Fall Break
I think our school district is experimenting. Not weirdly, just trying out some new things. They’ve not been the most progressive so any little thing seems like kind of a big deal. We live in a historically conservative town. This year one of the changes has been messing with the school calendar. So, we had a fall break. We’ve always had Columbus/Indigenous People’s Day off, which we didn’t actually have this year. Instead, we had a four-day weekend. And it was pretty funny the way some families treated this like it was Spring Break. I get it, it was unexpected time off without the added expenses of “travel season” (see: summer, holidays, spring break price hikes) but the elaborate vacations parents took were pretty funny. It was four days, and to be honest, we weren’t really on our game with this one. It came up and we were like, “huh. we have extra days off of school…” It really hadn’t been that long since we’d taken our last trip so we stayed home and did a couple of things around town.
Our first stop was harvesting the garden and breaks between adventures meant figuring out what to do with all of the vegetables. Squash was easily stored. Sam helped me chop peppers for the freezer. We made applesauce from the neighbors’ apples. Soups and sauces were made from tomatoes and the extras were frozen. Plums were made into jam. A lot of cucumbers were given away (I don’t think we will do cucumbers again). Pumpkins were put out on the front porch.
The boys liked the thought of a day just getting coffee and going to the shops so on Friday, we headed to Smokey Row, the library, and a couple of shops in the District. Ben recently joined a board game club at school and learned there were new game stores in town we should check out. We are all big fans of games so we headed over to a game store that just opened in Uptown. It was still being set up but had a lot of retro video games and comic books, a few board games. The boys thought they’d like to come back with their dad. I just started playing video games in the last year. I wasn’t allowed to as a kid and was disinterested as an adult until my kids showed me how. Still, mostly all I play now is Stick Fight and games on the Oculus.
Our next stop was our best stop. We ended up at a store called Dungeons Gate. When we walked in the first thing I saw was “New Fiction”. It was a lot of YA and Adult books that made my little readerly heart flutter. After sifting through books for a bit, I looked up to begin drooling over their immense board game collection. They have many of our favorites, but also tons of titles like them and even more, we hadn’t heard or dreamt of. We are amateurs despite the fact that we have a towering collection. There is a shop dog which let’s be honest makes me fall in love with any shop. The owners are a married couple, she used to practice law, I don’t know what he did prior to this, but they are both nerds at heart. They patiently and enthusiastically explained the games to us we were interested in, letting us know we could try them out now or on their Tuesday game nights. There were rows of fancy dice, inks, and great books. They have excellent taste in music (by this I mean they were listening to Cake and Foo Fighters) and they were planning a game party with a taco truck. I kind of wanted them to adopt me. We will definitely be patronizing this store a lot more often.
The next morning we spent some time enjoying fall in our backyard. We worked on a few things that needed to get done, but we also just enjoyed the weather, the leaves changing, and our new additions to the yard. In the evening we had tickets to Night Eyes at the zoo. We have been members, frequent zoo goers, program participants, and donors for years, but this was always one event we missed. This year we decided to check it out. We found tickets for a good price. The boys are at that age between not wanting to participate in the usual stuff and within that space of feeling like it’s starting to get too late to catch some of these things we jumped on this one. Night Eyes is insane. There was a traffic jam for several blocks to get into the zoo. We parked in a place I didn’t even know existed and though we had tickets we stood in a line that wrapped around most of the main parking lot. The walk was easy, the weather was beautiful, the costumes entertaining, and the workers efficient – so please don’t misunderstand me, it was pleasant as far as waiting goes. It just took us by surprise how many people were there. Craziness. Between the number of people and our inability to see pretty much any animals – I can understand the few we saw sleeping, but I can not understand the areas that were locked or the animals that were put away, why?- I doubt we will do this event again, but we had a nice time walking, and talking, Sam collected candy, there were some odd Halloween lights and decorations, random characters running around, and as I said, the costumes were entertaining. We ended the night with a rare dinner out. We don’t do this often these days and Latin King’s patio on a warm October evening felt perfect.
Sunday brought us another beautiful morning for drinking coffee on the patio. The dogs enjoyed running in the backyard together. Sunday afternoon was perfect for a baseball game in the park. Sam’s fall practice team coached by Jeff scrimmaged with a USSSA team while Ben and I watched, cheered, and walked through the leaves.
Monday brought rain, wind, and cold. So, while Ben headed to the library to make candy sushi, Sam and I headed to Petsmart to look at the animals, JoAnns to pick up some parts for the boys’ costumes, and to Target for Starbucks, and to mess around. Sam and I found a chinchilla we both wanted to adopt – along with two kittens, a hamster, and several fish. We decided our dogs would probably torture all of these things trying to play with them and thought better of it. He found a furry pillow, a lovely lounging bench, some books, and several blankets (could he be any more my kid?).
It was a good fall break. I don’t know if we will get another or if we would spend it the same, but it was nice to have the extra time together and to spend it relaxing.
