Day 1839 - This is Just a Random Photo Ruth Asked Me to Take of Her Hugging the Cat

Day 1865 - Kilgore Falls

Melissa had been looking for a waterfall to take Ruth to - kind of out of nowhere, Ruth had just been asking lots of questions about waterfalls. So, she found out about Kilgore Falls, and we made our way out there one Saturday after swim class.

It was a pretty short and pleasant walk through the woods.

Ruth striking a pose on some tree roots.

The falls were quite nice, and Ruth had fun looking around at everything.

Ruth had a ton of fun checking out the tadpoles in the pools. There were zillions of them.

After about seventeen hours of checking out tadpoles, we climbed the narrow path to the top of the falls.

Coming down was a bit scarier than going up.

Afterwards, we all went to Jarettsville Creamery for ice cream. Not really a proper ending for a story, but hey, yum.

Day 1869 - Dad and Ruth Don't See a Mosque

The other day, Ruth was asking questions about the photo of the Blue Mosque that M and I have up on our wall (though we did go to the Mosque when we were in Istanbul, our camera wasn't good enough to get nice pictures while respecting the no flash rule, so the photo is actually by the quite good photographer who runs Claude Taylor Photography in Dupont Circle - warning: the website has auto-playing music and no obvious way to turn it off). Anyway, Ruth thought it was beautiful and she has a book she really loves about Ibn Battuta, and so has questions about Islam, so she asked if she could go see the Blue Mosque - and when I pointed out that Istanbul was, alas, quite far away, whether she could go see a mosque, which is an easier request to grant.

Unfortunately, the mosques I know of in Baltimore aren't the kind she means - though she has asked some general questions about Islam, she's five and is going to want to see at least a dome or a minaret or something, and the Islamic centers around here are mostly in rowhouses (though there is a building down on 25th street with crescents at its peaks that probably had some sort of interesting life before it was an apartment building). So I offered to take her down to the Islamic Center in DC, which is a bit more ornate. The folks there were very friendly on the phone (they have an educational mission, but they're also a working mosque, and we've tried to make sure that Ruth understands that, yes, it's great to learn about other cultures and ways of doing things but, no, people don't like being treated as human zoos, so it's always best to ask first) and they suggested that we stop by during the 1PM prayers to have a look around and for Ruth to be able to ask any questions she had.

Ruth had also been interested in seeing Dorothy's slippers at the national museum of American History, so I figured we'd make a day of it. Go down on the train, see the slippers in the morning, then grab some lunch, head over to the mosque, and come home. And it would let me milk my seasonal unemployment without the book I had hanging over my head last summer.

Ruth enjoyed the train ride. The last time she'd been on a train she was young enough that she didn't remember it.

When we got to DC, our first stop was the National Museum of American History. 

 Ruth tires easily. This was about ten steps out of the metro.

You may notice the pioneer-style bonnet. Lately, Ruth has been really deep into the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. So it was especially cool for her that right in the lobby was a covered wagon.

It took us a while to find Dorothy's Slippers, but we did find them. They... didn't hold Ruth's attention very long. But we looked at a bunch of dresses from Wicked and some other stuff in the American movies collection.

Then Ruth noticed a bunch of folks sitting down in front of the Woolworth's lunch counter from the 1960 sit-in. So, we joined in to watch the presentation/play. Ruth got a kick out of sitting with the "big kids," the high schoolers who were there on a class trip. And she was pretty proud of raising her hand and answering the question about why the sit-in happened ("because they said that white and brown people couldn't eat in the same place and that wasn't right"). And even though she's normally shy, she sang a little bit when we got to the civil rights songs.

We saw a whole bunch more stuff in the museum, but, frankly, Ruth found it 500% more fascinating than I did. I remember there was a very big steam train. And I fielded some questions gently about why there was a whole exhibit about how the first motels in MD made sure that the people staying in them were really travelers.

I agreed that we could have lunch in the museum cafeteria. Don't do that.

