William is back at college now, and we are down to one child in the house, and I will tell you I am not altogether cool with these developments. I am experiencing a time of making non-equivalent comparisons: that is, I think to myself, incorrectly, in an attempt to self-soothe, things like “This is what families with only TWO children feel after the VERY FIRST child goes to college!!” But in a family with two children, when their first child goes, they are down to HALF THEIR CHILDREN, whereas when my first child left I lost only 20% of my children! And, in a similar vein, when a family with two children is down to only one child, they are down to HALF THEIR CHILDREN, whereas I am down to 20% of my children! And you may wonder, why is she all worked up NOW, when she already went from five to four to three and now to one?—but all summer I have had FOUR children at home, which is almost my FULL ALLOTMENT, and now it feels very abrupt to be suddenly down to one. Anyway what I’m saying is that in this frame of mind it’s tempting to make inaccurate/unuseful comparisons, and I am not in the right frame of mind to sort them out, so I beg your indulgence as I spin out a little.

Here is something I noticed RIGHT AWAY. Normally, when Paul and I are going on an errand, let’s say to the grocery store, or maybe we want to see if we can replace the recliner the cats have absolutely CHEWED UP; when, as I say, we are going on an errand, we say to the nearest child, ideally the O.A.T. (Oldest Available Thistle—this is taken from O.A.P., Oldest Available Penderwick), “Child, attend to this announcement: your parents are going on an errand,” and we assume that child will alert/inform the others as needed. If no children are in our vicinity, and/or if all children are sleeping, we will leave a note: “Mother and Father have gone on an errand 9:15 a.m.” or whatever.

But here is what I noticed within an hour of being down to one child: when Paul and I were thinking of going out to replace the recliner, I thought of notifying Henry—but then my overriding inclination was to INCLUDE HENRY. Like, INVITE HIM ON THE BORING ERRAND. I wonder if this happens with Only Children. In the years since the children were old enough to be left on their own, it has felt only LIBERATING to leave them alone as we go on errands without them; now, suddenly, with only one child left, it feels Unsettling. And this happened, as I say, within hours of dropping the other child at college: it was an almost immediate and automatic adjustment—and perhaps not a permanent one. My guess is that my parents, who had two children, did not feel this way after dropping me at college—but perhaps they DID!! Perhaps they felt similarly unsettled about my poor brother, a small sad helpless baby junior in high school, as Henry is!

Similarly, it suddenly feels weird to imagine going on a Date Night, unless Henry has plans of his own for that evening. I’m not saying it SHOULD seem weird, and please remember I am literally less than 12 hours into this new frame of mind so this is not where I’m planning to STAY—but it feels to me like there is a WORLD of difference between the scenario where Paul and I leave three or four or five kids to eat pizza and watch a movie while we go out alone for dinner, and this new scenario where we leave Henry alone while we go out for a special dinner. If you see what I mean.

Even GOING TO BED feels different, or it does on this the first night of it! Normally when Paul and I head for bed, we have been leaving THREE TO FOUR CHILDREN still up! We have locked up, but we have WORRIED NOT about the lights, or about the overall emotional stability/support of the household! No, we go to bed before 10:00, and they stay up later, and we don’t any of us fret ourselves! But now: now! The two of us go to bed, leaving, what, Henry alone? in the house? to figure out the rest of the evening?? the lights?? ALL OF IT??

I have three things to recommend:

1. The Barbie movie. Perhaps you have heard of it! If it seems like it could remotely be your thing (I did not like Barbie as a child, and yet the movie was still very much my thing), I suggest seeing it in a theater, because I think it is fun to have been part of a huge cultural event/reference, and this seems like a huge cultural event/reference, and I think you will be glad to be able to say you saw it in the theater.

2. Trader Joe’s dried mandarin oranges. They don’t look as good as they taste. I need to mention, though, that although I went absolutely wild for them and am going to buy like six bags the next time I’m there (our Trader Joe’s is about 40 minutes away, so it’s a rare visit), I made three family members try them, and none of those family members liked them at all. It was baffling to me. I also love the Trader Joe’s dried orange slices, which are a different flavor: bitter along with the sweet, because you eat the peel. But the mandarins are so tart and sweet, and not as pithy as they look like they’d be! Why didn’t anyone else like them?

3. The book Shark Heart, by Emily Habeck (Target link, Amazon link—but I recommend getting it from the library).

(image from Target.com)

It’s an ODD BOOK, and it is the kind of odd that sometimes I like and sometimes I can’t tolerate. This time it was the kind I really liked. I think it would make a fun gift, because the recipient would read aloud the flap description and everyone would say “whaaaaaaaaaa,” and that would be some Gift Value right there, even if they didn’t end up liking the book!

