Posts from — May 2010

Man, oh man, was that a gorgeous holiday weekend or what?   We went to Moreau Lake State Park today, which I’ll tell you about tomorrow.  But here are some things going on this week:

Tuesday, June 1st:

• At 11 am, there’s a ribbon-cutting ceremony at Jerry Burrell Park in Schenectady.  The playground was designed by community members and Union College Students–it’s called Project Skip.
• At 6 pm, there’s Music in the Park in the town of Schodack.
• It’s a 39 Clues Summer Reading Kick-off Party at 7 pm at the  Colonie Center or 6 pm at the Saratoga Springs Barnes & Noble.
• Curious George Live is at the Glens Falls Civic Center at 7 pm.  Tickets range from $15 to $55.
• It’s Pajamarama at 7 pm at the Bethlehem Public Library.

Wednesday, June 2nd:

• Curious George Live is at the Glens Falls Civic Center at 10:30 am and 7 pm.  Tickets range from $15 to $55.
• From 3:30-5 pm, 4th- through 8th-graders can participate in Books on Stage with staff from NYSTI at the Troy Public Library.

Thursday, June 3rd:

• The hiking group will be meeting at Christman Sanctuary in Duanesburg at 9:45 am.  See the local hikes list for more information.
• At 5 pm, it’s Alive at Five at the Albany Waterfront Park.
• It’s the 2nd Annual Taste of the Y at the Greenbush Area YMCA from 6-8 pm.  Restaurant samples, music, bounce house and other kids’ activities.  Free.
• Students from Schenectady’s John Sayles School of Fine Arts will be doing a Pops Concert at the Music Haven Stage in Central Park at 7 pm.   I’ve seen it listed elsewhere as 6:30 pm.  Free.
• It’s Lego Night at 7 pm at the Mohawk Commons Barnes & Noble.

Friday, June 4th:

• There’s Stretching with Stuffee at 10 am at the Children’s Museum at Saratoga.
• At noon there’s a Spring Wildflower Hike at the Albany Pine Bush.
• At 1 pm, you can watch the Squeeze Play Accordian Band at Bethlehem Public Library.
• It’s First Friday in Albany from 5-9 pm.
• St. Basil’s in Troy is kicking off its Greek Festival at 5 pm tonight–it will last all weekend.
• It’s Ballston Spa First Friday from 6-9 pm.  During the summer, this will include a family-oriented film at 9 pm in Wiswall Park.  Tonight’s is Coraline.  Personally, those crazy button-eyes creeped me out way too much in the preview, but maybe  some of you can handle it. . . .
• At 7 pm, the Guilderland Public Library will be showing Swiss Family Robinson.  I’ve got to say:  I love the Guilderland Public Library.  It’s one of my favorites, and since I’ve been to programs at at least 6 or 8 different local libraries (because I am a wanton library whore), that’s saying something.  But when I first heard that they were doing Friday night Disney movies, I kind of rolled my eyes.  Like, we don’t have enough of the freakin’ Disney movies, right?  So I was ever so pleased that they are kickin’ it old school with this one, Mary Poppins, Bedknobs & Broomsticks, and Treasure Island.  Yeah, baby!  And there will be popcorn.
• Steamer 10 Theatre opens The Good (& Bad) Faeries of Nottingham tonight at 7 pm.
• There’s an Alternative Prom from 7-11 pm for LGBT youth aged 13 to 19 at Revolution Hall in Troy.  It’s  $10.
• Okay, it’s about an hour northeast of us, but perhaps worth the trip?  The Cambridge Balloon Festival kicks off tonight with its first balloon launch and fireworks.  Anyone ever gone to this?

We visited the Albany Pine Bush today.  I hadn’t been there for quite a while–enough so that I’d basically forgotten all about it.   We started with a hike.  It was hot.  The shade was comfortable, but it was mostly sunny and hot-hot-hot, especially with areas of the trail so sandy.

