Niki's Blog

Spray Park

2011-08-27T16:20:00.000-07:00

We're pretty much just letting summer pass us by without worrying about it a whole lot.

My business was booked full in July and August, and now that my last August person has had a baby, I find myself with some unexpected birth-free time for a little while, which is nice. I didn't plan it. I had planned to take September clients, but one turned out to be due in August, one moved, and one risked out of my care. So here I am, with nobody due until October.

And since I can't catch up all at once anyway, CHUBBLE PICTURES!!! My dad is in town, and we spent part of the day at the spray park.

Crabble

2011-07-17T08:48:00.000-07:00

"Crabble" being, of course, a mashup of the words "crabby" and "chubble." Which is how I've spent my last few days, wrangling a completely crabby Chubble. One who also won't sleep for more than an hour and a half at a time and wants to nurse constantly. She wasn't this hard to deal with as a newborn.

She makes up for it, mostly, in cuteness. Except that she's 15 months old, and all 15 month old toddlers are unintentional punks.

Actually, I was letting her play with the bitty cast iron skillet because we'd been talking about them in a group I'm in, and it reminded me that we had one. We haven't used it for years; there's nothing I'd make in quantities that small! So she happily filled it with toys and walked it around the kitchen while I started making these:

(Recipe here: http://smittenkitchen.com/2010/04/homemade-pop-tarts/)

That was, unfortunately, pretty much the only time during all of yesterday that she wasn't either on me or screaming because I'd dared put her down to do something so trivial as pee.

A little bit hashed today. We started a huge project in the girls' room a couple of days ago; we moved out their broken dressers, put shelves in the closet, and have been sorting clothing ever since. If it weren't for Crabble, this probably would have been a one-day project. But folding/sorting is hard to do with a complaining toddler in your lap, and BittyPrincess is, at 6, not exactly proficient at knowing whether any particular piece of clothing is still wearable. I really wanted to finish BittyPrincess' half of the closet today, but apparently Crabble is still in full force and it is very unlikely we'll accomplish anything at all, much less a bunch of finicky reorganization.

Camping at Penrose

2011-07-12T15:25:00.001-07:00

This past weekend we packed up and went camping at Penrose Point State Park with another family.

And here are some photos:

Prettyfying

2011-07-12T15:11:00.000-07:00

Not that "prettyfying" is a word or anything...but still, the concept is obvious. We have a very ugly hot tub cover in our side yard, and we waited for a forecast of 3 consecutive sunny days:

Planned:

Took a break:

Or two:

Chalked and painted:

And now the hot tub cover is lovely.

Of course, a couple of days later our landlord called to say she'd finally arranged to have the defunct hot tub removed. We've been living here almost 3 years, so of course as soon as we decided to do something fun with it... Luckily, the whole cover lifts up, so we moved it to another part of the yard, propped it up on old deck foundation, and leveled it.

Zoo

2011-07-02T08:21:00.000-07:00

Well, we went to the zoo yesterday, but who knew it was actually a photo shoot for Chubble?

We do have pictures of everybody. Just mostly of her. Poor neglected big kids.

Us, Divided

2011-06-18T18:23:00.000-07:00

Last week, Chubble and I went off to Wisconsin for my grandmother's memorial service. It was a sweet little service and it was great to see family. In particular, my grandpa, who is so much older and frailer than he was when last we saw him, 6 years ago. Chubble got to see her little same-age cousins, which was fun; I saw family members I haven't seen in 6 or more years also.

Meanwhile, Francesco and the other three kids went to Oregon as planned to meet up with his mom/stepdad and all the siblings/cousins down there. By all accounts they had an incredible time. He had the camera and came back with it full; I've invited him to guest blog here, but we'll see if he actually does it.

Anyway. I can't write their experience, but I can write mine.

We had minor travel drama, and instead of getting into Madison (where my dad is spending the summer) in the early afternoon, we rolled in a bit past 10pm. We stayed at my dad's efficiency rental and had a surprisingly good night, took a walk in the morning, and then headed out for the memorial service. It was a little service in a sweet old tiny church. My dad dreads speaking in public but did it anyway, and I am proud of him for it. Elaina fussed just as he was getting towards the end of what he was saying, but it seemed like she and her three same-age cousins were tag-teaming the noisemaking during the service, and nobody seemed to mind.

I was perhaps not as close to my grandparents as I'd liked to have been. Certainly not as close as my cousins, who lived nearby, were.

My grandma (dad's mom) died in April. Grandpa wasn't aware of it, because he was coming off a major surgery and was hallucinating, so they couldn't tell him. They holding off memorial services until he was aware enough to plan it and well enough to attend it, which was last weekend.

Grandma suffered from Alzheimers, severe enough that she would have been unable to recognize me or the kids for quite some time. It feels like the relationship died long before she did, and although there is still sadness, there's also a hope that whatever happens after death, she's just as whole mentally now as she ever was before this disease.

Doris B. Judd, age 86 of Presque Isle, WI died on Friday April 22, 2011 at Our Home K-Care in Lac du Flambeau, WI. Doris was born on January 13, 1925 in Missouri the daughter of Earl and Edith (nee Tate) Hutchings.
She married Claude I. Judd on December 27, 1947 in Madison, WI.
Doris enjoyed traveling and spending time “Up North” with her best friend and husband, Claude of 63 years. They retired to Presque Isle in 1989 to their home on Armour Lake. She was a devoted wife, mother and grandmother. Doris had the greatest joy by doing things for and with her family. She created an annual “kids week” to spend time with all of the grandchildren and made many special memories with them.
She is survived by her husband, Claude of Presque Isle, WI and by their children: Tom (Karel) of Hayward, WI; Mike (Gwen) of Honolulu, HI; Carol (Robert Kelley) Judd of Muskego, WI; Kathy (John) Sitkiewitz of Presque Isle, WI and Steve (Cheryl) of Stone Lake, WI and by 11 Grandchildren and 16 Great Grandchildren. Further survived by 1 Sister, Mary Skaggs and 2 Brothers, Jim and Richard Hutchings and many other relatives and friends.
She was preceded in death by her parents and by 1 Sister: Margaret Young and 3 Brothers: John, Robert and Carroll Hutchings.
In lieu of flowers memorials to the Alzheimer’s Association.

We visited the sweet, tiny graveyard in Belleville WI where her ashes will be buried.

Afterwards, we all got together for dinner and a few hours of visiting at a hotel. My Grandpa, once so vital and invincible in my eyes, seemed a deflated person; he seemed much more himself when we saw him at breakfast the next day. Getting this short contact gave me very little feel for how he is doing. The idea that I may have had less contact with him than perhaps he deserved weighs pretty heavily on me now.

In one particularly sad moment, he said "you and your family must come to visit us...I guess it's just me, just me now." I told him we would visit just him, too, but honestly don't know when we can. My brief trip gave me a hunger to expand our family's horizons a bit, but that takes resources that right now, we don't have.

Elaina and I returned home just in time for me to go on call again, take her to a few prenatal visits (this went OK, not spectacularly but OK), and try to keep her occupied for a few days until Francesco and the other kids returned from Oregon.

They got back yesterday. Real life resumes.

Busy Busy Busy

2011-06-03T08:43:00.000-07:00

Starting a business is expensive. I know this isn't a surprise for anyone. I just had to say it because damn, starting a business is expensive.

Also, writing or updating my handouts and consent documents is time consuming. And I've never been the best at writing for a low literacy level; in fact, I tend to assume that even if everyone can't quite read as well as I can, most of them will understand what I'm saying. I think I was suitably unsurprised - visibly anyway - the first time someone said "what's my rectum?" and I straight-faced answered "your butt-hole," but those types of incidents still seem like random funny stories and not so much like things that might happen when people read what I've written. I scoff at authors who write simple sentence upon simple sentence (ahem, Terry Goodkind), only to find myself challenged to do the same.

Chubble (now a toddler) is very distracting. She just locked herself in my bathroom. While it might be convenient to leave her there for a bit...no. Even on my worst day I'm not that mean.

Anyway, pictures. Yes, you're going to have to deal with a lot of Chubble pictures.

Let us first go back in time, a whole month, to right before we left Hawaii. Here are the girls getting their hair dyed purple:

Chubble loves to be outside. And like the little Pacific Northwest child that she is, she loves the rain.

She ran around the deck licking rainwater off all the patio furniture (it's relatively clean here, no worries).

She spent about an hour out there trying to splash or lick or drink all the water, and we have many photos, but I think you get the idea.

Here we are at the park. I am not quite sure why I like this photo so much, but I do. Maybe because Chubble is a little blotch of pink in the Pacific Northwest color scheme.

She LOVES the slide. She's happy, I promise.

See?

:)

Boyness and Chubble, wearing matching expressions:

You can't really tell, but she's rolling down a hill:

Let's do it again!

Why hello, BittyPrincess! I've had a heck of a time getting this child to brush her hair lately. So much so, that we cut it really short just to try and make it easier. For quite a while she was wearing hoodies and hats and trying to sneak out of the house with her tangled mess of hair covered, but it's getting warmer out and besides, a head covering of any sort on that child is now a dead giveaway.

So, in the meantime, prenatal appointments and home visits. Gardening. Cleaning. Childrearing of various sorts. The kids had their big bad standardized tests and once again, the lowest anyone scored on anything was 93rd percentile. The big two both need orthodontic work (yay, more expense! totally not covered by any sort of insurance we have). Life life life.

The Words

2011-05-01T15:01:00.000-07:00

It hasn't escaped my notice that I have posted very few words lately. I just don't have it in me, I think, not with all the noise and hubbub and toddlering going on around here lately.

Our trip to Hawaii was lovely, but also, I have a toddler. She gets into everything, needs naps, and doesn't let me take pictures. It was a sharp contrast from last year, when I spent many hours reading in the shade while the kids played in the pool. Towards the end of our trip, I was really looking forward to baby gates, to handing Chubble off to Francesco, and of course, to my own bed.

Somewhere in the complete madness of the last few weeks, we've flown past the opening notes of Spring, past Easter, and even past Chubble's first birthday. All a blur.

Easter

2011-04-26T14:52:00.000-07:00

Beach

2011-04-25T14:48:00.000-07:00

Around the Isle

2011-04-20T14:44:00.000-07:00

Judd Trail, and Shave Ice

2011-04-19T14:37:00.000-07:00

Hiking on the (quite short) (loop) Judd trail. The poor baby got totally devoured by mosquitoes (the kids counted 23 bites the next day). The rest of us got 1-2 bites each.

Afterwards, we stopped by Johns Store for shave ice; it had been closed the first week we were in Hawaii, and FINALLY the kids got their shave ice!

Honolulu Zoo

2011-04-17T14:32:00.000-07:00

Girliness really likes this photo for some reason, and tells me that I am obligated to add it:

So. Honolulu Zoo. Hotter than hell, as usual.

Bishop Museum

2011-04-14T14:25:00.000-07:00

The day was hot, and the kids were sunburnt and tired.

So off we went to Bishop Museum, where they had dinosaurs on exhibit. Not really sure what the kids were doing here...

Either Chubble really likes dinosaurs, or she thinks they are dogs. Not sure which. Either way, she kept waving and saying "hi" at them.

This picture is intended for a specific person. You know who you are:

Totally obsessed with getting as much of her body as possible through the railing...

Hawaiian goose attack!

Elaina (Chubble) Turns One!

2011-04-12T14:20:00.000-07:00

We really should have gotten more photos of this event...especially the birthday cake part. But since Francesco was home in Washington and we were in Hawaii with my family, we were video conferencing during the actual birthday song etc part of the party.

For her birthday, Chubble went to the beach (loved it). She got her very own plate of spaghetti noodles all to herself (also loved it). She didn't so much care about her own piece of birthday cake. And I'm pretty sure she was just as excited about ripping the tissue wrap that was in her present bag as she was about the presents themselves.

I can't believe it's already been a year.

My brother and his wife had a baby

2011-04-11T14:11:00.000-07:00

And even though I missed the event itself, of course we wanted to see :)

So, after hauling 4 kids across 2000 miles of ocean (in an airplane, but still...)

We arrived late at night, crashed, and woke up too early to see the baby, so they swam:

And then, finally, some baby cuddles!

Sunny Day Adventures

2011-04-09T09:15:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was the first day of the year that was both sunshiney and warm enough to play outside. So we did, at ~L~s house, all day.

Chubble departing from the EVIL TENT OF DOOM (all the other kids like it; she hated it):

There is SUNSHINE on the BABY'S FACE. Has this happened yet this year? She might even GET WARM!

Loungin:

Girlies all together (Girliness is just out of the frame):

Ooooh, dirt:

Chubble warms up to the crawling tunnel:

Meanwhile, BittyPrincess has been steadily eating her body weight in overwintering kale:

No really, she loves the stuff...

I don't know what they're talking about, but clearly there is a conversation happening:

Boyness has been spending this whole time tromping around the backyard playing, but has managed to tick off EVERY other child by stomping on someone's play island:

And Chubble is getting dirtier, and dirtier:

And then finally passes out:

She is REALLY out. I think she must have been dreaming of dirt...

I went to go take pictures of the boys playing with the tent and with the dog, but the camera ran out of battery. So we missed both that and any additional cuteness, although really it was just more of the same for the rest of the day.

Nonsense

2011-04-02T19:04:00.000-07:00

I don't have anything to say, really. Well, I do, but it's hard to encompass here. So instead, I'll just photobomb.

Chubble finds spring...interesting.

Boyness has good balance:

And again...

Hi BittyPrincess:

Hi Cubble:

Hehe, you're WET:

Cute

Sleeping in the baby backpack:

Flash forward, BittyPrincess:

I knit that hat! The loose end is probably only 'cause she wears it constantly and it's been washed at least 10 times.

