Twelve Feet, Six Continents, One Year

Lily's hair got shorter and shorter during the year; she started by donating her pony tail in Minnesota! In Melbourne in January her hair got a lot shorter. Also, check out those freckles! The hair on my head has been getting scarcer for at least 20 years. Every haircut I've gotten in the last fifteen has been shorter than the one before it. For the last ten years I've been giving myself buzz cuts in the mirror, trusting Elise to tell me when I've missed a spot. Every few years the guard on the clippers has gotten smaller. During this time, I've missed barbershops and their casual banter. Elise once gave me a gift certificate to a place where I got a buzz, a beer, plus a hand and face massage but no chatter. I went to a place in our neighborhood and paid $30 for a buzz and a can of hipster beer but I was definitely too old and square to earn a conversation. Besides, even if I took a trim every two weeks (I prefer weekly), that would be an expensive habit.

I'm pretty tired. We've been sleeping on a lousy bed for two weeks and almost every night we get woken up by at least one child. We're averaging 1.3 bloody noses per night because we run the air conditioner a lot, drying out the air. The rest of the time, though, we're having a great experience. Too bad we need sleep. Tuesday: This was our 150th day. A clever writer would make subtle allusions to Waiting for Guffman and sesquicentennials but I am not that correspondent. Sorry. After we slept off our food party hangover, we tackled school and then walked to a Spanish class/tutoring session in a nearby neighborhood. The walk nearly killed the kids so we arrived in prime condition, of course. We found the tutor through "experiences" on AirBnb, which I had previously disparaged. It has turned into a very useful service and we were really lucky to find Monica and her daughter Diana. As usual, the twins more or less opted out but Henry hung in for about half th