Up until this summer we have purposefully held off on organized/team sports for Kyle and Owen. Don’t get me wrong, the boys have had plenty of exposure to sports (1 sports camp each summer, gymnastics, ice skating lessons, golf, swimming, and tons and tons of fun with sports). But overall we’ve really held back on what we’ve signed them up for. We have done this very deliberately, much to the chagrin of many sports enthusiasts we know. The pressure has been on us for years to get Kyle and Owen into the local sports leagues—baseball, soccer, basketball, swim team, etc., etc., etc. People who love sports love our boys— it is love at first sight when they spot the raw unbridled giftedness of Kyle and Owen’s athleticism. And the Sports Lovers of the world have not held back in sharing their opinions with us: basically, ‘Get these boys on track to the NFL/NBA/MLB/Olympics ASAP. There is no question that Kyle and Owen are mightily talented in the sports arena.
Braydon and I are not in any way against sports. In fact, for lots and lots of good reasons we very much want our kids (all three of them) to play team sports and be involved in organized athletics. But with Kyle and Owen we’ve held off thus far for a few reasons. 1) Kyle and Owen are so good at so much of the sports that they try that they attract coaches/trainers/advocates/etc. like magnets and we have not wanted to pigeon-hole them early into any particular sport – or even into athletics more generally. 2) It is important to us that first and foremost Kyle and Owen enjoy playing sports and feel as little pressure as possible to excel/perform/achieve in regards to organized play, so we have conscientiously encouraged them to just “play” and not be bogged down in the “organized.” 3) this is probably the biggest… we have been very certain that once we begin we’ll never end… in other words, once our life of organized sports with Kyle and Owen begins, we know there is no turning back. There is a sense we have that once we let the gates open we’re going to be semi-dominated by our boys’ sports for many, many years (the driving to their events, the schedules, the purchasing of all the equipment, etc., etc., etc.). And so, we’ve held off. And we’re so glad we did.
But now, with our boys at age 7, it is time to begin. We’ve felt it coming for awhile now. They are just chomping at the bit. And they’re verbally asking us to do it. They want to be on teams. They want to be coached. They want it as serious as it gets. They are ready.
And so, we begin. We go into it with our eyes wide open.
This summer K & O are signed up to do a lot of organized/team sports. First up was last week— a week of Baseball Camp for Kyle and Owen. Kyle did this camp last year and loved it. This year they both did it and it was Heaven For a Week times two.
So, the day after returning from our trip to South Carolina, Kyle and Owen began a week of immersive baseball day camp. And the camp ended the same day our houseful of 4th of July guests arrived. It was a crazy start to the Summer of Sports. For Kyle and Owen it was nothing but CRAZY GOOD.
P.S. Just for the J-M Family Record: at the end of the boys’ week of baseball camp the head coach pulled me aside and told me that he sees “one or two” truly “naturally gifted athletes” each year in his baseball camp—and that this year there were two—my two boys. It was very flattering and nice to hear, and I’m really proud to have such stand-out sons. But I also suspect I’ll be hearing the same story from their coaches of the other sports they’ll be doing over this summer.
We have a pretty well established annual tradition of hosting my side of the family for a 4th of July extravaganza. I go all-out for this, hoping that it will make the long trip to Pennsylvania worth it enough to them that they’ll make the trip again next year. And, importantly, for us J-Ms, the 4th of July is a big deal. It has become one of our very favorite holidays (Kyle told us last night that for him the 4th of July ranks as a close 2nd to Christmas, with Halloween coming in 3rd for his Favorite Holidays of the Year.) We had a fantastic 4-day-weekend of festivities for the 4th.
We went to The Lowcountry of South Carolina seeking a low-key, slow-paced, deep south break from our reality. We went for a week of simple things; a grounding, a re-connecting, a reminding. We got it.