What’s great about the Albany Pine Bush is that it’s so carefully managed, so it really looks different from the random woods near your house, and the trails are well-marked an well maintained.  What’s not-so-fun about the Albany Pine Bush, I thought, is that it’s so carefully managed.  I kind of like to get a little bit lost, or to feel free to stray off the trail and clamber around on fallen trees or in a stream.

The Discovery Center had plenty of information, and it’s free, so who doesn’t love that?  I think that the grown-ups both particularly enjoyed creating our own sand dunes, and M spent quite a bit of time looking through the microscope, while J was mesmerized by the video of a bird being tagged and release.   Both of the girls liked playing I-Spy.  There was an outdoor playground area that was not as fun as we’d anticipated.  We were around to see the 1 pm tour leave, and it was quite a small group, so that would have been a good option.  Oh, and I loved that they had a billboard with kids’ questions that had been answered–a lovely feature if you have time to come a back again soon.

We spent much of the day putting our garden in, and it’s our wedding anniversary, so I’ve got to get ready for a date!

Which means I’m slacking on a post for you.  Maybe take a hike or go to a playground?  The state parks are back open–yay.   Plus, Shrek’s playing at, umm, about every area drive-in.  Plenty of fun.  Enjoy.

First:  the bug update.  I’m pretty sure that it was black flies and mosquitoes all along.  Yesterday J and her BFF went into the woods and when they emerged, BFF was covered with bites and J had a few bites on the bottoms of her feet and one along her hairline behind her ear–some of the few spots not covered by the Skin So Soft.  So this morning I was working it into her hair and her ears and between her toes.  Yuck.

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Today was J’s last day of nursery school.  Yes, I cried.

Saying goodbye to nursery school.

Tonight at bedtime I asked J how she felt about being done.  “Sad,” she said.  “I’ll miss my teacher and my friends and the snack.”  But, really, she spent the whole day elated, telling everyone that she had “graduated” from nursery school.  She’s excited for kindergarten.

At the beginning of the school year, the kids were measured, and today, they all got measured again.  So as they were leaving, each child was wearing a little name tag that showed how much they’d literally grown while at school that year.  J was 3 inches taller.  I hadn’t noticed.  W didn’t even believe us when we told him.

Skipping toward kindergarten.

After M came home from school, we trekked over to Mohawk Commons in search of  bathing suits, summer pjs, and sneakers. As the girls tried on shoes and suits, I felt as if I kept having to rummage for bigger sizes than I’d expected.  Then  M convinced me to let her walk all the way across Target to try on her bathing suit while J & I were still shopping.  J settled on a swimsuit while I fretted, and we were turning the cart to rush over to the dressing rooms when M trotted back to us, glowing with grown-up-girl self-sufficiency.

After the clothes, M begged and begged to be allowed to buy ice cream at the grocery store by herself.  Apparently W had let her run back into the store when he’d forgotten something, and the thrill of this independent venture left her hungry for more.  Also, she was just hungry for ice cream.    And since we’d had a nursery school lunch-and-ice-cream outing without her, I was feeling generous, and her incident-free dressing room visit made me feel (somewhat) brave.  So we stopped at Hannaford, and I handed her a ten and she ran into the store alone while J and I waited in the car out front.

We were driving  home, the girls singing along with Taylor Swift, and I was just overwhelmed by how old they’d become.  I’m not really a mommy to little girls anymore, but a mother of daughters.

As we sat at a red light, a breeze brought a flurry of those white fluffs–I think they’re cottonwood seeds?–that fall every year at this time.  They always remind me of waiting for M to be born, because they’d land in great heaps all around the hotel where we were staying when I was 9 months pregnant and taking walks to bring on labor.

Cottonwood Seeds falling.

The cottonwood puffs–come on!  It was a total Sunrise, Sunset moment.  So I’m feeling proudly melancholy tonight.

Cottonwood fluff and Buttercups

I wasn’t sure, in the bright sunlight, if I’d be able to see the white in any of the pictures I took, but it’s easier to see among the buttercups.  Plus, J was picking them–she is always picking wildflowers–and she asked me to take a picture.   The two of them together almost feels like a family portrait to me–my little girls blossoming and floating away. . . uh-oh, getting maudlin.  I think I need a glass of wine!

