The Year of the Cat

Since Miss Patches adopted me in July of last year, and then proceeded to give birth to kittens just a month later, our lives have been full of cats. There's cats underfoot, cats on the bed, cats on any lap that sits still, and cat hair everywhere. Patches has become "my dog", following me everywhere (including when I ride off on my bicycle and see her galloping down the street behind me, so that now I have to make sure she's safely in the house before I take off). Every time I turn around, there she is, and nothing upsets her more than to see me packing my suitcase (so she usually sits on top of it whenever I get it out).

Each of the kids kept one of the kittens, and those kittens are strangely enough very similar to their respective kid. Bandit, Asa's cat is extremely gregarious, meowing loudly and rubbing against you repeatedly if enough attention has not been paid. He's very funny and is always keeping us laughing by doing oddball things like tightrope walking across the upstairs railing or drinking from the faucet. The one way he differs from Asa is that he's so fastidious that he not only keeps himself clean, but he frequently tackles his slovenly brother in order to groom him up to appropriate standards.

Mackenzie's cat Garfield eats everything in sight (not unlike a certain soon-to-be-12-year-old boy we know). He's a bit of a loner and can be seen crawling to the back of the closet behind the hanging clothes just to get a bit of privacy, especially from his "let's play now" sibling. Huh, sounds just like Mackenzie going to his room for "alone time" vs. Asa who would play non-stop from sunup to sundown. Garfield is not a very needy cat, and will pretty much only sit on Mackenzie's lap. Pick him up and pretty soon he'll be wanting to get down, whereas Asa can tote Bandit around all day.

And then of course, my old guy Noggin has turned 16 this year. Despite his advancing years, he still rules the household (and the block). He's still the loviest cat of the bunch, always finding a lap or legs to sit on. And lately he's been turning up in the funniest positions and locations, like this: "Waiter, there's a dead cat on my table!"

Here's a few more cat pics from our cat-filled family, starting with the kittens just a year ago today:

The Family Hug

Dorcas writes in Life in the Shoe about those mushy moments that younger couples share that may wane as people are married longer and longer. As always, she has such a way with words, writing "one learns to be knit together in mind and heart in many ways by the time you've been together 24 years, even if you forget to intertwine fingers."

Whenever hubby and I manage to steal a little kiss or hug or even a surreptitious bum grope behind the kitchen counter and away from little eyes, the kids' radars seem to go off. Wherever they are in the house, they come running grinning from ear to ear and shouting "Family Hug!!!!!" They pile into us, forming a circle facing inwards and squeezing us all together. Maybe someday they will turn their heads away with teenagerish expressions of disgust and excessive eye-rolling. Maybe they will think it just plain wrong for us older folks to embrace, but right now I love the way that they embrace us instead.

Do We Have Enough Underwear, Can I Conjugate the Verb Avere, Do I Know How To Get From Cortona to Arezzo?

We have just over four weeks until we leave for Italy and the details are endless. It's more or less like planning a wedding for two hundred guests, or an invasion of Britain, or any other minor such task. Wayne and Mackenzie are not the world's best linguists. Asa is fabulous, but a bit too young to want to sit down and do dedicated study (although she's so fast at acquiring language, I think she will pick up the most of any of us while we're there). But that leaves me as the sole communicator of la famiglia in the many parts of Italy we'll be traveling through that are likely to have few fluent English speakers. Rome and Florence I have no worries about, but what if we need to get directions or buy food in Rigutino or Fontiano (both on the way from Cortona to Arezzo)? I don't want to be one of those Americans who assumes everyone will speak English, so I've been studying and studying hard.

Funnily enough, I took four years of French in college, and while I did learn it passably well I had no real incentive to do so. Now, I have a burning desire to be able to communicate competently in Italian, so that's fueling my aggressive Italian learning spree. I have Italian on my MP3 player, my computer, my car stereo, my DVD and VCR, and in books and workbooks scattered across my kitchen table.

Besides that, I just need to make sure we have a compact and lightweight wardrobe for all kinds of weather, the biking gear we need, enough training on the bikes to climb the hill towns of Tuscany, cell phones, cameras, adapters for Italian power outlets, maps, routes, train tickets and schedules, and oh yes, enough clean underwear.

Ho mólto fare! I have a lot to do.

Don't You Just Love It When Your Kids Know Something That You Don't???

