Posts tagged Cottage

Toads!

August 29, 2011 · Filed under Frogs and Snails and Puppy-dog Tails · Tagged , , , ,

Homeward bound after a week’s stay at the cottage, our 6-year-old son surprised us with some unexpected news: “Hey Mommy, guess what? I’m bringing 3 frogs home!” While the news was unexpected, it didn’t come as a surprise.

One of Teddy’s favourite occupations while at the cottage was collecting tiny postage stamp-sized toads for observation. He’s now telling everyone that he collected 21: eleven little toads and one much larger frog that counts for 10. Now three of his little friends were embarking on an epic odyssey (at least for a toad) and their new owner couldn’t contain his joy. “Finally I have a pet!” he remarked continually.

The biggest surprise in this story is that Mommy also likes the toads. I am known to like – nay, love – plants, but animals are too uncontrollable and messy. (Which is precisely why I should probably have a pet, but that’s a different discussion altogether.) I wasn’t a huge fan at first, but those little brown speckled frogs with their scrawny legs and freckle-sized feet have grown on me.

Initially I was prepared to insist on having him release the little guys after a day or two, explaining that they would be happier in the wild where they could catch their own food. With a heavy heart and tears running down his face he headed outside to do as he was told. Now, I am a big believer in sticking to my guns in most parenting struggles, but this I couldn’t bear to watch. It wasn’t that long since I was a kid (was it?), and suddenly I could feel his pain at having to release his precious “new pets” into the wide open backyard. I ran outside to let him know that we’d try to make the arrangement work. Besides, this could be a great learning opportunity (for all of us!).

Now that we had some permanent amphibian residents in the house, we decided to make some arrangements to increase their comfort. For one thing, they needed food. What do tiny frogs eat? Ants, apparently. So until we could get to a pet store to buy some crickets, Oliver and the boys captured ants and watched the little toads hunt them down. This activity is much more interesting to watch than a cocoon languishing away day after day. We put a few rocks into the little bug catcher so they would have something to climb onto, and made sure to fill the water bottle lid with water so they could cool off whenever they felt like it. Still, every 10 minutes Teddy would ask if we could buy a terrarium for the frogs. When I could no longer stand it and forbade him asking me again (it was, after all, still only Sunday – the day after we’d gotten home) he began to say things like, “those frogs sure are squished in there…they need a terrarium” or “I’m sure those frogs would be happier in a terrarium.”

I knew installing that windowsill was a good idea.

By Monday Teddy had the responsibility of feeding the frogs, which was an eye-opening experience for him indeed. For the first time he realized that if these guys were going to live, it would be because he caught the food for them. While running errands on Tuesday we happened to pass a pet store, and I – in a very uncharacteristic move – went in with the children in tow. A pet store for kids is like a jewelry store for women. They have live animals, people! Not being pet owners ourselves (at least, until recently) we never darken the door of pet stores, so for our children this experience was as new as the dawn. We did manage to walk out with only the essentials and no extra pets: a plastic bucket specifically designed for kids who collect small critters, a plastic “rock” with a small depression to hold water, and some coconut husk plantation soil. I dug up a weed from the lawn and planted it in a small jar and placed it in our new “terrarium” along with a few rocks from the garden. Most importantly we purchased 10 mini-crickets, almost as big as the toads themselves. For the little toads, the crickets were certainly more demanding prey than the ants, but by the end of the day only 3 were left. Success!

In just over a week I have gone from having no contact with animals to babysitting a terd on my kitchen windowsill to observing a small eco-system interact in a blue-tinged bucket.  Here’s my latest observation about life, based on toads and children:  just as the clay of our life is beginning to harden as we reach adulthood, God gives us children to force change and new experiences. Any kid will tell you that soft clay is way more fun to work with than the hard stuff.

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Bi-National Trefz Summer Vacation: Part IV

August 26, 2011 · Filed under Frogs and Snails and Puppy-dog Tails · Tagged , , , , ,

The biggest dragonfly I ever saw

Nature-sightings continue as we study giant dragon-flies and red-eyed fish. We catch tiny toads and place them in the now vacant bug catcher. (The frog is more than happy in his new home where he bathes in a small water-jug lid pool and feasts on live flies). The children, Daddy, and Grandma pick wild blackberries in the woods for pancakes. We watch the resident chipmunk stuff its face with the peanuts the children place in front of the patio door. Tonight the Dads took the older boys out to catch small fish with corn bait. Unfortunately the resulting fishing lore is limited to stories of tangled fishing lines and arguing children. Alas, each day can only hold so many idyllic moments, even at the cottage.

How do I describe the lake? Lovely on the eyes, terrifying on the toes. I’d like to preface what I am about to say with the following: in general I am a relatively low-maintenance person. Spiders don’t bother me. I can go a week without a blow-dryer or mirror. I can clean behind the toilet without wretching. Lake-bottoms, however, are another matter altogether. Even at my very mature stage of life my imagination still runs wild when I’m forced to touch the bottom of a dark, northern lake, especially this one.

