Sick

Despite the mild winter, or perhaps because of it, I've been living in a sick ward for the last few weeks.

Everybody has had some sort of cold/cough/chest congestion/phlegm in that period. That's fine; I can deal with that, and everybody else, while perturbed at all the hacking and nose-blowing, was OK with it, too.

But then Amelia's congestion turned into an ear infection, and since that time, things have tipped toward the dark side.

After a week's worth of amoxicillin, the poor girl developed a rash. First her ears got red and swelled up. Then the next day, she had red, itchy patches on her elbows, knees, lower legs, race, chest, back and feet. We treated her with a few different kinds of cream, in addition to Benadryl, and hoped for the best.

Then, after two days of Benadryl and cream, she threw up. The next day, she was feeling OK. But then two days after her initial puke, she yakked again. And of course, both times were at night, in her bed, all over everything.

I took her to the doctor to see about making her rash better, and was told she had the worse of two types of amoxicillin rashes, the kind that takes a few weeks to go away. We were told to try oatmeal baths, which helped a bit.

Needless to say, she missed preschool last week. Just when it seemed things were getting better, she threw up Saturday night, once again a few hours after she'd been in bed, thus resulting in a mess on her bed and rug. To make matters worse, after I finished cleaning everything up (while Beth cleaned up Amelia and got her back to sleep), I felt a big oogie. Ended up with my second round of diarrhea of the week (oh, did I forget to mention that?).

After three puking incidents in one week, Beth and I finally realized that the last meal Amelia had prior to each barf was tomato-based: soup one night, pasta sauce the other two. Needless to say, she's off tomato-based foods for a while.

So of course wouldn't you know that once we figure out how to (potentially) stop Amelia from puking, Sunday morning Owen gets the barf bug. He threw up two or three times during the day, and spent Monday in recovery/paranoia mode. But Amelia was fine.

Yes, you can see where this is going. Beth didn't sleep well Monday night, and by early Tuesday morning she was tossing her cookies. The bug knocked her out all that day and much of Wednesday. But at least the kids were fine.

As of right now (Thursday at 9:00 a.m.) I'm fine. My theory is that my irritable bowel syndrome, which has flared up in recent days, is keeping the stomach bug at bay. "You think you can come in here with your fancy germs and take over this digestive tract? I don't think so, bug. Now bugger off!"

Beth's back at work today, neither of the kids has thrown up in several days and with any luck we're on the road to collective well being.

As your reward for making it through this post without getting sick, is this:

Woods

I'm not at all religious, but this is a place where I'd sit down and listen to a sermon. Located in Dover, MA, the Abigail Draper Mann Woodland Worship Center is operated by the Dover Church. The church is celebrating its 250th anniversary this year, which is remarkable. Miss Draper Mann died in 1875 and willed property in the town to the Second Congregational Society. The Society eventually built a parsonage for the minister.

I assume that in order to honor the fine woman for her large, posthumous donation, the church named this outdoor sanctuary after her.

I grew up running around the woods. My friends and I explored Russell Brook, which ran next to my parents' house and off into the woods behind the house. We'd hop from bank to bank, looking at the fish (mostly suckers), dodging the skunk cabbage, swinging from the vines, slipping into the water once in a while, exploring the stone walls and enjoying total freedom.

Don't worry: this isn't going to turn into one of those, "Back in the '70s, we ran around for hours and our parents had no idea where we were, we knew how to play outside, and we started forest fires but we had the wherewithal to call in helicopters to drop enormous buckets of water to put out the fires, then we'd plan a show, sell the tickets, put on a three-ring circus, clean up the mess and go back home and cook dinner for our parents, and we turned out fine. Oh yeah, and we fended off child molesters with one hand tied behind our backs" diatribes.

Parents today blather on about how their kids don't get outside enough, and they don't know how to make their own adventures, and even if they did go outside, we have to be so careful about weirdos and potential abductors that it's all so different than we were kids. But we have the power to shut off the kids' DSI's, GameBoys, Xboxes, etc. and shove them out the door. But we don't. It's nobody's fault but our own, so either force your kids' hands, or stop yapping about it.

I'm as guilty as the next parent, so I'm not trying to be holier-than-thou. Anyway, back to the woods.

I like walking in the woods, but I've experienced long stretches in my life when I don't hike, most of those in the years since my kids were born. But whenever I get back into the trees, it's like I never left. I've been recently inspired by Bill Bryson's A Walk in the Woods.

The book details Bryson's attempt, with a friend who's overweight and a recovering alcoholic, to hike the entire Appalachian Trail. I loved the book, and that's all I'm gonna say, except that I highly recommend it.

In recent weeks, I've gone to Snow Hill in Dover, MA, three times. This is odd because before January 19th, I'd never heard of the place.

On the 19th, I dropped Amelia off at school and decided, as I sometimes do, to cruise around the western suburbs looking for places to take pictures for my other blog, The Backside of America. Sometimes I have a destination in mind, but oftentimes I don't.

On that day, I drove aimlessly for quite some time, with no luck. I ended up on Pine Street in Dover. I'd never been on this street before, but it looked promising. And sure enough, within less than a mile, I drove right past a small parking lot that led up a dirt road. I noticed a sign: "Glidden Land Preserve."