And a final bit of awesome:

This week, this day, this hour

2011-03-20T17:13:00.000-07:00

I am so, so overwhelmed with all there is to do these days. "One day at a time" gives way to "one hour at a time" sometimes, and I often find myself sitting at the end of a day and wondering where all those hours have gone.

Still, in the midst of all this business-starting and practice-starting drudgery, there are signs that we're about to wake up.

When I lived in Hawaii and seasons were mild (almost, if you weren't paying attention, nonexistant), I didn't understand the concept of spring cleaning. Here, now, when we are coming out of the bulk of our 266-or-so days of overcast weather a year, and when the unexpected rays of light blind our poor maladapted children and stream into our windows to illuminate streaks on the the wall and stains on the floor and some spaghetti sauce from last week on the stove backsplash and *gasp* how have I not noticed my door is blue before!?....here, in the PNW, there is TOTALLY such a thing as spring cleaning. Last week I wound up scrubbing walls while the baby slid herself around the floor in the (nontoxic, no worries folks) cleaning solution. Not 100% productive considering I have a month of business expenses to log.

So far this year, my business expenses exceed my income 6:1. I'm not SUPER worried about it because just one full payment will bring me equal, and I've now purchased the bulk of my necessary supplies. It was a huge worry of mine that I'd get to the point where I'd be needing to attend births and not have the money to buy something I needed to feel safe, but I am past that now - both because I've bought the bulk of my supplies, and because I know I have people out there who have my back if I really need something. Still, there's always something that needs to be paid for. Malpractice insurance. Drugs. Office rent. Everyfreakinglittlethingelse.

Our van is dying. No, really, we've heard from reliable sources that the transmission is on its last legs (or last miles, or whatever), and we're shopping for a 7+ passenger vehicle, which is a surprisingly difficult endeavor.

It all sounds a little sad, writing out out, but really it isn't; it's just BUSY. Really, really busy. Not enough brainpower to fuel the blog on a regular basis kind of busy.

Through it all the kids grow and learn and change, and we try to grab as much as we possibly can. As happy as we are right now it's hard to regret how busy our lives have been, and still we go, go, go, go.

DITL 1/27/2011

2011-01-29T08:52:00.001-08:00

I've been wanting to do one of these for a while, but could never seem to remember early enough in the day. So when, two days ago, I remembered only a few minutes after waking up, I thought "why not?" Here follows a totally unremarkable day in my (and my kids') life. Taking pictures of everylittlething was totally easy, what is a PITA is the chunk of day it's taking to post about it.

So. 7:30. Francesco has left for work, I'm up, and the baby is still asleep:

I head to the kitchen to get my coffee started.

And then to the den to move furniture around a little. I'd steam-cleaned the carpet the day before, and the chairs and small bookshelves had been shoved into the laundry room to make space, so I brought them back out while I was waiting for the coffee to finish.

It's done now, computer time.

The baby is awake now, she shares the beans that I'm eating for breakfast (I'd looked through the fridge, nothing appealed...grabbed the beans...)

She wants some of my water too.

Of course.

Meanwhile, the big kids are waking up and eating breakfast, and have settled into playing the Wii for a little bit while I'm trying to do computer-y things downstairs.

But the baby is needy :)

And distracting.

It's starting to lighten up outside.

And it's time for the kids to get off the Wii and do some work, but first we need to go from this:

To this:

The girls do math (Boyness has elected reading time in his room).

Nummies again.

And another round of playing.

And we're out.

It's 11:30, and I'm starting lunch.

And switching some laundry.

We're playing musical rugs today. I hated the white/green one that had been in the den, so we're getting rid of it. The red one from under the dining table is temporarily in the kitchen, because I need to steam clean it and I'm scared it will turn the cream-colored carpet under it pink.

So it's not under the dining table anymore.

So the one that used to be on the living room floor goes there.

And then we break for lunch.

The baby is still asleep, so I start steam cleaning.

Chubble wakes up.

Girliness starts packing for a sleepover she's going to tonight.

It's over an hour since we started lunch and BittyPrincess is still eating. This is typical for her.

I am SO SICK of the big boxes in the living room, but the kids love their box village. We're getting rid of them soon...

Boyness and BB...(they're actually really sweet together usually...)

A little bit of knitting time.

Before ditching Chubble with Girliness.

And heading off to the shower myself, finally, at 1pm.

We're about ready to leave the house and do some errands, but first I switch the laundry.

And pack the backpack.

And gather the library returns.

To the car!

Aw, fuck.

It's 1:55 and we're finally actually out of the house.

At the library.

We check out and leave within 5 minutes of getting there.

We go to Goodwill to drop off stuff. We go in to look around, but leave without buying anything.

At Home Depot, we meet ~L~ and family.

I get scrap stuff to fix the girls' dressers.

And we say goodbye to Girliness.

I gather the remaining offspring, and we head off to Target.

I am very glad that Chubble sits in a cart now, because she's really heavy...

Our Target haul:

And on to Office Depot.

Our Office Depot haul:

Phew, home.

Laundry again.

Unloading the van.

Chubble is tired.

And then she's asleep. It's 5:45 pm.

I start up the computer again, and try to get onto the DSHS New Provider Enrollment system again.

Just after seeing this highly satisfying message...

...Chubble wakes up complaining.

So I give up for the time being and start dinner. I'm just making some spinach to go alongside the leftover spaghetti we're eating.

Chubble, wrestling with noodles.

The kids go back to playing Wii for a little while so that I can work on my applications.

I get started. The site is up! OMG!!! I'd better hurry before the stupid thing crashes again!!! I grab my assorted not-very-well-organized official-papers-and-bills-and-stuff basket.

Of course, I get help.

But I don't care. Because I get that online enrollment done. Finally. Nursing time.

=recreational computer time for me.

She's done, so I go sort through the new office supplies.

Meanwhile, BittyPrincess is STILL eating.

The red carpet is dry now. So the den has no carpet...

...and then it has a carpet! And Francesco gets home, so it has one of those too. Plus it's about time to start cleaning up for the evening, so the den gets tidied.

I do some dishes. Technically it's Girliness' turn, but she's away for the night.

Francesco takes the kids off to get ready for bed; it's 9:45.

I get the dining room clean.

And then the kitchen.

The kids are reading with Francesco:

I grab the baby and get her down for the night.

Oh yeah, the laundry.

I fold and watch a show.

And then off to bed, myself.

Tardy

2011-01-27T19:08:00.000-08:00

So I'll just jump in then, ok? Not that you have a choice in the matter. It's my blog. Neener.

Last week my brother, Uncle P, came to visit. We did lots of fun things, including doing the full rounds (Art Museum, History Museum, and Glass Museum) on Tacoma's free Third Thursday program, but the day that we got documentation was the day we took the ferry from Bremerton to Seattle to visit the Science Center (where they were having a special model train exhibition) and the Experience Music Project (which is just cool).

Uncle P and Girliness looking eerily alike on the ferry:

How very PNW the day was...

A rare picture of me, with BittyPrincess. Looking cold, because we were.

At the Science Center, BittyPrincess' favorite was, of course, the playmobil train. There were SO many set up, and I can't help but think that it was a LOT of work for an exhibition that only lasted one weekend. Still, it was pretty cool, and I don't even really care about model trains. Francesco does, though, and has a lot of old ones from his childhood either laying around in our garage or in his dad's storage, which he now wants to get out and rebuild with the kids.

Hey, check out the old guy wearing a Chubble-clone (complete with carrier that's almost-but-not-quite like mine):

So, we had a pretty decent day. We, in fact, had a few more-than-decent days, and then we bid Uncle P farewell so that he could go check out law schools and talk to friends and whatever impressive things it is that he does when he isn't dealing with my kids.

Does 'Scribble' Start with A?

2011-01-27T10:04:00.000-08:00

I asked BittyPrincess to draw something that started with A after practicing writing her letters. "Does 'scribble' start with A?"

This pretty much sums up what's been going on with my blog lately, and I don't have anyone to say "nope, no internets/snacks/coffee until you do your work!"

Still, somewhere between my "buried in business start-up paperwork and busy-work" and my not terribly unique (but useful) "CLEAN ALL THE THINGS" brand of procrastination, fun stuff is happening that I really should document somehow.

Later.

Push

2011-01-15T09:47:00.000-08:00

I officially opened my business, Gig Harbor Midwifery. I have a client enrolled; having that first visit at my office was pretty much the highlight of last week. My website isn't up yet, my office is a wreck, and my lab accounts are supposed to be up and running, but I can't sign on to check that until Monday. The Washington State DSHS provider application I sent in (electronically) apparently got lost in some kind of crazy system conversion shitstorm, and now I can't access anything there, which is stressing me out more than a little.

My to-do list is extraordinary in that it has many things on it and many of them are daunting in either difficulty or expense.

But I'm doing this, damnit, I am. Come hell, high water, debt, or bureaucracy.

Boyness Goes to Hawaii

2011-01-06T17:09:00.000-08:00

I should really post this after the fact with some pictures, but I don't know if he's even taking any. As long as he's enjoying his time, I don't care how he documents it.

He left with my sister after her visit and will stay for just over a week. We video conferenced last night and I think he was MUCH more interested in seeing the baby than in seeing me. My feelings aren't hurt; I like that the kids are so attached.

When you take any one of the kids out of the house, the usual bickering cycle that they all set up together short-circuits and happiness and calmness tend to prevail (this is true no matter which child is removed). So I'm hoping for a week+ of very productive business creation time that I get to feel completely not guilty about, because it isn't like Boyness is banished; he's wanted to go to Hawaii for an alone visit forever and thrives on the kind of 1:1 attention he'll be getting there.

Paper, Paper, Everywhere

2011-01-06T17:02:00.000-08:00

But not a contract to...um, bill? Advertise with? The saying fails me. Still, here I sit amidst piles of paper. As I printed out several hundred pages of user manual for the Department of Social and Health Services Provider One Enrollment (the actual enrollment takes place online, this is *just the user manual* weighing more than any novel I own, and I own some doozies) I thought "wow, how on earth could I need all of this paper to tell me how to fill in an online application? Turns out, I STILL have questions about what on earth some of their acronyms mean and how they apply to me (and yet I am assured they do).

My to-do list is extraordinarily long and boring to everyone but me (to whom it is daunting and somewhat panic inducing).

So, that's where I am. Like, forever.

That Crazy Christmas Post

2010-12-26T09:58:00.000-08:00

First, baby in a ball! Yes, she's happy:

While I am very much aware that there are about 5 billion of these posts on the internetz right now, and that my family's Christmas isn't super special, I still can't help myself. Besides, this is my photo book, so you'll just have to suck it up and suffer through another Christmas post. Unless you click away. That's fine too.

BittyPrincess' birthday is the 22nd, but her party was on the 21st. Our big Christmas/Solstice/Whateverthehell Party was on the 22nd. It was pretty well attended this year.

There's nothing spectacular about the photo that follows. It does, however, look like a stock photo for "party," which I find amusing.

They partied till they dropped:

The parents looked pretty droopy too, but for their sakes I'm not going to post that photo (it was funny though).

I love this nursing photo and don't know why it refuses to rotate:

Final head-count at our party was 29, and the damages were minimal. Excellent.

That night, the baby didn't sleep. NOT COOL Chubble. I know you're growing and all, but nobody needs to eat every half hour.

Babysat on the 23rd.

Went and hung out with ~L~ and family on the 24th, and then came home when Francesco got off work at 5pm to have dinner together, and eat gingerbread houses:

And watch a movie with some Christmas cookies and milk:

We rolled the kids into their beds at around 10pm (normal for us), but then had to wait until 11:30 before we could actually bring out presents and get things set up. So it was 2am before we had all the Santa gifts arranged. And we got the kids (and us) a Wii for Christmas, and needed to hook that up too. And then we almost forgot to eat cookies and drink milk and all of that holiday-feel-good stuff that the kids would totally be ruined if we didn't do.

Chubble didn't sleep again.

Thankfully, the kids didn't get up until 8:30.

Before the kids dug in:

Canwegocanwegocanwego!?

It's like Christmas!

Chubble didn't quite get it.

She kind of reacted like a baby, and kept checking something out for half a second before noticing something else.

Santa brought hot chocolate:

Meanwhile, Chubble was still at it:

She wouldn't rip wrapping paper. She wouldn't eat it either. She loves gift bags, though!

We should totally have taken video of the kids opening the Wii box (we'd hidden the console after we set it up, and made them open our presents last). But alas, we didn't think of it, so you'll just have to take my word for it: they had a totally gratifying running-screaming-jumping-around-the-room reaction.

And after all that craziness ("this is the best Christmas EVER!!!!"), we headed over to Nana's for some more present-exchanging and some lasagna.

We managed to leave by 5:30, which is a much earlier escape than we've managed in years previous, but we were TIRED. Basking the glow of happy post-Christmas kids this morning. And doing laundry.

Happy Birthday BittyPrincess!

2010-12-22T10:48:00.000-08:00

6 years old, awesome! We celebrated with a girlie sleepover, a trip to Jump Gig Harbor (awesome, by the way), pizza with the 5/6yo brigade, and cupcakes not just once but twice; once with the 5/6yo crowd:

And once later with the family:

Thank you Auntie Betsy!!! This photo wins Best Present-Opening Reaction for the day:

And because (at least until she's one) no post is complete without some Chubble...it turns out Chubble LOVES having little bows stuck to her head. Like, she got mad at us if we tried to take them back.

Santa

2010-12-19T21:26:00.000-08:00

Gingerbread House-ing

2010-12-19T21:16:00.000-08:00

From scratch, even! We got our recipe here:

http://homecooking.about.com/od/cookierecipes/r/blcookie111.htm

I then proceeded to not really follow it; I added 8 cups of flour in the mixer and the kneaded in the final cup. I didn't pre-cook gingerbread slabs; I rolled them out on parchment paper, cut patterns, and lifted away the excess. It worked out fabulously. Except that I forgot that gingerbread takes like an hour to bake, so instead of doing one more project before bed, I wound up waking up to get the final batch out of the oven and saving the decorating for the next day.

