Summertime

Summer's ending. I should be getting myself on an earlier schedule to get ready for school.

But I stay up late reading. Why?

Because I can. Because it's still summer.

A Long Night--No Fibbing!

1 wet bed
1 sick child
2 kid baths
3 loads of laundry
5 times a parent had to get out of bed

Katherine, Brown Eyes

I never had a child as ... as you.
Where'd you learn all the things that you say.
You run around and sleep and play.
We do it every single day.

Nothing for it but a bedtime tune.
Sweetest tune I know is...
Katherine, brown eyes, don't you cry now.
Katherine, brown eyes, time to say good night.
The stars are silver notes across your eyes now,
Katherine, brown eyes, now sleep tight.

(To the tune of "Sara, Brown Eyes" from Ragtime.)

Sweet Becca, Sleep Becca.

Sweet Becca, Sleep Becca
Daytime is done.
Sweet Becca, Sleep Becca
Wait for the sun.

Sweet Becca, Sleep Becca,
All through the night.
Sweet Becca, Sleep Becca
til morning light.

Moral Questions

Not that I have seen my children look at the "terrarium" during the last few days. Which leads to a new question: do we
1. sneak it out to the garbage
2. repopulate it in the middle of the night
3. explain the demise of "Extra Weapon" and invite the kids to go dig up more roly polies?

The Advantages of a Pink Plastic Picnic Cup Terrarium

1. cheap
2. you can poke holes in the top
3. through its wavery pink walls, every scrap of bark looks like a bug.

Blast Off

 

Scout Lake

Alex, Katherine, and I had a nice overnighter on Friday at Scout Lake with grandpa. It's a nice ~3 mile hike on a less frequented trail, yet there was still one other group camping at the lake already.

In the morning L & Rebecca joined us for a huckleberry pancake brunch.

Oh, and water was cold; comparable to the ocean.

Just the 2 of us

Even with kids we have squeezed in a few dates this summer.

A New Family Member

Alex added a new member to our family today: a roly poly bug he named "Extra Weapon." It lives in a house made of two pink plastic cups (the cups we used for lunch), with some rocks, some strands of grass, and some plaintain leaves he poked through the air holes after we found somebody online who says roly poly bugs love them. That is, if it didn't drown under the water Katherine poured in to give it a drink.

"It's great," said Alex. "Now we have a pet, and we found it ourselves."

A Conundrum

Why do we work so hard to clean a house for company--and then apologize for the mess?

Memories from our trip to the coast

• Rebecca gamely walking most of the two miles along the beach to Moclips--but getting carried back since she wouldn't stop digging with her razor clam shell or trying to walk backwards
• Turning up cinnamon rolls, coconut cookies, chocolate-walnut fudge, and an apple-boysenberry pie in one tiny town
• Singing a renaissance madrigal with my sister, since I had the sheet music from my audition in the car, and arranging "A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief"
• Hearing Alex singing "A Poor Wayfaring Man of Grief" the next morning
• Digging a giant hole that evaded the tides the whole weekend. Maybe it's still there.
• Kids running along the edge of the waves, a game my sister's friend taught them
• Wading in the waves with my pants rolled up because I thought it was too cold to swim, soaking the knees of my pants, and going in anyway. The verdict: Water surprisingly warm when compared to evening breeze; running back to the house extra-cold in long wet jeans.
• Alex getting wet every time we got near the ocean. Heading back, we ran out of underwear and had to keep him in his swimsuit all the way home.

Beach Snapshots

An Important Conversation

While we're at the beach, Laramie's brother in law gives me a call.

J: "Hey, what's up?"
me: "We're staying at the beach house. And guess what? We saw where your wife signed the guest book the last time we were all here! By the way, my battery's about dead so I might drop you."
J: "You're where?"
me: "At the beach house. Where we came two years ago."
J: "The same rooms? You mean you're staying in the same place?"
me: "Yes, the very same beach house. And we saw where your wife signed the book. But we can't read it, because it's Korean."
J (talking to his wife): "Hey, guess what? Laramie and Loralee are staying at the beach house and they said they saw where you signed the book...At the beach. Remember when we all went to the beach?...No, in Washington. They say--"

Beep. Phone dies.

