The Green Mountains have welcomed us home to northern New England. Lush forests, barren granite outcroppings, and plentiful boggy board walks. We even got to ride on a high speed quad chairlift.

The glaciated landscape provides myriad ponds for swimming and the beavers add even more. The scenic streams are teeming with fish and the weather has been smiling on us. Our erratic pacing has meant dropping into a whole new crowd of hikers. Some we haven’t seen since North Carolina, and the kids’ faces light up as they greet these smelly hikers like old friends.

RobinHood, ever the gearhead, has been talking tarps with people lately, which led to a firelight arithmetic lesson. He’s loving the mind-bending incongruity of our 10’x10′ tarp being 25% larger than our friends’ 8’x10′ tarp, but their tarp being only 20% smaller than ours.

Meanwhile, Cartwheel is struggling with another mind-bending incongruity. Although the kids are each other’s best friends out here, the other night as Cartwheel was working to ignore the deliberate and methodical kicking she was receiving from her brother below, she call out, “Mommy?!” But instead of the expected tattling, she directed a sincere and earnest question at Mama Bear: “Did you always love your brothers when you were growing up?”