I work in a workplace where a lot of people dress up, and where the customers/patrons/children seem to appreciate/enjoy costumes, so I would like to wear a costume to work on Halloween.

I own these two wigs (link to the pink one; blue one apparently no longer available):

screenshot from Amazon.com

I am willing to buy:

• clothes I can wear again for other occasions
• especially a froofy dress, like this one or this one that have been in my cart anyway
• small, inexpensive accessories
• a tutu, because I’d enjoy the excuse
• not much; I don’t even really LIKE Halloween normally

The costume does not have to involve the wigs or a dress or a tutu. The costume must be:

• work-appropriate (library) (shouldn’t be scary to little children)
• moveable and not warm (I move around a lot and get overheated)
• relatively easy to understand/explain

Here is a costume I have already used twice for this purpose and could theoretically use again but would probably buy new wings because the wings I’ve been using were made for, like, a gradeschooler, and are snug and uncomfortable:

• bee (yellow-and-black striped shirt no longer available to link to; wings from a child’s costume we had in our Halloween costume box; antennae made from a headband and black pipecleaners)

Here are some costumes I have considered:

• Barbie! I could wear a pink gingham dress and add a daisy necklace (it’s pink-centered white flowers in the movie, but daisy is close enough and I’m more willing to buy it) and put my hair back in a pink bow! But even though I VERY MUCH enjoyed the Barbie movie, I am not sure I want to…dress as Barbie. Or maybe I do! I go back and forth. I won’t/can’t wear heels, so would have to figure out shoes.

(image from Amazon.com)

• Crayon, using a t-shirt that roughly matches either wig. But I don’t really like…t-shirts made to be costumes. Even though they seem like they would EXACTLY fit my issue, which is that I want to wear a costume but I don’t want to spend much money or be too overheated.

screenshot from Amazon.com

(image from Amazon.com)

• Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz! I could get the blue gingham dress and put my hair in two weird ponytails and wear red Converse and carry a stuffed animal in a basket! This would be a leading contender except that I don’t like The Wizard of Oz! or Dorothy! But it meets all of my requirements: easy to recognize/explain; I can buy a dress I don’t mind buying; I already have the other items. And does it really MATTER if I don’t like her/it?

(image from Amazon.com)

• Princess Bubblegum! I could buy the pink gingham dress (she wears solid pink but gingham is close enough and I’m more likely to re-wear), and wear the pink wig (it’s not her hairstyle/length, but it’s pink), and figure out the crown using cardboard or something. But…I am not sure Adventure Time / Princess Bubblegum is well-known enough to be easy to explain.

screenshot from Amazon.com

(image from Amazon.com)

• Cat or mouse or whatever! I could wear the ears and the tail, and put a pink-lipstick nose and black-eyeliner whiskers on my face! I have not seen cat/mouse ear/tail sets I like, but I could keep looking.

• Just wear a pink or blue wig and call it a day! There’s no law that it has to be a whole costume!

I would love to dress as something I am an ardent fan of! But…I don’t think I am a fan of anything that works as a costume. I could dress as Love Nikki Dress Up Queen, but that is not anything most people would recognize. I could dress as a Pokemon Go character, but that is not a costume I can assemble out of items I already have and/or can use again.

This topic will involve some overlap with other posts, but so be it; we are thorough or we are nothing.

And I hope we can all remember that “surprise,” in and of itself, is not inherently positive or negative: surprise can be positive or negative or neutral; and surprise can be STRONGLY one way, or MILDLY one way, or anything in between. Some of these surprises I am about to tell you about will unavoidably carry the indication of what kind of surprise it was (such as the disheartening dismay of no rice with the Chinese food, which meant we hadn’t ordered anywhere near enough food)—but others are NEUTRAL: just things I noted at the time as things I didn’t know would be the case, and was interested to find were the case, and thought others might be similarly interested to know. And of course some are POSITIVE, such as good bath-product scents and fun yogurt flavors! Or even if the experiences are unavoidably interpreted as MILDLY negative (such as water going out of the shower onto the floor), it was not a particularly negative experience FOR ME, since I don’t OWN or need to CLEAN the bathroom where that’s happening, and am FULLY ABLE to cope with the measure of “putting a towel down to catch the water”—and so it is not a HARSH CRITICISM OF ALL OF ENGLAND AND ALL ITS PEOPLE AND ALSO OF THIS ENTIRE TRIP, it is just something I thought you would be interested to hear about, in a Let’s Marvel at the Wide World and All Its Infinite Variation sort of way, and in the same way as I might tell you about unfamiliar practices I encountered in other regions of my own home country. Let’s practice a little!:

We were surprised when we ordered Chinese take-out food in England and it did not come with, in order of surprise from least to most: fortune cookies (I’d heard elsewhere that fortune cookies were a United-States-Chinese thing), disposable chopsticks, RICE. (Only the rice was impactful: it took a meal we thought would heartily feed seven people and turned it into a hearty snack.) And it DID come with what we have since discovered were PRAWN CRACKERS, which did not seem like either prawn or crackers but instead like some sort of puffed-rice cup; our two vegetarians were alarmed to find out afterward that they’d accidentally eaten prawn.

