Yes It's Still Winter (Bonus ants, flowers, sheet music, and a chiropractic visit)

I vacuumed up ants today. They had apparently decided that they liked my subwoofer, despite the fact that we never eat anywhere near the thing, there's no water nearby, we have no ants anywhere else in the house (that I know about), and I can't see anything the least bit attractive about it. I vacuumed them up and then went and took a shower to stop the crawlies, but now I might have to shower again...it's almost as bad as when you start thinking about headlice and get all itchy (glad I could do that for you).

The weather continues to lie to me. Not quite as convincingly as it was a few weeks ago, but still. There are FLOWERS. Not the over-optimistic ones that you plant as bulbs only to watch die a short while later. Ones that usually don't bother until spring.

This has led to garden-bed-preparing on the kids' part:



No matter how many times I tell them it is still too early to plant anything, the girls don't seem to believe me. Girliness is just disdainful of my opinion (happily, or maybe semi-happily, since it means I will have to buy some later, I have none of the soil additives she needed to prepare her beds properly, so she was left with a "when it's TIME we'll get some" answer and half-prepared beds). BittyPrincess was moved to tears by my unwillingness to help her plant flowers.

Semi-dramatic subject shift: I can't tell you how happy I am to see music like this on the piano:



Even if it is a bit of a stretch for Girliness, and even if this particular piece is more than a tad played-out, I love that she's getting more and more capable at the piano. MIL still does the teaching and in my opinion her reluctance to push the kids at ALL past their comfort zone is making for a REALLY SLOW learning experience, but they ARE still learning.

That all still fell into the "lies" category because Girliness is for the most part still playing much simpler music, with this as her more extended work piece. Most of her sheet music isn't nearly so pretty. Yet.

Relevant to previous posts but not at all to this one, I saw a chiropractor yesterday (Wednesday) to highly pleasing effect. Fran made the appointment for me; I suppose he'd heard enough whining? Anyhow, I can put on pants again (whohooo for small victories!) without falling over, wincing in pain, or doing a three-step seated-then-standing operation. Oh, and it hurts WAY less.

Unsprung

It is dramatically not spring yet today.

After so much nice weather, I was really starting to get adjusted to warmer days and higher light levels, and not wallowing so much. Today it is 33 degrees and it has been snowing. The sudden shift leaves my brain confused and unhappy.

I did, however, sleep better last night after pulling our old memory foam topper from where it was stored (memory foam does have a lifespan, and that topper was well past it - we'd taken it off the bed and put it aside in case we wanted to cut it up for camping pads) and cutting it so that I could sleep on the not-so-used-up middle portion. I twice managed to sleep for 2 consecutive hours.

Prenatal sleep deprivation may indeed be an evolutionary advantage because if we are already sleep deprived when we actually give birth, we are less likely to suddenly slip into complete insanity when our babies wake us every 1-2 hours and resort to infanticide so that we can just.fucking.sleep. While we're pregnant, there's not really anyone to take it out on as our waking intervals come closer and closer together and it becomes harder and harder to get physically comfortable. I couldn't kill my husband and get a blissful uninterrupted nights' sleep. My kids have long since transitioned into their own sleep patterns that for the most part don't have anything to do with mine. It's all me and those lovely (not) pregnancy hormones.

Just another excuse for pregnancy space-cadet syndrome.

Continued Doings of Dubious Importance

But first, a little whining (I do that frequently don't I?)...I hate my mattress. This is bleary day #3 after waking up with hip pain at 3am that I just couldn't find a sleep position comfortable enough to alleviate. This despite the small pillow armada now inhabiting the bed with me, and the third-trimester rotisserie process (hourly turning) that I've been doing for quite a while now. I want a new mattress but can't justify it given that in another month it will probably no longer actually be hurting me, and given that even if we had enough money for a new mattress it would be better used paying down our credit cards. It does suck though (it is dipped/compressed into ruts where we sleep most often). /whining

Girliness' ear is much improved. No further high drama necessary, although greater than usual attention/cleaning/treatment continues.

Boyness continues to be a PITA and has had frequent outbursts this week. I think he's cycling. Hormonally, I mean. Like 'rhoid rage or something. Totally punting this to Fran, who says he was the same way as a kid and what I've been doing is not helping. The two of them can sit down and make a behavior/consequence plan and fill me in after. Of course, now that we're on the tail end of a week of this behavior, he'll probably be perfect for the remainder of the month (I really do think he's cycling, everybody has a hormonal cycle, some of us are just more affected than others).