So I've had maps spread out all over my bed, trying to find bike routes around Italy for our family's upcoming trip (5 weeks away.... gulp!), and I'm bemoaning the lack of data (like, say, elevations, which are quite important when you're on a bicycle with your kids) when Mackenzie comes up and says "Hey mom, why don't you just use Google Earth???".

Um, yeah, why didn't I think of that?

So not only can I see every darn road we'll be biking down (including the three or four road names that each road seems to accumulate in Italy - Via Vincenzo Biani may also be called Via Rapallo or Strada Montebuono), but I can see the elevation at any point along the way. I can see precisely how many meters any given route will gain or lose. It's simply brilliant. If I'd personally hired someone to invent a tool to help me plan this trip, it wouldn't be any better than this. Thank you Mackenzie, you brilliant boy!

Movies We Love

On a hot summer afternoon last week, I took the kids to the cheap seats theatre to see Nim's Island. I have to admit that when I watched the trailer I thought it might just be another parental snooze-fest. It looked like one of those cutesy movies with kids and animals and a happily-ever-after sappy ending with maybe some morals thrown in for good measure. In its favor was a good cast (Jodi Foster doesn't do much dreck these days) and the price of $1. Mackenzie even consented to go with a moderate amount of eye-rolling. Finding a movie that both my animal-happy 8 year old and my swashbuckling-loving tween love is not always the easiest thing in the world.

I was pleasantly surprised that the movie was engaging for all of us. The cast pulled some of the sappier bits along, you can't go wrong with slingshotting lizards, and we really enjoyed the sub-plot of the writer and her character, especially Mackenzie who is working steadily on writing his first novel (more on that later) and so really identified with many of the plot points revolving around the craft of writing.

On the way home in the car, we decided to compile a list of movies we've all liked - ones that hit the mark for every family member. So here, for your viewing enjoyment is our family's list of Great Family Flicks. Movies that have an asterisk (*) next to the name may not be appropriate for all kids and/or families. This list is not ordered in any way.

Secondhand Lions
The Princess Bride
Stardust
Toy Story 1 & 2
Star Wars
Sky High
Bend it like Beckham
Zoom
Galaxy Quest (spoof on Star Trek, a must for Trekkies)
Pirates of the Caribbean (#1 only)
Johnny English
Little Miss Sunshine *
Chronicles of Narnia
Nim's Island
Spaceballs *
Lord of the Rings *
The King of California
Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines
Mr. Bean's Holiday
Monty Python's The Holy Grail * and The Life of Brian *
Disney's animated Robin Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Bambi, & Snow White
The Pink Panther Series starring Peter Sellers *
Jurassic Park
Scrooged
Monsters Inc.
Troy *
Batman & Robin
The Mouse That Roared
Operation Dumbo Drop
Spiderman
The Terminal

Our Family's Laugh of the Day

We all found this boxing cat simply irresistable. See if you can only watch this once:

Window Into a Day in My Life

This is one of those rare blog posts that goes on all three of my blogs. This one's relevant to all because it's just a snapshot of my everyday existence. On a parenting list I'm on, we did this last year too: we each took photos throughout an entire day, and that way you get to see the average day in each person's life - what their dinner plates look like and where they go and what kind of slippers they wear, that kind of thing. So if you want to see all the nitty gritty of my life, you can check out A Day in My Life, 2008. And if you're really all that interested, my Day from 2007 is also still up. I found the similarities between the two of them a bit eerie. I have some routines that are pretty engraved in stone. I drink from the same tea mug, hang my laundry out at the same time, and make pizza for the kids once a week. But many things are different, too. The freaky snake in the high chair has been replaced by a cuddly teddy, that's a big improvement at least.

The Great Smoothie Explosion of 2008

Every once in awhile you should do something outrageously horrifyingly wrong in front of your kids. It lets them know that you too can screw up on a monumental scale and (hopefully) still laugh it off at the end of the day. This afternoon was just such a moment of excruciating mucked-upedness.

It started the way many of our afternoons go, with a request from the kids to make a smoothie, in this case a decaf mocha smoothie. Eggs, milk, frozen coffee cubes, chocolate syrup all went into the blender, but the blender alas was done for. So, being a mom who is not easily defeated by malfunctioning appliances, I decided to use the food processor. I reckoned it was round, had blades, and was used to chop things up, so as long as I covered that hole at the top of the hopper, it should be no problem, right?

