Nineties Summer!

  Well hello there! 

It's been a bit of a wild time, between the heavy rain and our dishwasher seeming to implode yet again. Last time it took a few months to figure out the heating element wasn't working right. This go around, it just decided not to drain. So far, after some perplexing and exciting times with the dishwasher guts all over the kitchen, it seems to have been fixed. Phew! But just in case, I have fresh new sets of dishwashing gloves and am ready to return to the hand if need be. 

Fledglings are out and about now, which is super cool. Unlike humans, altricially inclined birds don't really get seen until they're pretty well grown. Mama robins don't actually Boba their babies, as cute as that would be. So, by the time they arrive on "the scene" (my yard) they are as large as their parents, albeit with less distinct plumage and a generally rawer look about them.

Usually they follow their parent around with their mouths agape and occasionally accept food from them. Sometimes they go exploring on their own. Usually, they just stay put. Last week, we had a baby finch waiting unsteadily on our front-yard fence for a few hours, while their parent flitted about with the agility one expects of an LBB. 

This bird just sat on that fence, shaking a little bit for a looong time. 

After a while, the parent vanished and we started to worry that the fledgling finch was just waiting to die in our yard. They eventually flew off, though, so trauma avoided!

Our own fledgling is, by contrast, far more agile than at least one of her parents. 

For "funsies" the family went hiking at Franklin Falls last week last weekend. Yes, how "Seattle" of us!

 I don't and perhaps never will fully understand the appeal of hiking, but I am fine with walking and hiking is pretty much just walking with gear and more Patagucci vibes, so sure. Why not. 

I personally get more juice from wandering parks and nearby neighborhoods, and I tend to prefer being places where the ambulance can arrive within 5 minutes if need be, but you know... same concept. 

Hiking is definitely not 100% compatible with birding. I heard a ton of novel birds in the forest, but it's really hard to actually find them with that level of cover. And unless I am really familiar with a bird's call, I don't record a "sighting" by ear. Which is to say, I'm not going to trust Merlin that much on identifying them, because Merlin absolutely does hallucinate. So I'm pretty sure we encountered some cool birds, but don't quote me on that. 

 While I did see a couple of LBBs hopping around, none held still enough to identify at my slower speed. Definitely there were pacific wrens, since I have heard and seen those before. Mostly, we just trudged through too quickly to identify or see anything much beyond some slugs and a bunch of trees. But we really weren't there for the birds. It's not called Franklin Birds, after all.  

Allan had a blast, though, which is really all that matters. I survived, which is relevant to whether Allan had a good time so we'll call that little tidbit "mattering-adjacent"!

And we did indeed see THE FALLS of Franklin Falls. Mission Accomplished. Waterfalls are far less elusive than tiny birds. 

Pretty enough. 

Higher volume than Whatcom Falls (A park where I grew up and spent a lot of time as a kid), but generally similar vibe of "water and rocks" 

I found the entire thing a bit exhausting, particularly with a longer drive on either end, but I can see the appeal, nonetheless. I'm sure we'll be back. 

Not before we take several more strolls of the neighborhood though. And although Andrew is plotting roughly a million more "little adventures" he's also plotting to be out of the state for a decent chunk of the month, and we have plenty of plans to accomplish before a repeat excursion. 

In grander schemes, we are wrapping up another year of homeschool. Kind of. While Allan objects to "year round school" in theory, she's moderately open to continuing some of the routines and review through the summer in exchange for a mellower school year. And because the school year itself is so very mellow, the contrast is a bit muted other than not having to make it to a school-related building 3 mornings and one afternoon a week.  

The new hotness on my social media circles is something like "90's Summer!!"

My first glance at the discourse was derisive. Millennials are starting to exhibit some serious Boomer "those were the days" kind of behaviors so I keep an eye on them. There is a lot of nostalgia in the way some people were pitching it: "no planning. No screens. Just throw the kids outside and let them wander." 

Bruh, the mall doesn't even allow teenagers anymore and most areas are so autocentric in their design, they don't bother with sidewalks these days, so what are we envisioning here? Just like sitting in a parking lot until a neighbor calls child services and has parents arrested for neglect? 

Also: No screens? None? No? Are we... just... no?

Where were these people in the 1990's? Because I assure you, I was hardcore about the screens for most of that formative decade. My mom got one of the very first laptops with just Word Star and Word Plus on it and I spent hours on that thing. I learned how to make DOS prompts say funny things. And by the mid-to-late nineties, I had my own laptop, with my very own html driven GeoCities page - yes, the text on my html webpage would scroll OR flash and sometimes I used frames!!! I know!!

 I'll admit that in the first year of 1990's, I didn't have television (hard times, hard times). We did have a bunch of movies. And I absolutely engaged. But come 1992 or so, it came rushing gleefully into my life and what a heaven it was! 

Which is to say, as a nineties kid, I had a computer nearby and watched a lot of tv wherever possible. I did my homework on the couch with the tv on. My friends would call and I would tie up the landline for hours while we sat on our asses and watched tv together. I had breakfast in front of the tv. I lived in TV Land. I watched all the sitcom reruns, hours of Passions (best soap opera), all the Nicktoons, and so many random other things. 