I organized (well, the kids and I organized) our mess of swimming stuff (=stuff shoved under the bottom shelf of the hall closet that in some way relates to swimming). It was one of those 20 minute jobs that I'd put off for a year. Ridiculous.

Baby continues to wriggle about vigorously here on the shy side of 34 weeks. Head down all the time now, though.

I am newly enamored of a pair of shorts that Fran got as a Christmas present from his brother. Yes, I am stealing my husband's shorts. He'll live. It's a testament to how much weight Fran has lost that he and I can wear the same clothing (I wear it under the belly, not over), 'cause we never hit this point last time around (and I'm not bigger or heavier than I was at this point with BittyPrincess). I got a bleach stain on one of the three shirts that still make it all the way around my belly. Damnit.

We have still not decided on a name for this baby, although here in my blog it will probably be Newbie.

Ear Piercing Draaaaama!!!!

As part of Girliness' 10 year birthday, she got her ears pierced (I think I blogged about this, but I might have forgotten...she wanted her ears pierced and a haircut and lunch out with me for her 10th birthday present - awesome). This was over a month ago. As instructed by the woman who did her ear piercing, Girliness has been faithfully cleaning her ears thrice daily with the solution she was given at the shop. Nevertheless, yesterday the piercing in her left ear - formerly just a little more irritated-looking than her right - presented a pretty nasty infection. At about 10pm she came to me with the front part of the earing missing in her ear, because the amount of swelling had pulled it in too far. I have more than the average amount of ammunition to deal with such a situation. But OMG did it ever SUCK. Even with the lidocaine, pulling through the earing to drain and reposition was very difficult for her to get through. There was a bunch of thrashing and "mom my hand just DOES that I can't control it" going on. We had to take a couple of breaks (her excuse was that she wanted to look in the mirror, but it was that she couldn't handle it anymore). And I legitimately thought she'd hate me forever. After everything was drained and back in place and I'd hit her ear with enough antibiotic/sanitizing solutions to treat a small armada of girls with infected ear piercings (and made her take an oral antibiotic as well, although without so much overkill), she gave me a big and very sincere hug. She was eager to head off to bed, but a little shaky still, so a little rescue remedy and a warm sea salt compress for her ear, and she was out in 5 minutes.

I on the other hand am surprised by how much I absolutely totally completely hated this whole ordeal.

In the course of my midwifery education I have found that I am indeed capable of hurting people without feeling bad about it, usually because 1) I have their consent to do something necessary (or they would literally die if I didn't), 2) I know things will improve when it's over, and 3) I do my damnedest not to hurt anyone any more than I absolutely HAVE to.

It has always stressed me out, though. My body is really accustomed to stress hormones now and if I ever did get shaky and out-of-body because of them the way some people do, I don't now. My daughter thinks I dealt with her ear with utter calm and compassion. In truth I am not sure my stress level has EVER been this high, and I've seen some gnarly shit.

It really, really is different when it's your own kids. (Side note: I have SO much more compassion for the EMT dad that couldn't help our birth team out as his wife was hemorrhaging now.) And something nasty happens in your brain when you could just stop and it would still hurt, but not as much as THIS. I wanted badly to foist this off on someone else, but the alternatives weren't attractive (which pretty much sums up other circumstances in which I've hurt my children to provide necessary medical care).

Or maybe pregnancy has reduced my coping abilities to shit. After Girliness was safely and relatively comfortably abed, I proceeded to descend into a ball of horrified hormonal-ness, and contracted regularly for 2 hours until I finally got out of bed and ate a burrito and drank a glass of wine.

This morning, all is well with Girliness' ear. It isn't back to normal but it looks MUCH better and she says it doesn't hurt as much. Thank freaking goodness.

Lessons learned:

1) The antiseptic solution given at an ear piercing isn't sufficiently strong to prevent an infection, much less treat one. When I actually read the label I was shocked at how weak it was; barely enough to make sure there wasn't anything growing in the solution itself.

2) Pregnancy apparently reduces my coping skills to mush. Even moreso than I thought. I have no way of knowing for sure, but probably this wouldn't have been nearly so big a deal (still would have sucked) not pregnant.

3) My daughter loves and trusts me enough that she doesn't hold this incident against me.