(Practice round! This was clearly a NEGATIVE surprise, and in fact a BOUQUET of negative surprises. And the timing was particularly bad for this kind of surprise: we had become over-hungry, and then we encountered NUMEROUS hurdles for everything about that meal, from not being able to find anywhere to eat, to not being able to use the hotel-room phone to order delivery, to calling places from the lobby only to find they could not take our order or could not deliver it until, for example, 9:30 at night. And then we finally succeeded in placing an order!!! but then it wasn’t enough food because there was no rice, and our vegetarians unknowingly ate something they wouldn’t have eaten. Nevertheless: we are not trying to blame ALL OF ENGLAND, or ANY of England, for this set of surprises; this could have happened in any unfamiliar ordering situation. It could have been a good lesson for us about being more educated about our options—except that in this case, it never would have occurred to us that Chinese food wouldn’t come with rice: we have lived in and/or traveled to the U.S. west coast, the U.S. east coast, and several places in between, and in all of those places rice has come with the food. For us, this was like needing to know to ask the restaurant if the sandwich comes with bread, and also needing to ask if the bread is vegetarian: we didn’t know that we didn’t know that we didn’t know. So it was more of a lesson in knowing that we won’t always know that we don’t know we don’t know. And that in that case we CAN eat small portions of non-planned food out of hotel mugs with coffee spoons, and search online for anything we don’t recognize, and then fill up on cookies. It is, bottom line, a lesson in making sure we have lots of cookies.)

I was surprised by how much wetter the eggs were cooked: fried eggs with liquid yolks, wet scrambled eggs rather than dry. (Practice round! This was a NEUTRAL surprise! It was interesting that eggs were, routinely and in every case we encountered them, cooked DIFFERENTLY than we would normally encounter eggs where we live. It was neither positive nor negative, just different/surprising. Obviously we could have asked for them to be cooked differently if it had been a negative surprise, and this option occurred to us immediately and without effort!)

I was surprised by the looser alcohol restrictions. Hard liquor was available in regular grocery/convenience stores; 18-year-olds (and even 16-year-olds) were served liquor without being carded. (Practice round! This was a NEUTRAL surprise! It was interesting that the rules and enforcements were so completely different than in our usual experience. It was neither positive nor negative, just different/surprising when compared to the way it is where we are in the United States, where I still get carded sometimes even though I have CHILDREN old enough to drink, and where my 22-year-old was prevented from buying alcohol because he was accompanied by someone who could NOT legally buy alcohol, and where grocery stores can sell only lower-proof items such as wine and beer.)

Okay, enough practice! I will rely on you to handle it from here onward, and I will not feel the need to keep reminding you that “encountering something different, and remarking upon it with interest” does not mean “criticizing it and calling it bad.”

Also: keep in mind that I am a relatively NEW traveler. We do not take vacations: as with “going out to eat,” this was one of the things we voluntarily traded in order to have five children. (Not because NO ONE can do it: I know PLENTY of large families go out to eat, and take vacations. But because WE couldn’t.) The most traveling I’ve done is in the last few years, when I’ve been driving kids to and from college, and going on college visits. So maybe you will be surprised to find that I was surprised by something, and maybe you would like to cherish that silently within your heart!

This may have just been the particular hotels we stayed in, but all of the showers had half-or-less glass doors. Like, half-or-more of the bathtub/shower area was completely open, with unblocked water flying out onto the floor to some extent, ranging from “almost none, how it is almost none when this is wide open??” to “we had to put down a whole towel just to soak up all the water that flew out because there was not enough door/curtain stopping it from doing so.” I can’t claim to have been FULLY SURPRISED by this, because several commenters mentioned it ahead of time—but I still felt a little surprised to see it in actual practice, because it seemed so UNLIKELY, and particularly because several other commenters had said “WHAT?? That was not our experience at all!!,” so I admit I’d wondered if the first group of commenters had encountered something rare.

Again, this may have been just the particular hotels we stayed in, but none of the bathrooms had fans to remove the steamy air. At least one had what seemed to be a non-working fan; more than one had no apparent fan mechanism of any kind.

