You'll Have to Be up with the Lark

[Right: Jeanne, our host Emma, and our Cousin-in-law Nette slaving away in the Kitchen on the day before Mother's Day]

Just a day before the end of classes, our cousins John and Nette and their daughter Mina (Minerva) invited us down to Barnegat Light on the Jersey shore for the weekend to christen the new bed and breakfast Minerva’s By the Sea owned and managed by Nette’s wonderful mother Emma Lapsansky (who also happens to be Minerva’s proud grandmother, and drives a VW bug sporting the ever-so-hip license plate ‘ELAPS’).

Shameless plug—for a great weekend down the shore see: www.MinervasBandB.com

The traffic deities smiled upon us (meaning fast speeders to follow so I could speed without get more points on my license, and no traffic jams to slow any of us), and we made it to Long Beach Island with plenty of time for socializing in the evening before it was time for bed. Minerva’s By the Sea was a delightful place to stay and our company turned out to be more delightful than that. Along with Nette’s mother, our gracious host, we were joined by Nette’s uncle, my Aunt Laree and Uncle Dick, John’s sister Annie and her husband Eliot and their two kids Max and Sonia, and my sister Linda her husband Devin and their two kids Loren and Adelle.

Saturday morning, Beckett woke at 5:30 AM so we had an early morning stroll through Barnegat Light before returning so I could be the breakfast sous-chef for Emma. I stole a few cooking tips from her, while regaling her with stories of Japanese comic books and animated films. I definitely got the better end of that deal! Most of the rest of the people got up at a more vacationally appropriate 9 or 10, by which time Beckett, Jeanne and I had been up for half a day, and Beckett was working on his third meal. After waffles with fixings, we took a group walk to the boat docks to see the fishing boats, some jelly fish, and give Beckett and Mina a chance to throw a lot of things in the water, including, much to my chagrin, cigarette butts Beckett found on the ground. I don’t know why I suddenly feel more responsible for litter if it has been picked up once by Beckett and then re-deposited into nature, but I did feel a sense of ownership about that cigarette butt which is now polluting the bay with a small bit of tar and nicotine. I suppose that Big Tobacco will claim that Nicotine is not habit forming in fish, and that the science is still ambiguous as to whether the tar will give the fish cancer, but I still cringed.

We picked up Dick and Laree and continued the walk to Barnegat Lighthouse. Uncle Dick was his jolly and droll self as always, while Aunt LaRee remained ever the incisive commentator and puncturer of our self-proclaimed wit. Climbing to the top of the lighthouse for views of the ocean and bay is allowed and encourage, so we did. Beckett seemed mainly to enjoy the wind, and I couldn’t tell if he realized that he was going around in circles or just thought that the walkway at the top of the lighthouse was infinitely long, but he did circumnavigate the top several times. Loren went up and down three times in order to ensure that we had a good group average, but even Laree and Dick showed that they still have what it takes by making up at least 60 steps. I am sure this disappointed Loren who suddenly found that he could have skipped half a trip up and down and still kept us on average, but the exercise was good for us all.

All the while, Beckett and Mina renewed their budding relationship with Beckett trying to kiss or hug Mina several times. We have been working with Beckett on not hitting or pushing other kids, so in a sense, kissing and hugging are a step in the right direction, but there is that problem of a male kissing and hugging a female who hasn’t consented to such behavior. So we will have to further refine our coaching on Beckett’s interpersonal relationships at a later date. I admit I felt less guilty about Beckett’s forays into putting the moves on his second cousin (heck that’s legal in at least 16 out of 50 states), than I did his redistributing the litter from the street to the sea. Don’t know what that says about my ethical compass.

During naptime, the adults sat around and talked politics, economics, and the like and second guessed Reagan as much as would be expected with between two and six proud Obama-mama’s in our midst. Strangely enough, John was the apologist for Reagan. Don’t know what that says about his ethical compass.

We took a late afternoon trip to the beach, and promptly discovered that the May version of the Jersey shore demands a sweatshirt for proper beach enjoyment. We flew Loren’s kite, turned over atavistic horseshoe crabs, split open mermaid's purses, and then when we got chilled to the bone retreated to the lee of a beach dune to watch the waves and sky protected from the wind. Whatever we lose (like a dozen degrees), its always ourselves we find at the sea.
When even the lee of the dune couldn’t keep us out in the wind any longer, we double-retreated back to Minerva’s just in time to watch the sun drop below the horizon from the second story balcony. Dinner was lasagna provided once again by the industrious Emma, coupled with a birthday cake for Linda who is turning, dare I say it, the big 3-0. Conversation flowed freely, and lasted until way later than it should have for those whose 19 month old sons are likely be up with the roosters.