In another thank-freaking-goodness aside, I had warned Girliness that this might happen before we ever got her ears pierced. I am SO glad I didn't talk her into it with promises of "it's so easy, no problems ever blah blah blah."

I continue to be horrified with people who pierce infants' ears.

Spring Cleaning. Ish.

Today I engaged in a little of what I like to call "moving day cleaning." You know, that kind of cleaning you only do on the day you move into or out of a house, and then wonder why you hadn't done that at all in the years you'd been there. Like "why did I let that coffee splatter stay behind the coffee maker for three years? It looks so much better now!"

I am well aware that there are many people for whom this type of cleaning does not exist, either because they really are that on top of their immaculate homes or because they don't actually live in their homes. Or maybe because they've never moved, have never in their adult lives had to fully empty out a space they've lived in for years, and haven't a clue how dirty it really is underneath their stoves.

I was relieved to find that there was nothing scary (or living) underneath my oven when I pulled it from its cozy little nook in the counterspace. Some dustbunnies and a long-lost baking dish, and a toy that had to have belonged to a prior inhabitant.

The same cannot be said for the furnace duct that emerges next to the "pantry" (=large L-shaped shelving unit that holds all our dry goods/non-refrigerated foodstuffs). There were formerly-edible things in there that our family has never purchased so I'm pretty sure I'm not the only person who slacks when it comes to removing vent covers and cleaning the scary gaping tunnel that eventually leads to the furnace.

Unfortunately, while I now FEEL cleaner just standing in my kitchen, you can't really tell that big a difference. Except maybe for the front of the dishwasher, which will be dirty again next week I'm sure.

A couple of days ago we did the kids' bathroom in a similarly thorough way. That was downright scary, but luckily I had the messy-bathroom perpetrators to do the behind-the-toilet scrubbing. At one point they knew how to clean the bathroom really well, and would do it when I assigned it once a week or so, but standards had slipped to the point where I saw the same piece of unclaimed missed-the-can trash behind the toilet for four weeks running, and it became obvious that I had to take things into my own hands again. Which in this case mostly meant sitting cross-legged outside their bathroom and directing the Boyness cleaning army-of-one.

Also this week, I went into the garage and found all the boxes of outgrown kid clothes, and sorted them by size. You'd think they would already be sorted, but no...I tend to go through the kids' clothes on the same (or close to the same) day, and during the midwifery school adventure I didn't ever have time to do anything but stick the resulting pile in a box and slap a label on it, so I'd have three sizes in each box.

I have 9 large rubbermaid containers of outgrown kid clothes. Yikes. At least I know where/what it all is. And there is a piece of my decluttering-loving heart that is LOVING the idea of not having boxes of outgrown clothes lying around after this child; this is as-close-as-you-get-to-100% surely going to be our last.

Also since my last update, we completed Boyness' room. He loves it. I am very happy that he loves it and is so proud of his room. The girls, miraculously, cleaned their room very thoroughly and have kept it that way for a week; I had told them I wouldn't even consider rearranging their room until they'd kept it clean for 2 weeks straight, which I thought they would find impossible. I might be stuck rearranging their room.

This leaves the dining area, den, and laundry room to deep clean. And there are bits of the garage left to reorganize, too, but it's gratifyingly easy to walk through and Boyness has plenty of room to use his heavy boxing bag now (vs having to walk through a box maze to get to his mats etc before).

The really interesting thing here (and yes, I consider all of the above highly boring) is that none of that stuff HAD to be done. And indeed, if this was last year, I would not have done it, and nobody would have suffered. Funny how different things become important, how we fill our time. My life came to a screeching halt in early September when I simultaneously ended my midwifery school/apprenticeship obligations and got horrifically morning-sick. And it feels full again right now. I know we're descending into dangerous mommy-wars ground here...but for me it is a truth that this is less fulfilling and satisfying work. Nevertheless, it is where I find myself, unable to realistically work call or do midwifery work of pretty much any sort until a good chunk of time after this baby arrives. So I fill my time with the smaller joys of clean furnace vents and dust-bunny-free zones under the oven. What I was doing when my life was so hectic and crazy was Atlas-important for the women and families I was helping, and this feels...less. Even if it does still feel "full."