Again-again, this may have been just the particular hotels we stayed in, but all of them had what were to me DELIGHTFULLY-scented bath products. I am accustomed to the products in the U.S. hotels we usually stay in, which usually smell like public-bathroom handsoap (i.e., cheap/chemical/institutional), or else like artificial coconut.

Again-again-again maybe just the particular hotels, but anyway the light switches were OUTSIDE the bathroom doors. Which would have been fine if the lights for the rest of the room weren’t in the same panel. So if, for example, you got up and did not remember that the bathroom lightswitch was the second one in from the left in this hotel, you would turn on the light for the entire room when you got up to use the bathroom in the middle of the night; and, even if you DID remember, you turned on the bathroom light and then had to open the door and let the light flood into the room. Paul, fortunately, had inexplicably assumed I’d want a nightlight for the room (I never sleep with a nightlight), and so he put that nightlight in the bathroom so we wouldn’t have to turn on the bathroom lights at night. I have added “bathroom nightlight” to my Future Travel List.

We were surprised by how extremely hot the water was: many places (hotels and public restrooms) had little stickers warning about the heat of the water, which was easily more than hot enough to scald. In one of our hotel rooms, hot water came scaldingly out of the cold water faucets as well, and we had to let it run for a few minutes until it started being cold. Ample, ample hot water, is what I’m saying.

In one case, the light switches in a hotel room seemed not to work at all. Luckily, we were traveling with a cosmopolitan group, so I thought to group-chat them about it before going down to check with reception: it turned out we were supposed to put our hotel key-card into a slot right inside the door, in order to operate the electricity in the room. Maybe you already knew this, and would like to have a little chuckle! Or maybe instead you will file this away and it will save you later from other people having a little chuckle at you.

This might have been the particular areas we traveled to, but I was surprised to need reservations even for casual pubs and pizza places. The travel agent had advised us to make reservations, but her phrasing made me think she meant we should make reservations if there were PARTICULAR places we had our hearts set on, in order to avoid disappointment. Instead it was Pretty Much Everywhere. One night my half-group went to a pub and I felt self-conscious about our reservation once we arrived and it was three-quarters empty and extremely casual—but then we heard group after group being turned away at the door for not having a reservation, with the server saying they were “completely full for both sittings.”

I was surprised not to be able to buy Dramamine (meclizine hydrochloride); if we traveled again, I would bring TONS of it. Thanks to you, I was not surprised to need to bring our own melatonin, benadryl, and hydrocortisone cream. (There was a later discussion that indicated we could have acquired hydrocortisone cream by asking a pharmacist; still, I was glad to have it with me already when a child acquired an unexpected hive.)

I was surprised at how many women I saw wearing dresses, just out and about, casually. It’s not that dresses are so uncommon in my experience, or anyway I don’t THINK of them as so uncommon. But something about the number of dresses I saw in England was enough to catch my eye as unusual. And lots more fun patterns than I’m used to seeing! It made me want to wear more dresses.

I was surprised at how easy it was to go through Customs, in both directions. Regular airport security was the usual barking unhappy experience both ways: “EVERYTHING OUT OF YOUR POCKETS AND INTO THE BINS”/”SHOES OFF”/”MA’AM THAT NEEDS TO BE IN A SEPARATE BIN”/”SIGH, NO, YOU HAVE TO WALK STRAIGHT THROUGH, DON’T HESITATE”/”HANDS OVER YOUR HEAD”/etc., with several of the kids being put through additional screenings and backpack-searches. But CUSTOMS, which I was MUCH more worried about (especially coming home, because I’d heard U.S. Customs was pretty much The Worst, even to their own citizens, which did not remotely surprise me), was a breeze both times—so that both times, we ended up out of the whole process saying, “Wait: did we do it? Was that all? Did we miss something?” We’d talked to the children ahead of time about how we would be separated and asked questions, maybe odd questions about whether we’d walked in pastures (that specific example came up in Paul’s research), and then none of that happened at all. On our way into England, we weren’t even checked by a person: we just had to stand at a device that scanned our passport and our face; one of us got a “See an agent” alert, but there were no visible agents to see, so that person just started over at a new machine and this time was passed through. On our way into the U.S., we were checked by a person who checked us all together as a group, no separating us, and only checked each passport/face and asked one of us (Paul) if we had any food. I will note that both times, in both directions, I saw people who were not-white being detained for further screening/questioning. I’m not saying it was because they were not-white. But: they were not-white, and it happened both times in both directions, and there was more than one not-white person both times in both directions.

I would be VERY INTERESTED to hear about things that have surprised you in your travels!