Half of Nina in North OKC

Nina and Emilio had a double header on Saturday. Nina's U14 game was in North OKC. Mari and I drove her there, and the boys stayed home. 

We left at half-time of Nina's game so that we could get back in time to get Emi to his game. Nina rode home with Audrey, Greg, and Ken.

Half of Nina in Lawton

Nina and Emilio had a double header on Saturday. Nina's U12 game was in Lawton, which is a 2-hour drive from Ada. Mari and I drove her there, while Aunt Carolyn stayed home with the boys, and drove Emilio to his game at 3:30.

The weather was perfect, and Nina played hard.

After the first half, we headed back to Ada to see Emilio's game. Nina joined the team for lunch and then rode back to Ada with Lily and her family.

Nina scores a brace

Minutes after this one began, an Ardmore keeper picked up a ball that had been passed to her by a teammate. That's illegal. Coach Wes called on Nina to take the penalty kick, and she absolutely nailed it into the upper left-hand corner of the goal, giving us a 1-0 lead.

After Ardmore scored 2, Nina got an opportunity in the box final seconds of the first half, and she did not squander it. We go into halftime tied 2-2.

These were the only goals we scored on the day.

Nina Soccer Season Begins

This season, Nina (who turns 11 in November) is playing on the Ada Soccer Club's U14 and the U12 teams.  She played her first U14 game yesterday in Duncan. Emi had a game in Ada at the same time, so I planned my weekend so that I could see each of them play once.
 
Emi played in the rain yesterday, but Nina's game was played under a hot, hot sun.
 
Nina started and played the entire game at forward. This shot on goal was the closest we got to scoring in a hard-fought game that was more competitive than the final score indicated.

Starting 5th and 7th grades

They all seem excited: Nina most openly so. I will be driving Nina and Pablo to school each morning at the 5th and 6th grade center, which is a block away from ECU. In the afternoons, I'll be walking over to meet them.

Emilio will be walking to school for the first time, and he will continue to do so for the next two years. He's a 7th grader now and will be starting junior high today. The junior high is just a block away from our home. His electives are: athletics (basketball, then track), Spanish (he was most excited about this one, but he will only get one semester of it), and Geography.

Here are links to previous first days:
Below is 2017:  4th and 6th graders.


Below is 2016: 3rd and 5th graders.


Below is 2015: two second graders and one fourth grader. Emilio.



Below is 2014: two first graders.


Below: In 2014, Emilio was a third grader.


Below: in 2013, we had two kindergartners and one second grader.


Below: in 2012, we had two in Pre-K and one 1st grader.


In 2011, Emilio was a kindergartner.

2018 Summer Family Film Festival Finale

School starts tomorrow.  That's 5th grade for Nina and Pablo and 7th grade for Emilio and new schools for all. Tonight, we finished screening the 8th and final film in our 2018 Summer Family Film Festival. I curated, with help from Mari.

Karate Kid (1984). June.
The Sting (1973). June.
The Adventures of Tintin (2011). June or July.
Rear Window (1954) July 1.
1776 (1972) July 22.
The Cowboys (1972) July 30.
High Noon (1952.). August 5.
Murder on the Orient Express (2017). August 13.

We saw all of these, except for the last, from beginning to end on the big screen upstairs, sitting on the couch together.  Tonight, I asked the kids what their favorite was, and they all answered unhesitatingly: Rear Window.  Emi didn't think he could consider Murder on the Orient Express, since he and I saw it first in the cinema last winter, but he thought he might throw his vote that way, if he could.

Film festivals of previous summers have included: Spartacus, Ben-Hur, North by Northwest, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, E. T., Raiders of the Lost Ark (and its several sequels), The Man Who Knew Too Much, City Lights, The Great Dictator, Modern Times, and Mutiny on the Bounty. All were successes, except for Mutiny (1935), which produced a mutiny on our own Bounty. The kids are not fans of Captain Bligh.

Camp Nina

This is Nina's 4th year at Tallchief and the first year that we've seen photos of her posted online during her stay. I think that Wacky Wizard is holding a wand.

Benton Boys at Large in OKC

Mari had an all-day teaching conference to attend in Oklahoma City today, so we got up at 6, left the house at 6:15, and dropped her off at 8. With Nina at Camp and Mari's conference ending at 4:30, the boys and I had a day to fill.