I realize I am glossing over the main mommy-war point - that joy I'm supposed to be feeling about spending time with my kids - because truth be told I'm not sure I'm spending that much more good one-on-one time with them (I'm not talking about one me with one child, I'm talking about one me paying 100% attention to any or all three). The kids have been simultaneously enjoying the stability of knowing mom is around almost 100% of the time and missing the chaotic fun of the days that they used to spend at friends' houses. I have been happily allowing them to do projects of various sorts virtually all day (everything from making and racing boats a couple of days ago to identifying birds to doing "art" projects that essentially amount to little more than scribbling on various media) with little input necessary from the mama gallery. I've found the internet to once again be a vital social lifeline when I would otherwise be mostly cooped up at home doing that depressing stay-at-home-mom no-adult-interaction thing (AGAIN no slap-down on the mamas who do and enjoy this. I just don't).

A little over a month until the baby-in-arms part. Probably a couple of months until I get restless enough to start up my midwifery business, and a few months beyond that until things get really interesting when I start attending births.

I feel stalled.

The Boyness Roller Coaster

Boyness has been asking me to help him rearrange his room for at least 6 months. He doesn't like his bed high up, he says. And he doesn't like his bed, period, it isn't comfortable.

So I decided almost completely on a whim that yesterday was *the day* that we were going to tackle the bed thing. I figured it would take a few hours and we could be happily done by the time we were supposed to be at the Y. Plus Fran was home, and I wasn't about to un-loft the bed without another adult to do the lifting.

Semi-predictably, we wound up completely disassembling the bed and moving the entire contents of his bedroom into our room and the hallway so that we could steam clean the carpets. We still made it to the Y, but with the project at 0% completion and the floors wet. Come evening, the floors were still damp and we were back to digging a hallway through our bedroom so that we could leave them to dry overnight.

Meanwhile I got to thinking that Boyness' fancy 100% cotton futon mattress did indeed look kinda funky and flat and uncomfortable. And that maybe 100% cotton plus allergy-boy wasn't a great combo. So today, instead of putting his room back together, we went mattress shopping. This turned out to be a far more onerous task than I predicted, largely because we can't exactly run to Costco and spend $450 on a twin mattress (Holy shit! These must be the same people that buy their BMW and Lexus at Costco!). We wound up at IKEA, where we purchased a rather fancy combo latex/memory foam mattress at 80% discount because the washable outer cover was dirty (it looked like someone had pulled it across the floor of the warehouse pickup area). Right now, the washable outer cover is slowly drying on low heat, but when I pulled it from the washer it looked brand-new-white. SWEET.

And yeah, it's 8:20 and his mattress isn't even back on his bed (at least the frame is reassembled) and his room is still in the hallway and in my bedroom. At least we didn't really have anything planned for tomorrow.

This was NOT supposed to be a three day project. Ugh.

Anyhow, back to why I titled this post "The Boyness Roller Coaster." We swung dramatically from "OMG I'm so happy I am picking out my mattress and you're letting me CHOOSE the one I want!" to "the girls get something why don't I get something" when we stopped at Goodwill (of all places!) and I got BittyPrincess a pair of shoes for $2 and Girliness a *OMG THE EXPENDITURE* wicker basket. WTF?

Sweetness and sunshine on the ride home. OK, well, mostly sleeping on the ride home. And then a HUGE FUCKING BREAKDOWN because his sister wanted more yogurt than he put in her bowl and he was scared we were going to run out. Such a huge breakdown that it only ended when I threw him bodily out the front door and told him that if he was going to threaten the people that I love and live with in my house, he couldn't be in my house anymore.

Tears and reconciliation.

Folding laundry in the living room right now.

OMG PLEASE tell me I'm putting in my parenting duty with this child now and the teenage years will be a breeze. Please. Lie to me, even.

Maternity updates, of a sort

I kind of suck at this whole pregnancy journaling thing. It's pretty easy to see why. Daily updates from weeks 5-26 would have been "pregnancy sucks. I barfed x times today. I can't get out of bed. Oh yeah, and pregnancy sucks." 21weeks x 7days a week = repeat that update 147 times. Then normal life (plus a few added pregnancy-related foibles) happens from 26 weeks until about, hmmmm, now.

Tomorrow I make 32 weeks. For the uninitiated, this means...nothing, really. A "normal" pregnancy lasts about 40 weeks. Or not. It's even more confusing than you think, seriously. The system dates from before anybody really understood the science of conception. Sure, various cultures have had various levels of understanding about how women get pregnant and how long pregnancies should last and how on earth you tell where a woman was beyond "OMG you're huge/not huge/ready to pop/about-halfway-maybe." We're currently operating on something called Naegele's Rule, thanks to a (I'm assuming) well intentioned obstetrician who in the 1700s determined that women deliver, on average, 280 days after the beginning of their last menstrual period.

