Remember that great public transportation system I was talking about a while ago?  On weekends it runs on the hour.  And getting seven people (4 adults, 3 toddlers, so we had a kind of zone defense going with one adult playing sweeper) out the door and down the three (ok, five) blocks to the train station in time for the 9:17 local downtown was a squeaker.

"It just left!" said a guy cleaning up leaves near the station.  "You can probably catch the one on the other line, 7 blocks thataway…"  I looked at my crew.  No way.  Possibly if it were just me, in 1992, but not with three kids riding on shoulders.  We decided to wait for the next train.  Did I mention it was about 40 degrees out?  Luckily, we'd dressed warmly, and had enough emergency rations to last 40 days.

The trade-off for public transportation is giving up freedom to be late - [...]More

Remember that great public transportation system I was talking about a while ago?  On weekends it runs on the hour.  And getting seven people (4 adults, 3 toddlers, so we had a kind of zone defense going with one adult playing sweeper) out the door and down the three (ok, five) blocks to the train station in time for the 9:17 local downtown was a squeaker.

"It just left!" said a guy cleaning up leaves near the station.  "You can probably catch the one on the other line, 7 blocks thataway…"  I looked at my crew.  No way.  Possibly if it were just me, in 1992, but not with three kids riding on shoulders.  We decided to wait for the next train.  Did I mention it was about 40 degrees out?  Luckily, we'd dressed warmly, and had enough emergency rations to last 40 days.

The trade-off for public transportation is giving up freedom to be late - [...]More

I'd been wanting to take the kid (or, to be more honest, I'd been wanting to go) to the new playground park in Fairfax, VA, called Clemyjontri, for about a year.  One of our friends took her kids, and they couldn't stop talking about it, so I used that and my son's birthdays as excuses, and suggested all the boys meet up for a playdate at the park.

Which is pretty awesome.  It's a county park, but was privately funded in order to provide a playground for disabled children.  As a result it is quite lovely and manicured, with lots of open space.  My son could have spent 8 hours just playing on the one slides-and-climbing unit.  Several of the swingsets were designed so that wheelchair-bound children could use them (modified swings with straps, etc), and the carousel had a large percentage of non-mobile horses and a few wheelchair cars - and was in plane with the floor.

It was really cold and REALLY windy, and there were only a few other kids there (none with obvious disabilities), so I still don't

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Fran and her family graciously treated us to a day at the National Aquarium in Baltimore for our birthdays.  TWC has another entry on how awesome the Aquarium is, so rather than repeat that (although it really is), I'm thinking that a discussion about what it's like to travel with two toddlers might be interesting.

The main things I learned were that while everyone has different parenting styles, it works best if every parent parents every child, as needed.  For instance, I was wiped out from a fight about whether my son could go into the

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This weekend, we stayed at the veritable Admiral Fell Inn in Baltimore. Among its many charms, the Inn boasts two resident, and friendly, ghosts, who share tea every afternoon with the guests, and spend many an evening singing sea chanteys downstairs in the pub.  I cannot tell you how charmed she was when the ghosts invited her to play along on the drum.

Ghosts who can carry on good conversation, or at least a tune, are welcome in any season - especially in an historic area (more on this neighborhood's fine ghost tours in October).


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