It wasn't hot yet, so we started the morning at J.R.'s mini-golf, where we were the only putters on the course. Instead of competing against each other, we took turns putting for three mythical golfers: Albert Einstein, Han Solo, and Skanda Gupta.

The course had seen better days, but our mythical golfers brought their "A" game.

Han Solo was one stroke out of first through nine holes, but he had an 11-stroke meltdown on the 10th hole that he couldn't claw his way back from (although he was only 5 strokes back after hole #14).

Einstein had a three-stroke lead over Skandagupta after hole #15, but Gupta was never ever to make get any closer, and Einstein climbed back into his time-travel vehicle with the victory.

After golf, the boys ate free breakfast bananas at the supermarket at the invitation of the Walton family, and we picked up tiny carrots that we smuggled in to the 10:25 a.m. screening of "Ocean's Eight" at the Warren. It was still relatively cool when we got out of the movie, so we went on a 1.5 mile walk around Earlywine Park before we headed to the bowling alley at Heyday Entertainment in Norman, where I was surprised to run into an ECU Honors student who is working there over the summer.

Next, we drove to OKC's Paseo district. After we parked, I ran into the director of Oklahoma Shakespeare in the Park--who remembered me because I bring Honors students to see their shows every fall. I asked her for a pizza recommendation, and she gave me the Picasso Cafe, where the boys ordered a margarita pizza and I had a tasty, chicken-fried portabella mushroom with vegan gravy.

We finished our meal just in time to pick up Mari from a successful day of professional development.

Tuesday = success.

It's "I Miss Nina" Week

She and her Girl Scout pals have signed up for Wacky Wizard session at Camp Tallchief this week.

Day Last: From Las Vegas, New Mexico to Home

The last day of our trip was the hardest ride. The only diversion we allowed ourselves along the way a Dairy Queen pit stop and a lunch at Kabuki Romanza, a Japanaese teppanyaki-style grill in Amarillo, where a talented chef cooks your food in front of you and other dinner guests on a hot iron grill that everyone sits around (I noted the irony of eating here a day after we'd visited the Manhattan Project Museum in Los Alamos.)

We had learned about Kabuki Romanza from our Amarillo friends and had eaten her before. The kids remembered it fondly. They had fried rice and edamame.


After traveling more than 3700 miles, visiting three national parks, three museums, and Disneyland, spending one night in a tent and another in a tipi, enjoying the water in five hotel pools and one Pacific Ocean, reconnecting with lifetime friends, adding four new states to the kids' visit lists (which now stands at 20), eating Middle Eastern, Chinese, Italian, Cajun and Japanese dishes, bonfire 'smores and veggie hot dogs, home-made ice cream and Dairy Queen blizzards, lots of picnics and lots of big breakfasts, listening to a hundreds of years of world history in audiobook form, a compilation of classical music and the Hamilton soundtrack (repeatedly), and hiking through canyons and caverns, we got home before dark to find that our house was still standing.

And I went to the grocery store.

Day 13: From Monument Valley to Las Vegas, New Mexico

We woke up to a beautiful view in Monument Valley.

The rest of this day and the next were long on hours in the car and short on photo opportunities.

In Abiquiú, we watched a short film in the Georgia O'Keefe Visitor Center and had lunch next door at the Abiquiú Inn, where green chiles were the preferred ingredient.
The featured stop of the day was the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos, where we watched a film about the Manhattan Project, and saw several de-classified letters documenting different stages in its development. The kids liked the brain teaser puzzles in a different area, which was a win for them, but which I found somewhat unsettling given the

I was most interested in a corner of the museum reserved for an informational display prepared by one group that supported the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and another that opposed it. While most of the museum dealt with the Project as a scientific and secrecy challenge and a race against time, these displays focused on the morality of dropping bomb. The pro-side argued that the Japanese were cruel (and so, to some extent, deserved it), that more civilians and soldiers would die in a conventional invasion, and that the Japanese would never have surrendered otherwise. The con-side argued that the Japanese were ready to surrender, but Truman wanted to drop the bomb in order to get a head start in a race with the Soviet Union for post-War world domination. The con-side was heavy on quotations from Douglas MacArthur  and Dwight Eisenhower, both of whom reported that they considered dropping the bomb to be utterly unnecessary.

