Road Trip to MA

The kids and I took a road trip to the Boston area earlier this week. Here are some highlights ....

 L. taking charge of the camera in the car on the way down. How many pictures did you take? Ooh, lots I see....

Going to the car wash with Grandma. They acted like it was the first time they'd ever seen one before. Well actually by the look of our car, maybe it should be a little more often....

Running around Boston in their new ponchos - they were certainly easy to spot in a crowd.

Taking a Flat Stanley on the Freedom Trail in Boston to learn a little history.

Checking out the ice skating rink in Boston Common. Of course the kids were upset with me for forgetting the ice skates but then decided that was OK when I asked them if they would have carried them on the T. That was a resounding no.

Eating a "real" roast beef sandwich. Well that was my highlight. I love them and I haven't found any better than in the Boston area. But I'll leave the blogging about great food to my co-worker, Colleen....

George vs. geocachers

This morning I went to put my dollar into the candy machine here at the office and noticed a www.wheresgeorge.com stamp on the back of my dollar bill. And in a moment of curiosity (and knowing I really shouldn't eat a candy bar anyway) I decided to keep the dollar and log onto the website to find out where my bill had been.

Well, the bill's history consisted of two entries, one of which was mine. And where was it originally logged in?

Westbrook.

A whole 4.6 miles from my zip code. Not nearly as interesting as the kids' travel bugs in New Zealand.

And it was funny I should compare it to geocaching because there's actually a page on the wheresgeorge.com website about geocachers. Apparently the George people aren't so keen on geocachers using bills as travel bugs.

The general rules of this site specifically prohibit trading or exchanging bills with friends, family or anyone known to the bill distributor. This rule is to encourage "natural circulation" of the currency, and to prevent multiple "fake hits" from happening on any bill. Afterall, the purpose of Where's George? is to track the manner in which currency naturally circulates throughout the country and the world. Allowing people to arbitrarily enter multiple hits to track that a bill was traded among a circle of friends and family defeats the entire purpose of this site.

Poor George, feeling threatened by geocachers. Where's this game's sense of fun? Oh I know, it's with their related Where's Willy website....

New season, new road sign

A couple of weeks ago, snowmobile crossing signs were put up around our town. Since we don't have a snowmobile, the kids found an alternative way to introduce a Flat Stanley we're hosting from France to the snowmobile season in Maine.

Please sing to a snail

Tonight at my tap class (it should be called a talk-and-laugh -with-a-couple -minutes-of-actual-tapping class) my friend Darnell said that if you sing or hum a tune to a snail you find on a beach, it will come out of its shell.

OK, I have never heard this and I am skeptical. Before Darnell shared this bit of snail trivia, she had been talking about how she duped her young children into believing she made home-made oreo cookies. She went so far as to create the illusion of assembling the cookies and warming them in the oven as her children arrived home from school. She even explained away the oreo word stamped on the cookie, saying she had worked hard all day making it perfect for them.

So can you see why I question her information?

With winter upon us here in Maine and the fact we're unlikely to wade in the ocean when it's 10 degrees Fahrenheit, I am writing to request that my warm weather friends go to the beach, pick up a snail and try singing to it. Then tell me if it really comes out of its shell.

I really would like to know if this is another homemade Oreo cookie story...

Screaming for the Pirates

Yesterday we met some friends to see a Portland Pirates game. Bunny and the Flat Stanleys we're hosting came along for the fun.

This was G. and L.'s first live hockey game and they weren't sure they liked all the checking and fighting.

"Ooooh mommy his face smashed against the glass! That rat guy wasn't very nice."

"I am happy the Pirates won but I feel sad for the other team. They look sad."

Yeah I know, they need a little more exposure to live sporting events.

The highlight of the game was the slapstick goal by the Pirates at a face-off and everyone jumped out of their seats to cheer. And of course, Crackers, Salty Pete, the popcorn, nachos and soda were big hits with the kids - and Bunny had his share of popcorn too.

But I think the best part, particularly for L., was screaming her lungs out along with her friend - something I don't generally encourage at home....

Cross country skiing and disc golf, an interesting combo

What do you get when you combine cross country skiing and disc golf? An entertaining afternoon with a lot of laughs, especially when I heard G. lamenting ducks. But you'll have to wait until my next column is finished to find out what that was about....

I would admit that it would have been handy to have been an octopus while playing the game. I needed the extra hands to manage the ski poles (which I ended up ditching in the parking lot), score card and pencil, golf disc and camera. And we all agreed that it was no small effort to make tracks in 11 inches of ungroomed snow on cross country skis.

We took a lot of wipe outs on the course and ended up dumping the skis after 6 holes. It was a serious cardio workout and we were wiped out with the duck-walking up the course's hills. But we did play a few more holes in our boots before we headed home.