And our house part pattern here:

http://justgingerbread.com/patterns/small1.jpg
http://justgingerbread.com/patterns/small2.jpg

All laid out, ready to bake! Extra flour courtesy of BittyPrincess, who took my advice to add a little flour if she felt like it was sticking to her hands a little too seriously.

Houses, assembled, with remarkably little drama considering there were three kids, me, and a baby at work:

Starting to decorate. Apparently this is hot work, because Boyness has no shirt on. Then again, any excuse...

Buying off Chubble midway through:

The almost-finished wreckage (it got WORSE after this, believe it or not):

YAY, gingerbread houses!!!

Dada Time!

2010-12-17T20:20:00.000-08:00

I don't really have anything to say, I just have pictures. So, yup. Daddy Time.

And bottled beer:

A new bed for Chubble:

And yes, she was in it at the time:

More Daddy Time, at Zoolights:

Last bit of Chubble cuteness for the day:

Phew

2010-12-09T18:11:00.000-08:00

Someday, the kids will appreciate the fact that I just spent several hours perched on a ladder trying to get the #(@*#&$(*#&$ lights up. For now, I just hope they enjoy the magic.

Tree Time

2010-12-08T11:59:00.000-08:00

On our annual trip to Alpine U-Cut Tree Farm:

0, 5, 9, 10 - or Happy Birthday Boyness

2010-12-03T07:35:00.000-08:00

0, 5, 9, and 10 are the ages of my children, now that Boyness has turned nine.

Nine suddenly feels pretty old. He was still kind of stuck in little-kid land, at least in my head, until the moment I said "YAY, you're NINE!" and then stood in my living room all thunderstruck like a complete idiot as I realized that my boy was NINE.

He's learned to milk the birthday machine, at least a little (next year's revision will be to invite more friends, he says, although I'm not sure I agree with that one). "We can have a family party when daddy is off the day before my birthday, and then we'll have my friends come have a real party on my real birthday, and then I'll go to Nana's house and have my birthday sleepover the day after."

Luckily the family party consisted of hot dogs and rootbeer floats.

For his and-friends party, he wanted balloons. Many, many balloons. I HATE balloons - not so much the actual fact of them, not blowing them up, not even them popping, what I hate is the kids fighting with them and the fact that there are balloons in the house for a month after any given birthday; and aside from the fact that I would experience a wash of pure balloon-hatred every time I saw one, we plan to have two more parties here this month. So we compromised. I contained all the balloons on strands, and the kids took turns throwing a dart at them until there was not a single balloony survivor floating around waiting to start a fight:

When Boyness turned 5 I wrote: "In a conversation containing 1000 words, 449 of those will be "Star Wars,"" and this is still essentially true if you add the word "lego" immediately before "Star Wars." Given that fact, it's no real surprise that he liked his birthday presents so much:

And just because I can't let a whole post go without some Chubble...last night as we were cleaning up, BittyPrincess left a bowl of extra frosting a little too close, and this is what happened:

By Way of Explanation

2010-12-01T08:01:00.000-08:00

This is what happens when I try to sit at the computer and get something done:

And that is why my posts are few and my grammar and syntax are terrible.

Picturefied

2010-11-29T08:17:00.001-08:00

I didn't realize I had some more photos on my camera, so I'm going to go ahead and post them now.

In unrelated news, shortly before clicking into the blog editor I went to get my coffee, and spilled some on myself, fresh out of the coffeemaker. I have a barely-blistering burn on my belly (say that five times fast). Not cool.

On with the pictures. Chubble LOVES her sink bath. She loves it SO MUCH. She will splash around in there for half an hour or more. And this is what it looks like:

Feel free to laugh. She's quite happy in there and I'm quite glad to get half an hour to sit on the floor next to the sink and read-or-something. I'm waiting for her to figure out that she can't move anymore; she's already figured out that if she locks her legs I can't get her out.

I had pictures on the camera from our snow last week. Here's one I took the day before one of those trees (if I was all smart and photo-y I'd circle which one it was, but I'm not) fell into the neighbor's fence.

Chubble was...underwhelmed...by all the snow:

She preferred watching the big kids play through the window (I actually put her in a high chair and she sat there laughing at them for at least an hour), or riding around in my jacket:

And finally:

That is my very first attempt-in-progress at homebrewing my own beer, right after pitching the yeast. Because I'm stubborn and because the kits seemed a little too pre-packaged, I had someone (I think he's the owner) at the semi-local brew shop make up a package with fresh-milled grains and whole hops; this one is his Hefeweizen. This morning it is happily bubbling away.

PS - pay no attention to the incredibly ugly wallpaper. It's in my laundry room where I don't have to look at it often.

Carabiner Lovies and Other Stories

2010-11-27T16:58:00.000-08:00

I blinked and November passed. It's actually a little scary how that happened.

Chubble is attached to a carabiner; and by this I do not mean that my convenient new babyproofing method is to utilize one of the aforementioned objects to secure her out of harm's way, I mean that she has developed an emotional attachment to a blue carabiner. The other day she whacked her head on the counter trying to dive to it. I refuse to sleep with a carabiner or to have one snuggled against my breast while she nurses, so we'll see how long this lasts.

In the beginning of November, some of our extended family visited. We had a fantastic time despite the fact that I have four children and they ("they" being my children and not the more distant relations in this exchange) are difficult to do anything with. I haven't forgotten to send them the information they requested (not sure if they read this blog), I've just apparently lost all of November somewhere.

The blog has been more than a little neglected, mostly because I think things like "oh, I'll just wait until I can pay attention to it for a few minutes," and that never happens. So now I'm typing while I'm making Green Goo - that gloriously green herbal salve that will hopefully solve all of Chubble's skin issues - and kind of thinking "this sucks, but at least I'm posting." I've also been taking other endeavors in bite-sized chunks, which has resulted in the completion of a small handful of knitting projects (me! knitting!) and a couple of smallish sewing projects; primary in my mind right now is the one in which I altered a pair of Chubble's pants to be shorter and wider, a project that came out well but took significantly longer than it would have taken to just make her some new pants "from scratch."

Our power went out in a tiny storm earlier this month. It gave me a good excuse to start a fire and pretend like I was roughing it even though the baby and I got to have a fire, managed to make coffee, were plenty warm, and finished a knitting project.

Here's Chubble "helping" me knit:

And our "roughing it" setup. Note the coffee press.

My very-second completed knitting project: a hat for Chubble:

Our hot water heater is half broken. One of the heating elements isn't working. Our landlord is trying to figure out how to call in warranty service.

We had a nice snow, and then a wind storm where we didn't lose power, but did lose a tree into the neighbor's fence. Francesco and the big kids spent Thanksgiving morning helping clean up the tree and fix the fence. We then departed to MIL's, where we had a great time despite too many people and despite the fact that MIL asked me not to bring anything but then bought pies from the store (which I find mildly offensive given that I, in my own not-terribly-humble opinion, make one mean pie). Still, getting stuffed silly and having the kids behave is, indeed, my idea of fun.

Hmmmm.

Also on the topic of things-we-did-this-month: we went to the Pacific Science Center twice; once with our own family and a friend, and once with Aunty Betsy when she came to visit (the child-asshatness that the kids - particularly Boyness - indulged in when she was here would be worth a post of its own, if I ever posted). It was more than a little fun the first time we went, and then way too crowded the second.

Cubble enjoyed the baby play zone surprisingly much.

She flaps her arms when she's excited, like she's going to fly off or something:

BittyPrincess managed to learn something, go Science Center!

The big kids' favorite the first time (the second time there were too many people for it to be really fun) was the spelling game:

Oh look, small spaces are fun:

We left right at rush hour and tried to stall for a bit at the fountain. And yes, the kids ran around trying (not) to get wet.

I think that brings us approximately to date in a weird muddled kind of way. And if anyone has read this instead of just glancing at pictures and being done with it, I will be mightily surprised.

More later

2010-11-05T09:04:00.001-07:00

Happy Halloween!

2010-11-01T09:49:00.000-07:00

We ran a veritable Halloween gauntlet this year: a party on the 30th, a big downtown event in the early afternoon on the 31st, and then your standard trick-or-treating stuff.

I was fried. It was all I could do to make sure none of the children got misplaced or trampled. I didn't get pictures until after the kids were busy getting a sugar high and had undone half their costumes. Still, here they are:

Pumpkins, round 2

2010-10-31T09:57:00.000-07:00

We were a bit premature in carving our jack-o-lanterns this year. In consequence, they rotted on our mantle. So we tried again!

Chubble loves everything about pumpkins. It's hard to capture hyperexcited flapping-armed baby on camera, though, especially since Chubble isn't particularly photogenic.

Grabby

2010-10-25T11:18:00.000-07:00

Chubble has been in an interesting "grabby" stage for a while now, where she'll try to get her hands on anything we're working with...

Which means projects slapped off the table and other such irritations. Thankfully, it's also usually pretty cute, especially if she's trying like heck to grab a toy and not a phone/wallet/camera/other-thing-she-could-completely-destroy.

Anyway, merrily we roll along. Or not...Chubble doesn't roll yet, even though she sits well now. I think she just can't be bothered. No teeth yet (I happen to like the toothless phase, a lot). Wearing 24m or 2t, and that's not just about the humongous diaper butt, because her 12m long-sleeved shirts aren't exactly long-sleeved anymore. I can't remember weights/times, but I think she's giving her big brother a serious run for his biggest-baby ribbon, because she's wearing some of his old suspenders that I remember him wearing at around this stage, too, and they don't have a lot of wiggle room left.

BTW - I Voted

2010-10-23T18:14:00.000-07:00

And you should too. Just in case you haven't had enough reminders already! We live in an area where voting by mail is very easy, which is very convenient. Even if you don't...just do it! If you don't have any idea how to vote on a particular item, you can still weigh in on those things that matter to you, and just leave those things that you're clueless about blank.

Scarecrow Festival

2010-10-23T17:21:00.000-07:00

I was looking forward to this, because the location (Sehmel Homestead Park) and the theme both sounded really good to me. It turned out to be a rainy day, but nevertheless, we managed to have a good deal of fun. The Scarecrow Festival was a little light on scarecrows and a tiny bit heavy on a few companies advertising by offering their services for free, but the most important word in this sentence - at least so far as my broke-as-all-get-out family is concerned - is "free." It was that lovely sort of event where several very fun hours could pass without the kids whining at all about how they weren't getting to do X-thing-that-would-be-fun-but-costs-too-much. In fact, I brought cash along figuring that I'd have to pay for SOMETHING, but the laser tag, bounce houses/slides, and a modest amount of candy were all free.

Papa Visit, Rainier, Boy-Trip Failure

2010-10-17T08:48:00.000-07:00

This past week, we attempted to send Boyness to Hawaii. Not so far-fetched given that my whole family lives there, and my dad - who works for an airline - came for a visit and was going to bring Boyness home with him. The flight loads were all kinds of fucked up, though. Much guilt on the part of his parents (us) and his Papa. Much conciliatory "what do you want to do today?" activity. We'll be trying again in a few weeks, but will be waiting for optimally low flight loads - the main reason for this timing was that my dad was on the mainland already, not that the flights were particularly clear.

Browsing the toy stores - Boyness' choice of things-to-do on Friday afternoon - resulted in a whole lot of "I want" action. My convenient pass-phrase out of the whining became "OK, put it on your wish list!" Since Boyness is literate and able to go online (given how easy this is for him, I think the bar is set pretty low these days wrt what you can type into a search bar and still get a relevant result), he is now the proud owner of an Amazon Wish List: http://amzn.com/w/XE8G4HS2DBFH He begged me to share it, so there it is.

Well. So. Papa was supposed to stay for just a day, but due to overfull airplanes, wound up here for a bit longer, which we are extremely happy about. We don't see enough of my family.

The weather has pretty much been glorious all week. (Yesterday, in fact, managed to outdo every other day somehow and be *perfect*.) On Thursday, flights were so snarled that we gave up any pretense of trying to get anyone on an airplane, and we headed up to Mount Rainier National Park. I picked a hike that seemed pretty tame, one that we had already done the first little bit of a few times in the past. The elevation gain, however, turned out to be brutal, and the 2.7m each way turned into a 5 hour hike. BittyPrincess very seriously informed us, about 1/4 mile from finishing the hike, that she thought she was going to die. The hike was gorgeous; we started by crossing the Nisqually river, and then saw Carter and Madcap falls along the way before reaching our turn-around point at Narada Falls.

In the meantime, Francesco worked on his birthday - again - and then we went out to eat at like 9pm on a friday night, and it was a little crowded and loud, which isn't really our thing.

We've been feeding Chubble random bits of food from our meals, with great (highly excited happy non-choking baby) success. I realized as I gave her some rice with a little gravy on it that she is SUCH a fourth child, not that we were ever that particular type of parent that blends food and carefully feeds four meals a day spoon by spoon.

Close

2010-10-15T09:46:00.000-07:00

We do tend to make something of a big (day-long) deal of it when we hike. But we also have this cute little spot - McCormick Creek Park - right between the Y and our house, so when we had 2.5 hours to kill we went hiking around in there:

It has just enough up and down that you can really get a workout out of it, particularly if you chose to wind around the trails instead of picking a single loop. We drive past it at least three times a week, and regularly forget it's there. Maybe it's kind of like the trail behind our house (no really, the trailhead is 1/8 mile from our house and the trail goes through the forest behind us); if it's easy to get to, it somehow seems less attractive, despite the fact that (as our pictures attest), with a few exceptions for prior logging, elevation, and proximity to the coast, if-you've-seen-one-forest-you've-seen-them-all seems to apply here in Western Washington.