“I dream of simple things I can believe in, like the feeling this day brings, true love, and the miracle of forgiving. I believe in simple things.” ~Amy Grant, lyrics from her song ‘Simple Things’
It was a week of simple things in their finest form. Crab straight from the creek, caught with our own hands, and cooked right off the dock, dipped in drawn butter – the sweetest crab we’ve ever had. Watermelon picked ripe that day – the juiciest, most delicious watermelon we’ve ever tasted. Shrimp caught by boats trawling right off the beach where we spent our days in the sun. Salt, and water, and sand, and shells. Marsh grasses and a long wooden dock with oyster beds in the mud beneath. Silence. Pelicans and dolphins. Jellyfish washed up onshore and “Don’t feed the alligators!” and thousands of tiny fiddler crabs scurrying everywhere. Bare feet. Sunrises and sunsets. Fishing poles and sand shovels. Watching the tides come in. Watching the tides go out.
It was deliriously magical in its simplicity. It reminded us: we can believe in simple things.
The vacation was bookended on either side with road tripping. All five of us love travel of all kinds— even including (yes, I know, it is hard to believe this to be true of young kids)… long roadtrips. The drive from our house to Beaufort, South Carolina is 15 hours. We split it up each way with overnights at hotels (on the drive south, we stopped in North Carolina; on the drive north, we stopped in Virginia; which means… and this is important to them!… that K & O have now slept at least one night in every state on the eastern seaboard). Meera got weary a few times along the way, trapped in her carseat, and not entirely sure what exactly the point of all this was, but she was a real trooper. And never once did Kyle or Owen even utter a “when will we get there?” Every hour is part of the adventure for them. Believe it or not, they honest-to-God enjoy it. They watch videos; they color/draw/write/do mazes and word-finds; they play with their iPods (while Meera naps); and they eat (and eat and eat and eat– the roadtrip snacking is a major part of the experience – oh! and pizza! pizza is by far their favorite roadtripping fast food).
We had rented a cottage for the week from VRBO. We found it to be exactly what we had been hoping for: private, right on the marsh, small, simple, and with –the major attraction for us— a private dock. That dock came to take on a life of its own during our stay. It was like an extension of our house rental—a whole other room stretching into a weird and wonderful new land for us.
With only one exception (an awesome day trip to Charleston), our days went like this: an adventurous excursion of some sort, followed by a late-morning arrival at the beach, followed by a late-afternoon arrival back on our dock for crabbing and checking out the tides.
Our morning excursions included a bunch of different adventures at Hunting Island State Park (the lighthouse there, the marsh walks, the lagoon, the nature center); a trip to the Penn Center (awe-inspiring place!); and exploring our new favorite art gallery on the planet: The Red Piano Too on St. Helena Island.
The bulk of our days were spent on the beach at Hunting Island State Park. A vacation like this is a lot of work (especially for Mama); the packing and unpacking of beach gear, the picnic lunches, the laundry. But it is so worth it.
(and there was Dairy Queen for the bambinos on the drive ‘home’ everyday! what a treat!)
We took a daytrip to Charleston half-way through our week. Braydon and I lived together in Charleston for a year in our early twenties, before we started graduate school. It was an amazing year for us in so many ways and Charleston brings back lots and lots of good memories. Braydon and I have been back to Charleston many times since then (it is one of our favorite places in the world), but we have never brought our kids there. We loved bringing them to Charleston and showing them that heart-and-soul city of the the deep south. We did the top-of-the-list Must-Do Charleston experiences: explored the beautiful streets, browsed in the marketplace, took a horse-drawn carriage ride, ate warm pralines from Market Street Sweets, and walked along Rainbow Row. At the end of our day we put bathing suits on the bambinos and let them go crazy in the waterfront fountains. They had fun. Highlight of this daytrip, though, was our bbq lunch at Sticky Fingers. Braydon and I are long-time fans of Sticky Fingers and we suspected our boys would love it. However, we could have never predicted how much they’d love it. Never, in our entire seven years of parenting these boys, have we ever seen them love a meal so much. Owen ate probably an entire rack of ribs. And Kyle ate – no kidding – a entire half of a chicken – by himself. To say that they loved Sticky Fingers would be a serious understatement. At the end of our lunch they did something absolutely unprecedented: they asked us to buy them Sticky Fingers t-shirts. It was the only thing they asked for the entire trip. I sprung on the opportunity to gift them with that memorabilia!
