Twanoh State Park

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.

Hot!

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.

Love

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.

They're Baaaack

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.

Hurricane Ridge

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

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.

Rainy Day Updates

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

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

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

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.