Unfortunately, after lunch, I had to tell her that we weren't going to make it to the mosque in time for prayers. So instead, we went to the Natural History museum. Of course, we saw the dinosaurs. Ruth was also really interested in the replica of a neanderthal burial scene. She was explaining to other kids about why the one guy was tied up and in a hole.

The big hit, though, was the butterfly pavillion.  It's actually really impressive! I don't know what to say about it, really, so I'll just show you the pictures.

As you can see, Ruth had a ball taking her own pictures, and some of them came out pretty well:

Ruth was extremely excited to learn that the Atlas moth does all its eating as a caterpillar (er... callerpitter) - she's been telling other kids all about it, apparently. These things are legitimately huge, by the way.

I'm pretty sure if you look real close this is the one she took of a butterfly emerging from its chrysalis (my photo didn't come out any better).

Fruit left out for the butterflies.

"Daddy! I took a picture of words!"

We stayed at the museum pretty much until everyone was ready to fall asleep. Fortunately, Ruth managed to hold on to the cargo bike until we got home, even though I had to wake her from her nap on the train.

Day 1725 - Gleaning

For a while now, we've been looking for ways to involve Ruth in some sort of volunteering or community service.  This is harder than you might think!  I went around a few times with Food Not Bombs before being told by the woman hosting that she didn't want kids in her house. We set up a whole kid-friendly thing for the class a friend and I taught at the Baltimore Free School... only to show up with Ruth and have them, oh wow, the place where the classes meet isn't lead-abated.  And I'm currently waiting for a couple food serving places that don't just rule out kids on their website to even call me back.  After talking to one of their coordinators when I went by to help write Christmas cards for people in local prisons, I've got high hopes that if the Pleasant Hope Church resurrects their social justice committee, Ruth will at least be able to come and hang out - but the goal has really been to get her involved in something she can contribute to in an age-appropriate way.

Well, we may have found it! On Saturday, Ruth, Melissa, and I went out to Zahdraka Farm in Essex to do some gleaning with Gather Baltimore.

For those of you who may not know what gleaning is, it's a tradition (with deep roots at least in Judaism, though I'm sure it has other resonances) of gathering food from the fields that was not harvested/sold, and distributing it to the poor.

Gather Baltimore is a keen organization that has been around for a bit, but (so they told us when we were out there) is only recently scaling up and organizing to have regular volunteers. It started out as a couple of guys and their friends collecting unsold food from the Baltimore Farmers' Market, and has rapidly expanded. They're now partnered with (among other places - but as one guy told me, they need to work with places that can accept literally tons of food, which not every small service organization can) the Franciscan Center, Our Daily Bread, and Movable Feast, and the guy who started the whole thing is currently an Open Society Fellow.

From the start, Ruth was a fan of the set-up. We drove out to the farm, and as soon as the organizers got there, there were donuts for her.  You can't beat carbo-loading while helping those in need.  Seriously, Ruth has turned down the offer of almost anywhere else I will take her for lunch when we're hanging out ("do you want to fly to New York City on an airplane and go to Le Cirque?") to go to Dunkin' Donuts.

They started us on gathering russian kale, and Ruth was eager to help.  Cutting the stems was a little hard for her, but she loved getting to help by piling the cut leaves into the bins.

(I can't fix the weird picture placement. It's a blog. Live with it).

Ultimately, Ruth hooked up with the other little girl there (who was "five and nine-tenths") and they proceeded to smash their boots through every ice-frosted puddle of water within half a mile.  By the time we were done with the kale rows, as you can see, Ruth was pretty thoroughly be-mudded.  We hadn't thought ahead to bring a change of clothes, so the cold mud and soaked-through boots meant that we needed to head out.  But Ruth had fun, as did Melissa and I, and we're looking forward to going back the next time they have a volunteer day.

Next time, we'll bring waterproof pants and/or a change of clothes!

Day 1592 - Ren Fest

Yesterday, Melissa, my father, and I took Ruth to the Maryland Renaissance Festival.  Ruth is very excited about stories of princesses and knights and dragons and such, so we thought she'd have a good time.