Toe-chomping crabs

Resolved to go play in the waves, no matter what the weather, Laramie and I finally were able to leave our toddler with my sister and run to the beach on Friday afternoon. A spotty film of clouds and a strong breeze only pushed us into the water faster, determined to escape the wind and have our fun. In the very cold water.

"Hey, there's a crab down here," Laramie points out as the water reaches my goosebumpy knees. I sidestep where he's pointing and continue.

Suddenly, I step on something hard--a block of wood? I jump away and put down my other foot. Again it's something hard--with claws.

Yelling, I hop away. My third footstep lands on another crab, and so does my fourth. Laramie also is frantically jumping. Traumatized, I race back to shore, yelling at Laramie that the crabs are going to pinch my toes.

Only after much effort does Laramie coax me back into the water to brave the vicious crabs. This time we bypass them, make it out to the big waves, swim a little (cold!) and jump a few swells before heading back. We don't step on any crabs, but Laramie points one out to me, scuttling across the ocean floor. It's at least a foot across. No wonder they're so easy to step on.

While I'm pulling a windbreaker over my shivering joints so I can hurry back for a hot shower, Laramie tells my dad about the crabs. "It was horrible," I wail. "There were crabs everywhere!"

What does my dad say? "I want to find a crab!" They race back to the water, where Dad (in long pants) follows Lar into the surf, leaving me tending two children and a sagging kite. So much for my shower.

Laramie did find a crab to show my dad, even picked it up and waved it at him. But the crab got his revenge, pinching Laramie's pinkie so hard it drew blood. So they both got what they wanted.

I told you they were vicious.

Quote of the Day

On feeding your children melting ice cream in the beach parking lot (five hours away from your freezer), and teaching them to scoop it with apple slices and bread crusts, since your only spoon is a 3-day-old Dairy Queen castoff:

Lar: "Don't eat the apples. Eat the ice cream!"

 
 
 

Beach resolutions

• Pack more of every kind of clothing--except perhaps, Lar points out, summer beach apparel
• Check pockets when leaving, so you don't stumble on a stray key and have to drive back an hour and a half. ("You could have mailed it," exclaimed the office manager when I shared the story.)
• Visit the beach every summer. Maybe every week.
• Buy a wetsuit.

Packing for the Ward Campout

Since we'd been told that the campsite was a fifteen-minute hike from the parking lot, I asked Laramie if he thought I should pack our overnight clothes in the new backpack he'd bought for me.

"Are you kidding?" he laughed. Chastened, I hunted down a suitcase.

The campsite was indeed a long hike from the car along a stony trail. "I wish you hadn't told me not to use my backpack," I told Laramie as we set up the tent before hiking back for our gear.

"Huh?" he answered, stringing up tent posts. "I never said that."

"You did," I said. "When I asked you if I should bring the backpack and you asked if I was kidding."

"Oh, that. No, I meant you SHOULD bring the backpack."

Lesson learned while camping

--Never lick melted chocolate off of your mosquito-repellent-sprayed arm

Hiking out of camp

Alex, whose only forward speed is "run," raced along the rocky trail from our campsite towards the car. I lagged behind, suitcase strap around my shoulders, hugging a rolled-up sleeping bag.

Alex turned around. "Hurry up, Mom," he yelled. "I'm tired."

Curls

 
 
 

Google Picnic (and nearly 100 degrees!)

 
 
 
 

Heaven on Earth in Six Little Words

Peanut butter chocolate chip cookie dough

The Loud Blue Angels

Out on our own

 
 

L & I made it out camping on our own; after a 7 mile hike, all she had to say was: "Why didn't we stay at the lake all day?"

