Love, Learn, Play: Torpedos

There is literally never a dull moment around here! The boys are neck deep into their newest passion- shipwrecks. It is all we talk about from morning until night. And by morning, I mean 6:00am. I take full responsibility for this, as in a moment of exhausted desperation that only a mother of twins can understand, I told the boys back in the middle of winter that they couldn't wake up until dawn. At the time, dawn was close to 8:00am. It was glorious. But in the heat of the moment, it never "dawned" on me that in six months, dawn would be 6:00 in the morning. All summer long, I have been kicking myself each and every morning when I wake up to the words, "Maaaamaaaaaaa! It's daaaaay!! It's daaaaaay!" But so I digress.

Our passion for ships begins first thing in the morning. The boys scamper out to the living room to build their favorite ships out of Duplo blocks. At first they would build the Titanic or the Carpathia. I didn't know it at the time but these are relatively small ships, thus necessitating relatively small models.. We have since spent incredible amounts of time studying the freighters of the Great Lakes and as the boys will be more than happy to explain to you, ships on the Great Lakes can be more than twice the size of ocean liners because the waves on the lakes are smaller and closer together thus making it much less likely that the hull will be suspended between two waves and susceptible to snapping in half (unless of course you are aboard the Edmund Fitzgerald). By the time I drag myself out of bed, cursing at my dear husband who will spend the next 45 minutes claiming he can't get up because the dog is laying on him, I stumble into the living room only to trip over the 4 foot super freighters dotting the living room floor- aka Lake Superior. Seriously, the Duplo ships are now pushing 5 feet. And then the boys are furious when I walk in and step on the stern of the RMS Fred White which I honestly had no idea was sailing past my couch. Or when they pick them up to transport them across the house and they snap into a hundred pieces. And then again when they step on said pieces because there quite literally isn't any other place to step.

When the shipbuilding loses its novelty, we move into research mode. This entails both of them asking ten thousand questions to which I have zero answers. No, I have no idea how to build a submarine. No, I also have no idea why Germany felt the need to build so many. No, I do not know why the Britannic was painted white or not painted black. I do not know, nor will I ever need to know, the fate of the Carpathia. But that is what we fixated on this morning so up on my lap they climbed, perching quite precariously, while I Googled the fate of our beloved Carpathia. Turns out that six years after it rescued 705 survivors from the Titanic, it was sunk by a German U-55 submarine off the coast of Ireland. Why was there a different captain mama? What happened to Captain Rostran mama? How many captains of the Carpathia were there mama? Did all the people get off mama? Were there enough lifeboats mama? Why hadn't the Germans learned their lesson mama? How do you get to Germany mama? Can you fly there? Can you take a ship mama? Can we go to Germany mama? Will they torpedo us mama? It is now 8:30am. Luckily the questioning ends there, because they both jump down from my lap and pretend to be torpedos being launched at the couch, which was by that point the Carpathia, then the Lusitania, then the Britannic. Caleb also launches himself into whoever walks into our house while shouting "I'M A GERMAN TORPEDO!!!" Except that his head is at crotch height for the average adult. Don't say I didn't warn you.

Most days in the last few weeks, we just load up the whole family and go down to the Detroit River. We've found a few places and parks where we like to watch the ships coming up and down the river. Jon and the boys check out their new favorite website- www.ais.boatnerd.com - where they can track which ships are coming through, where they are coming from and going, what they are carrying, how long they are, etc. We've actually been spending quite a bit of time in downtown Detroit, enough time for me to realize that what is happening to the city is really quite sad. It reminds me of a line from one of the boys favorite story books- Please do not stomp here. There are seeds and they are trying. Anyways, we also took the boys out in daddy's duck hunting boat this past week which of course they thought was the greatest thing since sliced bread. Daddy is convinced we can now take his boat out onto the river to see the big ships up close. Mama is a bit more comfortable watching them with solid land under my feet! We're usually home by lunch, after which we repeat the morning's activities but with a Great Lakes theme as opposed to the trans-Atlantic theme. I've got to say, I have learned more about ships and shipwrecks than I will ever need to know in all of eternity, but it is still not enough to satisfy the two curious little minds who always feel to be one step ahead of me!

One of our beautiful days downtown- Boys had a photo shoot at Campus Martius Park