The Road to New Hampshire

So I just dropped my daughter off for her last day of kindergarten. Before you assume I'm going to get all weepy about that, consider how the entire summer stretches before us: I get to be with both these kids all day every day for the next three months. I don't have any part-time sitters. I haven't even signed up for any day camps. I am, apparently, a masochistic idiot.

Oh, whatever. Just a few months ago you could have heard me whining to my wife about kindergarten and its every day demands: I miss her. We used to be able to just take off and have so much fun. Besides, it often seemed like school had torn into my very purpose. I left my career so I could be with them; what am I good for if they're not with me? And despite all my recent kvetching and uncertainty, I have actually been looking forward to this summer. Even if I'm not able to get much else done, I feel my greatest sense of happiness when I am with them doing what we love to do.

All that stuff I wrote a couple weeks ago about the blog changing and all that. . . it will. But this is going to be a fun summer. A summer worth sharing. We have already started working on a lot of projects that I'll be posting about and the other day I sat down with the kids and we wrote down two pages of ideas for stuff we want to do this summer. So things shouldn't change too much around here until September.

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Here are a few pictures I took on our drive across beautiful Canada and Vermont on the way to New Hampshire.

The kids got to stay up so late every night on the road.

The front-yard culture of the Toronto neighborhoods we saw was pretty interesting. I saw this crazy garden and it reminded me of what I call "vernacular security" here in Detroit.