Indiana Idylls

For this Halloween of 2022 I dressed up as a spartan warrior. My plan for the costume was to focus on the helmet and shield and then go on to make leg and body armor. I had had no experience with making anything like this before, but I still had a general idea of how to go about making the shield, so the helmet was going to be the main challenge. After watching some videos, Mom and I got to work making a cardboard frame for the helmet, planning to paiper-mache over it, but the shield and leg armor would also need to be paiper-mached so we decided to do all the paiper-macheing at once. The shield was made out of cardboard with a paper plate in the middle to give it a curve, the leg armor was also made out of cardboard curved to fit my legs. Once everything that needed to be paiper-mached had been made Mom and I began paiper-macheing. After two coats of paiper-mache I them dry and then primed them, after letting this dry I painted them with bronze spray paint. We used red tul...

Imagine you are exploring Bloomington for the day and you have unloaded your boys at a playground on the first nice sunny day of March and you are enjoying a quiet moment alone in the car. You have barely begun to savor the silence and your homemade trail mix when you become aware of a son running urgently back to you, calling out to get your attention. MOM! MOM! In that moment, you take a deep breath and begin to wonder who could possibly have gotten hurt already and steel yourself for what will come and consider what options are handy in the car for blood or injury or what-may-come in a city you barely know. You resolve to be calm and brave. The son now reaches the car and launches himself into the front seat MOM! and mere inches away from your face THERE ARE CADDIS FLY LARVAE in the CREEK and they are EVERYWHERE and you have to go see them RIGHT NOW because it is AMAZING. You take another deep breath because -- it is a relief to see -- he is brimming with excitement and not alarm -...

A reading from the Gospel of Peter Jesus said to his disciples:  Go, and give the poor all that they need,  for they do not know that I am here.  They think that I am dead and crucified.  Go, in Jesus' name, we pray. The Word of the Lord

After he'd been singing for a while in the car on the way home from Michigan, I grabbed some scrap paper and did my best to write down what I could hear from the front seat. "...Everything that would be on a plane it has four propellers 80 hundred until 1900 hundred and he died in the early 94s Those tanks except they shoot guns right out of their guns There was a war and they changed to real weapons, real gunpowder And in the early 94s those that were different my bones fat... a gravestone of Kentucky ...and I saw what a gravestone looked like and I liked it. And in the early 94s an early broken neck Covered with a new... the wheels go around and round, round and round, I can show you the tractor... it was a really good tractor, like the one in my hand ... Went to the hospital and then I got better and the war began again and I got my uniform

This is what the boys remembered shortly after our 2014 trip to Baltimore, Colonial Williamsburg, and the Farm outside Shenandoah Park on our first Gestwicki Getaway. Baltimore Listening to music on the TV (at the Olivers') Williamsburg hotel splash pad Farm playing with Damien and Vella King of Town (King of Tokyo) Incan Gold playing Wizards Gramma & Pa were there It was not an exhaustive list.

Peter: My uncle the baron glued exploding cheese to the guys. 20160508_123304.jpg 82KB Download Someone (probably Leo), 10/16/14: I love that your tummy is getting bigger. It's like a pumpkin!

Cleaning out a box in my office, I found my handwritten notes, transcribed from a conversation with (ha! more like a short excerpt of a monologue by) Leo, on his 4th birthday, in the bathroom by the Dinosphere at the Indianapolis Children's Museum. There were two sci-fi movies posters up, one from 1959's Journey to the Center of the Earth , and one from 1979, The Land that Time Forgot . I wrote: Leo first noticed the T-Rex underwater fighting the submarine. "That monkey has a spear. I know what kind of monkey that is. It's a Monkey Knight. I've been one of those before, in Marvel Super Heroes. That monkey has a spear. None of the other monkeys have spears, so that's how you tell that one is the king. Did you know that?" Then he saw the volcanoes in the sky. He thought there were "red cracks" in the sky, but they were just pteranodons. L: Look at how big my legs are! Me: Oh, yes. Like tree trunks. L: Yeah, mostly. [I think that last...