We took Robot Bunny out to play the game with us. He's been a bit neglected lately with all the Flat Stanley comings and goings. But he's back in action. There is something to be said for being able to stand up on your own.

Flat things require a lot more hands-on attention....

Waxing away the night

When I got home from the office yesterday afternoon Fino and the kids were already out on their cross country skis. The kids' skis arrived on Thursday (we rent them) and we were psyched they came in time for the snow storm yesterday.

But when the kids came through the door after their ski adventure around the neighborhood, they were wiped out. Along with using muscles they hadn't used in a while, they told me that their skis weren't working correctly.

They aren't sliding right, G. complained.

It turned out Fino hadn't waxed the skis before the kids strapped them on so last night he spent a couple of hours taking care of the wax issue for all of our winter gear - 4 pairs of cross country skis, 2 pairs of downhill skis and both of our snowboards.

Fino's thoughts after he was done with the task? "Man, that's a lot of f***ing gear to wax."

The dog and seal controversy

We were driving past Hadlock Field the other day and decided to stop to take a photo of the Portland Sea Dogs statue with some Flat Stanleys we have been hosting. Both flat friends came from boys so we thought a photo with a sports logo would be a fun picture for them.

The kids jumped out of the car, we took a quick picture and then went on our way.

Then last night L. was working on the journal she was writing to send home with the Flat Stanley and mentioned the "seal" picture.

What seal picture? I asked.

The baseball guy, L. said.

G. chimed in, "He's a Sea Dog. You know, a dog just like his name says."

No he's not! He's a seal, said L.

But he has dog in his name and he looks like a dog.

G., I was sitting by his feet and he has seal feet. He does not have dog paws. See look at the picture!

After some searching, I came up with a story about the logo.

"I read him the whole list of names and he asked me what a Sea Dog was," Eshbach said.... Gilchrist said the logo of a spunky seal pup poking its head through the letter P and holding a bat in his teeth borrowed from the Chicago Bulls for the eyes, the San Jose Sharks for the bat in its mouth (the shark has a hockey stick) and the Durham Bulls for the animal through the letter.

So give L. a cigar, I thought he was a dog too.

Figuring ski boots sizes = ugh

I'm not a fan of math. The day I learned that computer science courses met my undergraduate "math and science" degree requirements, I never took another traditional math class again.

I can figure out sale prices easily, having spent my entire life in search of a good sale. But when faced with figuring out cross country ski boot sizes, I realized I had forgotten basic math.

I collected foot lengths for each child in a ski club I organized for my kids' 4-H club. I was told by a friend that the best way to figure out accurate cross-country boot sizes was to have the child's foot length in inches.

Everyone in the group emailed me their sizes and I sat down last week to put in our group's order to rent all the boots and skis through the Healthy Hometowns Program.

Originally I thought I could skip my own kids' measurements because I knew their downhill boot sizes. Nope. Cross-country ski boots use Euro sizes.

I did a web search for a conversion chart from MONDO (downhill boot size chart) to Euro but that proved time-consuming because G. wears an adult size and L. wears a child's size. Finding a chart that included the full range of sizes wasn't a quick thing to find, although I did track one down.

But that really was a waste of time. I should have just measured their feet in inches like everyone else.

I moved on to the other kids' sizes. According to the directions from my friend, I had to take the length in inches, add 1/8" and then convert that number to centimeters to figure out the Euro boot size.

Note to self: Have everyone send me their foot size in centimeters next year.

But OK, I could do the conversions as soon as I figured out first how to convert fractions to decimals and then figure out how many centimeters equaled an inch. This was not something I knew off the top of my head. Actually there was not one person I asked last week that knew the answer to either equation.

1 inch = 2.54 centimeters
1/8 = .125

I did the first size conversion with my trusty calculator and then decided to do another web search and found sites that did the fraction conversion and another for the inches to centimeters conversion.

After figuring all the sizes out and placing our group's order, I treated myself to a nice bowl of chocolate cookie dough ice cream and thought about how much I love the web .....

Re-stocking our geocache

Yesterday we went to re-stock the geocache we hid this past spring at the Lowell Preserve in Windham. It was a little muddy on the trail with all the rain we had the day before but that made the "fun stones" on the trail even more entertaining for the kids.

Don't fall in the lake, L. yelled to me while she was jumping around the stones.

The geocache was pretty well stocked so we only added a few new items, including a Travel Bug. Over 40 people have visited the cache and wrote in the log book since we hid the cache in June. That's a lot more people than logged their visits online but some first-time geocachers noted in the log book that they used the cache's treasure map instead of a GPS. I'm guessing the newbies weren't familiar with the geocaching.com website yet.

No matter. The kids and I enjoyed reading the cache's log and recognizing some familiar names. The kids thought people had left some "really cool trades" so I have to say thanks to everyone who has visited and taken such good care of our cache!