In short order, I had poured the smoothie contents in, covered it up, and turned it on. That's when my food processor was possessed by a demonic poltergeist, made a horrifying noise, and actually rose into the air before spewing the contents of it's receptacle over roughly the entire kitchen (and me). I'm quite sure my kids have not laughed so hard in their entire lives. It must've looked like a scene from a movie or something. And it only took me two hours to clean smoothie out of every crack and crevice of my kitchen. Small price for such mirth at my expense.

Yep, now my kids can rest completely secure in the knowledge that their mother can mess things up worse than they ever have (or possibly ever will). I'm sure it must be a comfort to them.

Take Me To The River

One of the things my kids remember most about the first time they visited their grandparents in Florida (hubby's parents) was one of those singing fish mounted on the wall like a trophy fish. It sang "Don't Worry, Be Happy" and "Take Me To the River". They loved it so much that years later, when they found one at a garage sale, they jumped around with elation and immediately bought it. I have to admit I was more than a bit glad when the darned thing finally quit working. It was funny at first, but the 30,000th rendition of snippets of those songs by a singing fish, well let's just say it wears a bit thin.

But "Take Me To the River" was certainly our theme for this last week. As hot weather moved in, we moved out to camp on the Rogue River with my mom. The idea was to meet up at the river, camp for a couple of days, and then Asa, my little Asa, my baby girl (well, okay, she's almost nine, but I can still think of her that way) was going to go and spend an entire week at grandma's house without us! You see, my mom has been telling us for a couple of years about the Missoula Children's Theatre, an organization that travels to various towns during the summer, setting up shop for a week. They bring a principal cast as well as sets and costumes for a full-scale children's theatre production, then audition local kids for the supporting roles. So Asa (of course!) wanted to audition. But the kicker is that it's hard for us to go South for a whole week, so she decided she could go on her own.

Also this weekend was the Bluegrass Festival in Prospect, just a few miles from our campground. My mom took Asa there for the entire day, and Asa ended up borrowing a fiddle and joining in a "band scramble", where various bands are put together ad hoc from the musicians at the festival. They had half an hour to rehearse, and then she played on the big stage. Her band played Old Joe Clark, which she has played before, and Cripple Creek which she hadn't. I guess she sang in both songs too, just ponying right up to that microphone. Her band won 3rd place, too!

I'm telling you, this girl is counting down the days until she is old enough to go on American Idol....

So now she's 160 miles away from us for the whole week, and she got a part in the children's theatre production (which is Rumpelstiltskin this year), despite over a hundred kids turning up to audition. We'll go see her performance this Saturday and then bring her home.

In the meanwhile, Mackenzie and I got plenty of time to hike together and then we spent Sunday and Monday camping together as well. We took a gorgeous seven mile hike along the Rogue River to the Natural Bridge and back, a place where the entire rushing river disappears into a lava tube and goes underground for a couple of hundred feet. It's hard to capture this phenomenon in photos, but it's very impressive in person. Then we decamped to Crescent Lake where we spent the next evening and day. All the boaters were clearing out from the weekend and we had the place almost to ourselves.

He's such a fun kid to hang out with, and I have to say that the great benefit to parenting mindfully and positively all those previous years is having an almost teenage kid that you really enjoy being with. We were walking along the lakeshore when we spotted a small shore bird, we think it was a mountain plover, tending a nest. I cautioned Mackenzie to be very careful, because their nests are often in shallow scrapes in the ground and very well camouflaged, we wanted to avoid stepping on it. Well, Mr. Eagle Eyes himself spotted the nest, with three eggs and one absolutely adorable fluffy baby bird:


This little birdie is about the size of my thumb, and the eggs not much bigger than my thumbnail, I can't believe he spotted them. By the time we left, we rechecked the nest and all four babies had hatched. What a wonderful end to the week's adventures!

Tagged

Stella tagged me with this one. I especially like the first question as it's always fun to see what people used to be up to before you knew them. So I think I'll tag HealingArtsMom (since she just started blogging), and Seppie (whose life is changing in big ways right now) and Sarah, whose blog is always interesting and inspiring.