Sure, the conventional choice for a Memorial Day Weekend post might be an American flag, but instead I took a picture of what’s in front of me:  Isis the cat.  Lookin’ for some love while her human just wants to  finish the blog post.  It’s a little irritating, but not as irritating as sneaking rodents into the house.  But, you know, she never gets into the garbage or humps my leg, so that’s something, right?

She sticks out her tongue when she's particularly content.

Here’s what’s going on this weekend.  I moved the parade information & the Friday evening information into this post so you wouldn’t have to look hither, thither, and yon while pondering your options.  Remember, too, that if you’re looking at the regularly scheduled events on What about TODAY?, well–a lot of them may be off schedule for the holiday weekend.

All Weekend

• The National Scholastic Regatta is in Saratoga Springs on Saturday and Sunday.
• GottaGetGon is a big folk music festival in Ballston Spa all weekend.  $20 per day for grown-ups, kids 12 and under free.
• Swimming opens for the season at Grafton Lakes State Park!  Yeah, baby!  It’s open Friday through Tuesday, and it’s $8/car.  On Wednesday & Thursday, there’s no swimming, so entrance is $6/car.  And on Monday, it’s the Annual Memorial Day Sand Sculpture Contest.  Registration begins at noon at the Beach Nature Center, and families can work as a team (now that’s some wholesome fun).
• There’s a pre-sale for Yo Gabba Gabba tickets for September 2nd at the Times Union Center. The password is BROBEE.  Personally, just looking on the YGG website made me overstimulated.  In a bad way.  But we don’t get cable, so perhaps I’m just woefully out-of-touch.

Friday, May 28th

• It’s Troy Night Out from 5-9 pm.
• Parade at 6:30 pm in Stillwater.  From Hudson Avenue.
• Parade at 6:30 pm in Maplewood/Colonie. That’s all the information that I could find!
• There’s a Full Moon Hike at Moreau Lake State Park from 7-9 pm.
• There’s a Taiwanese Dance program at 7:30 pm at The Egg.  It’s free, but you need to obtain tickets by calling The Egg.

Saturday, May 29th

• Parade at 9 am in Ballston Spa.  From Milton Avenue to Front Street to Low Street.
• At 9 am, they’re teaching Family Birding Basics at Thacher Nature Center.  Bring binoculars.
• At Five Rivers, there’s a mostly-indoor program on bees at 10 am, and a program on bugs at 2 pm.  The 10 am includes a craft, with a $3 materials fee for non-members.
• There’s a Bennie Brook Kayak Trip from 11 am to 2 pm at Moreau Lake State Park.  Call for details, and plan on packing a lunch.
• Learn about Pond Life at Up Yonda Farm at 1 pm.
• At 2 pm, there’s a Wildlife Program including a look at injured wildlife who are being cared for at Thacher Nature Center.  Call for details.
• Do some Stargazing at Thacher at 8:30 pm.

Sunday, May 30th

• Do a Nature Scavenger Hunt at Moreau Lake State Park at 11 am.
• Memorial Day activities from 1-7 pm in Schuylerville  at the Old Stone Fort.
• Discover the Pine Bush at 1 pm.  $2/person, $5/family.
• It’s pretty quiet, actually.  Maybe you should throw a little barbecue in the afternoon?

Monday, May 31st

• Parade at 9 am in Schuylerville.  This is another one that I couldn’t find more info. on, although I did find stuff on 2009–super helpful, right?
• Parade at 9:30 am in Albany.  From Partridge Street & Central Avenue, east on Washington Ave. until North Hawk Street.
• On the USS Slater, they’re having a ceremony at 9:30 am and then the ship’s open to the public from 10 am to 4 pm.
• Parade at 10 am in Hoosick Falls. From Key Bank on Main to Memorial Park. More info here.
• Parade at 10 am in Watervliet.  East along 19th Street, then right on 2nd Avenue.
• Parade at 11 am in Bethlehem.  From the Elsmere firehouse along Elsmere, Kenwood, & Delaware to  Bethlehem Veterans Memorial Park.
• Parade at 11 am in Lansingburgh/Troy.  Follow the link–lots of information.
• Parade at 1 pm Parade in North Greenbush.  I could only find one listing for this one.

