scenes from a weekend

What I like about camping:

1.  Getting away.  It doesn't have to be far, but it's nice to just pack the truck and take off for a day or two.  

2.  Camp food (and drink).  Everything tastes better cooked outdoors, and with an outdoor appetite.

3.  Hanging out with family and friends (we usually camp with a group of people, except for this past weekend).  I like the sounds of a slowly waking group of people starting breakfast and coffee on the stoves, and the sound of late night talking and laughing over a crackling fire.

4.  Hiking.

5.  Quiet beaches and sunny, dozy afternoons.

What I tolerate about camping:

1.  Camp toilets.

2.  Bugs.

3.  Being the crazy tent police - shoes off in the screened "porch" of the tent, no dirt in the tent, unzip / rezip immediately to keep out the bugs.

4.  The unpredictability: of weather and camping neighbors and the condition of the camp toilets.

What I don't like about camping:

1.  The fifteen minutes (give or take a few) that it takes F to resign herself to sleeping in the same space as other people.  She's a frantic, sloppy pile of frustrated angst between the first goodnight and the moment of surrender to the inevitable.

2.  Temperature swings in a sleeping bag.  Hot-cold-hot-cold-hot-cold.  I think next time I might lobby for bringing blankets or spreading out open sleeping bags and sheets.  Might mean less tossing and turning.

3.  Packing up and putting everything away.  I can't really complain about this since I do about 5% of it.  Still, it's a lot of work.

We went to Blue Springs Ranch because we had a gift certificate for the zipline there.  It was fun for the night, and the girls enjoyed the pool, and we drove over to the beach and ate a most delicious dinner and our family's best s'mores ever.  But the place was a little underwhelming compared to some of the other beautiful campgrounds we've stayed in before.  We managed to dodge some good sized storms, and the brief rain shower around three a.m. sounded lovely on the top of the tent.  Was that lovely enough to make up for the karaoke night in the pavilion next door?  The jury's still out on that one.

Some photos of what I like (and tolerate) about camping - I'm just kicking myself for not getting any karaoke shots:

another monday

We dropped E off at Girl Scout camp, by herself, yesterday afternoon.  I think I'm okay with this (although I suppose it's a little late to change my mind).  As soon as the camp catalog arrived in the mail sometime in January, she devoured every word on every page and circled the themed weeks she was interested in.  We sent her application in at the very beginning of the process and she crossed her fingers that she would get her first choice.  She did, and she hasn't looked back since.  

It's quite amazing to watch her freely join in with others, this long-ago-shy girl of mine.  She spent the first five years of her life clinging to one leg of mine or the other, watching groups of kids play and interact freely while she watched with one eye from just behind me.  Always watching.

Then slowly, so slowly, those fingers that were wrapped tightly around my thighs started to loosen, and she began to join in more.  Quietly at first, always quiet, and far too nervous to hear her own voice in front of a crowd.  If a new person asked her a question, she'd draw close to us and look at the floor, and maybe whisper her name or her age, and then wait for us to translate it into an audible response.  I would whisper to her "be brave" as we stood by a playground crawling with other kids.  She wanted to play, but more than that, she wanted me near, always near.

In kindergarten, for her birthday, she donated a book to the school library - just like all the other kids in her school do.  During assembly she was to present her book to her friends and talk about why she liked the book so much.  She was absolutely certain in her decision - it was Robert McCloskey's Make Way for Ducklings, and she wanted to share all the photos of the "real" ducks she had seen that spring in Boston, and tell everyone just why she loved that book.  She knew that she probably wouldn't be able to do it - to get up in front of those new faces and tell them all of those things - so we made her a paper to hold up to read, and if she couldn't do that, then her teacher could help her.  She wanted everyone to know those words that she was longing to say - even if she couldn't say them.  And she couldn't - not yet - but I've never been so proud of her as I was that afternoon when she stood up there, speechless, in front of that giant-tiny crowd.

Kindergarten was an amazing time for her, and she started to find her voice among those other eleven friends.  Then she discovered a soccer ball and a paint brush and a trapeze and a zillion books, and then a script.  A year later she was practicing lines for an after school drama club, and now she's the first to sign up for anything that's offered on a stage.  Those that know her now can hardly believe she was ever too shy to join in.  Even those of us that knew her then sometimes forget.  She repeatedly walks into new places where she doesn't know a single face - her sports team, her girl scout troop, a club or a camp, and now she doesn't even look back.  She goes to the teeny-tiniest of schools, but her circles of friends stretch across the city, and they will grow and change as she does.

Now she's off at camp - not with her troop, but on her own.  Just like every single Monday morning of this summer, she'll walk into a sea of new faces and find her place in the group.  I see a lot of me in her - I was pretty shy as a little kid, and I still get a little nervous walking into the unknown.  But I went away to college and to graduate school not knowing a single soul and I think I kind of liked it that way.  I know I did.  I've never regretted pushing those circles a bit, challenging myself to walk into a new classroom, a new church, a new workplace, a new neighborhood.  She'll do the same, I know.  And we'll miss her - oh, how I miss her - but I'll never let the missing part stop her, stop this.  Wherever this world may take her, for as many days as it will give her. 

dropping her off at the goodbye tree

we wrote her one for each day, F took Wednesday

those were her words, and her own sad face

after we said goodbye to E, we drove her gear to her cabin - so we saw it before she did

the little one was ready to move in

dad's day

This past weekend we packed the family up and went out searching for some Father's Day adventures.  One of those adventures was a ZipLine excursion - and M and E geared up for it Saturday morning.