1. WHAT DID YOU DO 10 YEARS AGO?

Ten years ago, I was still working for Microsoft, on a new web project called Sidewalk, that was not destined to last very long. It was an internet entertainment guide that was going to roll out city by city (seattlesidewalk.com, sanfranciscosidewalk.com, that kind of thing). I had just been working in Microsoft's CD division, doing titles like 500 Nations, with Kevin Costner's production company, a Wine Guide with Oz Clarke, and the Ultimate Frank Lloyd Wright with Byron Preiss, which was really kind of fun - I got to jet off to Burbank to work with the production company on 500 Nations, or wine and dine with a world-renowned wine expert, or tour a Frank Lloyd Wright house, all really cool stuff.

Sidewalk, however, was not nearly as engaging. Also, it really was just not working out for me to be a working mom. Mackenzie had never really adjusted to not having me at home. His early years were very difficult, he had multiple overwhelming sensory issues, motor skills issues, and food allergies. The world was hard for him, and he understandably wanted me there with him. So right around this time ten years ago, my hubby said "Why don't you just quit?"

The Magic Words. So I did, at the end of August in 1998 I quit my job of 10 years and became a stay-at-home mom, and eventually a homeschooling mom. Though I didn't know it, my life had definitely taken a turn towards an adventure I had never really even considered up until that point. I have never regretted it!

Oh yeah, and ten years ago I still flew my airplane, skydived a lot, and was (of course) doing triathlons!)



























2. FIVE ITEMS ON YOUR TO-DO LIST TODAY:

Cut up and freeze the remainder of the 15 pounds of cherries we picked

Pack up for our camping trip tomorrow

Work on the slideshow for my Team in Training end-of-season wrap-up

Go for a run with my hubby in the heat to get ready for the Cascade Lakes Relay in August (which will be HOT!)

Burn all of my downloaded photos from the last three weeks (all 1,000 of them!) to CDs so I can clear them off of my camera

3. SNACKS I ENJOY:

Fresh garden carrots, coconut popsicles, tamari almonds, good dark chocolate, Kettle's sea salt and vinegar potato chips, dates with cream cheese and walnuts, and smoothies.

4. WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU WERE A BILLIONAIRE?

Probably not much different than I'm doing today. Except I'd get a massage once a week. Maybe twice a week. I'd be able to give a lot of money to my favorite causes, like Heifer Project, Sierra Club Legal Defense fund (now called EarthJustice), and Obama's campaign among others. I might just get me that pretty red bicycle that I don't really need but really really want, and maybe a zoom lens for my camera. But other than that, I can't really think of anything I want that I don't currently have. Most of what's good in my life can't be bought be money anyways. I know that makes me a very very lucky person.

Broken Kids

Ooooh, urgggh. Summertime plans go awry. Mackenzie broke his arm! Not doing anything dangerous of course, like jumping on our trampoline, but jumping around the living room like a nut after hearing that hubby got him a cell phone. Never mind the fact that we emphasized this is just a phone for when he is on his own - he has started walking to the store or friends' houses by himself - I think it must be some kind of rite of passage or something to get a phone because he was obviously very excited by this concept! That one took me by surprise. But here's a photo of him trying to set up his voicemail. He looks so, well, older all of a sudden!

Anyways, the arm is definitely broken, and supposedly we hear from the orthopedist today how badly. Keep your fingers crossed!

In related news, in karate class last week, I was practicing with my friend's daughter. We were doing throws and as I threw her, the guy next to me threw his partner and his knee collided with her nose which is now broken! It seems like it's a broken kind of week. And the start of summer is not really when you want to go breaking things, when everyone else is going to the pool and biking around and stuff. Bummer!

Summertime Kids

Just wanted to share my favorite two photos of the kids taken recently. What I love most about my kids faces is their eyes. The first thing hubby ever said to me was "wow, you have big eyeballs", by which I think he meant I have big and blue eyes. He has beautiful baby blues too, and obviously the kids got some combo. Mackenzie has eyes very much like mine. Asa's have this curious tilt to them that my aunt had as well. Her face reminds me very much of my aunt, my mom's sister who died the year hubby and I got married.

There Is A Special Place in Hell

Reserved for people who shoot off fireworks at all hours of the night on days that are NOT the 4th of July. I hope all of our cats are still here in the morning. They were born after last year's 4th so they will have no freakin' clue what all this noise is about.

Mom Vs. Coach

I've been very lucky in my mommy career that my worlds really haven't collided all that much. In the first two years of Mackenzie's life, I was a working mom, and those times were tough all the way around. He was a high-needs baby and toddler, and it was hard to leave him each and every morning to go in to work. Fortunately, my husband was a stay-at-home parent during the day, brought him in to me every single day at lunch to nurse and play, and then went to work every night. That took the edge off of the conflict for me, and made it workable, at least in the short term.