In addition to our Charleston pralines and Sticky Fingers barbeque, we ate lots of other Lowcountry delicacies during our week. Steamed blue crab; shrimp and grits (with okra and heirloom tomatoes and thick bits of bacon – from Saltus River Grill, our favorite of the restaurants we discovered in Beaufort – oh so heavenly!); fried shrimp; steamed shrimp; fried oysters; raw oysters; fried green tomatoes; collard greens; hush puppies; boiled peanuts; biscuits and sausage gravy; and of course the watermelon – oh my! oh my! the watermelon! Kyle, Owen, and Meera did not like everything (O loved crab, K & M did not; K loved collards, O & M did not; M loved boiled peanuts, K & O did not), but they are adventurous eaters and they all tried everything. One southern delicacy we discovered that they all loved?! That oh-so-decadent-doughnut: The Krispy Kreme!
And there was the crabbing. The ‘high’ of our whole trip. We crabbed off our dock every day. Ask the boys why they want to go back to South Carolina next year and they’ll tell you it is for the crabbing. They loved it. Truth be told, crabbing was really the hook that got me reeled in to the whole idea of a Lowcountry vacation in the first place. I just knew that if we could do it right (a good private dock, a healthy marsh, the wherewithal to make it happen), then crabbing would be the perfect centerpiece to a great family vacation. Oh my gosh, was I ever right! We had never done it before, and before we left for this trip I did a whole bunch of online research, prepping, and planning in regards to crabbing (How to catch blue crabs? How to cook blue crabs? How to eat blue crabs?). It paid off big time with big beautiful crab-after-crab caught by our team of five. It was a blast!!! And they were so delicious!
As I mentioned (above, in Post 2 of 3), a vacation like this isn’t entirely easy. There were two main things about this trip that were not simple: #1) we – meaning I — did a lot of our own cooking and all of our own cleaning/laundry/etc., and— #2) and this is the big one… we – meaning all five of us – had to grapple with our country’s history of slavery and the legacy of those roots in our world today.
As for #1… I just so happen to be someone who really enjoys cooking, especially when it involves something along the lines of stopping at the shrimp dock on the way home from a day at the beach, buying up some fresh shrimp right off the boat, and then – while sipping a gin and tonic made perfectly by my husband with fresh tart key limes that we can’t even buy where we live – cooking up that shrimp into a simply divine shrimp scampi with linguine that my whole family then ooohs and aaahs over the entire time they are eating it all up. Yeah, that is pretty amazingly enjoyable to me. That said, the daily grind of cooking and cleaning and laundry is a bummer to have to do while on vacation. But there is no way around it – for the kind of vacation we had, it just comes with the territory. You can’t have a low-key, laid-back, simple-things vacation and a luxury-all-inclusive vacation too. And so I/we went into it with our eyes wide open and just tried our best to make the best of it (oh, and, note: I officially lost it – like total, full-blown, ugly-cry, raging mad-woman melt-down – exactly three times during our 10 day trip. note: there are no photos of that.).
As for #2… You can’t go to the Lowcountry and not come face-to-face with African-American history. The Lowcountry is African-American history. And nothing about talking about slavery with seven-year-old black boys (as white parents, no less) is easy. You could sugar coat it with all the amazing contributions that came, and are still coming, out of the Lowcountry and the entire African Diaspora: resilience and tenacity and creativity, Gullah Culture, the cuisine, the arts of every form, the music – heck, the history and craf-making of Sweetgrass Baskets alone is enough to fill up a whole ten day trip with celebration. But, we went to the Lowcountry in part as a way to approach African-American history with our children. And we worked hard to do the right thing; We talked about all the good and amazing and wonderful, and we talked about the horrors of the slave trade, the ugly truth of plantation slavery, and the legacy of racism and poverty that results in present-day form. Yeah, that is some pretty tough stuff to grapple with. Not easy. Not a simple thing.
But mixed with the raw harsh truth of the tragic roots of the deep south are the sweet simple truths of the deep south too. The place is just beaming with life. Resiliency and tenacity and sheer creative brilliance just ooze from every pour. In the smoldering heat tiny crabs scurry in and out of their mud holes with a fervor that is just mesmerizing. The thick Spanish moss hangs down and oysters spit from their beds and birds dive for fish. Dolphins swim with their babies, close enough to shore that you can watch them playing in the water. There is beauty and inspiration in every direction. Really, it is simply incredible.
