Day 192 (December 31): So Long, 2019

Things didn’t go badly today but they did go wrong.

First, school went quite well. Lily is struggling with her latest essay, a report on Treasure Island, but she’s making good progress. Elise has advanced her technique for teaching phonics to the twins and that seems to be helping. I don’t know if I’ve written it down anywhere else so I’ll say it here: Henry’s biggest problem with school is reading directions. Heaven help this boy if he every has to assemble IKEA furniture. 

Second, we returned to the amazing playground at Kings Park to have lunch at the cafe. A meal goes quite well when the kids have that amazing facility to enjoy while the food is being prepared. They also ate quickly and without fuss so that they could get back to their play. We even had some fun kicking around a soccer ball together (all six of us doing one thing, mostly happily). We snuck in a picture of our twelve feet just to memorialize the place.

Third, we headed downtown to rent bikes. This was part my attempt to make it up to Cate that we hadn’t biked on Rottnest. Cate fell in love with biking while we were still in the States and often laments that she wishes she had her (or any) bike with us. I had hoped to fulfill this request on Rotty but failed, as I described in another post. But I found bike rentals in downtown Perth.

The other motivation was to spend a bit more time in Perth proper, especially to see this brand new car-free bridge that was built with their new stadium. You see it from the highways and I wanted to see it up close. It was worth it.

The Perth waterfront is lovely. The Swan River in downtown reminds me of Austin, Texas where the “lake” is such an important factor in the natural spaces there. Perth has done a fantastic job of providing huge greenspaces and first rate paths for biking, walking, running, rolling or whatever along the river. It was quite windy during our tour but it’s easy to forget that you’re in the middle of a city of two million people while you’re rolling along.

We had a hair raising finish to our ride because the return bridge has a narrow path and there was both wind gusts and traffic noise. I’m amazed and thankful that we crossed it without incident. Ali was completely exhausted from the ride, which she wasn’t thrilled about from the beginning. Henry and Lily could have gone on for miles and it’s a shame that they couldn’t. Cate probably would have pedaled in circles until the store closed.

So that brings us to the homestretch of the day. After retreating briefly to the house to restock our supplies, we headed to a different part of downtown to have dinner before some early, family-friendly fireworks that had been advertised. Northbridge is a part of town I had read about and now realized Elise and I should have gone for dinner on our date night. The main street was closed to traffic because of the holiday and we had a bear of a time finding parking. It was delightful to walk through the streets. There are great public spaces in Northbridge and I’m sad that we didn’t spend more (any) time there.

Fortunately we found a good restaurant, choosing a sit-down alternative to the alley of streetfood options in the small Chinatown there. We ate too much and rolled ourselves back into the street with about an hour to go before the pyrotechnics. The park had been completely empty when we passed it but an officer assured us that Perth is just so mellow that not even the best seats are taken until nearly showtime.

This was encouraging, because at 8:15 the park was still deserted. Optimistically, we laid out our blanket, administered sidewalk chalk and tried not to shiver. Crowds began to arrive and our hope rose until a man I met while playing with chalk reported that a security officer told him the show was at midnight, not 9.

We were partially saved by a nearby fireworks display that lasted one or two minutes from the top of an office tower. We saved some face, walked back to the car, drove ten minutes home and let the kids go to bed without brushing their teeth. Elise fell asleep while I watched a bizarre comedy event on TV that combined the format of a Lincoln-Douglas debate with the atmosphere of a roast. Confusing but hilarious.

Considering the end of a year and the end of a decade, let’s pause to reflect. Ten years ago we had one child who had just begun to walk at 18 months of age. We lived in a different house than we do now and wouldn’t consider moving until a snowshoe adventure on 1/1/10. I was one year into a job that hadn’t begun to make me miserable yet. Our ambitious travel plans then involved going to Hawaii (five hour flight) without a child.

Today our children have a combined age of 31. I love my work so much that I make my family nuts with constant work-related observations on the places we visit (planning, design and construction of transportation facilities). We’ve been traveling for just over six months. We’ve flown tens of thousands of miles and have many more to go. We’ve been out of the country for longer than I ever have and we’re only one-third through this part of the trip.

A long time ago, I kept a blog about Lily (and subsequently Henry) and I ended/started each year with questions about their development. A year hence, would she be able to read? Would he be able to walk? Let’s rekindle that tradition here:

I wonder a lot about eating. We can pretty consistently put sauce on the noodles we give the kids, as opposed to just butter and cheese. By the end of this trip will we be impressed by the food they eat? Will they starve in Vietnam?

This is maybe TMI but will Ali and Cate ever stop announcing “I pooped” in hopes of getting an adult to wipe her butt?

Where will the kids go to school in the fall and how will the transition back to regular school go? There’s a chance that we won’t be allowed to return to our past school because of a redistricting issue. There’s a chance that Lily will follow one of her friends to a private school. There’s a chance that we’ll enroll Henry in college because he has advanced through everything between 3rd and 12th grade.

But, more importantly, how has our homeschooling done at keeping them on pace, neither too far behind nor too far ahead of their peers? I’m most concerned about the 1st graders’ reading abilities. They perform well on our phonics exercises but they haven’t yet begun to read. Elise reads to them almost every night. But it was winter break of first grade when both Henry and Lily really suddenly began to lay in bed at night and read on their own.

For Henry and school, I wonder if the stress and conflicts that we experience will have lasting effects. Also, has he gotten better at reading instructions?

For me and Elise, I think the biggest question is how big we are at the end of this. We are eating too much and exercising too little. We knew it would be impossible to keep our homefront level of fitness during this trip but how bad is it going to get? After six months, I’ve probably gained 5-10 pounds, mostly during the month that we lived in hotels. I’m hoping that this next two weeks we’ll do a lot more home cooking and a lot more walking around.

But the biggest questions are too big to write about. We talk about our re-entry to our home life often. Each time we assess our lives in rental homes or hotels, we wonder how it will feel to return to our, comparatively large, home. What will it be like to have more than four pairs of shoes?

I guess the other big question on my mind has to do with meeting people on this journey. I’d say that so far it is less than I had hoped for. It’s gotten much better now that we’ve been in an English-speaking country for a few weeks. The kids are spending a lot more time interacting with peers at the playgrounds (and libraries) that we visit. We’re able to chat with the other folks at our near our table, as we did at dinner on Rottnest.

Okay, that’s plenty. If you, dear reader, have questions you want to offer, I’d love to see them in the comments!