Since I quit full-time employment though, I've really had it pretty easy. Hubby is an incredibly involved dad who hangs with the kids through my novel-writing, photography, and coaching gigs and even through my training and competing in the Ironman (no small time commitment there). The last few weeks though have brought my mom role and my role as a coach for a Team in Training triathlon team into close proximity with each other. For one thing, his job as a corporate pilot means he can be gone on the spur of the moment with very little notice. Lately, his flying has coincided with almost every critical training for my team, leading me to drag my kids around to lakes and campgrounds and hang out while I help people into wetsuits and onto bicycles. Luckily, they're very good sports and after what we have jokingly referred to as my "suck it up" speech (something about kids in Africa being responsible for their entire family's goat herd all day), they've been great at helping me out in my responsibilities, or at least keeping themselves entertained (for example, by biking around the parking lot in a pirate costume!)

This last weekend was the culmination of six months of training for my athletes, they were to attempt an Olympic distance triathlon near Bend, Oregon. Again, at the last minute my husband got called to fly and the kids and I took off in our camper van without him. Rushing around registration tables, at the same time as juggling my daughter into the kids' triathlon I had promised her she could do just about turned my last hairs grey (and there aren't that many that aren't already!), especially in a crowd of around a thousand parents and a very unexpected (by me at least) five hundred kids participating in the race. I had unwisely hopped out of the car without my cell phone, leaving my friend to park it and bring my son to meet us. It was a total mad house, but we finally did meet up and got to watch Asa smile her way through her second triathlon. She especially loved how the "swim" part of it was really a gigantic waterslide.
After the race, I briefly lost her in the finish line confusion. Fortunately, we had talked about what would happen if we got separated, and she followed our plan and walked to the bike transition area and sat next to her bike. Having a plan in a crowded place is definitely always a good idea! I was so grateful to see her sitting there.

The kids also got to come with me (and the athletes) to the pasta party. They hung out with the other athletes and listened to inspiring speeches, and also to parents describing their children's battles with leukemia (leading Asa at one point to say, not so sotto-vocce, that she hoped she never had to have leukemia. I hope not either sweetheart, which is one reason that Team in Training is so important). Fortunately after that point hubby made it over and my days of juggling coaching and mom duties wound down for the weekend. From that point on I could concentrate on my athletes, and if you want to read more about their experiences, I'm writing it up in segments on my Ironmom Blog.

First Lazy Days of Summer

This week marks the first week after almost all of our scheduled activities have come to a close. No more dance classes, recitals, violin lessons, or any of that stuff for the summer. So we've picked buckets of strawberries and headed to the outdoor pool for the first lazy afternoon. We're packing up the camping gear, and walking to the park for a popsicle. Even though as unschoolers we don't "do school" or "take vacation from school", because of the activities the kids are involved in we still somewhat are tied to the school calendar. It's nice to be free of that for many unstructured months (even though the kids dearly love and now miss their activities). Here's to summer!

A Threat Only A 21st Century Mom Could Make

I told my son the other day "You're so completely and utterly covered in dirt, I'm going to edit Wickipedia and put a photo of you under the entry for 'Filthy'".

And the best part is, he believed me. My kids think I can do absolutely anything on the computer, it's like I'm omnipotent or something.

Dispatches From the Mom of A Dangerous Boy

"Mom, I'm going to go burn things in the middle of the street."

"Oh, okay son. See you in a little while."

I'm the mom of a dangerous boy. The kind of mom who thinks kids should definitely get in a little danger every now and then (the kind that doesn't hurt them, someone else, or property in any serious manner of course). So when hubby showed the kids how to light the deck on fire in less than two seconds with a magnifying glass, I of course insisted that any burning to be done take place in the middle of our cul-de-sac. Since then, Mackenzie and an ebb-and-flow group of the neighborhood boys have been experimenting with the burn rates of all kinds of substances, from moss and leaves to twigs and plastic. He burned his initials in a piece of wood (something I remember doing from my own childhood). Thankfully, he's not the kind of kid to try torturing ants or anything, and he's dependable enough that I know he won't take it down in the woods either.