When I was 1 week pregnant, the baby was not yet conceived.

This system has been in place for so long that it would just confuse everyone even more to start dating from conception.

There's also good evidence that while the 280 day average may have held in Naegele's time, with many grand-multips (moms of 5+) in the calculation, 288 may be more accurate today, particularly for primips (first time moms).

Not that I'm going to nitpick my due date. I almost chose it because I like it. Not quite, but almost. My cycles were wonky. Conception happened sometime "between this birth on this day and that birth about a week later." I've had all my babies slightly before their due dates anyway, so any safe guess will do.

Anyway, bringing the train of thought back in line...

Now is when things start to get interesting for me again. Not in a bad way, or in a good way, really...just MORE.

Today at the YMCA at LEAST 10 people asked me when I was due, prefaced with some variation of "it must be soon." I got my first "is it TWINS?" comment. And two people, one of whom I've never met before, think I'm having a boy.

I have indeed had a growth spurt this past week. I've gained about 4lb and I *feel it.* I'd like to say that the BABY had a growth spurt, but I'd be lying. *I* had a growth spurt, and baby may have incidentally put on a little weight while it was already doing that growing-ridiculously-fast thing that fetuses do. But probably all the weight went to my face and my ass and baby gained it's prim and proper 1/4 lb this week.

Speaking of the Y (just to keep the non-organized unflow of this post going), today was the first day of a new session (=kid swim lessons and classes of various sorts). Our membership cost went up (DAMNIT) but still costs less than anything else I could be doing; even buying a membership at a dedicated gym just for me would cost more, and this way the kids' swimming/ballet/PE/whateverelse lessons are included in the price. Today I put all three in homeschool PE at the same time and spent 45 minutes on the eliptical machine. There is no way that is happening anywhere else. I didn't even have to get up at ungodly-early to do it before Fran had to leave for his own gym-then-work time. TRAPPED.

I came home to find a package (yay!) of the maternity clothes I bought, just a shirt and a sweater. @($*&@#(*$&rs sent the wrong stuff! Like I have weeks to send it back and get new stuff? I told myself I was splurging on a sweater (all of $19) because the maternity sweater that lasted all pregnancy last time was exposing a strip of belly (ugh!) and I still have almost 2 months of cool weather before I have a baby. And then I'll still need bigger-than-usual clothes for a while. Needless to say, I am not a happy customer at the moment. I wanted just one shirt and one sweater that fit, damnit. Just one. Not too much to ask, I would think. The normal clothes I am still wearing (yes, seriously, I'm not wearing pregnancy clothes - I hated them so much I gave them away and I'm GLAD, I wouldn't want to be wearing them anyway) are stretched out enough now that you can see a little through the knit at the belly. You can't see anything important; just when the light catches it right it's like "OH, you can kind of see skin color through that shirt!"

Speaking of belly skin, I thought there was no more uncharted territory on my belly after 3 kids had left stretch marks behind. Apparently there was, a little higher on the right side, where I have a nice little peninsula of stretchmark now thanks to baby trying to push its head into territory I'm pretty sure my liver actually needs to be occupying even now. I think it's ever-so-obnoxious that this baby still hasn't picked a position. Not that it's a big deal for baby still to be flipping around at 32 weeks. It's just uncomfortable, especially since this kid is apparently destined to be a drama queen/king and doesn't just flip, but flips in a BIG OBNOXIOUS STRETCHED-OUT LIMBS-EVERYWHERE kind of way. And sometimes tries to hang out in places where really (seriously kid, why?) the amount of available space is not suitable. I understand that it's roomy in there after 3 other kids have stretched things out a bit, but still, back-up-limbs-down doesn't work at this point; I'm just not that huge. And the ligaments that are desperately trying to keep my uterus from falling off my body *really hurt* when those weird positions and position-changes happen.

This baby is still unnamed. Suggestions welcome.

In which Niki nests...but not in her own home (updated)

Before:

During:

That's me. Hard to see the extent of my belly. That was not an intentional pose; I had just finished using the hammer/prybar to take up some carpet tacking and was thinking about how I was going to haul my quite-heavy rear up off the floor, when ~L~ caught me sitting like that and ran for the camera.

