Re: our whereabouts

Yes! Permanent vagabonds! (see comment on last post) I like it. But only if my time in the car with the children is limited to less than an hour a day, and the hour is nap time. The fatal flaw of a road trip is that we have to be in the car with the kids. Manning the back seat for long stretches on trips is one of my least favorite parenting tasks. This trip we have six-hour car days on the first and last days, but otherwise no more than 3-4 hours, with a bunch of days with little or no travel.

We have done very little traveling since circa 2006 that hasn't involved family. Which is the most fun! Of course! Hi, loyal blog readers who are related to us! This trip is ALL ABOUT family, as you will see. But we also got to plan a bunch of stuff on our own and it's been really fun to have just the four of us for parts of the trip, at least between the hours of 8am and 8pm. We will never speak of those other hours again, CHILDREN.

Here I go, rambling on, and still not revealing where we are. Currently: somewhere in the Hudson Valley. We started out last Friday heading to Philly. I think you've all gotten a flavor of the actual journey, thus far. We camped out in a hotel room there for a couple days ("c'mon kids! pile on in the bathroom!")
Aaron, I guess, used the opportunity to practice his mime routine with actual glass to make it more realistic.

Then we eventually made our way to Tommy's college graduation. Remember when he got in? Right here on the blog? Because of his trustworthy photographs? I was waiting for Dylan to be born in that last link! I am STILL glad that finally happened.

Anyway, graduation!It had the requisite hot and uncomfortable, and also immediately upstaged my graduation with a brilliant student speech and the coolest venue ever.

I got around the hot part by volunteering to spend two hours in the air conditioned car to let Ollie nap.

Dylan got to relive her swinging glory from last time she visited. She has a single-minded focus on college attendance thanks to this swing.

The Giant Adirondack Chair: the novelty never wears off

Of note, Aaron and Ollie wore matching outfits in honor of graduation, but I didn't get any good pictures because of Ollie's grueling overheating/napping schedule. The best I could do was the one at the top of the post, in Ikea after we left. Because OBVIOUSLY buying furniture is an awesome idea at this point.

I think that gets us up to about Monday. WHO KNOWS where we've been since then.