And the rain, rain, rain...

2010-10-09T17:47:00.000-07:00

The sounds of the rain are coming through my half-open window. It's like a particularly good white-noise machine, and I love it. Alas, I am missing some key ingredients to make some good soup for dinner, so pizza will have to suffice (once the oven gets up to temperature). Once upon a time we made our own pizza, and when I can be sure of an hour without having to hold the baby, I suppose we can again: this one is from Costco.

It's gorgeous outside in that "I'm really glad I'm INside" kind of way. We did venture out today, to see a doctor (AGAIN) about Boyness' ear (which now obviously sports an infection, for which we now possess the necessary pharmaceuticals), and to do some grocery shopping. I got one of the main ingredients for my favorite soup but alas, forgot the other. One of the perils of shopping with children; even with your grocery list firmly in mind, by the time you've said "PLEASE stop poking your brother" for the 50billionth time, you've forgotten to buy both milk and sausages and the trip has gone almost* completely to hell (*"almost" rather than "entirely" simply because you've managed to acquire a six-pack of pumpkin spiced beer, a pint of ice cream, and several donuts; none of these things have anything to do with one another, but they're all awesome).

*breathe* the baby is asleep, the rain is lovely, and the children are playing messily and loudly but happily in the den.

Our Tuesday was awesome and horrible at the same time. I couldn't really post about it earlier because I wasn't quite sure what to make of it. Tuesdays are usually "my" days, and Fran (true to form) got up and gathered the kids early to take them to his mom's despite the fact that he had some training-something (I try, as much as possible, not to pay attention to his work, just because I have enough to pay attention to already) and a lasik consult. They got about a mile down the road before the car just.stopped.going, though. I picked up the kids and he arranged towing; I had an appointment of my own, which I kept with all four kids in tow (which was quite the fiasco you're thinking it was), and then went and ran some highly important (like, we really shouldn't wait until the day the rent is due before paying it, right?) errands. By which time, of course, Fran was at a mechanic we've never gone to before (but the towing fee for our favorite one was prohibitive), so we went to get him. And then played with a friend who was fortuitously available to play at a park not terribly far away. And then, when we had to go eat and they had to go do their afternoon, we ran entirely by chance into another lovely friend-family, and had an absolutely lovely time playing with them.

Which would all be wonderful and happy-sunshine-kumbaya-warm-feeling-y, except that our car repairs totalled nearly $600. Astonished (and more than a little nauseated) by this sum, we called our usual mechanics (with whom we have a labor exchange deal, Fran's networking expertise for their fix-our-car-damnit skillz), only to find that the bulk of the charge was in fact the parts and they really couldn't do any better. Fuck. Fran cancelled the lasik consult, because that handily ate his eye-fixing money. We attempted to justify the expense in a way that made it feel better, but really couldn't given how freaking broke we are.

See? Mind-bending how much that day's awesome collided with it's crappy.

Hooky

2010-10-08T09:07:00.001-07:00

I wasn't sure how to spell "Hooky" ("Hookie" "Hookey"?), so I looked it up Google-style only to find out that there isn't, in fact, an agreed-upon way to spell this particular word, and I'm stuck with the galling fact that I cannot be sure whether my post title is misspelled.

Anyhow, Wednesday was far too autumn-crisp and beautiful to justify spending any time at all indoors, nevermind our usual 6 hours at the YMCA. Instead, we spent way too much time packing ourselves up and left home at about 11am, heading for the Olympic National Park.

Side note: I was unreasonably angry with my husband because I prepared all three meals and some snacks that day. And then I realized that I must have a pretty decent husband if I am upset that for ONE day I had to make all of the food my family ate.

We arrived at the park a little later than we'd wanted to, but the hike we chose wasn't particularly long. We went to Four Stream, from the Staircase trailhead; the hike is 2 miles each way. I wore the baby on my back; she weighs 19.5lb now and isn't super cooperative with the babywearing. She likes it fine, but she chews on the straps:

And leans out sideways to look at the trees (yes, she spent most of the hike leaning sideways and looking up):

It was a glorious fall day:

With the changing colors (a little muted, due to the overwhelming prevalence of evergreens and moss) and the sunshine:

We stopped for a belated lunch (the trail winds alongside the North Fork Skykomish River:

Once upon a time, (from some unspecified time until the mid 90s, anyway), there was a loop trail; on our way back, we detoured for a brief look at where a bridge used to cross the river to connect with another trail on the other side. We will probably take that trail (the one that skirts the other side of the river) if we have just an afternoon to spend hiking in the area again. Here's where we can't cross over anymore:

The reason we'd probably choose the other trail if we were doing this again (aside from the fact that we'd get to do something new) is that while we felt fairly deeply submerged in forest murk, the other bank was getting some glorious sunshine:

And oh look, just before we finished the hike, here's Chubble leaning out and looking up...still...

The Grind

2010-10-07T09:59:00.000-07:00

First, some Chubble-ness; she'll happily plunk away at the keyboard for at least half an hour, which is a LONG time for a five month old to stay occupied with anything.

We're back into fall. The "school year," which can be a confusing designation for an unschooling family. So, to clarify, we're not exactly sitting at home playing video games once the rest of the underage world gives up on summer and starts spending ungodly amounts of time in their desks; we basically attempt (largely in vain, due to the shortening days and the crap...ening (? how do you make THOSE verbs agree?) weather) to continue the hustle-and-bustle high activity level of summer. This year we are, however, also spending an ungodly amount of time at the YMCA. Our YMCA fills classes by lottery, and we had the ill fortune to have our classes spread out in a really inconvenient way that basically necessitates that we stay put, in the area if not actually in the building, for over 5 hours two days a week, with a bonus swim lesson late in the afternoon on another two days.

This means two days of the week get "eaten" by the Y, another by piano lessons/lunch with Nana, and another at art club. By the time the weekend rolls around, we're just as ready for a break as anyone else.

We try to cram family things in on days when Fran is off, which unhelpfully coincide with Y and piano days. This Monday, we shoved pumpkin-carving in before and after the Y:

And I shoved pumpkin-cheesecake making in after a full day out for doctor appointments and playdates and that bonus late-afternoon swim lesson, yesterday.

It seems like despite the lack of nameable things to fill our time (we can't say "the kids are at school from 8 to 3"), we are always struggling to accomplish all those little day-to-day things that we set our sights on; not just the notable achievements like baking cheesecake (that was a nice use of the unwieldy hour between getting home from the store and needing to get ready for bed last night), but the everyday miscellanea like laundry folding and living-room-vacuuming.

This all makes me wonder - because we are pretty happy with the pace of our lives right now, if not with the entirety of the details therein - how many families are living in "survival mode." You know, that just-get-through-the-day glazed-over attitude that so many parents of young (and young-ish) children exhibit.

There would be a certain ease, I'm sure, to sticking the kids in school. I certainly wouldn't have to spend car rides attempting to sneak in math drills without making them SEEM like math drills anymore. I've seen the wholesale abdication of personal responsibility with reference to schooling/education that happens when parents assume their children will go (of course) to the neighborhood school. It's never disputed, then, whether the parent is doing well enough to make sure their child is educated; the onus shifts, the new variation on parental responsibility becomes a kind of habitual nagging of ones' children to finish everything someone else thought they should be doing, while involving oneself as little as possible in the actual details. Most families never even consider doing schooling - really, childhood - another way and thus never face up to the fact that there are options at all, that accepting a public schooling route is actually a choice in and of itself (regardless of whether that family has looked at alternatives, the fact that they are existent means that there was a choice made). It's an interesting paradox; I had to think long and hard about my choice before I decided to homeschool while the parents who send kids to public school often do so with little thought, and yet which of us is questioned - by perfect strangers, even - as if our decision were a mere flight of fancy? And yet, my choice to opt out of that particular childhood institution is viewed with a level of skepticism that is usually only allayed by my childrens' high standardized test scores (I am convinced that they'd have to be drawing pictures with the bubbles to fall below the median, but that's besides the point at the moment), while it seems that the decision to send a child to public school is rarely if ever questioned.

While I have painted a less than rosy picture of parenting a public schooled child, I have to say that I'm not opposed to public schooling at ALL; what I'm trying to point out is that there's an assumed and widely sanctioned absence of attention to education (and I'm not talking, here, about the homeroom-parent type of "paying attention" - I'm talking about knowing the scope and sequence of what your children are learning and why they are learning it) on the part of public-school parents, while those of us who are conscientiously making a choice and taking the minutiae of what makes children well-learned into our own hands are assumed to be the ones who just might not be paying close enough attention. The constant question of whether we're "good enough" is enough to drive a smart and well educated mom and dad of smart and education-in-progress kids a little zany. We ask that question of ourselves every day. We don't need anyone else to be asking it of us, thanks.

I feel the need now to state that I'm not talking about friends with whom I chat constantly about how we're schooling (or not) and what our progress is or what our plans are. Nor am I talking about the kind of curious and well meaning questions we sometimes get, particularly from family, when people are just not familiar with the whole process.

I've wandered far in the writing of this blog. I don't do well writing about issues, I have trouble compartmentalizing and avoiding "and you know what else?" kinds of statements.

The original purpose of this entry was, I suppose, to state quite simply that our days are full, our lives are relatively happy, the kids are learning and growing, and we're getting our fun in there too.

Farm Tour

2010-10-03T09:50:00.000-07:00

The last two weeks have found us mired in the autumnal gray wash of post-equinox PNW melancholy. Glorious days have coincided precisely with days that we've been stuck at the YMCA for classes. Bummer. I tend to think of autumn here as being kind of fuzzy 'round the edges; when the gray descends, the lines around everything (from leaves to street signs, my own hands to the shape of the car in front of me on the road) become ill-defined. The weather claims everything for itself. In my head, this isn't vicious; the overcast PNW-stereotype-gray-drizzle (it's a stereotype because it's TRUE, people) comes flowing over us to tuck us into bed for the winter. We are further north than most people realize, and by the time solstice comes around, daylight hours are precious few. I don't really know who originally told me that the people in our area are better read than usual because of this sleep-inducing weather-stupor that covers us for 4-5 months of the year, but it must be true; this is the weather for sitting in a corner with a spiced drink of some sort (let's just roll with the stereotype and say it's coffee) and a book.

At 11am, the light in my home is artificial. The warmth, thankfully, isn't; our heating bills were atrocious last year and we're putting off turning on the furnace until we have to.

We bring warmth in our own more emotional ways, instead. The smell of autumn, the excitement over Halloween. The sharp ginger-and-clove spices of fall, the warm smells of baking. Pumpkins. Sleeping in.

This weekend we went to the Farm Tour and (aside from a BittyPrincess meltdown of absolutely mind-boggling non-origin) had a great time. That child (BittyPrincess) has been really...emotional lately. "Go change honey, you can't wear your princess dress rock wall climbing." "YOU HATE MEEEEEE!!!!" (runs screaming into her bed). She's probably having issues with not being the baby of the family anymore, but since she still loves everybody, she has no idea how to vent it.

Anyway...Farm Tour...we saw chicks hatching at Gentle Giant Farms (this is the farm that gave us free apples and pears two years ago, because the farmer felt bad about the state of them...even though they were PERFECT for canning):

And (Girliness' favorite) got to feed the horses:

On to Creviston Farm, where the 10yo girls got embroiled in helping the owner's granddaughter care for the chickens (they were extremely happy about this), ate lunch:

And played with little bitty chicks:

We went to the Fiber Arts showing, and the kids got to card wool and keep the finished product (again, extremely happy kids). This was the site of the BittyPrincess melt-down, so no photos.

A final stop at Morgan Creek Farm, where I was intending to let everyone else explore while BittyPrincess and I hung out in the car resting, but BittyPrincess remembered that this is the farm that the flowers at the farmers' markets come from and wanted to check it out. She recovered her cool and walked around taking pictures of the flowers:

It was all in all a successful day, even though we could totally have done way without the meltdownage.

Overheard

2010-09-18T13:42:00.000-07:00

Boyness: "Mozart was deaf you know."
Girliness: "Mozart wasn't deaf. You're thinking of Beethoven. He wasn't always deaf either. He mostly wrote stuff when he wasn't."

Boyness is having trouble hearing, again. Antibiotic drops for his ears, again. This only happens once every year or two, but I can't help but think that that's still too often. He doesn't just get those piddly little "there's some extra pressure there" ear infections, he gets crazy turning-his-eardrum-green-and-leaking-nasty-smelling-fluid ear infections.

While I get a proud moment because my kids remembered something they'd been taught and applied it correctly, and because my son defends himself by deciding that it wouldn't be so bad to lose some of his hearing after all, I hate the fact that this happens to him.

Skip a Few

2010-09-11T10:43:00.000-07:00

Another week, another art club project. This week: nonviolence slogans. Naomi's:

Becca's:

Tony felt self conscious or something, and wasn't exactly prolific with the artwork.

Also this week, lots of kid stuff, a Labor Day BBQ, a short visit from Aunty Betsy, and a failed attempt to start Halloween constumes (ok, not entirely failed; I did manage to take white flannel and tea-dye it a more acceptable shade of rusty light brown).

Tie Dye Success

2010-09-05T07:48:00.001-07:00

Yay! Girliness did that all by herself; I gave her verbal directions on how to fold it (complicated!) and didn't touch it at all.

Remember this post about shopping with three kids? I still shop. With four kids now. I think it's actually easier than shopping with a toddler was, but we'll get back to that at some point (Chubble has to grow, after all). The big kids can be surprisingly ornery; it kind of makes me wonder if they will EVER grow out of needing to be yelled at for trying to run in the store.