Beckett was indeed up with the lark, so the three of us had another early morning beach walk that couldn’t be beat, and then hustled back to help out again with breakfast. This time, owing to a mother’s day commitment by the men to let the womenfolk rest, John was the head chef, Eliot was the sous-chef and I was the sous-sous (aka dishwasher and cleaner-upper). John oversaw the creation of famed Aldous crepes and the men almost (but not quite) dethroned Emma from her status as king of the kitchen.

That afternoon, Annette and Eliot and Dick and Laree and company had to head back to Virginia, but Jeanne, Beckett and I convinced the remaining folks to head to the beach again. This time the temperature was more accommodating, but the wind still sandblasted us. The waves were cold enough on our ankles to make us wince, but it sunny out and we had lots of good fun that was funny. We would have gladly stayed on for more, but classes awaited us back in Amherst, so in the evening, with tears in our eyes, we waved goodbye to Minerva’s by the Sea, and our wonderful cousins and host, and headed off into the sunset (actually away from the sunset) for the long ride home, but with warm feelings in our hearts and a desire to make Minerva’s By the Sea our Jersey Home away from Home.

Have credit card, Will Travel

Yesterday we were in Nantucket visiting our friends Kirsten and Marshall. Clearly the monied atmosphere influenced Beckett dramatically. When he woke up he told me, "I have credit card. I go Chucucago (Chicago) and California." (He has been talking about Chicago and California since Bruce and I had to visit each of those places for conferences.) Clearly this is the case of have card, will travel.

You Say Plimoth, I Say Plymouth, Lets Call the Whole Thing Off

You might think that in a college town with two colleges and one large public university, the public schools and colleges would get together and align holidays so that all the professors in town would have vacation at the same time as their children. This seems like it would be great for everyone. Kids and their parents could enjoy vacations together. However, due to some completely inexplicable oversight UMass’s holidays turn out not to be coordinated at all with those of Amherst public schools. We happen not to have any school aged children yet—we like to think of Beckett as a prodigy, but he is not that advanced—so this shouldn’t really affect us, but it also turns out that all of the day care providers in town must take care of their own kids during the public school holidays, so we day care consumers also suffer from the lack of cooperation between the colleges and the public schools. Add to this the simple fact that Jeanne and I managed to schedule our teaching times to exactly overlap with each other, and we realized that we had a problem on our hands. After much casting around, we realized that the cheapest (and most fun) option for ensuring that Beckett didn’t run the streets and hang out smoking cigarettes behind the gym with reprobates during his week-long holiday from daycare was to fly his grandmother out to tend him. So we got to have a special visit from Grandma Diana for week. [Plimoth Plantation Cannon]

She arrived on Monday evening and she and Beckett hit it off like old buddies. By the time it came for Papa to head off to work Tuesday AM, Beckett hardly acted like he cared at all. Diana is the ultimate baby-sitter and extrovert, so she planned up a week’s worth of activities and was soon better acquainted with all of the parents of Beckett’s friends (who were all on the same circuit of kid’s activities it seems) than we are. She took Beckett to the library singing time, and to the crafts time at the kids’ museum, and to the park. We also got some free housecleaning and dinners out of Grandma. So she did double duty for us.

For the weekend, we headed off to Plimoth Plantation, Plymouth Rock (yes the spelling is different for these two Plimoth/Plymouth’s just three miles apart) and the Mayflower. Plimoth Plantation is one of those places were actors dress up and act like the original pilgrims. This is both fun and not fun. First the not fun: If you were really a pilgrim in Plimoth Plantation in 1629 and a bunch of weirdly dressed wildly impractical people butted into your affairs all day every day to ask you questions about what you were eating and why you were stacking firewood and the like and wanted to stand by you and have their friends point little black boxes and you, it would probably take about three days before you would get annoyed with them and want to hide. So the problem here is that rather than act like Plimoth pilgrims, but ones that happened to have an infinite amount of leisure time and no pressing tasks to tend to and an innate love for answering the questions, many of these actors acted like genuine pilgrims who were bothered by all the interruptions in their overly busy lives. [Native Person House-Great Architecture]