After a quick test run to make sure everyone knew how to properly brake, how not to dislocate their shoulder in the process of braking, and (I'm guessing) had a quick check to make sure everything was attached correctly while they were trying it out about four feet above the ground, they headed up the hills in a little yellow school bus.

M took this shot of E on the first run of four.  She was right at the minimum seventy pound limit, probably a little under, so she had a little less zip in her line, but she still really enjoyed it - just no braking necessary.

Forty minutes later, F and I were waiting a fair distance from the bottom of the last run, but we got some good shots of the two of them with my zoom lens.  

All the other adults coasted easily onto the final platform, but the lightweight started slowing down just over the water.  One of the guides started to get hooked up to the other wire to go out and rescue her, but she just flipped around and pulled herself in, hand over hand.  See?  Studying the circus arts can give you real world skills!

While they were careening from one tower to the next, F and I were left to our own devices.  Luckily there was a small playground across from the zip line training area, so she kept climbing the rock wall to the top of the tower, sliding down the slide, and climbing again.  After scaling the rocks three or four times I commented to her that she must really like rock climbing.  She turned to me with a straight face and shrugged.  "It's not a zip line," she said, and turned back to her rope.

I took this picture the next day of M and the girls - on Father's Day.  He tells me everyday how lucky we are.  A lot of times he tells me this just after a particularly exasperating moment with one or both of them.  We roll our eyes skyward and take a deep breath and wonder for the eighty-second time what we've gotten ourselves into, and then he says we're lucky.  We may work at it and for it, but in the end we're just plain lucky to have these two.  And even luckier that we have him.

friday finds: cookie cutters

This Friday finds me ready to get into the birthday preparations.  I've usually started by now, but other than ordering supplies and mapping it out in my head (and on paper), I haven't really done anything yet.  E's off to Girl Scout camp next week, and so I'm planning to spend next week on some of the make ahead portions of the little one's party - starting with the invitations.  

There are still quite a few pieces of that will be last minute - like the cookies.  Last year I had dozens of tiny rainbow colored flowers and they were a huge hit with the kids and grownups - they are just right bite sized, and so delicious.  

For our Farmers' Market party I found a bunch of small "market" bags - they look like pastel burlap sacks - each a different color.  I'm going to fill them with little fruit and veggie bite sized cookies because there's no reason we can't take a perfectly healthy sounding party and turn it into a sweetfest.

Eggplant cookie anyone?

overheard: big words

The Playmobil pirate and an Ernie figurine are playing together in the tub.  The pirate's legs are bent at ninety degrees, and he's gently flipping underwater somersaults with the touch of her fingers on his toes.  Ernie is perched in a bright yellow plastic boat, watching the pirate's antics in the water.  She is carrying on a constant stream of dialogue between the two while I floss my teeth at the mirror.

Ernie:  Pirate, you must stop flipping.

Pirate:  I'm allowed to flip.

Ernie:  I don't want you to flip anymore, you are splashing water into my boat.

Pirate:  I'm still flipping.

Ernie:  I'm using my nice words.  (Growling in a most decidedly un-nice way.)  Stop flipping.

Pirate:  You need to talk to my supervisor.

.....

M and I are reading books to her before she heads off to bed.  Somewhere in the conversation around these books, she uses the word "Absolutely".  It rolls right off her tongue, despite the multiple syllables.  Her dad laughs at it, and asks her how she can say a word like "absolutely" so clearly when she still pronounces lemonade, "lemo-lade".  She shrugs her shoulders, cocks her right eyebrow just like I do and says "It's absolutely lemo-lade."  And so it is.

.....

I'm vacuuming her room, and the method I employ for this task is to first pull the furniture to the center of the room, vacuum the perimeter, and then push everything back to the wall and vacuum the rest of the floor.  Some of the smaller items like her desk chair and her rocking chair are stacked onto the window seat, but this day she is sorting all the unshelved books into piles and she asks me not to disturb them.  I cannot really follow how she is arranging them, but there is most certainly a method to her madness, and she frequently backs up to survey her progress.  I think maybe she is trying to create four different stacks of books that perfectly align in height, but then I think that maybe she is organizing them by color.  It was probably by genre; I have a bad habit of consistent underestimation on her behalf.

The vacuum is fired up and I circle the island of furniture which causes her to scramble quickly onto the window seat.  She is barefoot, and each little foot is wedged between two stacks of books.  The quickness of her movements causes them to start to slide, and the sound of her carefully arranged piles crashing to the wood floors below is louder than my vacuum, and I quickly turn to look, expecting to see her in a heap.  I turn the sound off and she is standing there with feet still spread apart, hands on hips, looking at the mess below.

"Unbelievable," she mutters.  "Unbelievable.  There goes all my organizing, in a pile on the floor."

.....

Did you grow up with a Reader's Digest on the end table in the living room or on the back of the toilet?  Did you read the "Drama in Real Life" story first, and then flip to the "Life in These United States" and "Humor in Uniform" and "All in a Day's Work"?  I used to read those funny little paragraphs and marvel at how everyone seemed to be living these little three-to-four sentence snippets of hilarity, especially in the upper Midwest and Florida (those states seemed to have the most frequent submissions).  As I got older, I started to wonder if any of those stories were actually true, or if they were shaped by each writer into funnier paragraphs for the minuscule submission fee that the magazine would pay them for their entry.  I mentioned this to my parents last weekend - how we managed to give birth to a child that could fill a monthly column of these humorous snippets.  I could be a rich lady if they'd let me enter them all.  Perhaps I already am.