We’ve built up quite a montage of Calvin playing with cars and trucks and digging in dirt. I think we’ve identified his favorite activity, and one of our favorite activities is taking redundant pictures of his cuteness. He also humors us and goes on hikes (eh, more like nature walks), but maybe that’s because he knows we always have some trucks stashed away to play with. On our walks, we often stumble upon highly diggable dirt and those come in handy.
What you’re seeing here is us trying to take full advantage of the beautiful, albeit very brief, Rexburg summers.
Just right down the street from our house, there’s a factory that manufactures concrete mix among probably other things. They have a line of semi trucks, crane trucks, dump trucks, etc parked out in front with no fence or anything keeping us out. Calvin calls them “big cars” and he wanted to go see them every chance he got, which for a while was every day of the week but we realized we probably should go on the weekend to avoid getting in trouble. This was a Calvin paradise; he could spend several hours in one outing walking around and inspecting each truck. Toward the end of the summer, he began inspecting individual parts of the trucks and asking what they did, which maybe led to us BSing a bit.
One of his favorite things to do with cars and trucks is to neatly line them up into lines.
The Big Cars also have prime digging dirt, and what better place to play with toy trucks?
Occasionally we’ll stop at an inactive construction site to look at the cool machinery and take advantage of the dirt.
We started taking Calvin to the skate park in the morning before squirrely teenagers woke up and could usually have it to ourselves. The skate park is fun because there are a lot of ramps to let cars and trucks speed down.
If he looks single-minded in one pursuit, that’s because he kind of is. However, he has been developing other interests such as cooking. At night before bed, he chooses from a list of non-truck videos which include videos about cooking, music videos, power lines, volcanoes, and germs. He’s grown particularly fond of cooking videos. These are not kid-focused videos, these are videos that are geared toward adults but he loves watching people putting ingredients together and explaining what they’re doing. This has led to him helping me in the kitchen, which I’ve been enjoying and I don’t mind at all that it can make dinner take longer.
This summer we were able to visit and spend some quality time with grandparents.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/mIa4KXENIYY
https://www.youtube.com/embed/RqssRaB8OXE
Emily and Calvin travelled to Denver to support Emily’s dad and brother in a race using a frankencar they worked very hard on leading up to the race. We thought Calvin would enjoy looking at all the cars but it was cold and wet and I’m not sure he enjoyed it as much as he would have.
We had a little bit of a sibling get together in Utah (Janae and Mark’s family were visiting from Oklahoma), and had a picnic at Silver Lake. If you look closely you might see a boy playing with trucks in the dirt. Afterward he wanted us to explain why there was so much laughing, and then explain it again. Laughing is something that he’s been trying to wrap his head around and often wants us to explain ourselves when we laugh. If you’ve never tried to succinctly explain why people laugh, it’s much harder than it sounds. Laughing is a complicated matter!
Our neighbor’s cat likes to come visit us and Calvin loves it - we might have to get our own cat!
We had fun going to the apple orchard at BYU-I and picking some fresh apples.
In case you haven’t heard, we’re officially moving to Oklahoma. The reason we’re moving so far away is mainly that housing prices anywhere even close to a coast are breathtaking and puke-inducing. We would spend the same amount of money renting a studio apartment in Utah then we would be paying only a somewhat inflated price for a house (with 7 percent interest). The foaming-at-the-mouth house buying has become so intense that we’re simply priced out of anywhere that we wanted to live, which has been sad to come to have to come to terms with.
I look at the pictures from Rexburg summer and my heart hurts to not ever be able to visit the Big Cars again and so many beautiful places in Idaho. However, as I’m writing this it’s the middle of November and we’ve been stuck inside since late October and we’re staring at another 6-8 months of being stuck indoors. Also, Rexburg is not immune from foaming-at-the-mouth house buying and it seems there’s desperation to snatch up houses in this hellscape like it’s beachfront property or something. What that means for us is that our rent could go up by 40% at any time, as would have certainly happened if we would have stayed in Phoenix.
So off we go to another adventure. The big upside (other than being able to go outside) is that we will live right down the street from Janae and Mark and we’re excited for Calvin to have a lot more opportunities to play with cousins and have more social interaction in general. On one hand, I am excited to live in and explore a new place, but we’re also mourning not being able to live in the area of the country that has been our home for so long.