And she did!  Sorry, didn't mean to leave you in suspense.

Melissa had the good idea, since we knew she'd be interested in the costumes, of helping Ruth make one for herself to bring.  So, you can see her outfitted in her knight's breastplate.  Melissa spraypainted it silver, and painted the phoenix on the front as a device (at Ruth's request).  In the next photo, you can see Ruth striking a "knight pose" and showing the rose she painted on the back.

Despite my insistence that there were some famous female knights and warriors, like Joan of Arc and Wonder Woman, she insisted that she was going to tell everyone her dress was a tunic because she was in disguise as a boy, since "most fighters are boys."

After a somewhat confusing scene at the entrance (that you're not interested in, I'm sure) about whether or not we needed tickets in addition to our internet "vouchers," we went in and let Ruth lead the way around.

Oh, by the by, Ren Fests are always an eye-opener.  Who would have thought that belly dancing and tattoos were so popular in the Rennaissance? <\ obligatory joke about Ren Faires being more D&D than history>

We started out by catching a performance of A Fool Called O and La La's show right after we got in.  I thought some of the physical comedy was funny, but it left Ruth underwhelmed aside from the whoopee cushion bits.  Oh well.  Then we found a face-painting booth; face-painting is Ruth's new obsession.  So she quickly ended up being a rainbow-princess-knight.  A hungry-for-meat-rainbow-princess-knight.

Bellies full of teriyaki (AUTHENTIC RENASSAINCE FOOD) jerky (and mine of coffee), we saw a ping-pong crossbow game that Ruth wanted to try out.  I helped her steady and aim the crossbow; she didn't hit anything (unsurprisingly), but seemed to think it was neat to pull the trigger.

The other big thing that Ruth decided she wanted to try was climbing the rock wall.  I was about to tell her she was still a little bit too small, but the attendant said that, nope, they'd had smaller kids try, so I figured I'd let her give it a go.

Ruth getting snugged into the harness

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Miss Paige talking to Ruth about how to climb the wall.

Climbing!

Unfortunately, right after I took that last picture, I came around to the side to get a snap of Ruth from a different angle (she'd made it up to having her foot on that yellow rock) and she started to get scared.  So they let her down, and tried to give me my money back, which was nice.

Let's see, I'm going to get the order wrong, I'm sure, but for most of the rest of the day we:

• At Ruth's insistence that she "knows it's fake" and "won't be scared," tried - and failed - to take a walk through the Museum of the Unnatural.
• Watched part of the singing pirates, which Ruth seemed to enjoy, but then asked to leave because she had "stage fright."  We tried to explain that you can only really have stage fright when you're on stage, but that was her story and she was sticking to it.
• Rode ponies, for free!  The pony-leaders did not seem that thrilled with their jobs.  Ruth's pony was named Misty.  Surprisingly, later in the day she turned down my offer to buy an elephant ride for her.
• Ruth wanted to watch me throw axes, and to be fair I didn't take too much prodding.  I could consistently hit the target, but not get the rotation right - I kept bonking it with the handle.
• Ate bratwurst.  My dad tried a smoked turkey leg, which was, as I remembered them to be, really hard to eat.
• We went to the children's knighting ceremony, but Ruth was getting pretty wiggly, and has stage fright (see above) so didn't want to go up to get her picture taken with the king and queen.

We figured we'd end the day with the Joust, and we did go.  It was cool, Ruth enjoyed it, and the dude who got unhorsed made it look like hitting the ground in full armor is really, really, really not fun.  Ruth was acting very tired by this point (despite an emergency ration of candied nuts), so we skipped the siege engines that I'd wanted to see to head out, but then Ruth got sucked into the Renaissance Man's Romeo and Juliet show.  

If Ruth tells you that Romeo and Juliet made "poor life choices," as she did to us several times on the car ride, home, that's from me trying to explain why everyone dies at the end.