The next day, the only real after-effect is a little tightness in the ass muscles from the squatting/bending. Still, I was happy to move my blanket around the yard (keeping it in the patches of sunlight) and watch the kids zoom around on wheeled objects of various sorts (rollerblades, scooters, bikes, skates) while ~L~ and Mr. P painted the now-bare floor.

More During (I didn't get any pictures of the completely empty room, but you get the idea):







After!





The room still needs rugs to be placed, but the furniture and school stuff is all there! Woot!

I should totally do our own schoolroom/den now, but nah. We start a new Y session today. And I don't feel like it.

Onward!!

Well, it took half of February, too, but things are looking better :). Our financial picture is far from rosy, but I can breathe a little and I promise not to whine about it anymore. Fran got a tip-off from an acquaintance working at Best Buy, and we treated ourselves to an extraordinarily cheap new computer (seriously, I couldn't have purchased something secondhand and lame for less), because we really wanted one that actually worked. And it does! Back online, baby!!! Him running across the parking lot and buying it immediately felt REALLY impulsive, even though we did fight our internetophile natures and sit around for 4 weeks waiting for something to fall out of the sky at us. Boyness' joy at being able to play his Lego games again was so much fun to bask in that I let him at the computer practically before I'd checked it out. I've never seen the child so grateful for some game time, and I hope that lasts. My joy at being able to load my discussion boards and watch Hulu is just...wow. I'm speechless. In real life it doesn't take a lot to render me speechless, but if I can't even figure out how to TYPE my level of relief...yeah, it's amazing. Am I an internet addict or WHAT?

In the meantime, my pregnancy is puttering along all semi-supervised like. Benefits of hiring a friend and classmate to be your midwife and all...100% access to your midwife + being a midwife yourself = not bothering to have official visits quite so regularly. Baby-of-unidentified gender is happily driving me nuts in there, now about 31 weeks along. I figure I've got two months, almost exactly, to get ready. So far, so good; low-ish weight gain, but the baby already feels humongous and I'm certainly not measuring behind any.

I went into a brief hypernesting mode after our house got broken into, which I think was more about reestablishing my territory than about actually nesting, because it has calmed WAY down and I can actually sit in the corner and read for a couple of hours without starting to stress out about whether my closet looks OK if it's left open or if there are pine needles in the hallway again. I am sure my family will laugh at that, because I was absolutely disgusting as a teenager and not all that much better for the first few years of having my own household. I've only kept an acceptably clean house in the last year and a half or so. My daughters are as incapable of keeping a clean room as I once was. My son, however, is as aggressively organized as I am now, and doesn't even need guidance to get himself there. It's a bit of a role reversal, that; Boyness doing way more cleaning work than his sisters because he just does it faster and knocks out 3 or 4 jobs while they're still whining about how hhaaaaaarrrrrddd it is to sort through the clothing on their bedroom floor. It seems like I hear from most families that the girls wind up doing more chores than the boys for that exact reason.

Thus ends my ramble for the day. I shall attempt to update more often, although I can't promise anything terribly interesting, since my days seem to be full of the sort of standard "life" stuff that usually doesn't even interest me enough to write about it. It's hard to remember sometimes that as uneventful as this all seems (my life as it is now), this is life that's happening to me, as much as it was life happening to me when I was driving around like a crazy person and spending my days doing challenging work in clinic and/or holding lives in my hands.

February - BRING IT

So the second half of January sucked. Like being burglarized isn't enough, let's just add insult to injury in the form of locked down bank accounts and hundreds of dollars of late fees. None of which we can afford, in the most basic can't-get-blood-from-a-rock kind of way. We needed our tax returns ASAP, but Fran's work, H&R Block, and the IRS each contributed separately to create a delay that might result in our electricity and water getting shut off. FUN. For the past 5 years we've filed our taxes in a single day after getting our W2 forms midmonth in January, so of course when we actually NEED that money all hell breaks loose.

So February, LET'S GET ON WITH IT. Let the reconstructing begin.

Hiking, Biking, and a Not-So-Fun Homecoming

No pictures, because some punks stole our computers while we were away and I have nowhere to put them. More on that later. Posting from a borrowed computer now.

In our last days in Hawaii, we did more hiking, Girliness did some mountain biking (some of it pretty extreme) with her Tutu, and we generally had fun and wore ourselves out. I went to see Avatar, which is the first movie I've gone and seen at a theater in at least 4 years, maybe more. We packed up, left our swimsuits in Hawaii by accident, and had a pretty smooth trip home.