There are

This is a day late because we lost our cable internet–heat related, I think:

I mentioned that yesterday was not my most fabulous day ever.  Here are the highlights.

At 4-something in the morning, our cat Isis, who had refused to come inside the night before, managed to push open a not-closed-hard-enough-by-me door and bring a mouse into the house.   So W and I were up “oh-dark-early” trying to rid our house of this mouse.  Isis, meanwhile, had lost interest in her quarry now that she’d brought it home for our review.  As we urged her to  act more  like a predator, she practically shrugged her kitty shoulders and ran for the door to see what else she could find.    Leaving W and I sleepily stumbling over each other in our efforts to catch the mouse.  In fact, we literally stumbled over each other, fell with a crash, and snapped the plastic dustpan I was wielding in two.  The mouse, sensing that this was a place of violence and lunacy, actually trotted right out the open back door.

It was not an auspicious beginning to the day.  And it was not the only home invasion–or perhaps I should say alleged home invasion–of the day.

For almost two weeks now, I’ve been a little bit freaked out by J’s bug bites.  A whole bunch of bumps appeared in a spot that’s normally not exposed, and we had no idea why.  Several days passed, and then one morning we noticed a mess of bites on her legs.

Scabs on her arms, bites on her legs, and she's itching as I take the picture.

Yuck.  First I thought that we might have fleas.  I hadn’t seen any, but lately Isis likes to lie on the princess sofa in our room (you heard about that sofa), so it seemed like a possibility.  Gross.  I got medicine from the vet, dismantled the princess sofa, washed all of our sheets.

More bites.

A neighbor I’d been chatting with started talking about bedbugs.  She thought they were bedbug bites.  She’d had two harrowing experiences while living in the city.  I Googled bedbugs and saw gruesome pictures and examined J’s room and found nothing.  Neighbor said she couldn’t find any evidence, either–until she turned on a light in the middle of the night and there they were, sluggish from having feasted on her blood.

eeeeeeewwwwwwwwwww.

I made an appointment with our pediatrician.  Which was yesterday.

Okay, so what I really like about my girls’ doctor is that she does not offer parenting advice, but she does offer almost too much medical information.  In a sort of nerdy way.  Like, both kids will have ear infections, and she’ll choose a different antibiotic for each one of them, and then she’ll explain why she thinks this or that one will be better for this specific infection with this specific kid.  Which is, you know, informative, but sometimes I’m like:  freakin’ give me the script and let me leave now  please.

But it’s endearing, really.  So, at the office, she starts going into a lengthy explanation of spider bites vs. flea bites vs. bedbug bites.  There’s a brief mention of black flies (probably not:  just if we’re around water) and hives (nope:  transient.  J’s stick around).  Based on all of this information, it appears that the bites seem more like bedbugs’ than fleas’, but definitely not spiders’.  And, have you heard, bedbugs are a real problem in Schenectady right now?  I am hoping that this is all a long build-up to a definitive bottom line, but that’s not her style.  She’s not sure, and she’s not going to guess wildly.  Part of me fears that  she is sure that it’s bedbugs, but she’s aware of the enormous shame that I would feel if she actually said it out loud.

Instead, she tells me that there are some excellent Youtubes on Bedbug detection, adding that I should watch without the kids around because they’re so disturbing.  And she pulls out a ginormous reference book on bugs if I’d like to do further reading.  I am just nerdy enough that I spend an extra 15 minutes reading and taking notes, while my panic escalates.  I’ve decided, now, that it must be bedbugs, and the reading seems to reinforce this impression.

