Urban Mountain Kid

It has been a concern of Travis' and mine that our child will take a while to adjust to life with the outdoors. We have taken care to expose him to plenty of outdoors experiences but his home life to date has been pretty, well, paved. Thus the life of an expat child in city dwellings. We don't regret our choices of homes in any of the cities we lived in, each place was carefully selected to meet our overall family living requirements, but none of them in Dublin, Brisbane, or Perth had any grass.

We spent a lot of time in parks, which were always very close and easy to get to. But it's just not quite the same. In Perth we had great places to play in and around our house, especially as they spilled over into our next door neighbor's house, too. However no grass, it was all paved in brick. So young Master F. consistently chooses to play on the driveway or patio instead of the nice lawn at Granny Annie's house and tends to stay on the playground or path when we wander through all the nice parks around her house.

The mountain house is a whole new adventure. No lawn here, it's wild mountain side all around us. There's a rock garden on one side of the house, but since everyone's been too busy to come out here this summer it's run riot and is WILD. There really are a lot of rocks there, and for a 2 year old it's like a boulder field.

I am pleased to announce that the mountains definitely agree with FFM. While we had to restrict scootering to the deck, it's the only safe level place to do it without going 5 miles down the hill to the park, the long prickly grasses, crazy looking bugs (he called a cricket a bird and would not be convinced otherwise), and giant boulders are a huge hit. He has gotten stuck in the rock garden several times but he'll just sit there hanging out until I can come get him. Our one hangover from city life is that all the big birds of prey that circle around floating on thermals still get called planes, but we're working on it. By the way, the helmet is, and always has been, at his insistence.

21 years ago this month when my family purchased this house my grandma named it MDV for Million Dollar View. The house didn't cost nearly that much but the view is worth ten times that in our opinion. Here's just a sliver of the view, it goes all the way around the house and changes all the time. Right now the aspen trees are starting to change color and every day a few more turn bright yellow. In about a week a whole lot of that mountain across the way will be bright yellow.

Still green aspen leaves in the autumn light. I love the sound of aspen leaves in the wind. This one is for FFM's Daddy. In all this moving about FFM goes through the litany of recent houses by name several times a day. Perth house, Granny Annie's house, F's Denver house (our under contract house which he's seen a couple times), and now we've added MDV house which makes me crack up every time he says it. You'll have to wait for it, he comes around back to and asks to 'see' the camera screen before putting on his act.