Highlights from our Utah drive

• listening to nearly all of Rick Atkinson's An Army at Dawn, about the Allied invasion of Axis-occupied North Africa. The author has done so much research that the setting is as vivid as a novel, and the snippets of quotes he uses from contemporary soldiers and observers are as well-written as his own very fine prose. My biggest surprise learning about the US army: we were a bunch of amateurs back then! North Africa apparently whipped the armed forces into shape.
• eating at Cafe Rio in Twin Falls (the northernmost Cafe Rio we can find) coming and going. Had to stop to change a diaper on the way out of Twin, and found a spectacular lookout with a view of the canyon and the arched bridge over it
• helping Katherine and Alex cross-stitch
• having Alex read to us (two McGuffey reader lessons and the first sentence from his treasured Hardy Boys book. So far, out of the Hardy Boys book he has read the first sentence and about one paragraph on page 67, but he's determined to read the whole thing.)
• enticing Rebecca to play with her toys by showing off their features to Laramie until Rebecca was practically straining out of her seat shrieking for them.
• playing Pictionary with Rebecca, using a tiny magnetic drawing board (really bad resolution), holding the board up over a blanket stretched to keep the setting sun out of her eyes
• hearing Katherine read her literary compositions from the last drive, including the saga of two toy balls at the park (they get to eat ice cream when it spills on them), and her fantasy description of her sailboat (which she sails around to tropical islands to find bananas and coconuts)
• the kids' rendition of B-I-N-G-O (even Rebecca got into the clapping)
• trying to teach the creation of friendship bracelets, which Katherine's cousin has started making. The verdict: it's a hard craft to teach in the car, and both kids gave up in frustration when their loose knots failed to make colored stripes
• wading across the shallow creek (the Grande Ronde River, actually) at the Hilgard Junction State Park in Oregon, one of our favorite stopping places. Alex fell flat in the water several times, perhaps intentionally. Loralee tried to suck in the heat, bracing for a return to cool weather at home.

Highlights from our Utah trip

• Receiving a quilt from Laramie's grandmother, one of the quilts she made for each of her 22 grandchildren
• Seeing so many Belmears at the quilt reunion.
• Taking kids to play with cousins at the Pleasant Grove pool, which has two waterslides and a sloping shallow end. Rebecca thought she was so brave to jump in from the side at a depth of 6 inches.
• Visiting the Thanksgiving Point Museum of Ancient Life, i.e. "the world's largest" dinosaur museum. Great interactive things for kids, like fossil footprints they could touch, a water and sand room to learn about sediment formation, and a set of gears with a crank on the 1 year wheel, going up to a Million Years wheel. If you turned the crank as hard as you could, you could barely budge Thousand. A great illustration of the enormity of aeons. Huge dinosaur skeleton reconstructions, although you had to wonder about some of them (the Gigantosaurus, over a hundred feet long, is a guess based on about five bones actually discovered).
• Laramie taking the kids back-country hiking and camping around some of his favorite childhood terrain. The verdict? It would have been easier with a trail.
• Loralee experimenting with Jelly Beans on behalf of a mother planning a Jelly Bean birthday party. Jelly Bean logos float like M's and S's; regular Jelly Bellies are not sour enough for an impressive acid test (only Green Apple produced visible bubbles); Green Apple green separates into blue and yellow, while Dr. Pepper brown sends up a nice red streak. Disappointingly, black didn't separate at all, but that may have been the fault of poor paper towel filter paper (you don't find many coffee filters in Mormon kitchen cupboards)
• Loralee interviewing Laramie's youngest brother about the sugar content of all the cereals in his Boston kitchen. The winner was Golden Crisp, at 53% sugar.
• playtime in Fish Creek (pronounced "crick"). Laramie fished, Rebecca waded in a shallow pool, Katherine and Alex scuplted mud balls to throw in the water
• reading Hunger Games and Catching Fire (Loralee could hardly put them down; even Laramie is now interested since his brother read them).
• seeing a new musical, Great Expectations, at the Cedar City Shakespeare Festival. The verdict: decent lyrics with some brilliant rhymes; many plot holes probably straight from the original source material; a better ending than I had hoped for; and no melodies that I could recall after I'd walked out the door.
• peace and quiet during 2 nights at the mountain cabin, which was nice and cool after the oppressive heat in the valley. Grandchildren admired grandpa's new toy: a trackhoe.
• Katherine's new record: she didn't sleep once in the grandparent's house. (Instead, she bedded down in a tent on the lawn, where it was cooler.)