Twanoh State Park

2010-09-02T20:00:00.000-07:00

We officially LOVE this place. There are nice facilities, it's in a GREAT location, and it has a nice 2.5 mile loop hike that was pleasant and nearly deserted, but well kept.

A brief babywearing discussion: I'm still trying to figure out how on earth to get Chubble into a back carry without dropping or strangling her or dislocating my own shoulders. Even with help it's really awkward:

But she loves it once she's set up, and it's much more comfortable for me to carry her on my back than it is on my front:

The loop hike starts off with some nice little bridges over a creek:

We walked along the creek bank for a while, before heading higher up and over several contributing branches, as creek dissipated-in-reverse.

Girliness and I dressed alike by accident:

BIG tree!

BittyPrincess found a stick and a pine cone that she fastidiously kept hold of through the whole hike. I asked her what was so special about that particular pine cone, and she said it was big. Hmmmmm.

Fran tried to capture the pine cone magic (BittyPrincess approves this photo of her special pine cone):

Girliness spent a restroom break looking decidedly pre-teen-y:

We passed a happy two hours playing at the beach and picnic grounds after our hike:

We will definitely be going back to this spot. This will probably be a good winter hike, because the trail is easily defined and we have cell signal (just in case) the entire route. And because the park has a covered and mostly-enclosed picnic site with a GIANT fireplace and cooking stoves, which will be handy in cooler weather (keep in mind that in WA this means 40s, not sub-freezing).

Oh, and I finished reading Drums of Autumn...I LOVE this book.

Morning and Evening

2010-09-02T10:55:00.000-07:00

Or in this case, evening and morning; somehow it didn't seem right to title it backwards like that.

It's a lovely time of year in the Pacific Northwest. We haven't quite hit Fall yet, but the days are shortening just a tad, so that we have time to eat dinner at the beach and if we leave as the shadows lengthen and the sun threatens to dip behind the mountains, we still have time to bathe before bedtime.

We seem to have used up those mornings warm enough to sit outside at 8am, though. We did get one last breakfast on the deck in:

Gratuitous Chubble photo:

PS - I turned 31

2010-08-24T16:09:00.000-07:00

Wow, that's a lot of time to spend being alive. I don't have a particularly distinguished set of accomplishments to go with those 31 years, but this last year I added a new baby and a midwifery license to them. I think creating a new human can be a significant accomplishment for my 31st year.

While nothing hugely significant happened on my birthday, my kids did wish me a happy birthday approximately 12,425 times; this made me feel both loved and slightly annoyed. We went hiking:

Again, at Point Defiance, but this time on the other side of the point; we walked from Fort Nisqually to the Gig Harbor lookout, and then followed the spine trail back to where we'd parked. Oops, they learned something:

Obligatory Chubble photos for the day (here hanging at the playground after our hike):

When we got home, the kids noticed that our blackberry tangles finally had ripe berries, and went about harvesting and processing them:

Meanwhile, Fran made us all chips in the deep-fry and started dinner on the grill, and we had a very nice evening. The kids really, really wanted to make me a cake, and this process narrowly skirted disaster but did - miraculously enough - result in a cake. I am the proud owner of three new necklaces, which apparently is THE THING to get your mom on her 31st birthday.

It was a non-spectacular but happy day. And...onward.

Poetry

2010-08-24T15:00:00.000-07:00

The refrigerator roars into the sudden silence of our napping home.

Produce sits subservient on grocery store shelves.

I pound a dizzying rhythm on the keyboard, the poetry returned to my inner monologue; I feared it lost forever, to age or fatigue or something even more difficult to enumerate - as if one can name or number the loss of an inner poetic voice in the first place - but here it is again.

My internal voice doesn't just seize at the random flotsam of everyday stimulation, the way it has for the past couple of years; it narrates a coherent stream. Sentences often unfinished, yes, but narration (and not simple overwhelmed observation) nonetheless.

I don't know whether this blog post will be comprehensible to anyone at all, or whether every person I pass has an internal poetic monologue that I can't hear or sense. I set it out to the world (bearing in mind that grandiose concept that anyone can read this blog, though few do), anyway.

Thank you B and ~L~

2010-08-22T09:12:00.000-07:00

I think she likes it!

Full

2010-08-20T22:06:00.000-07:00

It's kind of hard to imagine how I fill those so many hours of so many days that stretch out on either side of my existence as a stay-at-home (again, misnomer, nobody staying home around here) mom.

Our days are filled with trips to the beach:

Sewing cool pants (one of several pairs accomplished that day):

Trips to the flower garden (Tony took these first two):

Hiking (here at Point Defiance):

Not to mention piano lessons, Art Club, and playdates. Feeding the kids, and feeding them again. Nursing the littlest one, and nursing her again. Reading my way through the hearty stack of fiction novels that threatens to topple off my bedside table. Some mama friends and I have been talking about how when you are a mom, there are precious few things in your life that you get to be FINISHED with. Maybe this is why so many of us are drawn to crafting in some way or another. I can finish sewing a pair of pants, and be done with it. I will never, ever, ever finish the dishes; not for real, anyway, when another is sure to appear 5 minutes later.

Is it any wonder that I haven't had the time to fold my own laundry yet this week?

Still, the last little bit of paperwork that I finally took time to complete and send in to the Department of Health bore its intended fruit, and I can turn my head as I type and see my active Midwife License, neat and official in a frame I picked up from Goodwill - all we can really bother with these days - just for the occasion.

Hot!

2010-08-15T07:53:00.000-07:00

Two days ago we washed the deck. And we didn't just wash it a little, oh no, we spent 6 hours pressure washing and scrubbing on hands and knees (my fingers still hurt). It was so clean when we were finished that it was probably cleaner than the floors inside the house. OK, certainly cleaner - it's been about a week since we vacuumed last. And then yesterday rolled around, all 90 degrees and ridiculously hot even in the shade (rare for Washington), and it was SO worth it.

It is much nicer to lay about in the shade reading than it is to swelter, right? I also got some spray paint (for the wicker furniture) and refinishing supplies for the tables, but those projects weren't done yet when I ran out of materials. It turned out to be pretty nice on the deck without the furniture there, maybe when we put stuff back some of it will live down in the yard instead - at least until winter rolls around.

Girliness has been reading chapter books aloud to BittyPrincess. I am extremely proud that this was their own idea and I'm also very glad that there's someone willing to read aloud, because I hate doing it. This may or may not make me a bad homeschooling parent. You want to read it? Then YOU read it.

And Chubble was, of course, very cute.

She's the first of my kids to enjoy hanging out on her tummy - the infamous "tummy time" that I think is such a crock of shit. I did a little (not too very heavy) research and basically concluded that "tummy time" is only really necessary if you're not holding the babies enough for them to get used to activating their core muscles to keep their balance. You don't need to go through the whole baby rotisserie (sleep on the back! tummy time! look, fun stuff overhead! play blankets!) if you're carrying them around. It sounds funny to say it like that, but yeah; I think it's easier to carry the baby around than it is to worry about whether they're developing properly as they're wiggling about on some surface somewhere. ANYWAY...baby feet!

Check out the eyebrows:

It's supposed to be high 90s today. I'm going to try to set up the tent before it gets too hot out there, so that we can sleep outside - it will be 70 degrees out there overnight, but potentially stifling in here.

Finished Voyager by Diana Gabaldon. I enjoyed it, certainly, but I'm finding the level of coincidence in the character reappearances to really stretch things to the point of scoffability, and I usually have a pretty high tolerance for that sort of thing (I love coincidentally running into previous characters as I read along! But many of them halfway across the world, independent from each other and for different reasons? I think you need to explain this one, Ms Gabaldon). Still, good book, and the next two in the series are sitting on my night stand waiting for me to finish Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which finally made it to my library reservation shelf. I'm only a few chapters in but I'm liking it; the proposed year is in the 1990s, but I can imagine this as being the future-as-imagined-today, too, which is some pretty serious staying power for a book written in the 1960s.

Ten Years

2010-08-14T19:55:00.001-07:00

Wow, 10 years seems like no time at all. I think I love my husband more now than I did when we got married. We've matured, both of us, in different but compatible ways. I don't know whether to blame luck or foresight for the fact that as we've both changed, we've settled into a comfortable and loving spot rather than growing apart.

Anyway, like I said before, we're sitting at a big anniversary with an infant again. But it's not for lack of childcare offers that we spent the day with our kids. Another unknown: is it a good thing that we spent an ideal day with our whole family, or does that say something pathetic about us as a couple apart from the fact that we have children?

We had planned nothing. I pulled off some pretty convincing dancing around with the kids in the morning:

But Francesco had left for work on schedule, ass-early in the morning. Unbeknownst to me, instead of his usual routine, he went to the gym and then went and got flowers and pizza and surprised me back at home, just as I was settling into a pretty deep "wow we suck" kind of funk.

Fed and happy, we headed out to the beach:

And then dropped a somewhat appalling amount of money on supplies for the kids to make us dinner:

Maybe it's pathetic, and maybe it wasn't, that it was a really good day. We have a lot of years left for having good days without the kids, and I think it says good things about the rhythm we've set for ourselves that we're NOT sick of the life we have right now.

Chubbles!

2010-08-12T07:33:00.000-07:00

Chubble's most common expression:

And now, a bunch of pictures just because, well, she's a baby. She's cute. And she'll look different next week.

Kids at Play (Wordless Wednesday, a Day Late)

2010-08-12T07:30:00.001-07:00

Love

2010-08-10T14:48:00.000-07:00

I love my family.

And I love staying at home, even though I feel oddly unsatisfied at times, like there's a further level of relaxation that I'm just.not.hitting despite cooperative friends and family. It might just be that the current level of stress-out and my maximum relaxation level aren't far apart enough. Still, I'm enjoying "just" being "at home" (those things in quotes because "just" is kind of funny given what gets done in an average day, and "at home" is just a joke given that I actually stayed home all day only once in the last two weeks).

A few days ago I sent in the last little bit of paperwork to get my midwifery license. While I don't anticipate trouble, I also know that it's been almost a year since I passed my exams and am wondering whether the late completion of my application will be suspicious given that most people push everything through ASAP. I'm crossing my fingers that things move smoothly through and I'll have license in hand soon. I am reluctant to use it. I like having my baby time. And family time. And I am supremely lucky in that Fran understands the whole "me" time thing, so much so that Tuesdays are "him and kids" days and when he wanted to do something else today (a Tuesday), he got his brother to babysit rather than co-opt my "me" day.

Anyway, I forgot to mention in my last post that last week we went kind-of-hiking again. It was a little (2.5 mile) baby (relatively flat with a huge-ass driveable-if-it-was-open) trail.

We went to the new Pen Met 360 park (so named because it covers 360 acres). We knew it wasn't "finished" yet, but what we didn't realize was that there wasn't any forest left to speak of. It was a hot day. The trail was dusty. It was not a peak hiking experience. It will be GREAT to bike on, though.

A little over half a mile in, Girliness and ~L~'s 10yo girl ran ahead and didn't bother to check in with us. For the rest of the hike. They left little hints about where they were going...

...but we didn't see them again for quite a while. Which wasn't exactly our idea of fun or safe hiking, despite the really safe trail. And is also completely, totally against the hiking rules we've set for the kids (no walking ahead without an organized plan and a GPS), which we didn't think that we needed to tell them they needed to follow even though the trail was easy. They were required to write two-page papers on hiking safety in the aftermath.

They only did their papers, I think, because we required them before Girliness and ~L~'s daughter were going to have their Nerd Party (they ate Nerds candy, acted like Nerds, and in general had a massive sugar rush). They had their Nerdy sleepover party and acted like hungover jerks the next day, particularly Boyness. I've decided that Boyness and food colorings don't mix...it wasn't at all just a sugar thing, because I let them have a TON of sugar on a regular basis. It was the food coloring in the candies, which the kids almost never have.

And I'll leave you with a slightly happier picture...

Cubble and Boyness listening to music together. Love, love, love.

I forgot to mention: I also finished Dragonfly in Amber. I liked it more than I expected to given the slow beginning and some mediocre reviews from my friends. It still feels like a placeholder book, the way so many books that are in the middle of a series wind up feeling. It isn't that I want major action and resolution in every book; it's that I don't like it when a whole book essentially becomes a background-information book, where it exists only as a source of information for further novels. I liked it anyway.

Write Something

2010-08-09T11:09:00.000-07:00

There are almost too many somethings to write. None of them particularly interesting, but oh well. Here they are anyway.

We had a great get-together last night. Fun with friends and kids getting along. Chubble even slept for quite a while during it. The 5-6yo girls were particularly cute.

I forgot to take out the trash and am listening to the trash truck make its way around the rest of the neighborhood. I think the crew is taking extra long just to rub it in.

10 ~~month~~ year anniversary this week. Nothing planned. We thought maybe we'd do "something" but are a little short on cash and a lot long on children. It's kind of pathetic because we also had our 1st and 5th anniversaries with babies too young to go and actually do anything big (big, in my world, being the-two-of-us-somewhere for a day or two, not two weeks in some far-flung tourist spot). There's always 15 and 20, right?

Hmmmm...I helped Girliness temporary-dye her hair red. It came out pretty awesome. BittyPrincess wants to do hers now.

Chubble is:

Giving big wet baby-kisses
Sleeping through the night (for real! 10pm-7am!)
Loving her Johnny Jump-Up
Laughing maniacally at a friend of ours

And peeing (and usually pooping, too) in the sink. She's done it for me, Fran, and Girliness. We just hover her semi-sitting over the sink and she goes. On purpose. It's awesome. As long as someone gets her there before she really had to go, we avoid the whole wet diaper deal altogether. Which is kind of funny given the hip-high stack of diapers we have for her that aren't really getting used all that fast. But also kind of awesome given that I still hadn't found a diaper arrangement that didn't result in a rash. And kind of awesome all by itself. There are whole communities on this subject that I have never bothered looking into, and since this is just kind of working for us I don't think I will now, but this is a "thing." Until Chubble came along all super compatible with this kind of arrangement, I thought it sounded totally nuts.

