Aiden spent a whole week with his Grandma Sally in Vermont last week. During the day he went to "birding camp" at the Green Mountain Audubon Center in Huntington, right near where we used to live when Aiden was born. He spent the week playing migration and survival-of-the fittest games, watching bird banding, learning how to use binoculars, building nests, and scoping out feeders for glimpses of hummingbirds and chickadees. Since it was by far the hottest week of the summer so far (90s and 99% humidity), they also spent a lot of time in the Huntington River cooling off (and pretending to be mergansers?). In any case, he had a great time at camp. He also had a great time after camp with Grandma- they spent a lot of time talking and relaxing in the kiddie pool in the backyard, eating "TV" dinners (dinner in front of the tube- total treatsville!) and they even went to see Despicable Me 2 in 3-D.
Then we showed up on Friday to give Aiden a big squeeze, and to help install sugaring lines in the woods for next spring. The work to get the main lines in actually went very quickly, which was good since we kind of left the kids to their own devices watching Loony Toons in the basement. Aiden did have walkie-talkie communication with us in the woods and we had regular check ins. Now that the main lines are in, the next job is to install the feeder lines which tap into individual trees- that's much trickier to get just right, so we're planning on devoting another couple of weekends to it in late summer and fall. We also made a good dent on re-stocking the sugarhouse woodshed with splits to fire the evaporator, so we all felt good about the progress. Not quite ready for March yet, but then, who is in mid-July?
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