Art Lessons from a 6 Year Old

He is a good teacher, patient and kind to his mom who can't draw nearly as well as he does.  He has always loved to draw. From the first time he could hold a pencil (around age 2) he always held it the right way, not in a fist like a lot of kids.  Not a day goes by that he doesn't sit down to draw something.  If he watches a movie,  he stays up after to draw something he saw in it.  Whenever we go on a trip I have to be sure to pack pads of paper and colored pencils or he'll be drawing on

something in my purse.  He is very detail oriented and always draws something specific, like a humpback whale or a star nosed mole or a battle between the French and the British.  I wish I had that kind of talent and concentration.  This picture is of him showing me how to draw a sperm whale and giant squid.

Mystic Seaport.....always a lot of fun

The day was chilly but sunny. The seaport was not crowded and there were special activities going on for the kids who were on school vacation that week. I had forgotten how much there is to do there and how big it is.  We had a blast!

The Charles W. Morgan:  America's last surviving wooden whaling ship, currently under going a 3 year restoration.  Her maiden voyage

was in 1821.  In her 80 years of service, she made 37 voyages ranging in length from nine months to five years. Charles W. Morgan, in total, brought home 54,483 barrels of sperm whale oil and 152,934 pounds of whalebone. She sailed in the Indian and South Atlantic Oceans surviving ice and snow storms. She's been in Mystic Seaport since December 1941.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year !

By Cooper (age 5) - an artist in the making

No Boat....but we do have a Sea Monster

The boat purchase fell through in the survey. Many more things were wrong than we ever imagined, but the killer for us was the port hull had a huge delamination issue. I mean a $50k (or more) delamination issue. Just too much for us to comprehend. We didn't want to buy a boat that someone neglected those kind of issues for so long.

I guess there's another one out there for us, we're sure of it. Just not sure when we'll find it.

On the other hand, we do have a resident sea monster on our beach and the boys have definitely bonded with it. I might even say, tamed it.

We've Moved....and Bought Another Boat (almost)

Well, after a year squatting at my in-laws place in Florida, we finally moved into the realm of rental houses. We are renting a house by the Sound in Connecticut until the end of June. It's an academic rental, so the house comes furnished and we only get to stay in it until the start of summer (July here). It works out well for us because we were able to leave our furniture in Florida while we get this boat thing out of our systems, and don't have to pay to store things.

The boys are in school for the year (Cooper in K and Cole in 4th). Cole has only been to school for K, so all his knowledge has come from me homeschooling him.

Getting Ready to Move

We don't have a home of our own anymore. Not even a boat of our own. Now that we've been off our boat for a year, it's about time we found a place to live for a while. That is, until we find the next boat. We thought maybe that was going to happen in the last 6 months, but it hasn't. We are still trying to save and look at the options out there, but we haven't been able to make the commitment to actually buy another boat. It's a lot harder when you're spending 4 times the price of your last boat. Even if it is 4 times bigger, the money bite is hard to swallow, especially now. So, we are looking to rent a place for a year and by then we will hopefully have our new boat and be able to move aboard.

I started this blog because I didn't want to pay for maintaining our old website. I had intended to move most of the content over here, but it doesn't look like that will happen any time soon but I will try to bring over some of the photos from our trip to the Bahamas. Everything else over here will be new.