rips and tears, he did cut them off at the knees and wore them like a humble Scotsman.  My guys love their old plaid pants, what can I say?

Speaking of fathers and sons, Troy’s dad has been quite ill for a while now and last week he suffered a terrible fall.  Troy is there with him in Wichita now, hoping to relieve his sister Tina and stepmom Laura a bit.  Please send a little prayer for a peaceful end to a difficult life.

We just returned from a few days in the beautiful Poconos Mountains of Pennsylvania.  Our friends have a beautiful home there on Lake Naomi, and this meant several days of canoeing, fishing & swimming, along with guitar playing, hot tubbing, a rainy day Monopoly game, some hardcore card playing, too many laughs to count, pretty much every season in three days, and a beautiful sunset on our last night.

We city people are practicing to become country folk …

Having a cautious child has been very good for this cautious mother and has meant zero trips to the emergency room and little anxiety at the playground.  Which made it all the more terrifying when our city boy fell into a little children’s table and cut open his forehead around 10:30PM on our last night in Kansas at our wonderful friends Sally and Phil’s SweetLove Farm far away from a hospital.  (We’re not used to country livin’.)  The kids were playing like slaphappy cousins, wrestling and tickling and giggling loudly.  When the lights went out in an attempt to get everyone into their own beds, Huck crashed into the invisible table and the fun came to a sudden end.  Being the horrible emergency handler that I am, I got lightheaded and had to sit with my head between my knees while Troy, Sally and Phil took care of my bleeding child.  The decision was made that stitches weren’t necessary and so after applying butterfly bandaids all over his eyebrow we tried to sleep.  If you know me, you know I’m a terrible sleeper in the best of circumstances, so suffice to say I got about seven minutes of shut-eye that night.  Early the next morning we awoke to actual cockadoodledooing, packed up some delicious SweetLove Farm goodies, said our goodbyes and headed to the airport.  Because Huck’s forehead looked like he’d just survived some sort of insane plastic surgery, he was met with all kinds of comments like “What’s the other guy look like?” and “Oh, the girls are going to love it!” which made no sense at all to this sleepy seven year old.  Back in New York the doctor said the cut was healing nicely and the scar wouldn’t be too devastating for his mommy.  I’ve decided he must never play again and will spend the rest of the summer reading books.

Here’s the day-after picture and the week-after picture:

It was the vacation of glitches, from the moment we headed to the airport at 5:15 AM in a violent thunderstorm all the way up to the moment Huck crashed into a table and got a deep gash in his forehead on our very last night. There was a problem with the self check-in at the airport followed by a lost car seat and then a lost car reservation.  There were broken hotel doors, lost rental car keys, a mysterious lobby wherein people disappeared, a misplaced camera, a lost swim suit, elephants in the room, insomnia, allergy attacks, heat exhaustion, a bruised heel, cricks in the neck and water in the ears. But there were also hotel swimming pools with rafts, happy cousins, vending machine goodies and roller coasters.  There were more swimming pools, a lazy river and a sand box.  There were cute babies and loving grandparents and aunts and uncles and pizza and fireworks on the driveway and ice cream sundaes.  We had many interrupted conversations that never quite got their endings, but we also learned new card games, had a fishing lesson, played some catch and some chess, caught up with old friends and witnessed a beautiful thunderstorm.  As with life, you take the good with the bad.  You get some Neosporin and apply it to the wound and let the healing begin.  As always, thank you Kansas family for taking care of us on our whirlwind visit in the ever present heat wave.

There’s no place hotter than Home.

Before heading off to Kansas first thing tomorrow morning, here are a few pics of our wonderful summer vacation so far.  The last 24 hours have brought us a Chuck E. Cheese pizza lunch, followed by the last “Critters in a Jar” science class, followed by a pizza picnic dinner, followed by a day of swimming at the New Jersey pool, followed by a neighborhood pizza picnic dinner, followed at last by setting the alarm clocks for 4:45 and going straight to bed.  Because when your child doesn’t get to start summer until nearly July, you’ve got to work really hard to squeeze in as much fun (and pizza) as soon as possible.