My mom gave him this lovely old magnifying glass as part of a Sherlock Holmes costume for his birthday. He loves the Holmes books so much, and the glass has already gotten a good workout magnifying things around the house. This is just another fun and exciting experiment to do with it.

Dads

It was a crazy weekend, and my poor hubby was gone on a flight, so he wasn't even around on Father's Day. Meanwhile, I had to hold down the fort with my triathlon team training, birthday parties, and all those dress rehearsals and dance recitals! So I barely got time to think, let alone reflect. Now that life has settled back into a reasonable fascimile of normal though, and after having been able to talk with my own dad this morning, one thing pops out at me. I was lucky enough to marry a guy who's a great father, and I think that's in part due to the fact that I have a great father myself so I know how important it is to me. Still, when we got married kids were the farthest thing on our horizon, so probably there's a huge measure of good luck in there that our priorities turned out to be the same when it came to our family.

My own dad was the kind of father who made it a priority to come home from work and be with us. I love this photo of him with me as a baby, because you can just see the love that is present whenever he was with us kids (also, I can totally see our family resemblance as I look very much like him now that I'm an adult). My childhood memories are of wrestling around the living room, "airplane rides" on his feet when I was small, trips to the park with a huge "Jolly Green Giant" kite, bicycle rides, camping trips, cutting Christmas trees in the forest with a thermos of hot chocolate, card games of "Spite and Malice" (dad's and my favorite) and snowball fights. My husband is also the kind of dad who makes it a priority to be with his kids. When he knew he had to fly this weekend, he made sure to come to Asa's dress rehearsal so he could see her in all of her dances before he had to leave. I'm sure when our kids are grown, they will have memories of wrestling on the bed where they pigpile their dad, bicycle rides, camping trips, walks to the park on summer evenings, merry-go-rounds, family dinners and game nights.

We took this family bike ride a couple of days before he had to leave on his flight. I had gotten the kids to help me get a good photo of them together, and then at the right moment casually suggested that he turn around for a snapshot. Well, he kept leaning on the bike with his ...um.... posterior pointed at the camera, hardly the Father's Day photo I had in mind! I finally got him to turn his butt in the right direction and got a good photo to put in a frame for his desk.

So to all the dads out there who are out there on bike paths and parks, in living rooms and dance recitals supporting their kids: Happy Father's Day. It's more than a Hallmark holiday, it's a time to reflect on the important people in our lives and how much they mean to us. It's not about a BBQ or other presents, it's about your presence in our lives. Thank you Dad! And thank you to my hubby for being the great dad that he is.

Rainy Day Button Box

I can still see my mother's button box. It was tin, with embossed figures of old-fashioned ladies and gentleman outlined in red all around it. One of my favorite things to do was to empty it out on the table finding all the fun and unusual ones, and sorting the rest into empty egg cartons or muffin tins. Sometimes I sorted by color, sometimes by size or the number of holes. I had favorite buttons too - the little green pearled buttons from a long-ago sweater set, the big flat glossy purple one, the ones that looked like leather or wood, and the ones from my grandpa's navy uniforms with little anchors on them.

A button box is the perfect rainy day activity for kids, especially if you forget about it for awhile and then bring it out on a day when nothing much is going on. In my button box, I have some large needles, thread, and a couple of old dish towels, and the kids have had fun sewing buttons onto the towels. They can also use the thread to string buttons into a necklace, or to make a button spinner toy. There's just no end to the fun a simple button box can provide, except the kids sometimes have to move me away from the buttons and stop me from sorting them.

Two Dress Rehearsals, Three Recitals, Six Costume Changes Each

That's what you get when your daughter goes crazy into dance and you hit the end of the season. This week is insane! But, dancing is her absolute joy. So without further ado, here's the fabulous Miss Asa in her first dress rehearsal. Excuse the grainy quality of the photos, I was shooting without flash:

Hip Hop with "Men in Black" (she's the peewee in the center):


Ballet: "Ode to Degas":


Dance Team: "Pop" (she looks so tiny compared to the rest of her team, I just can't get over it! Most of them are tweens and they all sprouted this year, she's still 8))



Her favorite, Lyrical. To the song "Arms Wide Open":


And again with her dance team, "Saved By the Bell":


That's her, front and center in the splits.


So we're one rehearsal down, one more and three performances to go! Wish this stage mom luck (I'm not so good with make-up, buns, and all that stuff).