The fun part: some of the pilgrims did indeed act the way you would want them to. One fellow seemed to have nothing better to do than regale us strange passersby with all sorts of stories about town politics and wove a skillful monologue which taught us quite a bit about life and attitudes in 1629 Plimoth. It was also fun to answer one of their questions naively and have them express amazed wonderment at something we said. A different fellow asked Jeanne how old Beckett was and when she told him that he was 18 months old, he replied that he had never heard of such an odd way of reckoning age, and wondered what she would say when he was 12 years old. A woman didn’t know what Jeanne was talking about when Jeanne asked if she wore make-up and no amount of explanation could get across to her why someone would want to put extra color on their body and why anyone else would think that doing such a thing would increase ones allure. Somehow the conversation wound around to bathing and the she wondered why anyone would want to bath more than once a fortnight or so, and expressed deep concern that we were washing essential oils off our bodies by cleaning ourselves so often. It is always good to be reminded that one’s own practices are near arbitrary and just because that is the way we have always done it and the way that everybody around us does it, it doesn’t mean it's the right or best way to do it.

After Plimoth Plantation, we went to Plymouth Rock and the Mayflower II. Beckett napped while Diana and Jeanne went to the Mayflower II, and then Beckett and I watched motorcycles cruise main street. Our Beckett loves motorcycles. Then it was my turn to had Beckett off to mama and grandma and visit the Mayflower II and Plymouth Rock myself. Oddly both were much smaller than one imagines, but while the rock was smaller in the disappointing kind of what’s-all-the-fuss way, the Mayflower II was smaller in an Now-I-understand-what-all-the-fuss-was way. Imagining all those people and sailors packed into that tiny ship getting sick and growing tired of the same provisions every day—it really must have been miserable. But they stuck it out for a glimmer of a different better life, and while its hard from this remove to condone the condescending way that they treated the native population when they got here, its not hard to empathize with people who were feeling their own kind of oppression or marginalization and wanted to go somewhere else and establish a different society.

All in all it was a good day. And all too soon, we had to take Grandma Diana back to the airport and send her back home again. But we had a real New England experience with her, and Beckett enjoyed becoming good friends with Grandma.

Beckett is also a Hardy

Last week Bruce and Beckett were in Henion Bakery (the bakery at which, as you might remember from our 2005 Christmas letter, we have a tab) to buy bread. Beckett stood in front of the cake display, pointed up at the cakes, and insisted CAKE! CAKE! CAKE! I WanT IT! (With incredibly precise enunciation, that even made his linguist father proud).

Smiles that Assuage Guilt

It is dark and freezing outside. I sit on the couch blogging while Bruce is outside shoveling the walks so we don't end up with a skating rink for a driveway. Does this seem fair? I am feeling a little guilty, but my guilt is assuaged by Beckett's smile. I incubated that!

Beckett is a Baird

Before Beckett was born we spent time debating the best movie of the year or whose economic policy had the best potential long-term impact on science funding. Now we debate whether Beckett looks more like a Hardy or a Baird. Tonight at dinner Beckett ate his weight in the homemade apple sauce his Aunt Lindee gave Bruce for Christmas. It is not that the Hardys don't love apple sauce. We just don't seem to have quite the same insatiable appetite as the Bairds. Clearly, he is a full-blooded Baird! I present this post-sledding photo as additional evidence. Look at those toothy grins!

Leaf-Peeping Toms

In October (yes we are behind in our blog), we had a wonderful visit from Grandma Diana, Alisa, and Cousin Syd.



[Syd and Beckett and Alisa's head cut off--wonder what that says??]








We went to Vermont to do what the locals call “Leaf Peeping.” We were lucky enough to meet Diana’s friends, Ruby and Nephi Jackson (not pictured—wonder what that says??). They told us that the leaves were past their prime, but we sure enjoyed the vibrant colors anyway.
[Grandma Diana admires the flowers, and Beckett tries to maul them.]

Ruby and Nephi turn out to be connoisseurs of not just leaves, but old roads, covered bridges, and leaning silos.
[Beckett trying to fit into the quaint New England landscape.]