Tag: Lititz PA

Rose at breakfast

Up betimes Saturday morning at cri de coeur from Lily, 4, desperately wanting to do something — go upstairs, best I could figure.  A much more modulated voice, also female, was urging patience.

The voice was 8-year-old Madeline’s.

Later I ask Rose, 4, how’s the toast I just made her.  “Lovely,” she says, and I am gratified.  She eats it standing up, on the breakfast table chair.  This works for her.  I have no opinion, and decline to comment.

I ask Rose what she plans to do today, she says, “Color,” which sounds good to me.  I say “Fine.”

We interrupt the interview to let Leo in.  Little trouble unlocking the glass door to the deck, on which Leo waits, scratching with paws against the door.  Rose helps, we get door open, Leo enters, as usual lord of all he surveys, which is only right because he is a cousin of the king of the jungle.

Rose leaves the table, now I have the earlier highly vocal Lily at table with me.  She is now a church mouse, silently spooning her cheerios while Johnny, 6, does justice to his grahams under milk.  It’s a quiet time.

Also here is Grandma, who lets me in on her plans for the day, all of which sound harmless at worst and lovely at best.

So begins another day in vicinity of Lititz PA, a few miles north on 501, then east a mile or two up a winding hill with horse farm and planted fields to the right and houses on a hill side to the left, then left up a steep hill past an old church cemetery on the right, houses on the left, to the road on the left and into this very merry subdivision.  Brickerville is the town.

Travels with Johnny et al.

Blogging one two, in trip to Lititz. OK, this works. In air on way to Phila. airport, where SUV awaits us at the Enterprise Car Rental facility.  9:35 flight left more or less on time, arrival to be noon-ish.

We will take the scenic route from airport, most of it on Pa. 322.  (Rough going in-flight here, 45 minutes out, plane rocking to and fro.  For little kid behind me it’s fun, she keeps going “Oh” with each rocking.  Amusement park ride for her, sitting with parents, to whom she frequently chatters.)

Traveler’s tip: Online ticket buying, as thru Orbitz [correction thanx to Maggie below], which we did, lets you pick a seat, but that seat is not confirmed, so that you and your loved one or other traveling companion may not be seated together as planned.  You have to call to confirm it.

Orbitz did not tell us that, even if they were kind enough to call us at home this morning to say the flight was on time (and to wake us, of course).  Recorded message but effective nonetheless.

So we sat apart, and wouldn’t you know it, I struck up a conversation with a young personal trainer from Utah, now living in Chicago and working for a national p.t. company whose name escapes me.  Nice young lady, on way to visit expecting sister in Richmond.

At the airport we got our Enterprise Rental medium SUV for $35 a day plus various fees and taxes.  OP-based Red Cab to O’Hare had been as usual a good choice on getting to O’Hare from OP, @$32 including taxes and tip.  When we go cab, it’s Red, not Blue, which as it happens matches our politics, which is irrelevant, in that service is the thing, Red having arisen in the last very few years as good alternative to the longstanding Blue Cab, which got sloppy in our (limited) experience.

Drove to outside Lititz, named after Lidice, the city in then-Czechoslovakia which was infamously decimated by German occupiers in WW2 in reprisal for assassination of a bigshot Nazi, I discovered reading a plaque in the town park, next to the park’s glorious duck channel, where mallards, and one AFLAC-style goose, gather to loll about when not chased by little boys.

Johnny, age 6, chased them as Grandma and Grandpa walked with him and his twin sisters, Rose and Lily, age 4.  Older sister Madeline, age 8, was in class.  We were to bring Johnny to the school, on a sprawling site opposite a farm field, on time for his aftenoon kindergarten session.

Johnny also worked out on every muscle-using climbing and swinging vehicle in the park, as if he had his own personal trainer operating in his brain.  The kid takes pleasure where he may and finds it everywhere he looks.

He and Madeline, for instance, on the ride last night back from the Little Gym, where they each had hour-long gymnastics sessions with 20 or so other urchins, they judged buildings we passed, one by one — “good, good, good, good” — on what grounds it was not clear, and spotted various kinds of cars, the two of them eagerly announcing what kind — “big, big, white, white.”

More later . . . .