We go straight from the doctor’s office to gymnastics, where I plot my strategy.  On the way home, I pick up trash bags and a horrible poison that will kill bedbugs  at the store.  This in spite of the fact that I usually just use vinegar and water to clean almost everything because I’m anti-chemical and I love the earth and all.  I also borrowed a steaming apparatus from my lovely friend whose child is allergic to dust.  She volunteered to watch J for a bit while I completely dismantled her room.

By the time I got home, I was starving, so I ate lunch while watching hideous, horrifying Youtubes on bedbugs.

Then I went upstairs and started the hunt.  What I’ve learned is that, while bedbugs look pretty obvious in photos, they can sneakily hide under molding, in switch plates, or just about freaking anywhere.  On the video the narrator tells about how they once found an infestation inside the tv remote control on the night stand.  Oh. My.  That is so gross that I can’t even believe it. So as I hunted without “success”, I knew that I was going to do everything possible to eliminate any chance of bedbug life whether I found signs of them or not.

You see, I had a strategy.  Heat kills bedbugs.  They’ll start dying at 95 degrees, and they’ll definitely be dead at 110 degrees.  I figured that it was a perfect day for bedbug elimination.  I decided to heat up the whole upstairs.  I shut all the windows and opened all curtains wide for maximum sunshine.  Then I started bagging all of J’s extra belongings and I carried them downstairs and slammed them into my sizzling-hot closed-up car.

Piles of belongings in the hottest car ever.

Meanwhile I was also pulling all of the sheets and bedding from everybody’s rooms and doing super-hot loads of everything, including my dry clean-only comforter.  As far as I could tell, the mattresses are absolutely pristine–those little grooves along the edges are the bedbugs’ favorite home.

Could 200 vermin be happily living in these handhold thingies?

And yet.  The Youtubes had filled me with intense paranoia.  I was blowing compressed air into the handhold thingies and sliding a playing card under the cracks in the molding just in case a bunch of bugs were hidden.  All this while sweating.  Profusely.

After the exam, it was vacuuming and wiping down the floor.  Then I steamed all sides of the mattresses and the rug.

Steaming J's mattress.

As you can imagine, it was getting quite hot.  I followed that up by spraying horrifying toxic poisons in every nook and cranny of the room.  Through this entire process, it’s just getting hotter and hotter. Hellish, even.   Oh, and I learned some tips, in case you ever do this:

• Don’t actually grab the bottom of the steamer with your bare hand.  In case you forgot, it’s hot.
• Remove every last knick-knack, or you’ll find that the one thing that you forgot to move will get knocked over and make a tremendous mess.

J's knocked over "fairy garden".

• Don’t look up and watch as you spray poisonous bug spray, because it hurts when it falls directly into your eyeballs, and you’ll be out a pair of contacts.

Improvised face mask and "safety goggles"

• Just keep the tv on constantly.  Because otherwise your children will join you and make helpful comments like, “Wow, it STINKS in here!”  And that will be before you’ve used bug spray.  So you’ll know that the horrible stink is entirely your own body odor.

After taking care of J’s room, I shut the door with two space heaters, so it stayed at 100 degrees for about 45 minutes.   When I opened the door to check (I was a little bit afraid that the room might blow up), it was literally steaming.  I tried to take a picture, but, alas, you can’t see the haze of toxic fumes:

Hot, hot, hot!

Phew!  That room was done, and I moved on to our room, and then to M’s.  I didn’t bother with the sauna treatment and I was a little bit less vigilant about moving all of the furniture, so it went more quickly.  Except when I had just finished vacuuming and I looked down to see my very favorite earring on the floor.  Alone.  This is the only time when I almost cried.  I shook the vacuum canister in a panic, forgetting that there was a hole for the suction tube to enter, so I spilled vacuum junk on my nasty, sweaty self.  Then I went outside and poked around our steaming trash can, to no avail.  Then I pondered why it was that I’d chosen to wear the Target cubic zirconia in my ears instead of my favorite earrings.  Then I shook my bedside lamp and the other earring dropped from where it had stuck in the lamp’s base! Yay!

