Shack Weekend

Tasmanians have this endearing habit of calling their beach houses "shacks".  We're not sure why.  But if nothing else calling a place a "shack" is a great way to resist the urge to over-fancy it up.  Last weekend we went with some friends to a shack in the delightful seaside town of Bicheno, two and a half hours or so from Hobart.  We walked on the beach and went for a bushwalk to a billabong and stayed up late at night drinking wine and playing games and slept late the next morning.  All good.  Plus, there were penguins nesting under the bushes around the back porch, and in the woodpile, and under the house itself, and they all groaned and roared through the night.  Too cool.  Our friends ended up staying an extra night, but we had to get back to town as the dogs we're watching at our current house-sit needed our attention.  Plus the fact that I'm heading to New Zealand this week to look at a boat, then I'll turn around two days after I'm back in Tassie to fly to the States for a three-week work trip.  Things are suddenly feeling a little rushed.

Top picture is backyard cricket at the shack - the dads are playing and the four year olds are lying around in the grass.  Middle picture is of the mob on the bushwalk, and the bottom picture is Elias drinking out of the billabong.  He LOVED drinking this way, and did it over and over, though inevitably it ended with a slide into the water, soaked clothes, and tears.

Pelagic Sails

Spring has made it to Tassie.  Today we observed the change of season by taking Pelagic out for a daysail.  What with our second child being born and all, it's been something like six months since we were sailing.


The experience was a bit nostalgic - Pelagic, after all, was our home for more than half of Elias' life, and therefore for more than half of our life as a family.  The top pic is of Elias burrowed into a duvet and deep into his afternoon nap on the outboard side of the forward bunk, his old bed and the scene of hundreds of good-night books and songs in his past.


We had a great sail.  Hobart has one of the greatest settings for sailing of any city I have seen.  We glided along, pointing out penguins to each other, and looking up at the dwindling patches of slush on Mt. Wellington.


Alisa, Elias and I all felt the old magic coming back.  Ah, Alisa and I both thought, this is why we're so keen to be living aboard again.  And we gave Eric the first lesson for sailors who begin as infants - the joys of playing with lines (third pic).


And we had a quick taste of what it might be like to sail full-time with two little people on board instead of one.  We didn't have a crib rigged up where we could leave Eric to sleep soundly on either tack, and, denied the chance to lie down when he really wanted it, he cried and cried, and we didn't leave the dock until he was finally asleep.  Meanwhile Elias was taking a bit of our attention, and our two-hour sail was only accomplished after about four hours of preparation.


Alisa and I agree that for all our bold schemes for sailing from New Zealand to the fabled Austral Islands, and counting seabirds in the less-visited of the Cook Islands, we will in fact be starting off on some very slow cruising, some very no-goal adventuring, when we do move aboard the next boat.

Cheap, Fast, Out of Control

Our friends who crossed the Pacific with us might remember the cherubic little one- and two-year-old who lived on Pelagic with us at the time.

Well, that was yesterday's Elias.  Today's Elias seems to be a little, well, high on testosterone for someone who's only four.

Lately Alisa and I have noticed a pattern developing in our interactions with the little guy.  We ask him nicely to stop doing some incredibly disruptive thing.  Then we ask nicely again.  Then we ask nicely a third time.  Then we yell.  Then he throws a completely nuclear fit.  We (well, I) scream.  Afterwards we wonder how it all went so wrong.

(Don't get the idea this happens all the time.  But it does happen!)

It's really just the common lot of parenthood, and we're blundering our way through it just like everyone else.  But I have noticed how much my mood at a particular moment plays into these interactions, and whether they escalate or dissipate.  And that, logically enough, has gotten me thinking about the current state of our funny little society's ethnopharmacology.

Apparently it's become over-the-top popular in America to feed kids behavior-modifying drugs.

I'm starting to think that this approach is just another way that our lazy society rewards the guilty.

If anyone needs a some big pharma magic to get through childrearing, shouldn't the parents get first dibs?

It's just an idea...

~~~

Elias and his mates.  Australia above all is a place where it is easy to make friends.

Alisa and Eric the morning they flew up to the U.S. consulate in Melbourne.  He's now officially American.