 Eventually, I even started sleeping in the living room with the television on and it was the best sleep of my mid-to-late teens! A lot more calming than my alternative strategy of listening to Art Bell at night.

 (If you're not familiar with Art Bell, he did a paranormal themed overnight radio show, talking about all manner of spooky ooky X-Fileish things. And while it was engaging, it was also a bit maybe too engaging. I would stay up well past 2 a.m. listening to government conspiracy theories and the escapades of the Chupacabra.) 

Reruns and late-night tele-ads for the shake weight were a lot easier to sleep through than paranormal radio. Both were better than just trying to lay still in the dark with no background noise and the relentless onslaught of MY THOUGHTS. (This was well before sleep podcasts and white/pink/purple/rainbow noise apps, and a bit before I put up a ton of moonlights and fairy lights in my bedroom). Even into law school, I would sometimes grab a DVD to run of American's Next Top Model or Top Chef to play while I zonked on the couch. TV got me through some stuff. 

So, yeah, characterizing the nineties as a screenless free-range paradise is a questionable construct. We consign that nonsense to the hose-drinking Gen Xers, I think.

And the parents who were like "yeah but it's the kind of screen that matters" are a bit sketchy. I actually am moderately sympathetic to some level of graduated technophobia. I don't think Gemini and Chat GPT - as being implemented - need to be in Elementary schools. I'm a fan of one-on-one person to person tutoring. I generally support more tangible and physical educational tools where possible. This is kind of a funny position to take, since I pretty much let my little cyborg wander around attached to several symbiotic electronics at nearly all times. She does, in my defense, hand write in two journals and hand draw/color/paint almost constantly. So... that. Hold that thought. I'll return to it in a bit. Maybe (narrator: she did, in fact, not return to that thought). 

Overbearing Karens calling the cops aside, the whole "kicking kids outside" to presumably wander the earth or whatever Gen X flavored nostalgia we're getting off on these days doesn't seem that awesome either. Yes, I lived on the lake and our back lawns were all connected. I did run pretty free back then when I wasn't involved in one of my surprisingly many activities.

 But also, it gets hot in summer in some places. And the air quality turns toxic more often than it ought to. And, well, some kids did a lot of stupid shit while unsupervised. So, yeah, unsupervised time is cool, but also Gen X was raised with parenting that very well verged into straight up neglect. Kids did die unnecessarily in the face of the more extreme freedoms they received. Meanwhile a lot of us just did a lot of stupid shit we're lucky to have survived. 

If Allan wanted to roam the neighborhood with her friends, I'd support it, but I'm sure as shit not gonna push her out the door on a hot high pollen day with 190 AQI and tell her not to come back before sundown. 

That said, I'm a lot more sympathetic to "Nineties Summer" as a trend when what it really means is "parents stop trying so fucking hard to fill up summer with neat expensive camps that costs oncology prices and require preplanning from January to get on the waitlist!" 

Despite my own happy experiences with day and overnight camp in my childhood, I'm somewhat soured on "summer camps" in the modern day and age. I like the novelty, but these days you have to sign up for summer camps before February mostly. I don't know what Allan will be into or up to six months after most registrations fill up. I don't know what our summer plans will want to look like. And I don't know just how expensive gas might be for the camps that require driving two-plus hours a day in heavy traffic!'

Not to mention, our summers fill up regardless. There are always family visits, trips (Andrew's taking two to California in June alone), excursions, birthday parties, group playdates, etc etc. Summer bloats up so damned fast, it's staggering. 

A few years ago, we made the tactical error of signing Allan up for about 4 or 5 week-day camps in a row. It started out ok and was a nightmare by the end. It's not just five more weeks of school. Every week is starting over. Every week is new kids and new teachers who need to learn the kids yet again. It's epically disruptive. Girl was so burnt out by the time school started up again I don't think we ever recovered.

 Even when it's one or two weeks of the summer, it throws things off. With the exception of one "summer camp" that actually was just a weekly game class and a weekly D&D group that coincidentally started up in summer, camps just catapult everything into some level of chaos for weeks surrounding the event. 

I admit, I took Allan's riding camp last year harder than her. But she was terribly disappointed that doing the camp meant missing her regular Outschool groups. And she was beat for a few weeks afterwards. (Plus, she now does adaptive riding every week, so it lacks the same novelty somehow)

This summer, we've agreed to a summer schedule that incorporates a lot less schoolwork and a lot more "lazing around the house guilt-free". There's also some "ok, but there are limits to how many Youtube vidoes where a dude plays geography games and talks about flags in a Welsh accent. Whatever else, it won't be the pure chaos of camps. There will be playdates. There will be Outschool groups. We will continue listening to our books in the morning. We'll take our regular crow walk when the air is breathable. There will be some holidays and fireworks and birthday shenanigans. We'll still go to the barn. And that, largely, will be that. 

But I assure you, there will be screen. And nobody is living on the streets without a viable telephone. I'm nineties and all, but not that nineties!