needles highway, toddler poop, and a few ways in which I'm not like Thoreau.

Because I refuse to let vacation die, because we're nearing the end of Daylight Savings Time and I desperately need to remember happier times, I bring you yet another installment of "What We Did on Summer Vacation: The Black Hills, 2018."

Have you seen Needles Highway?!  This year was the first time Todd and I decided to check it out, and man, were we glad we did!  It was beautiful!

It was amazing, but after a while, I was forced to admit to Todd that I just couldn't get past the fact that the rock formations looked uncannily like bundles of turds.  What can I say?  I've been a mom of successive Under-Fives for the last decade; I look at a lot of turds every day as a matter of course.

See?  You other moms of preschoolers can't not see it, right?

This is the liberated smile of a mother who finds herself in the midst of hundreds of truly massive poops, and not responsible to clean up a single one.  There is no smile more genuine.

The kids were duly impressed:

We drove past Sylvan Lake on the way home, which was beautiful as well.  I like to pretend that someday, when the kids are older, I will be the kind of person who kayaks and hikes and things like that.  A real Thoreau, traversing the land with a sense of purpose and fulfillment.  I like to pretend that my deep commitment to mothering the tiny set is the only thing keeping me from this.

In order to keep pretending these things, I have to conveniently forget the fact that I am not outdoorsy in the least, and never have been, even long before I had kids.

Almost every instance in which I have tried doing something adventurous outdoors has ended with a very embarrassing take-home story.  Once, I went swimming in a quarry, and a fish bit off part of my belly button, leaving a bloody wound, and I was pretty sure I was going to contract giardia.  Another time, I was 'strongly encouraged' (read: forced as a part of a group exercise) to climb a rock face, got about ten feet up, and then would not come back down because I was too scared to rappel backwards, and too scared to climb higher.  I have a bum ankle from once gracelessly sliding off an innertube into three-foot-deep waters and hitting my foot on the bottom of the lake, and the resulting sprain never fully healed and has plagued me ever since.  I later rolled the same ankle while on a hike, stepping off a 6-inch-high rock.  (Ironically, we were in South Dakota at that time, too, and I started screaming bloody murder and would just not quit, and Todd was whispering at me to shut up because I would attract mountain lions.  Todd is also not outdoorsy.)

These kind of things never happened to Thoreau, I am certain.

These are the realities of my life, but luckily do not get in the way of the reading of books, or the watching of Amazon Prime, so I don't feel the daily chronic sting of all my missed nature-y opportunities until we drive past places like Sylvan Lake and I start pretending again... sigh.  Wouldn't it be glorious to kayak here?  It would be such a beautiful place to sprain an ankle or catch giardia.

Ah, well.  We viewed it from the comfort of the leather seats of the Kristy Chrysler, which is my kind of outdoor experience, anyway.  So, in that way, I can in good conscience say we almost kayaked here.  We basically kayaked here.  I think Thoreau would be almost, basically proud of me.

'sup, little riders?

(Name that movie!)

Well, I think you can gather from the sheer number of posts about our trip to the Black Hills that we all had a blast, but one day in particular stood out for the kids, especially Penelope: the day they got to ride Joe the Horse!

Waiting for Papa Tony to get Joe all ready for their ride...

Scrappy little cowhand.

Penelope, like many eight-year-old girls, is in love with horses.  She was so comfortable and natural riding Joe, and even got a chance to ride him solo without Papa needing to hold the lead rope!

Not to be outshone, Rocco casually tried his hand at cowpoking, even though Joe was about a million times his own size.  NBD.

Laurelai was not convinced she wanted a ride - at least, a ride of this particular variety.  So she stuck to her trusty bike.

Again, not to be outshone, Rocco hopped on his own bike.  One that had a button to play its own music.  One whose music made Rocco channel his inner Hell's Angel.  He seriously made this face about 100% of the time he was sitting on the bike.

Then, everyone started getting jiggy with it.  Here, the kids are having a floss-off.

And here, Finneas is doing his best dab.

When I see these photos, my first instinct is to be proud we're not raising weirdo homeschoolers who don't know what the floss is, or how to dab.  But my second instinct is to suspect that perhaps at this cultural moment, only weird homeschoolers are continuing on with the floss and the dab.  I'm sure Jello Fingers or The Fwip are out there somewhere, gaining traction among the more culturally relevant.  But leave us in blissful ignorance, okay?

And, unrelated to anything else I've posted here today, but too adorable not to share, Finneas found a turkey feather, and Laurelai got to live out some pretty hardcore Pocahontas pretend play.  (I'm sure I'm being culturally insensitive somehow in posting these, but half the time I suspect I'm being inadvertently culturally insensitive to someone anyway, so I might as well just enjoy my five-year-old in all her P.C.-ignorance without getting too worked up about it.)

 

ADORABLE, no?

crazy horse and mount rushmore.

Some things in the Black Hills, like visiting Mount Rushmore, make it onto the itinerary most years and have become well-loved traditions.  Other things make it on the schedule only once every few years, like Crazy Horse.  This year, I was really itching to revisit the amazing museum housed there, so we all decided to take the trip.

