Craftacular

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

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

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

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

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.

Venturing

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

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

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.