She also turned out to be fascinated watching one of the small glass-blowers after being utterly uninterested in watching the larger glass-blowing show (that Melissa took in).  She watched him make a small dragon hatching from an egg in rapt fascination, along with a ten-or-so-year-old boy who was really digging it.

Then home again home again, and to complete our tour de force of historical accuracy by watching Jason and the Argonauts.

MELISSA: Oh, so that's why the restaurant is called "Harryhausen's" in Monsters, Inc

Day 1564 - Bzzz

Ruth had asked to help me with the next time I needed to re-fill the bees' sugar water, and so today we did!

She was pretty excited to wear her veil, but I finally managed to get her to wait long enough for me to get the smoker going and such.

We went out and opened up the hive, and Ruth looked inside and even touched a couple of the bees.  "They feel like plastic," was how she described it afterwards.  I didn't take out any of the frames this time, as I didn't really have a reason to, and feel like I shouldn't disassemble their home if I don't need to.

We added a third Illinois super to complete the brood chamber, and then refilled their sugar water reservoir and closed the whole thing up.  No stings, no burns, and she's excited to do it again (if you get her to concentrate enough to answer your question)!

Day 1549 - Mermaid Adventures

I've been posting occasionally about Ruth on Facebook and G+, but I realize that that's both a venue that not everyone follows, and that won't do as well when I try to show her things later on.  It's just soooooo temptingly easy.

I refuse to use Instagram, because I am old.

Anyway, so this is yet again me saying that I should put more stuff up here on the blog.  I actually have a massive backlog of pictures and such that I should eventually categorize, and you're missing out on Ruth's political punditry!

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A little while ago, I backed the Mermaid Adventures Kickstarter on Ruth's behalf, and last week the game (a bit belated) finally arrived!

So we played a bit after breakfast and before school on Friday.  The game's art definitely succeeded in getting her sucked in and excited to play - the long-suffering Melissa had to read her about all the different merfolk splats as I made her lunch (Melissa has given up on saving Ruth from my geekery, but she draws the line at getting excited about the relative strengths and weaknesses of Lobsterfolk and Octofolk).

We did a guided/streamlined version of the game, but honestly I was a bit surprised at how little "dumbing down" I needed to do.  The game is pretty traditional in structure, and uses essentially a version of the Burning Wheel die-pool system.  For Ruth, who is just starting on math concepts, it's great - it involves counting and number recognition (I need some more dice with numbers on them instead of pips, I realized, as she can recognize numbers now, but has to count pips, which is much more tedious, and learning to "see" the standard pip patterns at a glance is not a skill that I think she's terribly in need of), but no addition/subtraction/multiplication, which is still beyond her.

I did chargen just by asking her what her character was especially good at, and filling in stat stuff on my own.  Ariel (natch), had a princess crown, was a great singer (+1W for singing), a Human Expert (from watching Prince Eric), was Cheerful (free from being a fish folk), and was Beautiful.

Ruth took the reins of the story immediately, telling me that Ariel was swimming around when she got trapped in a dark cave!  IIRC, she found her way out just by thinking hard about it.

But then she got trapped in a cage, and some fishers dragged her up on their boat.  They were talking about what to do with her, whether to sell her to an aquarium or just to cut her up with the rest of the fish and not tell anyone.  But one of them had a pet snake (Ruth's suggestion) that could get her the key.  Ariel made him a little crown that looked like hers out of coral (again, all Ruth) and gave it to him as a gift, and the snake got the sailor's keys off his belt and unlocked the cage so she could swim home.

I was pretty happy with how things went.  We played for all of about ten minutes, but Ruth seemed to have fun, and I was actually impressed with how creative she was.  And while I offered to play without the dice, she really wanted to use them, and with my help and Melissa's was able to mostly get the hang of finding all the ones with 1-3 on them and tossing them, then counting up the green and red ones (I have plenty of those, but not as many B/W) that were left.

I look forward to trying it again with her!  Then, maybe Apocalypse World.