Kid Tracks Column: Distractions enliven day of playing disc golf in the snow

"I hate ducks," my 9-year-old told me on the third hole of the disc golf course.

Why was she lamenting ducks?

Because she was tired of duck-walking up the hills on the disc golf course with her cross country skis.

OK, you'd be right to question our sanity at combining cross country skiing and disc golf. And although it was clear we hadn't thought things through, it made for an entertaining afternoon.

Last fall we tried our first round of disc golf at Enman Field in Brunswick. We had a great time and the kids thought hiking through the woods to track down our wayward discs was as much fun as throwing them into the chain-link cages (dubbed "jail" by my kids).

We were told by the staff at Enman Field that disc golf was a year-round sport. I asked how you could possibly find a disc in the snow and was told to look for the smiley face imprint the disc made when it landed.

Bennett's Disc Golf course in Gorham opened this past summer and since it was closer to home, we decided to give that course a try for our winter disc golf experience.

We paid our course fee and received bright red discs to use. I asked if we had to follow the holes in order and was told since there was only one other group on the course, we were welcome to go out and play the holes in whatever order we wanted to.

That's one of the things I love about disc golf, the people and the game are casual and laid-back.
We strapped on our skis in the parking lot, which took a while because we're out of practice putting on our gear, and gathered up our polls and discs to head to the first hole.

The first thing I realized before getting on the course was that I needed to get rid of my poles. I couldn't manage them along with the score card and pencil, disc and camera. But OK I thought, I could still do this, it was just going to be a little tricker than I had planned.

The first hole led us down a hill that the kids were excited about. But then we discovered we all sort of forgot how to ski down a hill with cross country skis. The kids fell down every five feet or so before they found their balance on the skinny skis.

"I think I used the wrong wax on these skis," said my husband after his second fall. Excuses were easy to come by.

But we all made it, albeit a little wetter than when we started. We recovered our discs after our first throw without much trouble (except for the skiing part), seeing the smiley faces in the pristine snow pretty easily.

After another throw we had to climb a hill, which took a lot of effort on cross country skis. But we managed that challenge well and all of us made that hole as a three or four par.

We made our tee-off for the next hole and proceeded down another sloping hill, this one a little bigger. The kids skied ahead to retrieve their discs and then made their next throw.

Ah, but that's where we made a mistake. The kids were skiing down the hill willy-nilly and disturbed the snow all around the area my husband and I had thrown our discs.

"Where's your disc?" I asked my husband.

Slowly he looked around and then back at me, "I have no idea."

After about five minutes of searching we came up with the disc. That's when I made a new rule. Everyone tees-off together, spots their disc and doesn't forget where it went.

On the next hole we started to get into a rhythm throwing and spotting the discs. But then we were faced with going up another hill.

The kids immediately started complaining and I reminded them again about "duck-walking" their skis so they wouldn't slide backwards. My 9-year-old started muttering to herself as she made her way up the hill.

"I'm walking like a duck. I don't like walking like a duck. I don't like ducks.... I hate ducks."

But she did it. My 8-year-old however decided to take off her skis and walk up the hill. She had the biggest grin on her face and started laughing as she passed her sister.
"Look. I took off my skis. It's easier." My 8-year-old is a firecracker and often tries to find the easiest way out just about everything.

After the next hole, we were all wiped out and the kids and I had decided to take off our skis. The course was hill after hill and had been a serious cardio workout.

We carried all our gear to the next tee-off while my husband stayed determined to keep his skis on. But by the next hole he was all set with the skis.

"Let's dump the skis and then come back out to finish playing," he finally said.

I liked that plan so we hiked back to the car, dropped off our skis and grabbed something to drink before heading back out to the course on foot. But here was another example of an error in judgment - I drank seltzer water on our break. Why was it a mistake? Because I had the hiccups for the rest of the afternoon.

I was trying to shake the hiccups as we made our way back to the hole we left. The kids were gleefully running through the snow and making snow angels, happy to be free of their skis.

After we played another hole, we had a snowball fight. Another hole was played and the kids made pretend snow make-up and ate handfuls of snow (I tell them not to eat the snow but as soon as I turn my back, they've got it in their mouth anyway).

Even though we veered off course with our round of disc golf as the kids found a variety of distractions with the snow, we decided unanimously that disc golf was a great winter game.

If you're a family that's looking for a new sport to enjoy in the snow, disc golf may be just the thing to put a little excitement into your winter - and a smile in the snow.

Trip: Winter Disc Golf at Bennett's Disc Golf
Town: Route 114, Gorham
Hours: Wednesday - Sunday 9 a.m. - 6 p.m.; if the clubhouse is closed, players with discs are welcome to play on the course without charge
Fee: $5/person, includes disc rental
Phone Number: (207) 839-9177

Originally published in the Maine Sunday Telegram, December 2005