Even though I couldn’t ever confirm that there had been bugs in the house, I felt pretty confident that nothing could possibly survive my hours-long heat-and-chemical-warfare onslaught.  So although I still had mountains of laundry to complete and an entire car full of household items to replace, I felt pretty good about my efforts when I finally got to take a shower that night.

The next morning, J had four fresh bites.

Utterly defeated.

Later, I was visiting with Mary and I made a partial confession to her.  It seemed less shameful now that I was pretty sure that I’d been wrong about bedbugs all along.  Turns out, J had been reporting to her every step of the way.  J had said that she thought it might be the cat days ago, and I told Mary that J’d thought so because I’d thought so at first.  Mary had been hearing about J’s room being dismantled.  (Which I should have guessed: she’d told her friend, “My room looks crazy because I have bugs!”  Awesome.)  Anyway, after a long discussion about my various efforts, Mary made her firm diagnosis.  “Black flies and mosquitoes.  They’re both definitely in our yards.  And she spends so much time in the gardens–with her small body she immerses herself.”  I had no idea that we had black flies at all.  Mary was equally firm with her prescription:  Skin So Soft.  Clearly, I should have gone and talked with Mary first.

I put out a call to my moms’ group and a lovely neighbor-mama gave me a bottle of Skin So Soft.

J is out in the yard right now, thoroughly slathered.  Wish us luck.

Phew!  Hot enough for ya?  We’re officially beginning the pool opening countdown.  If anybody’s got recommendations for their favorite water spots–parks or pools or streams, anywhere where the kids can get wet–I’d love to hear about them. Especially places that happen to be available at this very moment.

Meanwhile, back to business.

So, looking around for parade information was quite the quest.  Many municipalities don’t keep things too up-to-date, but I’m listing these because I’ve found them either on the municipality’s website or in at least two different locations if the official websites didn’t list them–usually the Daily Gazette, the Saratoga events site, the Times Union, the Rensselaer County site, and miscellaneous sites like the  Fyfes & Drummes of Olde Saratoga.  I’m sure that I’m also missing some good activities, but keep in mind that there’s still the weekend post coming up on Thursday. This is just very Memorial-Day specific parades or activities.  And not services.  Because this is about Capital District Fun.

Wednesday, May 26th

• 6 pm in Scotia.  From the corner of Sacandaga Road & Mohawk Avenue to the Veterans Memorial on Mohawk Avenue.
• 6 pm in Saratoga Springs.  From North Broadway (at First Street?) to Congress Park.
• 7 pm in Waterford.  From Clinton Street to the Soldier and Sailor Park at First & Broad.

Thursday, May 27th

• 6:30 pm in Rotterdam. From Mohonasen High School down Curry Road to Sundrise Building, finishing at the Town Hall.
• 7 pm in Cohoes. From West End Park to Canal Square.
• 7 pm in Burnt Hills.  From in front of the bowling alley–I could only find this one in the Gazette.  Anyone know?

Friday, May 28th

• 6:30 pm in Stillwater.  From Hudson Avenue.
• 6:30 pm in Maplewood/Colonie. That’s all the information that I could find!

Saturday, May 29th

• 9 am in Ballston Spa.  From Milton Avenue to Front Street to Low Street.

Sunday, May 30th

• 1-7 pm in Schuylerville.  Memorial Day activities at the Old Stone Fort.

Monday, May 31st

• 9 am in Schuylerville.  This is another one that I couldn’t find more info. on, although I did find stuff on 2009–super helpful, right?
• 9:30 am in Albany.  From Partridge Street & Central Avenue, east on Washington Ave. until North Hawk Street.
• 10 am in Hoosick Falls. From Key Bank on Main to Memorial Park. More info here.
• 10 am in Watervliet.  East along 19th Street, then right on 2nd Avenue.
• 11 am in Bethlehem.  From the Elsmere firehouse along Elsmere, Kenwood, & Delaware to  Bethlehem Veterans Memorial Park.
• 11 am in Lansingburgh/Troy.  Follow the link–lots of information.
• 1 pm Parade in North Greenbush.  I could only find one listing for this one.

