Do you ever watch the show “Modern Family”? We love it. It features three families, all very different, connected by blood relation. One of the families is two gay men and their adopted daughter, Lily. It’s weird, actually, how much we have in common with the gay guys. There was one episode where they were trying the “cry out” method, which Shawn and I attempted with Mason for about as long and with as much success. One of the dads kept bursting into tears, while the other complained about not wanting to always be the “teach-y dad.” That was so us – with me and Shawn being clown dad or teach-y dad at some point or another.
One of the last episodes we saw before heading up was about the entire extended family’s trip to Hawaii. The gay guys bit was about how people vacation. One of the dads was all about events and doing and Adventure, with the capital “A.” The other just wanted to sip Mai Tais by the beach and relax. This all came to a head when the adventure-loving one, Mitchell, had it in his mind to go to a lavender farm. “The biggest in the world! Five different varieties of lavender!” The other dad finally broke and said, “No. I’m not doing it. Lily and I will be at the beach.” This trip I’m kind of in lavender farm mode; Shawn is all about the Mai Tais.
So we’ve been doing a bit of both. Moose View Trail satisfied a lot of my lavender-dad-ness, as does the occasional canoe/kayak around the lake. Mason is perfectly in-between, spending a lot of his time making his own fun on the main lodge’s tiny beach front/boat landing. I’ve also spent some time sitting on the dock and reading. In fact, I finished Scott Westerfeld’s UGLIES while up at Bearskin Lodge, not knowing it was a cliffhanger ending! Argh! Worse, the other books I brought I’m not entirely in the mood for, though I think I will finish up Laura Resnick’s DOPPLEGANGSTER.
While in Mai Tai mode, we saw this hen duck nosing around in the weeds by the shore very close to our dock. At first, we were very quiet, trying not to spook her. But after a while it became clear, she was totally playing us. When I brought out a bit of trail mix bar to coax her with, she came zooming up and even took it out of my hand. At one point it apparently took me too long to tear off the next bit, because she flapped her waddle-ly self up onto the dock and just grabbed it. We were quite amused by her antics and even fetched her more bread from our cabin. Shawn and I dubbed her “tourist duck” because the lodge couldn’t have entertained us more, if they’d arranged the whole experience.
I saw her trying it on with the folks down the trail earlier today. She’s got quite the racket.
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