Vacation week

Thanksgiving vacation has begun and Rocket Boy has come home, so we are the usual mixture of very happy and somewhat irritated. It's nice to have him home. 

He arrived about 7:30 pm Saturday, after a day in which I vacuumed the whole house AND cleaned the bathroom, plus did a load of laundry and cooked and tidied. (The house looked really nice and RB noticed and commented.) For the last hour or so he had been sending us short texts each time he drove past a town or landmark: Limon, Byers, Sapp bros, Scotts (i.e., the restaurant Great Scott's), and then Home. We all got that "Home" text, looked at each other, and then shouted, "Dad's here!" He was waiting outside for us to notice his message.

I had made dinner -- baked tofu, some leftover rice, broccoli -- and there wasn't really enough. The "boys," all three of them, were fighting over the last of it. I'm used to cooking for three, not four!

Today he kept asking me, "What's the plan?" "What are we doing today?" "What should we do now?" I finally had to explain to him that we usually take it easy on Sunday. I do the kids' laundry, sometimes we go to Starbucks for treats, sometimes I go to the library,  I write a blog post off and on through the afternoon, the kids play computer games. "Oh, OK," he said, and busied himself switching out the screen doors for the storm doors.

But he wanted to do something more ambitious, too, so I jumped online and got us entry tickets for the Denver Museum of Nature and Science at 3 pm. They have an exhibit that wasn't open yet when he was here in October: "Survival of the Slowest." It has live animals! (also some statues) The Zoo must be jealous. 

There was a big open area with five Sulcata tortoises. They weren't super big. There was a sign explaining that people adopt them when they're little and then get overwhelmed when they get big, but I thought the exhibit wasn't very convincing in that way. If people think this is as big as they get, they'll probably say, oh, I could handle that, and then, whoops, what to do when they actually get enormous?

Most of the animals in the exhibit are reptiles, so you figure they're probably OK with the whole thing. Reptiles are pretty easygoing. There were lizards, a chameleon, a skink, a very fat toad, a tarantula.

Oh, but the sloth! There was a beautiful two-toed sloth and it was so adorable. I saw it yawn and scratch its eye. It has such long hard nails, I was sure it was going to rip its own eye out. It didn't, though. It just yawned again and went back to sleep. The volunteer nearby said it likes to find a comfortable place in its enclosure and then just stay there for hours.

We also enjoyed the boa constrictors. The volunteer said there were four of them in the enclosure. We could only see one, a very friendly, interactive one, and then a big heap, which apparently was three others. There was also a tortoise in with them. We thought the tortoise looked worried.

The twins eventually got tired and ran off to the Health Exhibit, but Rocket Boy and I went over to the guitar exhibit. That was OK. It probably would have been very exciting for someone who was really interested in guitars. 

We almost always go to Great Scott's on our way home from the museum, but this time we went to the Chili's in Westminster because it's near the Honeybaked Ham place and we wanted to get a blueberry coffeecake. No ham -- we're planning to have swordfish for Thanksgiving dinner, if there's any in the stores. But we like that coffeecake. It's a special treat. I also got a bag of rolls, though they looked kind of stale. I never make my own rolls.

We still haven't decided how we're going to spend the rest of the week, but we have at least agreed that there will be a Thanksgiving dinner at home. Rocket Boy would have been happy to skip it, but the boys actually want it. They remember all the yummy side dishes that we always have and they're eager to eat them. Today, on my way home from the library (I went before we went to Denver) I stopped at Safeway to buy Rocket Boy some oat milk, and while I was there I picked up a bag of cranberries, and so then I also had to get a jalapeno pepper, and a jar of crystallized ginger. I will have to study my cranberry sauce recipe to see if there are any other odd ingredients I need to buy, but those two always come to mind. Onion, garlic, a lemon, dry mustard, a cinnamon stick? I can't remember if I have those. Well, I need to go to the store anyway.

But I don't know if we're going to go on a little trip after Thanksgiving or not. Rocket Boy suggested we go to Glenwood Springs, but that would mean driving I-70 over Vail Pass on Sunday afternoon when everyone who's gone to the mountains would be driving home, and I'm just not willing to do that. Maybe we will end up going to Wyoming instead. It will probably be uncrowded.

I was a little freaked out by the dearth of masks at the Denver Museum. Denver hasn't reinstated its mask mandate, so masks are "recommended," but not required. I'd say maybe half the people at the museum were wearing them. At first I thought all the maskless people were rule-flouting anti-vaxxers, but eventually I realized that they weren't breaking rules, they were ignoring recommendations. It's not really the same thing. It's quite possible many of them were vaxxed.

I think the last time we all went to the museum together may have been last March, the day of the King Soopers shooting in Boulder. Nothing like that today, but I was just reading about the SUV that mowed down a lot of people at a Christmas parade in Wisconsin. Our holiday parade is on December 4th and Teen B will be marching in it. Sigh. I don't want to worry about something like that happening. Why do people do this?

Tomorrow I'm supposed to take the kids to a movie. I think we're going to see "Clifford the Big Red Dog." I'm not excited about it -- haven't we gotten beyond these sorts of movies yet? -- but it's OK. Rocket Boy has a dentist appointment to get his new crown. I'd rather see a movie than do that. 

I don't have to worry about cleaning this week because the house is freshly clean, just keep up with the kitchen, do laundry, scoop the litter boxes, and all that. Rocket Boy will work, the twins will goof off, he'll get mad because they're on their devices all the time, and I'll try not to get in the middle of that argument. We'll make a puzzle, play some games (I hope). I need to figure out what else I need from the store. I should probably make the cranberry sauce on Tuesday or Wednesday. The rest can be made on Thursday -- it's not that hard. Sweet potatoes, regular potatoes, stuffing, spinach dish, pumpkin pie. Some kind of sauce for the swordfish, gravy, whipped cream. Several bottles of sparkling cider. Am I forgetting anything?