Kids, Cold, and Camping

We went camping this last weekend with the triathlon team I'm coaching for Team in Training. The idea was to camp out at the lake site and let the team members swim in the lake and bike and run on the actual race course. At the last moment, my hubby couldn't make it, so the kids knew they were pretty much along for the ride with me and that my attention would be divided. And yes, it was also unseasonably cold for June. As we drove through snow (snow!!!) to get to the camp site, I think we were all wondering what we were in for.

Still, the camp site was right on the lake, and my kids are old enough now for that not to be the hazard it would've been when they were younger (and Asa would plunge pell-mell into any body of water, regardless of whether she could stand up or swim or not). And best of all, it had a loop! Luckily, my hubby had found a great hitch rack and installed it on the van, so we could bring the triathlon bikes plus both of the kids' bikes along. I have so many fond memories of camping as a kid, riding our bikes around and around the campground loop, it just gives me such a warm and fuzzy feeling to watch our kids doing the same. Yes, it was cold, but they donned hats under their helmets and warm gloves and I joked that they logged more miles than the 28 that the triathlon team members put in on Saturday.


And, being kids, the cold just doesn't seem to faze them the same way it does us thinner-skinned adults. Remember swimming in the ocean as a kid? And urging your mom to come on in, it really wasn't that cold? Ha! Now I'm the cold weanie and my kids are out there in bathing suits while I'm donning my neoprene. I love this photo of the team ensconced in their thick insulated suits while in the background, check out the kids! By the way, the water temperature measured in at 52 degrees near the shore. Brrrrrr! As for me, having a full wetsuit actually allows me to play in the water with my kids and not get too cold, a nice side-effect of having that triathlon gear.

Sunday was actually sunny and feeling pretty warm at 65 degrees, the kids and I hung out in the campground while the team ran. Asa built fairy houses out of sticks, and Mackenzie spent an hour observing an ant's nest and putting various food articles next to it to see what they would do with them. All in all, a childhood's weekend idyll. Well, except for the cold.

Looking For Stella, That Not Ordinary Teen?

Stella, the very un-ordinary teen, accidentally deleted her blog. But her new blog Not An Ordinary Teen can be found here. I love reading Stella's blog, because she has such a fresh perspective and is right at that magical time in life where you're staring at your whole adult life stretching out in front of you and thinking of where you want to go. Like the world is a gigantic roadmap and all roads are open. As we get older, I think we can start believing that we can only take certain roads, that many of them are blocked off to us. It's good to be reminded that we can always reinvision ourselves. Plus, she's just plain funny and fun to read. So check her out!

The Moments You Remember

I don't usually post about politics on this blog, leaving the ranting and raving to my blog on sustainability issues. But regardless of your political party affiliation, or even the country that you live in, last night was a momentous occasion. It's not often that you stand in the course of time knowing that this moment will be written into the history books. I can remember twice in my childhood when my parents told me to remember a moment, that history was being made. One was the moon landing, and though I was only three I remember it clearly, perhaps because of my parents' solemn pronouncement and the fact that everyone was unaccustomedly glued to the television set. I can still see the room clearly in my head, where people were seated, the fuzzy black and white imagines on the old console TV. The second was when Nixon resigned, and my mom pulled the car over and turned the radio up, and again I can tell you exactly what road we were driving on.

So as Obama began his speech on the eve of his garnering the delegates to clinch the presidential nomination, I uttered the same words to my kids: Pay attention now, history is in the making this moment. Of all the white and "Western" nations in this world, America is nominating a black man to aspire to our highest office. Enough of us (though admittedly not all of us) have moved beyond the issue of a person's skin color, and choose to judge their candidate on his abilities alone. Of course, if Hillary had been the nominee, another kind of history would've also been made. A woman candidate as a major party nominee would've been a first for America, though not for the rest of the Western world. This moment is a living proof that whatever else may be wrong with our country in the moment, we are still striving towards a better world for all of our many diverse citizens.

And all of us, kids and adults alike, will remember where we were this moment, forever.

We Interrupt Your Yogurt To Bring You A Little Brown Bat

One thing about motherhood is that it's very rarely predictable. Yesterday I was all set to make yogurt for the first time from some of our raw goat's milk. Those of you who don't have to feed your kids non-cow's-milk products would probably gasp at paying $6.50 for a quart of yogurt. I gasp too, but goat's yogurt is the only kind my kids can eat, due to a cow's milk allergy. Fortunately, we buy our goat's milk from a local farmer for $7.00 a gallon (you're probably still gasping, but it was costing us $12 a gallon at the store), so I can make yogurt a lot cheaper than I can buy it.