The next sign told me that I'd found what I didn't even know I was looking for:

A fire tower! What a perfect addition to the Backside blog.

I hiked up to the tower, but there were a couple of guys working on it, and frankly, I wasn't sure I was supposed to be up there, so I chickened out and went back down to explore a small, vacant building I'd seen off the path on my way up.

The building turned out to be a scout camp of some sort (I'll detail more about these places, and include photos, in future Backside posts). I walked around a bit here and then headed back down to the car.

I wasn't satisfied with my visit, so the next week I went back, determined to get some better shots of the fire tower. I did that, and then explored some more. I wandered aimlessly down the other side of the hill (elev. 443 feet) and before too long I was just feet from the backyards of some impressive estates (Dover is one of the horsiest towns in the state).

I meandered up and down some more small (but steep) hills before arriving back on the main path. Before arriving back at my car, I spotted a path going between two boulders. About 50 feet deep into the woods there was a break in a stone wall, and a sign for the woodland worship center just above. I was tired, so I didn't push on.

But once again, after I left, I had a nagging feeling that I should've done more exploring. So I went back a week later, and that's when I discovered that the benches and lectern in the above photo.

I've done some other random hikes (very easy ones) this winter, and certainly plan to do more this season and beyond. In recent years, it's been difficult to get Owen to go on hikes, but in recent months he's been maturing in some ways, so my hope is that I can get him to join me on weekends to do some exploring in Greater Boston and maybe even hit some bigger hills like Mount Wachusett.

And while I'm no expert camper, I would love for the whole family to do some hiking and camping in the near future, too. Just gotta get rip those kids away from their screens.

Beard

I'm ambivalent about my beard. I didn't grow it for any particular reason. It's not a playoff beard, although I won't shave it before the Pats win the Super Bowl this Sunday. It's not for warmth, as this has been an unusually warm and snow-free winter. It's not to go undercover, although if my Neighborhood Watch asked to do so, I would in a heartbeat. It's not a spite beard, to annoy anyone.

It's just a beard. During a normal week, I shave two or three times -- I'm a stay-at-home dad, so there's no pressure to be clean shaven. I last shaved the day after Christmas, fully intending to remove my whiskers before New Year's Eve. But I simply didn't, and then figured I'd see how I looked if I let it go for a while.

On January 4th, when I posted a picture of myself and my nascent beard on Facebook, reactions were varied:

"Are you going to grow it really long and let things get stuck in it?"

"Not weird enough." (See video below that addresses my friend Jay's need.)

"If you're growing a beard for winter warmth, you should have started earlier!"

Face-to-face reactions break down along gender lines. From women, I get comments along the lines of, "Oh, you're growing a beard," to "Still got something on your face, huh?" to "When are you gonna shave that ugly beard?" (guess who said that).

Men tend to be complimentary: "Beard's looking good," "Got the beard going, huh? Looks good," "That's the most awesome beard I've ever seen, and I'm 107 years old!"

I hesitated keeping the beard too long, because I have painful memories from my post-college days, when I grew a beard. I was working at my hometown newspaper in the winter of 1987-88 when I decided, for the first time, to get my ZZ Top on. I had no clue about trimming, so the thing got a bit mangy, although thankfully I don't have the genetic makeup to actually grow a long beard. I thought it looked OK, until I saw pictures taken in February '88 at a going-away party my coworkers threw for me before I embarked on a road trip with my friends.

In the pictures, my hair is a bit long, because, you know, it was the '80s and I was young and thought I was cool. And I have tortoise shell spectacles -- what I liked to think of as my Woody Allen glasses. See, you're already getting the idea here about how bad this was.

I'm wearing a pea-green sweater over a brown turtleneck. Yes, you're forming a picture in your head, and it's not pretty (and no, I'm not going to post any of these pictures, primarily because I don't want to scare you, secondarily because my scanner is broken). And under the sweater and turtleneck is something that I can only describe as a big wad of dough. Yes, my stomach, in these photos especially, although less so in reality, looks like I've trapped a baby hippo.

The overall effect of all this -- the unkempt beard, the nerdy glasses, the earth tones, the lumpiness -- is that I, not yet 23 when the pictures were taken, look like a middle-aged professor of geology at a small, out-of-the-mainstream community college. Not that there's anything wrong with that. But not really the image I was going for, or one that I thought I was projecting as I prepared to say goodbye to my friends and family and head out on the Kerouacian path.

Unlike most road trippers, I shaved my beard before I hit the road, and stayed relatively clean cut during my four-month odyssey. Not long after my return back east, I started growing Van Dykes and goatees, rather than full beards. I've stuck with those motifs for the lion's share of the last 20+ years.

But since I can't do much with my hair...OK, I can't do anything with my hair...I figured I'd try a full beard. I've learned a bit about trimming my facial hair over the years, so I've kept the beard much cleaner this time around. I think it looks pretty good, and I seem to have gotten past the itchy stage, so I'm happy.

Still, I won't keep it too long. If I could grow it really long, or at least cultivate enough 'stache to go with a Gay '90s look of some sort, then maybe I'd soldier on.

And now, to make my friend Jay happy, here's Fu Manchu doing "Weird Beard."