Kõrvemaa

Morgan and I travelled to egviidu for an overnighter. We stayed at Kõrvemaa keskus, which while not your coziest tourist farm -- more of a sports base -- is well-situated and has the necessary Wifi in case I had leftover energy to get some work done.

The biggest luxury of being out of the city has got to be the fact that, after inspecting an area for bodies of water and nettles and Sosnovski karuputk or what have you, you can plop a kid down and you don't have to worry about them every second. All of a sudden the radius is 200 m or even more if you have line of sight.

Morgan turns into a completely different person outside. It's like his games expand to their natural size. Whereas they might seems a little cramped or even incomprehensible indoors (he uses a lot of placeholders to symbolize stuff and it isn't always the obvious choice) a game of house make more sense in the architecture of the forest. (More arguments for getting out of the city.) I also noticed that gone is the "cautious" toddler we knew from our trip out West last year. At Kõrvemaa, he charged down an embankment that was more of an overgrown cliff face, though sandy, no potential for any harm. (I feel obliged to add these disclaimers for American readers, "charged down a cliff face" might raise eyebrows.)

The forests here are pretty deep, part of the Kõrvemaa complex that extends 20 km north clear across to the Narva highway, then continues as Lahemaa National Park. Morgan doesn't quite have the concept of "lost" down, and still shows a tendency to go off trail. We will be on your standard 18-inch width forest trail a kilometre out, and still he will say, "let's gp into the forest". So I indulge him, and we follow a faint herd path where a deer has trod on some ferns and still he wants to plumb deeper.

I'm a little concerned that he always seems to get sick at the slightest bit of fresh air. I sometimes have a dark suspicion that his immune system is stressed from the city. It's probably unfounded, but I know no one chills him. In this case, temperatures in the 70s and there was little wind. Maybe he doesn't know how to take it easy and exhausts himself. He also stopped taking naps when he turned 2 and rarely seems to need a time out. We climbed Valgehobusemägi, a 103 m prominence -- for his size it was probably like a Virginia mountain. I let him lead the way, but maybe it was too much.

Incidentally: Morgan was sleeping by 9pm, despite the light (at home we have covered over the windows), slept deeply until midnight, during which I vegged and got no work done. At midnight I fell asleep. When he awoke briefly at 1am, I couldn't get back to sleep until 3am. At 5:15 am the sun was brilliant in our room and that was all anyone was going to sleep. Typical night when it's the two of us. I don't know what I would do without my wife, hire a sleep attendant (do they have those?) I guess.