Until we actually got here.

At some point while we were gone, our house was broken into. The power was turned off at the circuit box, so it was cold and dark and it took us a while to figure out what the heck was going on (weepy cold kids in the meantime, who wanted to follow us around all underfoot instead of sitting with the candles in the living room). Our computers are gone, as are all the electronics that Fran had repackaged for gifting or sale. Lots of $$ lost there, and significant data/pictures. Other random stuff is gone, too, like our razor/haircut set, cordless drill, some of our coats, toilet paper... Our fridge/freezer was off for long enough that we had to throw out almost everything.

I'll be offline for a bit while we figure out the computer situation; this one needs to go back to its owner.

Welcome home, eh?

Enter The Man and Assorted Other Adventures

Fran joined us on Tuesday. His flight arrived early in the afternoon, and as we'd discovered before, if we don't get the kids out and doing something in the morning we're pretty much doomed to much whining and fighting. So we did the Judd Trail hike again, and stopped at Jackass Ginger, where this time the kids were a little bit braver, including BittyPrincess:



We stopped for a bit of vine swinging action (the kids have been trying to find a suitable setup since we got here):



Afterwards, we went to Kanaikapupu, Kamehameha III's summer house. Or the remains of it anyway:



We searched for wild-growing cinnamon nearby and didn't find anything we could bring home; it's there, we're sure, we just couldn't identify it.

Fran got in and we spent the rest of the afternoon chilling in the pool and catching up.

The next day, we walked around Ala Moana shopping center, had bento boxes from Shirokiya for lunch, and briefly met up with a friend. Fran also got a haircut, but we neglected to take before/after photos, so people who know us will just have to spot it in upcoming photos.

In the evening, we decided it was time to do something with the beans. In the absence of an actual coffee-roaster, we ghettoized one (weird, the spellcheck recognized "ghettoized" as a word):



We discovered that the beans had an additional layer that needed to come away, and then coffee beans magically appeared:



We were roasting them to drink the next day (because who wants to listen to the popcorn popper for 15 minutes at 6am?), so to be continued...

The family gets up and about at dramatically different times in the morning (ranging from my dad's 3:45 to my mom's 8:30), so we decided not to roast coffee right away. Instead, we piled into the car and drove around the island for sightseeing. It was a beautiful day. We made several stops for various kid playing and peeing reasons, including one at Kualoa Park (next to Chinaman's Hat) again, where the kids tried to figure out how to climb palm trees (unsuccessful but entertaining):



Boyness found a pet coconut to take home (well, to take back to Tutu and Papa's house and try to get someone to help him open):



We made additional stops for lunch at Giovanni's Shrimp Truck (yum), and for play at a couple of different beaches including this one:



We got back around 5pm, luckily driving opposite the evening rush hour.

And now, let the coffee adventures continue! We ground and brewed our beans, which resulted in a lovely smooth medium-roast coffee experience, particularly after the addition of a little fresh-whipped cream:




And then we proceeded to spend the last bits of daytime babysitting our ghettoized coffee popcorn thingy while the kids swam in the pool, finally producing three batches of beans in medium, medium-dark, and dark roasts:



That wasn't the most attractive photo of the beans, but it was one where it was clear we'd intentionally scaled the darkness of the beans.

And an FYI for anyone who might read or google to the blog considering this particular experiment, the popcorn popper method as outlined on the internet has some problems. The first is that after the first minute or so the beans are light enough to fly out the front of the popper when you use the normal plastic vent; this is why we put an old pizza grate over the popper. The second is that the stated roasting/popping time for dark roast was 6 minutes, and we had to go WAY past that to get our beans suitably dark (no, we didn't burn them). 6 minutes would have resulted in an extremely light roast, which I'm sure some people would like, but none of us were those people. I think our dark roast took closer to 20 min.

Ala Moana Park, and the Neighborhood Circuit

First, we put the coffee beans out on the patio to sun (it was early, most of the day they were in direct full sun):



And off we went to Ala Moana Beach/Park to walk around the park and Magic Island:





Then, a swim, and back for lunch. In the afternoon, we walked the kids to the neighborhood park (Girliness was more than mildly irritated that they'd changed the play structures) and then to Johns Store for another dose of shave ice. Back "home" for some swimming time in the pool and some time playing Little Big Planet on Aunty B's playstation.

Meanwhile, our coffee beans retained some of their sticky but have been changing to a golden-brown-ish color. This may just be working.

