Category — Uncategorized

Many years ago, we started the twins’ Grand Tour, except we based our trip on a favourite David Nicholls book (Us), which goes through the art backwards. We’ve done another section each year, and this year’s trip covered Belgium and the Netherlands — two weeks of making up inappropriate captions for beloved paintings, Liege waffles, and dodging bicycles.

But we started in London because the twins suggested this trip as something I could look forward to in the fall while they were away at college. They did nothing to plan it beyond listing the cities, but I loved the idea of starting in London because it would be familiar, AND I could go on a book-buying spree.

Our big splurge was a 30-person tour of Buckingham Palace. No photos because they do not allow you to take pictures inside, but they DO give you a photo book at the end of your tour. It was like being in a Crown episode (and, yes, now when I watch The Crown, I can tell exactly where they were in the palace or whether.)

After a few days in London at the National Gallery, Portrait Gallery, and British Museum, we jumped on the Eurostar and headed to Amsterdam. When I was little, I had a camp counselor sign my camp autograph book with “Score some smoke in Amsterdam” (because that was apparently a normal thing to say to a child in the 1980s). While we did not score some smoke, we did eat at Upstairs Pannenkoeken, the smallest restaurant in Europe.

We toured Anne Frank House and the Jewish Quarter.

We saw art at the Rijksmuseum, Van Gogh Museum, Moco Museum, and Stedelijk Museum.

When you travel in winter, you can get alone time with The Night Watch.

We toured Rembrandt’s house and took a canal ride to see some of the Amsterdam Light Festival.

But mostly, we dodged bicyclists. They whip around the bend, and it never felt like a safe time to cross the bike path. You know how the Muppets run with their arms flailing over their heads? Imagine that energy, but on a bike. That is Amsterdam. And we loved the city so much and could have spent many, many, many more weeks there. But more Flemish painters were waiting for us in Belgium.

To be continued…

Apple News keeps delivering the same type of news story: Bringing a child into the world has grown unaffordable. Salaries haven’t kept up with the cost of raising a child, and more people are choosing not to have children because they cannot afford them.

A CBS article put the estimated yearly cost around $21,681 in 2021, and it is likely slightly higher in 2023.

That is the estimate before college, which you’ll want to start saving for as soon as the child is born because the average in-state tuition is $26,027 per year and private college tuition is $55,840 per year. So let’s average that to $40,933 per year or $163,734 that you need to save over 18 years. Assuming you don’t have a 529 plan (and we can’t predict the performance of the plan), that comes out to an additional $9096 you need to save per year beginning at birth to send your child to college, based on 2023 prices.

So it’s expensive — even if you take college savings out of the mix.

The birth rate has been dropping for years, but we’re also asking people to take on enormous costs to ensure we have a future population of little Generation Alphas to support the Gen Xers and Millenials and beyond without giving the societal support needed to make this happen.

I’m not sure why Apple News keeps delivering stories about this to me except that the algorithm connects infertility with any lack of reproduction?

In addition to undigging from the trip, the kids are slowly returning to school. Just as they came home on different days, they’re returning on different days, so I need to go through the departure twice. Two times of having my stomach in knots for days. Two times of feeling so empty, blinking as they disappear around the bend.

When we were in Amsterdam, we went to the Rijksmuseum. They’ve gathered their greatest hits in a single gallery. It’s a long hall with open pods on either side of the walkway, and you crisscross the room, going from one pod to another, until you end at Rembrandt’s The Night Watch.

We were heading for The Night Watch, but I noticed a different painting in the third pod as I crossed from one side of the room to the other. It was an enormous bird at the edge of a pod in the middle of the room. I tried to go back to concentrating on the art in front of me, but I finally gave up and headed to what I wanted to see because the ChickieNob always reminds us that you should spend time with the art that moves you vs. the art that you’re told you should like.

So I went to spend time with The Threatened Swan by Jan Asselijn.

It’s over five feet across and over four feet high, painted around 1650. It’s hard to see, but there is a dog in the lower left corner, and the swan is protecting her eggs in the nest. The dog looks playful — maybe a Portuguese Water Dog? — but the swan is clearly in mid-scream, sensing danger even if everyone else would look at the situation and say, “What is the problem? The dog is curious. He’s in the water. Not doing anything wrong. Why are you freaking out?”

I felt so seen. So incredibly seen.

I couldn’t leave the painting, and I doubled back when I was done with The Night Watch, returned in the middle of another room, and returned a third time when we had to leave the museum. We bought a postcard of it and a magnet, though neither invoked the sensation I felt standing in front of the canvas.

The next day, we had a little time before our tickets at the Stedelijk Museum, and Josh suggested we swing by the swan as a consolation prize for skipping the tulip museum. But when we got to the door, even though we could book tickets online, they wouldn’t let us in because our iAmsterdam card only worked once per museum.

I think the woman at the door sensed how crushed I was when I said I wanted to see one painting, and she whispered, “Just go. Be quick. See your painting.” As I walked past her, thanking her repeatedly, I told her the painting was the swan, and she beamed with approval. “Go up; it’s in the gallery of honour. Enjoy it.”

Being in front of it feels like the release I get when the twins return home, and we cleave together once more as a family. Cleaving is such a funny word, meaning both to separate and come together. It’s what we’ve done all year, what we’ll have to do for the rest of our lives.

I was worried about traveling again. Would it be different now that they’ve been away? Would we continue to mesh well? It was the same but better. None of my fears came true, but we could divide and conquer in ways that we wouldn’t have tried when they were little. I had two uninterrupted weeks of looking at art, eating waffles, and hyperventilating my way to the top of towers.

My heart hurts knowing we’re home and so far away from the picture of the swan. Even with an enormous poster that Josh got me on that second visit, it’s not the same as being in front of the real thing. Knowing it’s in another country makes my heart hurt in the same way of knowing how good I had it for eighteen years when the twins were with me every day but they now live far away. I am happy knowing they’re in the world, and we’ll be together again in the future. But it hurts to cleave apart at the end of each break.

It makes my swan heart scream at playful, seemingly undangerous time. I know its true nature.

Beorn and I are currently in a standoff about his water bottle. My parents watched him while we were away. When I dropped him off at their house, it was clear that the water bottle was missing the o-ring that went inside. It had dropped into the sink in my haste, and I walked out of my home without noticing.

So, I ran to a nearby pet store and bought a new water bottle. Beorn tried it, realized it was not his normal water bottle, and immediately rejected it. Beorn, like me, does not like change.

But it was arguably a better water bottle.

While we were away, he refused the new bottle, and my parents indulged him by wetting his vegetables and giving him cucumber slices. The pig is so spoiled when he goes over there, so much so that he completely ignores us the moment he’s with his grandparents.

We brought him home, and he refused the new water bottle. So, we have entered a standoff. I reassembled the old water bottle, and I will likely cave today because he has a stronger will than I do. But I cannot believe how long he’s willing to refuse the water bottle just because it is new and shiny and not dented from years of chewing on the end.

That pretty much sums up my life.

We took a trip, and I thought I did a pretty good job setting myself up for an easy landing when I returned. I’d just stroll back into my life — work and home — as if I paused in the middle of a sentence.

Except that is never what happens when you take a trip. You come back to a mound of emails that were comprehensible when you first read them while away, but now you’ve forgotten the context when you go to respond. And you have a nagging suspicion that things are falling through the cracks.

So I’m undigging. And I’ll be back in a day or two with stories.