I think I used the word "awesome" about 20 times in that last paragraph just because I recently heard about somebody who can't stand how people use the word "awesome." Awesome, awesome, awesome. I can't remember who is being driven up a wall every time I say it, but AWESOME. Teehee. Of all the weird things to get bugged by.

They're Baaaack

2010-08-02T20:50:00.000-07:00

Time flies when you're down a few children...

We got the kids back on Sunday evening. By all reports they were great during their getaway, but since it was grandparents' reporting, I'm not sure how true it was. They were surely their same old irritating selves today. We tried to blow off some steam at the beach with limited success.

I feel like the exercise in book reviewing has served its purpose, and I'm thinking about the blog more often now. Nonetheless...

Shadowmarch by Tad Williams was quite enjoyable. He writes really well and I don't really get tired of it. While this and the series Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn appear to have similar roots, another series that he wrote - Otherland - is quite different, so I'm assured of his versatility, which makes me want to continue reading. The next book in this series is on request from the library.

I'm about halfway through Diane Gabaldon's sequel to Outlander, a book fittingly titled Dragonfly in Amber. So far it's pretty lackluster.

Seattle Center

2010-07-30T10:16:00.000-07:00

On Tuesday we took the ferry from Bremerton to Seattle, to go to the Pacific Science Center. While we go to the Science Center regularly, we haven't ever done it by ferry before.

Chubble really liked the noise.

That's where we're going!

We had a great day in the Science Center, followed by lots of time at the fountain:

Now, a few words on the ferry: I'm not sure about it. I liked it and all. But I don't (as many of our friends do) find it stressful to drive in Seattle, and neither does Fran. It's a little more expensive and it takes a lot longer by ferry. But it *is* an experience, and that's nice on days when it really is all about the experience.

The kids are gone in Portland with MIL for 4 days now. Well, Chubble isn't - she's right here napping - but the rest of them are. It is QUIET in my house today.

Good Morning

2010-07-25T07:45:00.000-07:00

Craftacular

2010-07-25T07:26:00.000-07:00

In more indoorsy adventures, this week ~L~ taught Girliness how to bead on a bead-loom and I re-taught ~L~ to sew.

I have no idea how to bead on a bead-loom, aside from what I saw Girliness doing; it seems like it's a fairly simple but really fussy undertaking.

After the lengthy process of helping the girls get set up, ~L~ let them have at it, and they worked...and worked...and worked...

Until everybody else got all tired of each other and started acting all sibling-y, and I packed them away for the park. The girls did their beading for over 5 hours. That's some serious attention span right there.

*Earlier that same week*

~L~ can sew by hand and can piece patterns, two things that I'm just middling comfortable with, and she also has a bigger sewing vocabulary (literal words) than I do. However, she is terrified of sewing machines. At a yard sale a couple of weeks ago, she came across a WONDERFUL machine and bought it, and is facing down her fears. I suspect it will be a little like how she didn't bake when I met her, and then "well if Niki can do it so can I!" happened, and now she makes bread on a regular basis. Kind of the same reason that I kind-of-almost garden now.

Anyway, the project I chose was sandwich wraps. These are little flat hexagonal fabrics with velcro attached, meant to take the place of saran wrap when you're packing a lunch. I chose them because they require several different stitch types, three of the most common skills you need to sew, and are VERY forgiving; you don't even need to get the edges all same size, because you really can't tell.

I freehanded the hexagonal wrap shape. Made closure tabs, placed and sewed velcro, sewed wrong-sides together, turned, topstitched, done.

Baby's First Road Rash

2010-07-24T08:47:00.000-07:00

Here it is:

Girliness was carrying Chubble down the front stairs on the way to the van, and took a tumble. Chubble sustained minor damage to forehead and eyebrow. Girliness essentially unharmed.

Back to our regularly scheduled (um, or not) activities...

This week we checked out the Cushman Trail through Gig Harbor. It's not particularly scenic, but it's a paved trail with some fairly long (one of them 1.5 miles) stretches that don't intersect with any streets. This will be great for the kids to do on bikes, and it's not far from our house - except for a too-big uphill, we could almost ride from here. We did one section of the trail, 5 miles. That's about all I'm up for with the baby strapped on my front.

It was overcast but didn't rain on us; we liked that idea, except that the kids forgot to water their plants ALL WEEK last week and some of them died. Ugh.

We had better weather luck for our picnic dinner at Sehmel Homestead Park the next day:

And at the zoo the next day:

Garage Sale Floppage

2010-07-17T14:52:00.000-07:00

We're two days into our three-day neighborhood-wide garage sale, and have earned a whopping $5. Even our FREE stuff is still here. It hasn't rained on us, there's just...nobody. I'm not the organizer but after being visited by a grand total of 4 people yesterday I listed on Craigslist and still, nothing; a stupendous 2-person follow-up count for today.

At least my garage is a little cleaner. There's actually MORE stuff in it now, though, because the stuff that we were planning to sell is now sitting in our garage, apparently not destined to be sold.

Tomorrow I think I'll spend garage sale time posting my stuff on ebay or craigslist.

The sun came out as we packed up, and I think we're off to the beach as soon as Chubble wakes up from her nap.

Seasonality

2010-07-16T09:23:00.000-07:00

I just looked it up; in Gig Harbor, we average 139 sunny days a year.

This makes deciding your activity days easy. When the sun shines, you go out and play. When it doesn't, you rest; thus our goal in this bright and lovely late summer has been to squeeze as much fun and play and wear-outage as we possibly can out of our good weather. We can recover during the 266 not-sunny days we can expect to have. In the PNW it isn't "we'll sleep when we're dead," it's "we'll sleep when it's overcast."

On those days when the motivation to plan an extensive trip is just not there and no great local ideas are forthcoming, we default to the beach.

Boyness is totally going to make a princess out of his baby sister...

I just love the colors in this photo:

*sigh* she's getting so big:

10yo girlies PNW'ing it up:

Hurricane Ridge

2010-07-15T21:35:00.001-07:00

The $15 admission that we purchased to do the Staircase Hike last week at Olympic National Park was good for 7 days. So on day 7 (after filling the intervening days with beach and zoo and park and birthday parties and more park, a trip to Nana's, a music-in-the-park afternoon downtown, and all the miscellanea of everyday life), we re-ventured out to a different spot in the same park. Olympic National Park is huge. We could easily use up a week going to a new part of the park every day, seeing a different ecosystem each time. We went on Wednesday to Hurricane Ridge to do the Hurricane Hill hike.

It was a GORGEOUS day to be in the mountains. Temperatures hovered above 70 and below 80 (although there was a hearty blast of sun for the majority of our hike, and we did get hot and sweaty and sunburnt - while walking past patches of snow). The air wasn't as clear as it can get, but we could see Rainier (another National Park on our to-do list for this summer/fall hiking season):

We could also see Victoria BC from our perch atop the mountains. Boyness' improbable statement? "I didn't think Canada looked like that!" "What did you think it would look like" "I dunno...it looks like a city though..." Oops. Educational opportunity.

The view was already excellent on our drive up, and spectacular by the time we got around to parking our van.

The smaller lot at the trailhead (about 1.5 miles from the visitor's center) was full, so we wound up parking in an auxiliary lot/picnic area about 1/4-1/2 of a mile from the actual trailhead. No big deal, that little walk was pretty:

We'd chosen the Hurricane Hill hike because it promised good views and also because it was an intermediate length, 1.8 miles each way (extended to just over 2 miles each way by the walk to/from the car). So in that sense it was also no big deal that it was extended a bit. The other available trails tended to be either less than half a mile or more than 6 miles.

Boyness and Girliness are sure they want to do a backpacking trip all the way across the Olympic National Park at some point. This is something I have zero experience with and find a tadbit intimidating, but maybe at some point in the next couple of years we can tackle that project. I know there are probably people hardcore enough to go backpacking with a baby, but I'm not one of them.

There were a couple of signs at the trailhead about an aggressive mountain goat that had been frequenting the area; they warned that we should be prepared to yell and toss some rocks around if we saw it. BittyPrincess, thus forewarned, loaded her sweaty hands with rocks and kept on the alert for about half a mile before asking me to take over rock-holding duty - at which point we had a discussion about the fact that there were copious rocks about and we didn't need to carry them, really.

This is how Chubble hikes (and her little shaded perch meant that while I had a pretty decent sunburn by the end of the hike, she was totally fine):

Check out this view! From the almost-top of the hike, we can see water, and also the water-like fog, accumulating lazily against the shore:

We did see some wildlife, too. We didn't need to work to get this shot - the deer were just kind of THERE.

We also saw 6 bears (in three separate groupings). 4 of them were so distant that they looked like rocks until we realized that the rocks were moving, and 2 of them had wandered within a few feet of the road as we were driving out. We didn't get any pictures because, yeah, they looked like rocks in the first instance and we were driving past and trying not to fall off the mountain in the second.

Anyway, back to the hike - we picnicked next to the snow! It was still quite hot up there, and the cool coming off the snow pack was very pleasant.

Boyness wouldn't let Chubble get through the day without experiencing some snow, too.

The kids were instructed to STAY ON THIS SIDE OF THE SNOW, because (it's hard to see from this angle) the last few feet of snow were overhang and then a few hundred feet drop-away.

This was a perspective trick shot, BittyPrincess is supposed to be holding me and Chubble. Hi!

And we'll close with an awesome photo of BittyPrincess running the last 100 meters or so to the van:

Oh yeah, and the book thing. I read:

Lolita. Ugh. Beautiful writing, though.

Things Fall Apart. Awesome for many reasons, but the biggest was that it was completely non-romanticized and told from a seldom-heard-from viewpoint - in a way that felt really authentic. I have a big gripe with books that end happily for a native tribe in this time period. There aren't happy endings to be had, not enough that they should be accounted more often than the great sadness of this era for native peoples of pretty much any area, tradition, or religious persuasion.

Waiting for Godot. Didn't get what the big deal was.

I'm now starting in on a 4-book series by Tad Williams, one of my favorite authors, and it's going to take me a while.

Mmmmm Beachy

2010-07-09T20:57:00.000-07:00

Well, we did wash the van today, but then we decided to go to Kopachuck. It is "our beach," the one that is just 5 minutes away and our default go-to spot. Even on ridiculously beautiful days like today, it isn't too crowded because you have to "hike in" down the hill to the beach. I guess if you can't see the beach when you park the car it's less attractive? I don't care. I happily hike if I can stake out my own little bit of happy beach zone on a 90 degree day.

Chubble did her nurse-herself-comatose thing and promptly dropped off to sleep, enabling me (and sometimes Boyness, too) to sit and read for most of the afternoon.

Boyness, by the way, has turned out to be a surprisingly strong reader. And I don't really mean that he can read particularly well, just that he enjoys it a lot and will almost always take a book with him when we'll be somewhere for a while. Girliness does this too, but tends to wait until she's actually bored to do her reading; Boyness will make a point of sitting himself down and reading while he's taking a break from the action.

See those mountains waaaaaaay far away in the background? We were there yesterday! Cool, eh?

I should probably mention, in the interest of keeping up with the book thing, that I am waiting on several things from the library. Who knew Betsy's dystopian novel suggestions would be so popular? In the meantime, I picked up Deception Point by Dan Brown. I have really enjoyed other Dan Brown novels I've read, so about a year ago I had purchased this book while on the way to what looked to be a long and boring birth. It turned out I didn't need it that day; I found it again in the car a while back, got two chapters in, thought it was a political thriller (not my favorite thing), and then Fran picked it up and loved it. So I retried it. And enjoyed it. I should have given it more time, because it rapidly got much better. Dan Brown has a real ability to build suspense without using the usual suspense-building overt descriptions of, well, how suspenseful everything is (this is what turned me off on Crichton, although I do admit that it takes a couple of his novels for his writing to get old). And while there was a political background to the novel, it was heavy on the action and light on the politics. It was good enough that I am reading it again while waiting for the library to bring me something else, and it has been a while since I've liked a book that much.

Venturing

2010-07-09T10:09:00.001-07:00

In the middle of a highly comfortable 88 degree Washingtonian "heat wave" (seriously, the church down the street has set up a "cooling shelter"), we grabbed some friends and took ourselves to Olympic National Park for some adventuring.

Chubble, in case I haven't mentioned it, has a somewhat ambivalent relationship with her carseat. When I say this, I mean that about 50% of the time she doesn't seem to notice that she's in it and the other 50% of the time OMGOMG-YOU-ARE-TORTURING-ME-GETMEOUTGETMEOUTGETMEOUT!!!!! Olympic National Park is about a 90 minute drive away. On our way out she mostly didn't notice she was sitting in a car seat. The way back was torture. In between there was some kid whining but mostly a good hike; we went about 4 miles total and there was a LOT of whining on the last mile ("I want water, why are we still walking, I'm tiiiiiired"). I guess the kids are out of practice.

The camera ran out of battery about midway through (my fault, we have a GREAT camera in terms of battery life, but I haven't charged it in a month or more). But I did get a lot of great pictures anyway!

We entered the forest and it wasn't quite instantaneous cool (in fact, it was just as warm in the forest yesterday as it was down in Gig Harbor, we found out). It was instant pretty though!

The kids really wanted this photo op:

Chubble rallied quickly once out of the car, and really enjoyed riding around in her carrier.

We packed in lunch. Water and lunch for four people = heavy! Boyness was NOT happy to take his turn carrying the backpack! Next time I'll have each kid pack their own backpack - I can carry a pack that weighs this much fairly comfortably, but not while I'm wearing the baby (it just gets to be too much weight on my shoulders, pulling in two directions like that), and it's too much weight for the kids.