Maunawili, and Coffee Wildcrafting (part 1)

Yesterday in the AM we saw Grandma E for a little kid-spoiling time and visiting time.

Once she'd left, we decided to go hike again, this time at Maunawili. This hike is in the mountains and is often seriously mud-covered, but we thought that since we'd had no big rainfall in the past week it should be ok. Ha.

Before we could leave, BittyPrincess interrupted the process by pulling a stool down on her face (ouch) and giving herself a nice bruise. It will probably be visible in any future photos for this trip. She rallied over saimin and an episode of Fairly Oddparents, and we were on our way.

When we started it was overcast. I got one picture of the trail before the madness hit:



By a little into the trail it was drizzling and the camera was stashed in a ziploc bag. Before we'd hit the halfway point it was pouring big fat thunk-thunk drops of rain on us. So much for there not being too much mud.

Still, we got to the falls without incident. The rain slowed to a light drizzle and I could get the camera back out. Almost everyone was game for a swim:




Well, not me. My belly is not actually that lopsided, I'm standing on two rocks and my hips aren't lined up with my shoulders.



Girliness was game for some jumping:



Uncle P, of course, had to jump from one of the higher points (not the highest at this site):



On the way back, OMG the MUD. We hadn't actually slogged through or detoured around (too much foliage to just walk alongside the path) anywhere NEAR that volume of mud on the way to the falls, it had collected/mudded-up(?) in a big way since then. Since I didn't want to risk the camera, again, no photos except for two as we left the trail:




And now, the coffee adventure begins

We found wild-growing coffee plants about 1/2m into the trail:



On the way back, we collected a smallish bag full of ripe looking beans, so that we could see if we could process them ourselves:



The coffee beans were surprisingly easy to liberate from their berry/shell/whatever you call the red not-coffee-bean part:



Two days of drying in the sun and we'll be ready to figure out how to roast them.

Kaena Point

There is an interesting myth that you can drive "around" the island of Oahu. Pure myth, even if at some point some intrepid souls could make the journey. Even when we say we drove "around the island," what we really mean is that we drove around the eastern edge, up to the North Shore, and then through the center of the island from Haleiwa through Wahiawa back towards the south. Yesterday (Saturday) we decided to go hike at Kaena point, the big circle-island-road fail point. Our group requires two cars; had we thought about it beforehand, we could have parked at opposite sides of the point and each done the hike in opposite directions, swapping cars at the end; we didn't, so we hiked to the point and back again on the western (Makaha) edge.

Among our first sights on the trail at Kaena was a tourist who "has done this before" (probably over 30 years ago...) and who "comes every year" who didn't realize that there is no such thing as going around the West/North border (aka Kaena Point) to complete a circular drive around the island. They got stuck about 1/4 mile in. As we walked on we saw them get free of their ditch and start backing towards the trailhead.



On the trail:





BittyPrincess spent about 5% of the trail like this:



And my camera spent about 99% of the trail in my backpack.

We got to the nature preserve at the tip of the island, and did see some albatross, a few brave ones even nested pretty close to the trail:




Later we saw some of the birds in flight, but again, the camera spent 99% of the trail in my backpack.

The point itself:



And some Hawaiian Monk Seals (a critically endangered animal, probably not least because people don't seem to bother them at all):




Here are a few photos of an area where the road just doesn't even exist at all anymore:





A pause to explore a rock bridge:








Plodding our way back (OMG it was HOT!). Boyness and Girliness actually jogged portions of the trail with their Tutu, doubling back to meet us. You would never guess it by the time we got back to Tutu and Papa's house, what with all the swimming and running around they did...



And a last view to the point from about the halfway out, before we couldn't see it anymore.



The hike was heinously hot. I remembered it (from doing this about 13 years before) as a "thirsty" hike, so I brought 6 40oz water bottles and Tutu brought her camelback, but we still did the last half mile or so thirsty and out of water. Oh cruel world, the water wasn't potable at the trailhead, so we had to drive out before we got another dose (the dog was suffering particularly badly). So (and I know this happens occasionally) if you've reached this blog doing an internet search and are deciding to do this hike, LOTS OF WATER.

Despite professing extreme weariness, the kids bounced around and sang the whole car ride back. Swimming in the pool. Plate lunches at the beach for dinner. Lots of rowdy for kids who'd just been on a tiring hike. Apparently there is no wearing them out...ever.