Spring Break with Family

I welcomed spring break because it gave Priscille and me a couple of days to be with our two granddaughters, Margot and Monique, in an informal, relaxing setting.  Margot is completing her high school freshman year in Hamilton, and Monique starts middle school next September. 

A mom and her son view flooding along White Bridge Road, Millington, NJ

There is nothing like getting immersed into the lives of your grandkids to find out what the generation beyond that of your own children 

is thinking and talking about.

It’s a learning experience that gives grandparents a meaningful insight into the minds of the upcoming generation.

I find that it’s always better to intersperse talking with fun and activities.  Priscille and I don’t go out of our way to plan what we do during those visits.  In fact, we don’t do much planning at all.  We just go with the flow and come to an easy consensus among all four of us as to what we will do on any given day.

 Nonetheless, there was some homework to catch up on:  Margot had to hit the keys on her PC for a writing project in MS Word, while Monique was designing a maze, using a pizza box as her basic material.  But we also needed to get some fresh air. 

We decided to go to the Raptor Trust in Millington.  It provided us with a firsthand experience into the lives of birds of prey who have been injured in the wild and who – without the help of this facility – might not make it on their own.

We found out that, although some of the birds get well and are released into the wild, there are others who have been there for years and may never get released – they become permanent residents! 

This afternoon, we came across one such animal, a buzzard who was being courted by another from the wild who had swooped down outside of his large wire-enclosed pen and wanted in.  It is, after all, spring mating time!  But Virgil would have none of it:  Yes, one of the keepers advised us, resident raptors have their own names.

It turns out that we almost did not make it to the Raptor Trust facility.  The normal route that we took from Bridgewater, the one which our Garmin GPS unit directed us to follow, lead to an impassably flooded road. 

We were aided by a kind lady at Lord Stirling Park in Basking Ridge who provided us with an alternate route around the flooded roadway.

Thanks for reading this post, and take good care of yourselves.