The soil here is clay, so the lake bottom sucks at your toes like a family of leeches (at least that’s what I picture it feeling like when a family of leeches sucks at your toes). Not only that, there are large, slimy boulders – perfect hiding places for crayfish or other creatures with meal utensil appendages just waiting for an unsuspecting city-slicker’s toe to chomp into. The smaller rocks are sharp; a perfect recipe for a cut foot, and you know what that means: the smell of blood that will beckon all kinds of predatory lake creatures to your beach. (Ugh…shudder)

The Trefz men have staked their claim to the cottage’s property by doing

Under construction

what Trefz men do best: build a fort. When vacationing with Trefzes there are three non-negotiable activities to make the holiday a successful one. 1.) drinking lots of coffee 2.) swimming 3.) building a fort out of forest materials. Although they say it is for the children, the uncles have more fun building it than the children do playing in it. This year’s fort was even furnished with three seats (logs) and a tiled entrance (which Teddy expanded as the week wore on). My only concern with the activity is the poison ivy that may or may not be lurking in the undergrowth where they collect ferns and leaves to fill the holes of the fort’s branch skeleton. Despite the nightmare that I know would ensue if our children woke up with poison ivy one day, the joy of fort-building is one of those vacation memories that I would not deny our children for the world. Besides, it is expected that our boys be apprenticed in the art of building forest forts, so who am I to stand in the way of family tradition?

Complete!

 

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Bi-National Trefz Summer Vacation: Part III

August 25, 2011 · Filed under It is What it Is · Tagged , ,

For one glorious week our hand-me-down, Thrift-Store-shopping, DIY family has experienced the life of luxury – at a cottage, no less. Little did we know when we booked this cottage that it also came with leather couches, flat screen HDTV (with satellite), and two slate-tiled bathrooms with state-of-the-art stainless steel full-body showers behind sleek glass enclosures. It was worth all the effort of Day 1.

In stark contrast to previous years when our family has lived with scratchy, dated furnishings in dilapidated buildings equipped with tiny showers designed for brooms but not people, we slept in plush beds in a room with a balcony and a view of the lake and a shower big enough to accommodate the entire family. Let’s just say this beats camping by about a country mile.

 Life at the cottage is glacially slow. Some would argue that this is a good thing when you’re on a holiday, and in a way, I agree. Instead of posting statuses to Facebook our family spent the time playing board games, reading books, watching a movie together, cooking together, swimming, boating, fishing, and knee-boarding. (If you’ve never knee-boarded behind an aluminum fishing boat with a 15 hp outboard motor, you should try it sometime).  

This is not the “glacially slow” pace I’m referring to though. Here’s an example of the problem:

It’s naptime for your two-year-old, so you promise your older two children that you’ll take them out on the paddleboat. Since the cottage’s lakefront is about 900 metres long with two separate docks, you and the children hike through a small section of woods to get to the other dock. Once you arrive, you realize that the paddleboat’s seats are wet. As the sun breaks through the clouds you also remember that your kids are not wearing a hat. So everyone hikes back up the steep 100 yard embankment to the cottage, where you climb the 7 steps to the door, followed by four flights of stairs up to your room. Everyone changes into swim trunks, but only one child’s hat can be found.

 Where’s the other hat? You look on every level of the 2000+ sq. ft. cottage which yields nothing. You hike back down to the waterfront, check at the first dock (find nothing) check at the beach further up the waterfront in the opposite direction (find nothing) and finally decide to ditch the hat and use sunscreen. By the time you finally get the family onto the paddleboat, 15 minutes have elapsed from when you first decided to go, and chances are your two-year-old is awake back at the cottage anyway. The advertisement for this cottage failed to mention the toned calves that accompany a week’s stay.

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Bi-National Trefz’ Summer Vacation: Part II

August 24, 2011 · Filed under Frogs and Snails and Puppy-dog Tails · Tagged , ,

We had stopped at the Haliburton library to use the internet and the bathrooms.  “Ten more minutes!” Uncle Denny promised as we drove out of Haliburton and into the woods, looking for our remote cottage. After 5 ½ hours on the road, anticipation ran high as patience wore thin.

Little did we know how remote our “private cottage” really was. After half an hour and two U-turns we found ourselves in the parking lot of Camp Timberlane. Nobody liked my suggestion that we ditch the cottage idea and stay here for the week instead. Denny, our fearless leader in a Jetta, asked for directions and took off without telling anybody where he was going. We followed his frequent twists and turns in blind faith, trusting that this man (whose sense of adventure has landed him and his companions in all kinds of uncomfortable situations in the past) would bring us to where we wanted to be by bedtime.

The cottage's foundation (brother-in-law on top)

 

A few more conversations with local cottagers and several kilometers later down a dusty, winding road called “Blueberry”, we finally found ourselves at the aperture of a driveway that was meant for Everest explorers and Shirpas only. After a few minutes of carefully navigating our family van down what seemed like an uncharted road, we stood at the top of a 45 degree incline. The cottage beckoned from the bottom, so Oli turned the van’s nose downhill (I silently prayed that our brakes would hold) and crawled downhill.

We stepped out of the dusty van, stretching stiff legs and looking around in wonder at a property that has literally been reclaimed from a steeply slanted, mammoth slab of Canadian granite. “We’re here,” I thought. It’s all good.

“The door’s locked,” announced my sister-in-law. “They said they’d leave it open for us.” After checking every entrance and finding it locked, it became clear that there was no way we would be getting into this cottage unless we somehow magically figured out the lock-box combination. A quick call to the cottage owners yielded nothing more than an outgoing voice mail message. The family fanned out, each person trying in his or her own way to get us in. Some of us tried moving screens on windows. Others (Teddy) ran around saying things like, “We’ll never get in! We never should have come!” and other dramatic utterances he’d heard on television.

Suddenly, through the large lake-front windows we saw people walking through the cottage – people from our family. “How did you get in?” I called through the window.

“Oli cracked the lockbox code,” someone answered. After 12 years I somehow thought I knew my husband. Evidently not as well as I’d thought.

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