There were some massive trees, and there was evidence of more massive trees in the recent past:

And they see...something...something interesting...

The river was definitely the main attraction of the day. This time of year, it's fairly fast flowing (not at peak levels but still really swift), and COLDER THAN SHIT because it's all snow melt.

Chubble REALLY liked her ride (don't worry, I didn't let her dangle like that for long, just long enough to take the photo after she fell asleep).

The kids thought these trees growing on top of this big 'ole boulder were pretty awesome, and they liked the view to the river too. They tried to get me to climb up there with them, but it's hard to do that kind of thing with the baby in a front carry. Most of the trail was quite easy and I only needed to use my hands to get around a couple of times, so it was a good trail for babywearing (not boring, but not difficult either).

Gratuitous sleeping Chubble photo!

Boyness' artistic senses were tingling for this shot. Alas, I couldn't figure out how to get it to work properly with our camera. I know what he wanted me to capture, and maybe if everyone else hadn't been running up the path I would have eventually figured it out. 4 pictures of essentially the same thing with different settings, and this not-very-spectacular photo was the best I did:

Merrily we hike along...moving up the mountain...

The kids NEEDED me to take this photo. Like, they may have exploded if I hadn't!

We like rocks! The mountain is made out of rocks! Awesome!

I think she likes her carrier:

Look, more rocks! Big ones! Girliness really wanted to explore the caves, I really didn't want her to get squished by a gigantic rock, and ~L~ helpfully reminded the children that if something is growing on it, the rangers said to try not to disturb it, and with that we left the humongous rock overhang.

We stopped on a gravelly "beach" for lunch. The kids didn't seem to want to stay in the calmer backwashing waters, until D got pulled and ~L~ had to go in after him, lest he get swept down the rapids (actually, this was really scary, and the kids finally "got" that even where the water looked relatively calm, it was moving too fast for them to wade out even a little).

The kids LOVED this area:

I mean, think about it, the day is hot, there's a cool breeze coming up from the river, there's all this cool stuff to climb on, and a big high place to drop rocks into the water from - it's like the kidtopia grotto:

About a mile, maybe a little less, down a second trail, we found this lovely stretch of beach alongside the river:

And yes, bonus, I am nursing a baby in that photo. We stopped here and played for a while before we turned around and headed back to the trailhead.

There was even a swimming spot - this drops off pretty precipitously, and was maybe 6' deep - we all went in at some point. The water was SO COLD, really we just dunked ourselves and RAN for the sunshine. It was physically painful, that's how cold it was. BittyPrincess went in naked and SCHREAAAAAAMED until she got back onto the hot rocks.

It was a lovely day to get wet and then dry ourselves on the beach.

And then the hike back and the aforementioned screaming-in-the-car episode.

By the time we got home it was after 9pm. Fran had dinner (burgers) ready. Dinner, shower, and all the kids dropped precipitously into sleep and stayed there for 11 straight hours, ready for new adventures today. Alas, they will probably just include washing the van (which got so dusty on the drive up the mountain yesterday that I could close the back hatch and get a shower of dirt) and playing in the yard.

Shiny

2010-07-04T10:14:00.000-07:00

Yesterday we washed the van. It took all afternoon. No, really, we took small breaks between steps and stopped for lunch and went to the store for window cleaner and wax, but we started just after noon and ended at 7pm. My standards concerning what constitutes a successful day have clearly fallen far. But it is clean, it got its first wax since we've owned it (pathetic, I know - we've owned the van for about 5 years now), and it's sitting in the driveway all shiny and ready to go drive for 4 hours today. What was I thinking accepting an invitation to celebrate the 4th of July 2 hours from here? At least we'll be driving in a shiny freshly laundered (yeah, we did the carpets too, although that was last week - yesterday we just vacuumed inside and armor-all'd the plastic/vinyl/etc) vehicle. Irritatingly, Francesco and I will have to drive up separately, since he's working today. BittyPrincess thinks we should bring cake to the party. And celery. "Because I like cake and I like celery."

I also had a near-meltdown over the fact that it seems like I care more than the girls do about whether their room is clean. And then I realized my room isn't exactly clean at the moment, either: my dresser is full of random crap I just couldn't be bothered to put away, and my desk has quite a bit of extraneous correspondence on it. *Sigh* I think it's the stuff that's randomly shoved into their bookshelves that is setting me off. If you're going to put something away, do it right. That and the scatter of toys and clothes on the floor. I recognize that I was a terribly messy child and am getting back some of my own here. But I'd like them all to be as particular as Boyness is about his room and his stuff. I suppose it's one of those blessing-in-disguise situations that the two that don't give a shit are living in the same room, so it's not like there's one child stressing out about the mess the other child is making. They're just both really messy.

Rainy Day Updates

2010-07-02T09:11:00.000-07:00

This has been a busy week. I'm feeling a little short on brainpower this afternoon, so I'll just outline it all boring-like.

Saturday - We rearranged the girls' room. I loved the way the girls' room was arranged before, and I'm really trying to buck up and deal with the fact that they want to change it and it's their room, so the arrangement that makes them happy is going to be more important than me thinking it looks good. We got all the big stuff where we wanted it, including leaving a space for a new desk, and left piles of their crap all over the hallway. And went to bed.

Sunday - Escape to visit friends. Yay!

Monday - IKEA in the morning for the desk, and then met with friends at the park; they came to our house afterwards and left around 8:30pm. Nothing of any consequence was accomplished.

Tuesday - Pacific Science Center! Yay! We'd already been to the Circus exhibit, but got to spend more time with it this time. The girls both waited an excruciatingly long time in line to use the trapeze bungee thing. BittyPrincess *just barely* weighed enough to use it, but managed to bounce herself around pretty well. Girliness outdid everyone else there, pulling off at one point 8 forward flips in a row. It was pretty awesome.

Wednesday - Nana day. We got home around 8pm and I did manage to assemble the desk for the girls' room before we went to bed, so there was some headway made on the mess.

Thursday - Friends over. We also chose this day to sort through all the girls' clothing, getting rid of or packing away outgrown items and pulling stuff from storage that would fit BittyPrincess. This was actually a BIG SUCCESS, which is a little surprising given the level of chaos in the house with 3 extra kids running around. The 10yo girls had established a mint - yes, they printed money - and then had the other kids turn in stuffed animals and puppets for money. By the end of the afternoon the artificial economy was thriving.

Friday - Well, that would be today, wouldn't it? The weather STINKS. We went to the library and got the kids signed up for the summer reading incentive program. We went to Goodwill and got a desk chair for the girls. We went to the transfer station and threw all our glass recycling into the bins. And we went to Costco, where (you know it) we spent an appalling amount of money on food - I suppose since we almost never throw any food out, though, it's not like it's wasted. It just hurts to fork over that much in one go.

In the in-between: A million and a half nursing sessions. Feeding the kids, and then doing it again. Minor-league cleaning and laundry. All that fluff-and-nonsense that takes up 80% of the day.

Our week has felt really busy and really satisfying.

I also read Mixed Blood: A Thriller by Roger Smith. I'm still sorting through whether I liked it or not. I enjoyed the writing. The characters were interesting and complex. This book got pretty incredible reviews, but I found I was quite able to put it down at any point, which makes it not such a compelling read as a thriller. What I found interesting was that it wasn't formulaic at all. I'm usually a happy-endings type of reader, but was satisfied with the not-entirely-happy-for-everyone ending here. If you like these kinds of slightly-gritty novels that do have an element of suspense - albeit one that is (surprisingly satisfyingly) not played up too much - you'll like this book.

Drive and Kite Runner

2010-07-01T12:24:00.000-07:00

I was going to pack up the kids and go to the farmers' market in Tacoma today, but alas, the day semi-dawned crappy and we're staying home.

Just three posts in and I'm already running out of steam on this book thing, because I don't really want to write comprehensive reviews, I just want to like-it-or-not-and-why and get back in the habit of posting things every now and again. But halfway through this week I've finished a couple of books already so I thought I'd better buck up and post about them.

So...Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us by Daniel Pink is a work of non-fiction. I try to throw a few non-fiction books into the mix from time to time, even though I'm usually less than enthusiastic about them. The premise of the book is that reward/penalty systems don't work; that they, in fact, screw everything up. This is supposedly a whole new approach to motivating people, but it's essentially something any parent could have told you - if you pay a kid for something once, they will expect to be paid from there on out. The book gives a shout-out to the interest-based way we school, but is primarily about motivating employees with a little bit of aside for self-motivation and kid-motivation. There are echoes of Alfie Kohn, the hero of wussy parents everywhere, for whom I harbor an irrational hatred mainly because his ideas make no practical sense. Drive spends all of 6 pages talking about how to avoid extinguishing kids' love of all things new and learn-y and yet manages to impart more actual attainable advice than Kohn puts out in several hundred pages of "whaaaa my parents sucked *hurt hurt*". People are born loving to learn for no other reason than that it is satisfying to learn. The really interesting thing about this book is how much research went behind proving that we don't stop loving to learn, we just get fucked up by the way parenting and schooling typically work. The other great thing about this book is that the author doesn't go as far as Kohn goes; he says that when something is boring and can't be made more interesting, it is appropriate to have a reward/punishment system. This TOTALLY makes sense to me, and it takes parents off of Kohn's overly permissive wishy-washy never-tell-your-kids-what-to-do (entirely impractical) hook. I got pretty caught up in how this book applies to parenting and schooling, but that wasn't the main focus of the book. Overall impression: if you manage people, even little obnoxious underaged ones, you should probably read this book.

Kite Runner by Khaled Husseini has been sitting on my bookshelf for at least three years. I don't really like reading deep real-life personal-memoir books, because my deep personal real life has enough deep personal thoughts already. About 80% of my reading is escapism and the other 20% is practical application. I can see how this is a good book and why this book had such a following when it was first written. The writing was good, the story felt very real, and I really have nothing negative to say about it except that I wasn't really excited about it. I much prefer A Thousand Splendid Suns, by the same author, because I connected better with that book. Overall impression: worth reading but not on the top of my list.

This week we did lots of things other than reading, so I'll have to post again.

Brave New World

2010-06-26T17:41:00.000-07:00

OK, so I'm already done with this book. It's a pretty quick read. Like The Road, it reads a little like a writing exercise (the idea is X, now go!), but unlike The Road, it isn't a complete failure.

"Not a complete failure?" you say, "but it's a classic!" And classics, I say, usually aren't that fun to read. This one was at least engaging. The world that was portrayed had a bit more thought behind it. Character development was really weak, which I could see as part of the point of the book; the characters are SUPPOSED to be weak. Still, I like it when I can really get into the heads of the characters in a book (at least one of them), and that didn't happen at all here.

Impression? I liked it and am glad I read it, and recommend that if you are another of those rare souls that initially escaped this book, you pick it up and spend a couple of hours with it.

Books, books, books

2010-06-26T10:20:00.000-07:00

I like to read. I especially like to read while nursing or cuddling kids. I thought: gee, I'm having trouble blogging lately. And then I realized that blogging about my reading for a little while might help me get back into the habit, since it's easy and requires very little creativity, but friends might appreciate it nonetheless.

This week I went through, back-to-back, two of the most disparate books I've ever read. The first was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. The second was Outlander by Diana Gabaldon. Unless the second had actually featured rainbows and unicorns, it would be hard to think of a way to put more emotional space between the two.

Let's start where I started: The Road. This book can be described in a single word, and that word is BAD. It's not just a single kind of bad, it's the kind of well-rounded totally bad that I'd be hard-pressed to put a more complicated label on. If I said it was horrible you might think I was referring to the subject matter in a kind of horrible-but-compelling way, but no, it's not. The subject matter is, granted, horrible. It is also incompletely imagined and shock-value heavy; by this I mean that there are scenes in the book that the author describes in ways that maximize the use of disturbing words and subject matter but that contain elements that do not make sense when you stop to think about them - and it's not the kind of book that is complicated that way on purpose. But let's not stop at the subject matter; the writing is also bad. Yes, I understand that our dear probably-mentally-unstable Mr. McCarthy was trying to use a writing device. It didn't work. Screw the author, it's the visionary that read this book and decided to publish it that should get an award. There's no good reason that anyone who reads with any sort of regularity should like this book. I suppose if you read something bad enough, the good stuff seems even better in comparison...but still, whoever read this complete piece of shit book (it took less than 2 hours to read, so maybe the short story category would fit better) and thought "wow, this should be printed!" and later "wow, this should be a movie" TOTALLY deserves kudos for seeing the money underneath all the crap. Yes, yes, I understand the thinking that "a good book makes you think and this book makes you think." This book makes me think about what a load of shit it was, it doesn't make me think constructive thoughts of any variety. Overall impression? Utter crap. Save your time for more pleasurable literary experiences like reading translated technical manuals.

Onward...

Before I started the second book I read this week, Outlander, I looked it up online in a semi-desperate attempt (because I am not a fan of online book reviews, and now I get to laugh at myself for posting one) to avoid the disaster that selecting based on jacket reviews had caused earlier in the week. "Hard to classify," they said. Well, I have no such problem. It is a romance novel. I don't read romance novels, so you can be surprised when I say that I loved this one. I guess I liked it the way that people like Playboy for the articles or go to Hooters for the chicken wings. I read a romance novel for the phenomenal writing. Because it was, it was, it was. Thank the freaking Lord. After reading my way through the absolutely shitty writing of Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series and then picking up Cormac McCarthy, it's kind of a wonder I didn't give up reading altogether (aside from necessary evils like street signs, party invitations, and text messages). Thank you Diana Gabaldon. You have restored my brain's language centers to balance. And the sex was pretty good, too. Extra points for really good plot devices, not leaving holes in the story, and avoiding "movie magic" writing mistakes. Overall impression? Woohooo, requesting the sequel from the library!

