It’s a bummer to feel like a tourist in your hometown. I suppose that’s my own fault considering the fact that I moved from the east coast to the west coast for college and never looked back, but I’m still allowed to be sad about it. 

Lewes, Delaware is a small beach town with great bike-ability and super quick access to both the ocean and the bay. When I was little, I thought that going to the beach always meant you could pick waves or no waves, boogie board or kayak, lifeguards or little kids, ocean or bay. It didn’t really occur to me until I moved to California for college that most beachgoers just have one option.

*The cover photo for this post is me with my mom and my brother at the ocean, so I must have been feeling extra-adventurous that day. Or more likely, my brother wanted to play with his new boogie board.

A few weekends ago, Will and I made the trek to Lewes and crowded into my dad’s house along with several other family members, including my almost-three-year-old niece Jade. We don’t hang out with that many toddlers on the regular, so spending a weekend with Jade was super fun, especially now that she’s talking. The ratio of understandable english words to babbling is still pretty low though. One morning while playing with a simple building kit, she happily gave Will and I a solid 20 minute lecture all the while handing us building blocks and then taking them away for unclear reasons. We’re still not sure what she was going on about but it definitely wasn’t meant to be a conversation because there was no room to even politely add a “hmm” or an “oh really?”

Will said his main takeaway from the weekend was that having a kid involves giving up a lot of bites of food. Jade always wants what’s on her parents’ plates even if her own plate has exactly the same thing. Will even claimed that it might even be the hardest part of parenting, which is a big statement coming from someone who’s not a parent. 

I personally think Will is still traumatized from the cinnamon roll situation. Less than a year into us dating, he was immensely enjoying a cinnamon roll, probably on a weekend morning, and I didn’t ask for a bite until the very end. Which meant that he gave up the center of the cinnamon roll, i.e. the very best bite, just for me. To disabuse you of the notion that this was a romantic gesture, he also firmly declared that it was a one-time thing and would absolutely never happen again. I have been reminded about this gallantly noble sacrifice a few times a year for over a decade and to be honest I’m not sure that single extra-cinnamon-y bite was worth it. 

On this recent trip to Lewes, Jade also drank almost half of my smoothie one morning, which I was not emotionally prepared for but had to come to terms with pretty quickly. I think that counts as my penance for the cinnamon roll so we should be even now, finally. Right?!

A couple other notes from the weekend:

  • My dad mentioned offhand that his garage door needed some repairs and Will’s ears immediately perked up. I could tell he was trying to play it cool but it was tough not to drop everything to go look at it. (The parts arrived at the house two days later and the door was fixed a few hours after that.)
  • My family is not particularly adventurous when it comes to food. The best way to illustrate this is the text that my dad sent me before I went on a trip earlier this year: “Enjoy your time in Japan. Watch out for the food.” (That is a direct quote.) In Lewes, Will and I cooked a few dinners for the family and felt like we had to dial back a bit on our usual flavor profiles, which was not hard considering the lack of my two favorite spices in the house (cumin and cayenne).
  • I saw my grandmother for the first time since before covid, and it was the first time that Will had met her. As Will asked some of the standard questions, it was a lot of fun to listen to stories from her childhood and from my father’s childhood that I hadn’t heard before. (She met my grandfather when they were both working for Air France. She drove all the way around Lake Tahoe back in the 1960’s but hasn’t been back since. And her brother-in-law passed away in a freak summer avalanche while mountaineering in the Alps.) It reminded me to place more value on that time spent together and those stories because my grandmother won’t be around forever to tell them.
  • Jade really wanted to be involved in everything, which is how I learned that you can make anything a game, including chores. Making the bed, setting the table, moving the sprinkler, and mixing the batter for chocolate zucchini bread were all very fun games that we played over the weekend.

I usually only see my family a couple of times a year, but I am trying to up the cadence a bit as my niece grows up. My brother and his wife (and therefore, Jade) live in Brooklyn, and my (not so) secret mission is to turn Jade from a city kid into a mountain kid. 

  • Step 1 has already been executed: when she was in Tahoe for Christmas, we took her to the climbing gym to play around for a bit.
  • Step 2 is in the works: we’re going to the Catskill mountains for Thanksgiving this year, and if I ask Will nicely enough to carry the backpack, she’ll find herself on top of a mountain at some point.
  • Step 3 is to get her up The Nose route on El Capitán (a four-day climb that involves sleeping overnight on the wall) but there are at least ten fifteen years until that’s viable.