Okay!  Before I get to the week’s listing, I have to say that I’m feeling like a complete dork because, after adding that lovely hiking list, I forgot to add the Thursday morning hikes to the weekly listings.  I just forgot about it.  So, from now on I’ll remember.

In addition to what’s listed here, there’s plenty going on for Memorial Day–at least one parade a day starting Wednesday until the holiday.  But I’m terribly sleepy, and many of the listings I’ve found are incomplete, and so many towns and villages are not super-great about keeping up with their websites.  So I’ll do a separate post on Monday or Tuesday with those, once I’ve had a chance to find the information.

Monday, May 24th

• There’s Teen Fun and After School Fun at 3:30 & 4 pm at the Mont Pleasant Branch Library.
  

Tuesday, May 25th

• At 6:30 pm, there’s a drop-in Family Storytime at Niskayuna Branch Library.
• Book Buddies is meeting at 7 pm at Bethlehem Public Library to talk about Encyclopedia Brown.

Wednesday, May 26th

• From 9-11:30 am, a new fitness program, Stroller Strides, is meeting (and, one assumes, strolling) in downtown Saratoga.  This event is free.
• It’s Katie’s Kitchen at the Children’s Museum at Saratoga at 11 am or 1 pm.  $15/non-member covers the program plus admission for one child and one adult.  You must pre-register.  It’s also a Playroom Day at the museum.
• At 7 pm, young adult author Margaret Peterson Haddix will be at the Clifton Park-Halfmoon Library.  They’re asking people to register online.

Thursday, May 27th

• At 9:45 am there’s a group hike at  W. Powell Bird Sanctuary in Old Chatham.  See the hikes list for directions, or call the contact person, Judy, at 482-9329.
• At 11 am, there’s a Drop-in Family Storytime at East Greenbush Library.
• There’s Teen Fun and After School Fun at 3:30 & 4 pm at the Duane Branch Library.
• At 6:30 pm, learn about Inside Gardening with Mushrooms at the Albany Pine Bush.  $2/person or $5/family. You can register online, and you’ll prepare mushrooms to take home and grow yourself.
• At the Bethlehem Public Library, there’s a Children’s Circle playtime at 6:15 pm followed by a 7 pm storytime.  All children are welcome, but this is designed with special needs in mind.  Pre-registration is required.
• At 7 pm, there’s a Teen Book Club at the Mohawk Commons Barnes & Noble.
• From 7-9 pm, the Riverview Ramblers (I am a fan!) will be playing bluegrass as part of the “Howling at the Moon” concert series at Mabee Farm.

Friday, May 28th

• The Children’s Museum at Saratoga will be closed in the morning, but it will be open at noon sparkling clean after a bunch of high schoolers have spent the morning scrubbing it down.  Germ-a-phobes, this is your day!
• It’s Troy Night Out from 5-9 pm.
• There’s a Taiwanese Dance program at 7:30 pm at The Egg.  It’s free, but you need to obtain tickets by calling The Egg.

Anything else going on that we should all know about?

Yee haw!

That’s what my neighbor Mary calls Niska-Day.  The kids (all four of them, because of our sleepover guests) were up super-early, then there was parading, candy catching, biking to the festivities, general frolicking, playground-playing, biking back, hitting the neighborhood party, and in just over an hour there are fireworks.  J begged to go to the fireworks and has since collapsed onto the sofa, fast asleep.  We fully intend to wake her up, try to force some dinner on her, and pack her off to the fireworks.   W promised that they could go, so hopefully she’ll be able to regain consciousness.  I agree:  it’s probably a really bad idea.

The day’s highlights included the giant slippy slide and M’s stunning 43-second ride on a mechanical bull.  We also realized, after we’d sat down in the grass for a snack, that we were downwind from the cotton candy stand.  Every other minute a fresh breeze blew little wisps of cotton candy through the air, and I told the girls that they could eat whatever they could catch before it hit the ground.  It was like catching snowflakes, except infinitely more rewarding.  I mean, I love snowflakes, but this was cotton candy, man.

Hope everyone enjoyed the day!