Happy Summer Vacation, Everyone!  We’re going to catch up with the rest of you if it kills us.

It’s that time of year when Huck brings home relics from the classroom and makes me scream in high pitched sounds of delight.  Yesterday he proudly handed me his weekly journal, a heartbreaking little notebook filled with his attempts to spell and write words that describe his weekend.   I love how Huck speaks so articulately about matters that I don’t quite understand (math, science, optical illusions, what have you), but he’s still at that tender age where actually writing about it makes him seem like a drunken neanderthal.  It’s one of the few areas where I’m still smarter than him and I’m going to hold onto that as long as I can.

So here are a few of my favorite journal entries from first grade. We’ll begin with my favorite one from the very beginning of the school year, which was in response to a Tomie DePaola story.  I am happy to say that it stars my mother, Grandma Hottman, and her annual joke used to torture her vegetarian daughters:

“Every time my grandma makes food she always tells my mom it has a little bit of chicken in it and everybody laughs about it like this: Haha!”

“We had dinner.  First my mom and dad made stir fry.  Then we had dinner and I ate the whole meal with chopsticks.”

I woke up and lost my tooth.  First I woke up and found my tooth was gone.  Then I called “Daddy!” and he came.  Next we went back to sleep.  Finally we woke up in the morning.  I felt great.”

“I went snow tubing!!!  First we ate lunch.  Then my mom pushed me and thought I was going to die!”

(True story.)

“I saw AN ORDINARY FAMILY at my aunt and uncle’s church.  First I sat in church.  Then I ate lunch that was a sandwich, grapes, crackers and a cookie for desert.  Next I saw my movie.  Finally I went to my aunt and uncle’s house.  I was happy!”  (His drawing is from the scene where his character Jack says “Oh sorry, I was in a daze!”)

It’s really going to break my heart when his handwriting looks less caveman-like.

We have some pretty great friends around here and a few of them have some pretty great houses in other places for relaxing weekend getaways.  Kelli, Paul, Lucia and Imogen are four such friends and we were lucky enough to spend a few days at their glorious piece of heaven on earth about an hour and a half away in upstate New York.  We spent most of our time either at their backyard swimming pool or standing in various spots gazing at the incredibly beautiful, breathtaking view while drool slowly came out of our mouths.  (Maybe that was just me.)  We also did some frog catching and hammock resting and nature walking and guitar singing and there was even a pond baptism or two.  And since this was country livin’, there were some casualties.  While playing on the hammock, Lu’s two front teeth went missing and while playing on the pool deck, the world’s largest splinter decided to live in Huck’s foot for a few days.  (I may never recover from holding down his flailing, screaming body at the doctor’s office back here in NYC while most of it was removed.)  Other than those moments of tears, there were nothing but great big smiles.  And some drool.

Oh, heavenly days …

As the school year winds down, we find ourselves more often than not at Muscota celebrating one thing or another and preparing our summer goodbyes.  It’s particularly bittersweet for us since Huck and his classmates have been with their teacher Marilyn for two years now, and come September they’ll walk up three flights of stairs to their brand new second grade teacher. Monday was the fourth and final Family Breakfast with Marilyn’s class, and though most of us were too busy handing out homemade thank you cards and making sure hugs and kisses were given to everyone in the room, I could feel the change in the air.  For one thing, hanging from the ceiling were the children’s thoughts for next year.  For another, before school that morning Huck sat in his bedroom with the door shut as he wrote the world’s sweetest love letter to one of his seven girlfriends who was leaving for the summer immediately following Family Breakfast.  (The other day he told me it would be easier for him to list the ones who aren’t his girlfriends.)  To prove that I am now a very respectful mother in this social networking world, I am resisting posting the letter that I immediately scanned into our computer.  I will, however, tell you that he called her his “GFF (Hopefully)” and that he wrote these super romantic lyrics to one of his favorite songs: “Hey ho, nobody home.  Meat nor drink nor money have I none.  Still I will be merry!  Hey ho.”  And lastly, because Troy and Huck reenacted their first-day-of-kindergarten picture and made me once again aware of how Huck is practically ready for graduate school.

Hey ho!

Then and now …