I'm now reading Brave New World. Believe it or not, I've never read it before!

Future reading suggestions are welcome.

Her First Sick

2010-06-26T04:36:00.000-07:00

Some blessedly short-lived but super-crappy illness has been running through our family. One person at a time (except for Francesco and Tony, who had it at the same time). Fever, body aches, light nausea, and just feeling TIRED. I am not even sure where in the body this particular bug lives, but it drove Tony to 103.7 "and everything looks purple." Motrin to the rescue! The rest of us weren't hit quite so hard and rallied without drugs within about a day and a half.

Chubble, though, totally hates being sick. She's pretty used to being pampered, I think. She refused to eat (I managed to make her eat once) for 24 hours. No big fever for her (she didn't even break 100). The rest of us had gotten all lethargic and she did too. It SUCKED. I think her being sick might have sucked as much for me as it did for her. Still, she even looked all sick and pathetic. I tried to take a sick pathetic picture, but since she is already about the most unphotogenic baby I've ever met, it just looked like all her other "OMG my baby looks like that? Oh, ok, I'm glad you don't think so either" pictures.

She's better now but still being weird about eating, like she's not sure that's such a great idea until she actually gets started. She won't eat half-awake. I can't get her to fall asleep while she's nursing, which was never one of her strong suits but I could get her down when she was tired. Now it's all about bouncing and rocking and other highly me-awake baby soothing activities. Not cool, not cool. Particularly at 2:30am, which we've done for 2 nights in a row. Please, Chubble, you are 2 months old. You had figured out, finally, when night time was. You can do this. Sleeeeeep.

Walking, walking, walking

2010-06-17T16:33:00.000-07:00

Today we walked from our house to a big neighborhood park, 1.5 miles each way. Chubble in the wrap facing forward and wide awake on the way there, facing in and sleeping on the way back. Totally doable. Awesome. 3 miles = no obstacle for me and the kids.

Play?

2010-06-14T15:53:00.000-07:00

Last week Aunty B and Uncle P visited :). She got pictures and I didn't, very strange. We had a very good visit despite the angsty PNW weather. The kids were THRILLED to see their Aunt and Uncle, and didn't act like complete asses the way they had during the last visit. They got a little wrapped up into our normal YMCA/music lessons/etc schedule, but we did manage a trip out to IKEA, some thrift store shopping, and a day at the Pacific Science Center. And then as we were dropping them off at the airport the sun came out and hasn't really gone away since.

I feel like the dog on Over the Hedge. "Play?! Play?! PLAYPLAYPLAYPLAY" (I looked on youtube for a clip just in case somebody didn't "get" that, but no go) I must be annoying the living heck out of my friends. If I haven't gotten you yet don't worry, either I or Francesco will be right on that the next time we have an impulse to go beaching or parking or hiking or whatever-it's-SUNNY-OUT-ing.

Yesterday the kids and I walked a mile out (another mile back) down our street, collecting a full bag of plantain and chickweed to dry out. Today, we went on a bitty hike at McCormick Creek; we came home, at lunch, and I shuttled Francesco and the kids out the door for their Y classes. I am TIRED. Really, I'm not sure whether I'm being coherent at the moment or not.

Chubble is growing and, well, chubble-ing. It's not uncommon to hear "look Mom, she's chubbling on me!" from the big kids, meaning that she's looking around not doing much of anything. She's getting to my favorite part, when they start looking at you and smiling, trying to figure their hands out and whacking themselves in the faces. I love the weird faces, the cooing gurgling "conversations" (Chubble is either the most conversational of my kids, or I've completely forgotten this stage for the others), the feeling of a more interactive baby when you pick her up and hold her. There is a different "feel" to them when they start cooperating with you while you move them around, and I really love that. We're to the point where I can scoop her up with one hand now (this always seems to freak first-time parents out).

I think we'll keep her.

Yesterday we tried out various carrying methods for our walk, and the best option is still a face-in front wrap. I am anxious for her to grow into her backpack carrier.

I am also TOTALLY ready for her to make friends with her car seat. I can put her in there happy and gurgling, and in a few short minutes she'll be red-faced and sweaty from screaming her little head off. Sometimes she decides, seemingly at random, that the car seat is fine after all, and she'll look around the car happily for the 15-20 minutes it takes us to drive anywhere of consequence. More of that, please.

Good Big Brother

2010-06-05T20:31:00.000-07:00

Only one month old, and she's got her brother totally wrapped around her little teeny not-yet-under-her-conscious-control finger.

Chubbletastic!

2010-06-05T20:28:00.000-07:00

How to Have a Water Birth for $50

2010-05-26T10:57:00.000-07:00

I promised that I'd eventually post about the birth pool. I think it seems so primary to the process of getting ready for birth in my mind because it was probably the only thing we really did to get ready for the birth that somebody having a baby in a hospital wouldn't have done. The pool setup and a car seat were the only new purchases I made for this kid during the pregnancy. Not that having a baby was inexpensive; take into account my deferred income and she's one expensive little being.

This is kind of like the cheap-but-not-TOO-cheap person's guide to preparing for a water birth.

Anyhow, without further ado:

Selecting a Birth Pool

I had three main criteria in mind. First, that the pool be sufficiently deep (>22" is my minimum, even given my shortish 5'2" stature), and second, that it not have a terribly large capacity. And then the big make-it-or-break-it quality - PRICE. We don't have deep pockets. Particularly after our break-in. I wanted, ideally, to spend less than $40. This automatically rules out pools that were designed to give birth in, like the AquaDoula or Birth Pool in a Box or any number of available (and really good IMO for varying reasons) options. It even rules out rentals, which in my area run $250 or so.

We accomplished 2/3 of our criteria for $29.99 on Amazon (crap, it's even cheaper now!), and our happy little "OMG we're almost ready for a baby" package arrived just two days later.

The pool I linked is actually a little large. At 72-75", the capacity is about 1/3 more than that of the 60" I would have preferred. That pool, though, was for whatever reason a lot more expensive when I was doing my shopping. The price point changes constantly, so if you can get the 60" (still 22"-24" tall) pool, go for it, it will take a lot less time to fill. The larger pool was so big I couldn't even reach both sides at once. This is desirable in a play pool but not so much in a birthing one.

Accessories

Hose - For sanitary reasons, we needed a brand-new hose. For avoiding-disgusting-toxins-in-the-pool reasons, we needed one that was OK for hot water and for drinking water. This type of hose was a tadbit more pricey, but since we could pretty comfortably get away with a hose that was only 25' long (in most houses 50' is the safer bet), it was just $14. After we were done with it, we ran bleach water through it and set it aside for the next time we need to run hot water through a hose.

Adapter - we were going from our shower (we remove the shower head) to the pool. The adapter was a little difficult to find at Home Depot because it wasn't labeled in anything even remotely resembling an obvious way, and I had to bring a shower head and the hose to the adapter isle and find the one that matched. $2.45 (plus $.50 for thread sealing tape). We did a trial run without the sealing tape just to make sure it worked (HIGHLY recommended, since I've seen "universal adapters" fail at births and it's not a good scene).

Liner - painting drop cloth, $1.49. We wound up not using it for the birth (we did in the trial run and it was a PITA and water still got out, so we figured if we were going to have to sanitize the pool itself anyways we might as well not deal with the crinkly). If we were going to be passing this on to another family, we would recommend purchasing a liner made specifically for pools.

Air pump - this is really important, because these pools have HUGE air reservoirs. It took 30 minutes to fill with the pump and would probably have taken way over an hour with our lungs. We had a pump from way-back-at-some-point that is half-broken, so we didn't buy a new one, but we did need to inflate the pool outside using the car adapter. So we left the pool inflated, propped sideways against the closet doors in the bedroom from about 37 weeks on, mainly because we had no desire to stand outside in the rain pumping up a pool again (even if it wasn't in the middle of the night).

Strainer - women poop when they push, it just happens. You need a strainer. We had a metal one that we planned to boil afterwards if we wound up using it, but we didn't use it. I've mostly seen women use fish nets (some birth kits even contain them), which are very cheap too if you can't get over reusing something you've gotten shit on.

Tarp - we didn't have one, but I highly recommend it for others. We didn't wind up making a mess but it's SUPER common for small splashes to get out of these pools during labor. Nothing fancy, and another painters' plastic will work just fine if you don't already have one, so max expenditure here is still just $1.50 and we spent nothing.

Water pump - NOT NECESSARY unless your pool will be below ground level. A water pump will typically cost more than our pool did. We siphoned the water into our garden. It wasn't THAT gross, really. A little bloody. Yay fertilizer! Out-of-doors, the blood gets consumed/broken down really fast, so it wasn't a sanitary hazard out in a garden that nobody was going to be setting foot in for several weeks. Anyway...pump not necessary. We gravity siphoned and it took quite a long time to empty the pool, but it worked well.

Assorted Other Lessons Learned

We started filling as soon as my water broke, before labor really set in. This was a GOOD IDEA because it was only actually "labor labor" for about 30 minutes, which would totally have been enough time if I wanted to soak the bottoms of my feet. The water stayed reasonably warm overnight with just a heavy flannel sheet over the top of the pool, so we had a good volume at a decent (probably about 90 degrees by the morning) temperature when we woke up and started filling the pool for the real deal. As it was, it was still a little on the cool side (more like 96 degrees than like the 100 we were shooting for) when I got in; Francesco added some water in big pots from the stove to boost the temp after Chubble had actually been born and we were sitting in the tub trying not to let her get too cold. The other reason starting so early and covering worked for us is that we stopped filling the second the water started getting cool, so we were covering a 130 degree pool and we could leave it unattended for 10 hours and have it still well over room temperature when we needed it. The worst thing that could have happened is that we'd have had to siphon out a large portion of the pool water and refill with hot water if my labor had turned out to be much longer.

This isn't one I had to learn myself, thank goodness...those almost-boiling pots of water? They're freaking hot! Pour them as far away from the laboring woman (burns in labor! Ack!) as possible without getting the water or the pot directly on the pool plastic (melting plastic! Ack!).

Clean the pool right away. It's just easier. We don't need to elaborate on how we know that, we just do.

Expense

Pool - $30
Accessories - $18.50
---------------------
Birth pool - $48.50

A side note about utilities - we haven't a clue how much they cost us. Our water bill that month was only slightly more than usual, maybe by between $5 and $10, and that's after filling the pool twice and showering at home way more often than usual. Our electric would be impossible to figure out (this is a factor because it took 3 reheats from the water heater to fill the pool) because we set the thermostat much higher than usual in the first couple of weeks after Chubble got here, and because April this year was much colder than April last year (so no good comparison point).

And, we have a happy fully functional birth setup for under $50!

Poor Abandoned Blog

2010-05-16T18:25:00.000-07:00

I have good reasons to abandon the blog, but I should also check in because it isn't like I'm keeping a journal anywhere else.

It is no longer winter! WHOHOOOO!!! When I calculated my April due date, way back last August, I pictured myself sitting on a blanket in the sunshine with my infant watching the kids play. I TOTALLY intend to spend as many hours as I can muster doing exactly that. I really, really, really, really (REALLY) needed summer and sunshine. I am really glad it's here.

I decided that "Newbie" doesn't fit the baby. She'll be "Chubble" for now. It's my blog, I can rename her as often as I want. Chubble is now a month old, and closing in on 11lbs. That's over 1/3 more than her birth weight. Crazy, right? Her cheeks are getting chubby and she's accumulating fat rolls. She has a terribly unpredictable sleep (non)schedule. And despite the fact that she's a very noisy/active sleeper, I'm managing to get a decent amount of sleep myself, which probably explains why I'm feeling a lot more mentally "awake" and like myself than I have any right to feel at this point. There's this mental fog that new moms seem to walk around in; it's half hormone and half sleep deprivation. I guess I have the light burns-off-every-morning version rather than the weather-service-warning version. I still reserve the right to revert to full-on mama brain if my baby suddenly decides she doesn't like to sleep at night anymore. Right now the biggest sleep challenge is that I don't know whether she'll be out for the night at 8pm or will cling to consciousness until midnight.

I am having some overly-awake-BittyPrincess (Toddlerness, back then) flashbacks, since Chubble is awake a lot for her age. *THIS IS NOT THE SAME BABY I WILL NOT HAVE TO DO THAT AGAIN*

When I looked back for that link I read a few other posts (because let's face it, saying "fuck" fiftybillion times in that particular post was hardly the high point of my blog), and I realized that my blog used to be more entertaining and had better pictures. Maybe I have had more student-midwife/pregnant/new-mama fog going on in the past two years or so than I was giving myself credit for.

Still, life is looking decidedly normal. Which is a little bit stunning at barely a month postpartum. It's a little different getting around with the baby in tow, but for the most part this has been easier than I had anticipated.

I am VERY MUCH digging the 5 year spacing between Chubble and BittyPrincess. The others are 2 and 3 years apart and that was a lot harder, because there was no such thing as letting them go do their own thing while I dealt with the baby. I can't exactly leave the 5yo home alone or anything, but I *can* take a shower with the realistic expectation that nothing horrible (or even remotely horrible) will happen while I do so.

All three older kids are adjusting really well and loving (sometimes a little too much) on their new sister. At least the loving-a-little-too-much at ages 5, 8, and 10 means they're a little more in her face than I'd like, and are sure that they can get her to stop crying without my help thankyouverymuch, not that they're exploring her eyeballs with their fingers.

OK, I could probably ramble on semi-endlessly, since the baby is asleep and the other three are occupied doing various quiet things around the house, but I need to put bread in the oven and start making dinner.

PS - I suck at taking pictures. Somehow getting out the camera seems like a monumental task lately.