So there I was, embarking on our yogurt-making adventure, when one of the kids hollered out that there was a bat in our garage. A Little Brown Bat, to be exact (yes, that's the official name), and a very cute one to boot. The night before, I had accidentally left the garage door open, so I was thinking he might've gotten closed in there and confused, but then he looked like he might be injured so we weren't sure. Because one of my great mom strengths is that I'm not in the least bit squeamish (and also to protect my kids from possible rabies), I volunteered to corral the bat into a shoebox. We gave him a shallow dish of water in there, but he continued to look lethargic into the evening hours. Once night fell, we put him in his box out on our deck, hoping he would fly away, but no such luck. He was still there this morning. He was looking not very good at all, so I decided to try to feed him some raw milk (figuring he's a mammal, so what the heck). He immediately took to that, licking out hungrily with his teeny tiny pink tongue at my eyedropper, and then he perked up substantially after that.

I told the kids I would call a wildlife rescue facility if he wasn't gone by morning, so I put him back into the box and into the garage on a shelf and called around until I found the local Bat Lady. She's really gung-ho about bats and said she would come over and transport the bat. Unfortunately, when I went out to check on the little guy he was nowhere to be seen! He had escaped out a hole in the box - apparently anything they can get their heads through, they can squeeze the rest of themself through also, so his tiny little dime-sized head went through the breathing hole and so did he. So the Bat Lady helped me search the garage for the bat, but with all of our camping gear and stuff it was pretty much a lost cause. She suggested going out tonight and trying to hear him scrabbling around, and that might give us an idea of at least which quadrant to concentrate on. For size reference, that's a mason jar lid he's sitting on in the photo. He's tiny! Hopefully we'll be able to find him tonight. In the meantime, check out the Bat World Sanctuary link for more info on these amazing creatures!!! We're building some bat boxes this summer for sure.

And Off to Church We Go

Organized religion and I have had a long and diverse relationship. If you drew it on a map, it would look like two paths that run roughly parallel, but sometimes come right together and sometimes diverge wildly in different directions. I've always felt like a deeply spiritual person, but churches have not always spoken to that spirituality. Part of that is that churches inevitably have to decide what side of issues they will come down on - whether to allow gay pastors or even women in the pulpit, whether to become involved in hunger relief agencies or more political causes (many churches when I was growing up were part of the original Nestle Boycott. So finding a church that

A) Aligns with my spiritual beliefs
B) Has an engaging pastor that gives me reason to think deeply on spiritual matters
C) Has a congregation that is welcoming and warm, and
D) Aligns with my personal beliefs

has sometimes been challenging. I was raised a Methodist, and then when (in the tradition of the Methodist church) our pastor was moved on after a few short years, for someone much less appealing to my family, we jumped ship to the Presbyterian church across the street. As a young adult, my then-boyfriend (now husband) and I happened upon a lovely little brick Methodist church in the small town of Monroe, Washington. In true Methodist fashion, the minister that drew us in was also moved on, and by the time we got married in that church, we had another minister. She also moved on so by the time we moved away and left the church we were on our third minister there (I must say, as much as I love the Methodist church, and I'm sure this practice has it's reasons, it causes a lot of turmoil in a congregation to always have to adjust to someone new). Nevertheless, we loved the church and found it to be a wonderful spiritual community.

Since moving here, I haven't really found anything to replace it. I've gone to various churches and even sung in one choir but none of them have stuck. The kids have grown up with spirituality, but no church.

Fast--forward to this last week, when Asa suddenly decided she wanted to try going to church. Part of this is undoubtably motivated by the fact that many of our homeschooling friends are devoutly religious and are involved in very active churches with lots of youth activities. So she hears about that all the time. So this morning we're trying out a friend's church and we'll see how this goes. I have to admit that after so many years of lapsed church-going, I'm loathe to give up my Sunday mornings again. I guess I've come to the conclusion that God speaks to me more on the mountaintop than the sanctuary. More on the beach than in a building. My long runs, bike rides, hikes, and swims are times when I feel closest to the spirit of God. So we'll just have to see how this goes. When your child is asking for something like this, you definitely need to follow through. So off to church we go.