So, from our dock everyday we kept track of the tides kept an eye on the oysters and crabs and watched the sun rise and the sun set. It was, simply, glorious.
One final note about our Simple Things vacation: a not-so-simple thing for us = trying to get a family photo. Here are the only three we managed to get (none of which are, in our minds, at all frame-worthy):
We almost never go back to the same place twice, but this place is pretty tempting. I won’t be entirely surprised if we find ourselves back there for another vacation a year from now. This was, for sure, one of the best trips we’ve ever taken. If it were up to Kyle and Owen we’d have spent the whole summer there.
“I dream of simple things I can believe in, like the feeling this day brings, true love, and the miracle of forgiving. I believe in simple things.”
Two books we can highly recommend, especially for black kids learning about the history of African-American slavery:
Moses: When Harriet Tubmen Led Her People to Freedom
Circle Unbroken: The Story of a Basket and its People
And one book we can highly recommend for families planning to travel to South Carolina:
Today is Kyle and Owen’s last day of school and yesterday was Meera’s last day of daycare; we have eleven whole weeks of break-from-the-school-year-routine. And we don’t plan to waste even one little bit of it. HELLO SUMMER!
We’re taking a 10-day blog break to kick off summer glorious summer~~ we’ll check back in with y’all on June 28. Cheers!
7:45 am, at the breakfast table, before the 3rd-to-last-day-of-school. For who-knows-what-reason they decided they wanted to have their hair in “four ponytails each” for school today.
Driving the kids home from school/daycare today, I got the call on my cell phone— I pulled the car off to the side of the road— Kyle’s biopsy pathology results were in: “benign growth on lymph node.” Five words. Sitting there with the hazard lights on, and looking at my three precious ones in the rearview mirror, I heard those five words. As my friend Robin said not long after: “you must feel like your world was just handed back to you.” Yes. Except that we’re some of the lucky ones: it was never actually taken away from us. And so, it is a huge sigh of relief— Braydon was out late tonight with work, but cried hard when he finally got home, letting all his angst flow out with those tears and a glass of white wine (it was so good to see). And I can suddenly take a deep breath again (that ten pound brick that had been weighing on my chest was instantaneously lifted with five words). We have the honor and the privilege of continuing on with life as we know it. We are deeply grateful and feel like we just dodged a bullet. But we’re not ‘celebrating’ it tonight, at least not in any festive way; it would just feel so wrong to do that; so many families got the opposite news tonight. Going through this these past couple weeks has been a truly solemn experience, and I cannot even imagine how horrific it must be for parents whose kids are gravely ill.
When we arrived home I pulled the car into the garage and the three kids poured out of the backseat for scooter-and-bicycle-riding and chalk-writing and ball-bouncing like they do every day. And literally, within 30 seconds of their arrival into the driveway, a torrential downpour hit. There had been some foreboding clouds on our drive home, but never did we expect the pouring-down-rain that ensued. The three of them jumped for joy and spent the next 30 minutes running, scootering, and screaming through the pouring-down-rain, stomping in the quickly-formed-puddles, and catching humungous raindrops on their tongues. By the time the rain let up they were drenched and muddy and I had texted and emailed Kyle’s news to the important members of our innermost circle. Things like this (the sudden downpour at that particular moment on this particular day) happen way too often in my life for me to think they are pure coincidence. I am convinced that there is much more to all of this than meets the eye. Tonight, we give thanks for the good life that we’ve been afforded. And, we feel so much compassion for people everywhere whose worlds are taken away from them as quickly as it takes to hear five words or less.
Thanks to everyone for checking in on us. As always, thanks for reading. ~hbj
I know lots of you are checking in, hoping to get an update on Kyle’s situation. We have not heard anything; the pathology results are not yet in. We are trying to stay calm and keep focused on our good life. As I have said in the past couple of days to a few of our friends: if the results are not good, we know that we can do it. We are strong, we know we can handle it if we have to. The thing is, we just really really don’t want to have to do it. Nobody does.
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