We got there just in time to see a Lakota dancer, and at the end of her performance, she invited audience members up to join her in a circle dance.  Finneas and Penelope were brave enough to go up with me, and we all had a blast.

Since it's right up the road from Mount Rushmore, we decided to just kill two birds with one trip out of the house, so that was our next stop.

One of the nice things about visiting in early September was that families with kids were all settled back into the school year, so the crowds weren't very thick anywhere we went.

Rocco was not convinced he wanted to see the Presidents.  Zooming in on the evidence...

Churlish.

Papa and Grandma treated everyone to ice cream afterwards!  It was delicious.

George Washington seems a little sad to see us go, don't you think?  I could almost hear him saying, "See you next year!"  If you stare hard enough at this picture, eventually a granite arm pops up and starts waving, I'm not even kidding you.

And that is how come our kids came back from South Dakota noticeably more cultured and educated.  All in a day's work.

walk this way. (into the woods, that is.)

You know what, guys?  Just call me Super Nature Mom (or something similar, but cooler), because I've had a lot of opportunities lately to brag about how I'm taking my kids out on nature walks, and letting them go all Wild + Free, and cultivating a really earthy experience for their childhoods and all.  What can I say?  I'm basically an expert now, and my children are osmoting wilderness skills directly through the soles of their Chacos.

See?  Look at us, Nature-ing!

When I Nature, I like to do it sitting down.  But not directly in the grass because that's a surefire way to end up wicking moisture into my pants and getting made fun of by whatever resident hooligan decides it's his job to point it out.  So I Nature from the elevated stands.

Penelope also likes to Nature as a spectator.  It gives her plenty of time for girl chats, and keeps stuff from getting into her shoes, which are open-toed and not at all appropriate for the terrain.  I will neither confirm nor deny whether I was the parent who thought shorts and sandals would be 'totally fine' for hiking.

See?  For all the naysayers who would assert that I'd be better off walking around and exploring, I have physical evidence that the best things about being outside can be enjoyed from the comfort of a seat on a jagged boulder.

I think it's clear we returned home as rugged conquerors and fearless outdoorsmen.

I should probably just graduate them from homeschool now, since I've met all the Instagram requirements for a well-rounded childhood.  Onward and upward, little survivalists!  You are now equipped for a college education and a fulfilling adulthood!

take a walk on the wild side. (i mean, a drive through the wildlife loop.)

One of our favorite things to do when we're up in Custer is to take a drive through the Custer State Park wildlife loop.

There are so many things to see - buffalo, burros, deer, sheep, prairie dogs, active duty military running drills in full gear.  You know.  But in the past we have typically driven through at sunset, when the animals are active but the visitor's center is closed.

This year, we went during the day, and had a blast.  Obviously, we saw plenty of animals, though Atticus was bummed there weren't any military drills happening this year.

But the biggest highlights were the two visitor centers within the park.

We even found a rock climbing wall, and the kids were seriously in heaven.  If anyone has any ideas of what it would take to install a kids' climbing wall in our basement, I'd be interested to chat with you.  I've been thinking for a while it would be a good Christmas gift for them, but once they were actually able to try one, it was obvious they'd love it.

The kids were doing awesome through the visitor center - curious, engaged, quiet enough.  Apparently it wasn't enough to deter a couple of people from making negative comments to me and Todd about the number of kids we have.  It was a true joy to get to justify our kids' existence to complete strangers.  But oh well.  In the immortal words of Taylor Swift, "haters gonna hate."  Shrug.


After the climbing wall, we were headed into the Imax theater room to watch a movie about Custer State Park.  (Narrated by Kevin Costner!  Honestly, I always get him mixed up with Kevin Spacey and Kevin Kline - the entire movie, I thought I was listening to the voice of Marcus Skinner from Orange County.  HOWEVER.  I would not tell the dear people of South Dakota these things - they dearly love their Kevin Costner, who seems to dearly love them in return.)

Since Team Negative Nancies headed into the theater shortly before us, I knew we could all benefit from a little powwow before going in ourselves.  ("Some people don't know yet that large families are great! Let's show them what a blessing we can be by behaving well - sitting quietly, watching the movie without wiggling or talking, and being respectful to the people around us.")  In all honesty, it sometimes stinks knowing that critical eyes are occasionally on us, expecting us to fail and then attributing our failures to large family choices at large.  It stinks being the 'face' of large families to some - we are, after all, just a group of intensely human people.  But at the same time, it's also a privilege that we get the chance to show people that children don't have to be stressful, chaotic burdens, even in large numbers.  (Go figure, right?)

Pre-game Pep Talk

Callista was apparently not listening during pre-game warm up, so she was benched.  She hung out with Todd outside the theater while the rest of us finished the movie.  She wasn't mad bout it.

After the movie, we all got to spend a little time doing our favorite things - the kids got to spend some time out in nature...

...and I got to get some tacos from a street truck back in town.

Does it bother me that the word "authentic" is intentionally scraped out of the lettering on the side of the truck?

Tacoooooooos.

Nope.  I may or may not have gone back out for more once the kids were down for naps.  And any day that ends with me getting street tacos twice is a good day, indeed.