In the car on the way to Las Vegas, New Mexico, the kids and I spent some time discussing the scenarios and the arguments presented.

Day 12: From Page to Monument Valley

One of our kids' favorite memories from vacations in years past was the night we spent in a yurt at the Joyful Journeys Hot Springs and Spa in Colorado. So, although it was expensive for us, I arranged for us to spend a night in a tipi near Monument Valley on this summer adventure. This was only the third night on the trip when we actually paid for accommodations. We spent every other night either at a friend's house or in a hotel room that we paid for using points earned on our credit cards. The tipis did not have air conditioning, though, so although we got up early to visit the Lower Antelope Canyon, we weren't in a big hurry to get there and check in.

Before leaving the Page area, we stopped at the Horseshoe Bend of the Colorado River. There's a 3/4 mile hike--some of it uphill and some over--sand to get to the observation area and there were many people--including some who'd come in buses--to see it.
Our next unplanned stop was the Navajo National Monument, where we had a picnic, checked out the visitor's center, and hiked down to the observation point where you can see prehistoric Puebloan villages built in the sandstone alcove of the canyon. From a distance, we saw a village dated from 1250 to 1300. The last time Mari and visited a site like this at Mesa Verde in Colorado was in 1991. At that time, I learned to call the people who lived in these villages "Anasazi," which is the Navajo word for "ancient ones." I learned that the Anasazi had vanished from the region for mysterious reasons.

This time, I learned a different story. The Zuni and Hopi in the region--who also have a tradition of living in "pueblo" structures like these--both trace their ancestry to the people who lived in these communities.  Consequently, it is not accurate to say that the people who lived here "disappeared."  They just moved. And became Zunis and Hopis.  It is also strange to call them "Anasazi," which is a Navajo word. The name of this site is the "Navajo National Monument" because it was established in 1909, when the people responsible for naming such things didn't attribute much importance to differentiating between Native American nations, their cultures and their histories. Today, The Park Service is reluctant to take the name away from the Navajo, even though the cultures featured at the monument are not ancestors of the Navajo, since it is on Navajo land. To add further irony, the word the "Navajo" use to refer to themselves is not "Navajo," but "Diné." "Navajo" is the Pueblo Indian word for them.

In the photo above, the cliff-dwellings are not really visible in the alcove, but they are there. The day we visited the monument, they only offered one tour of the grounds, and it was at 8 a.m.

We were last in Monument Valley in 1991. The monolith on the right in the photo below is Agathla Peak. "Agathla" is the English spelling of a Navajo word that means "much wool," according to my good friends at Wikipedia. The Spanish called it "El Capitán." Its peak is 1500 feet above the valley floor, which makes it taller than the tallest skyscraper in the United States.

Our first stop after reaching Monument Valley was the Tipi Village. After checking in, we headed over to the Monument Valley visitor's center.
We got lots of conflicting reports about whether or not we should try to take a mini-van on the unpaved, 17-mile valley loop, the beginning of which is visible in the photos above and below. The last time we were here, we were in an 8th generation Delta 88. The guide at the information desk said that earlier that day, he'd had to dig a Camry out of the sand. His advice was to try it, but he also advised against driving slowly, which gives too much time for the tires to sink into the sand. In the end, we risked it.

I like the juxtaposition of the photo above, in which the East Mitten Butte is in shadow, and another, a few photos below, in which it is in shade. The West Mitten Butte (on the left in the photo above and below) rises 856 feet above the valley floor (79 stories); The East Mitten (in the middle) rises 1026 feet above the valley floor (94 stories), and Merrick Butte, on the right, rises 966 feet above the valley floor (89 stories).

After we made it out of the valley, we celebrated with a take-out food from the View restaurant--which opened in 2008.
After we left Monument Valley, I couldn't resist the urge to just drive around the area with the windows down while we listened to some of the classical music.

The view from our tent of the moon's dramatic entrance over Monument Valley was spectacular.

The final adventure of this extraordinary day began when we realized that the front door flap of our tent would not close. It's a story probably best told by Mari, but my part involved lots of tying and untying of cloth ribbons in the dark.