A Small Everyday Disaster

 

In the four and a half years since the twins were born, I've successfully avoided almost all art projects. I'm not an artsy kind of person and Rocket Boy doesn't like big messes, so I think we both casually agreed that art was something the boos could do at daycare/school.

But as of last week, daycare has turned into preschool -- except that the "school" part happens in the morning and boos go to daycare in the afternoon. So mornings at home have become "homeschool preschool" and that pretty much inevitably means art projects. I'm trying to go with the flow. I'd rather do art with four year olds than two or three year olds. For example, as you can see in the photo above, boos have already done some cutting at daycare, so it is not so scary to turn them loose with scissors and old catalogs (as long as by "turn them loose" I mean "sit right next to them and watch them like a hawk").

I have to say that my admiration for REAL preschool teachers is growing by leaps and bounds. It's so hard to come up with creative learning activities. I need to get some books and workbooks, obviously (suggestions welcome!). Last night I was busy and didn't have time to plan an activity for today. When I woke up this morning I thought, oh let's just take it easy.

But the boos had other ideas. Every few weeks or so they pull out all their old Ladybug children's magazines (saved and sent to us by Aunt Baba) and ask me to read them. I feel that we ought to read the ones that correspond to the current month, but they have no such compunctions. This morning they wanted me to read a Ladybug from February 1993, so I did. And unfortunately, it contained this article:

"Mom!" Baby A said, in righteous indignation. "We never made cookies!"
"It's too hot to make cookies," I said. (It's supposed to be 104 today.)
"No! It's not too hot in the house!"
"That's because the air conditioner is on. If we make cookies, it will get hot in the house and then the air conditioner won't be able to cool it down."
"No! The hotness will stay in the oven!"
"No it won't."
"Yes it will!"
and on and on and on.
I really didn't want to make cookies today. No interest whatsoever. But then I studied the recipe more closely and I thought, Oh! We could decorate the cookies with letters! And that could be our "school" for the day!

So we made the cookies. First I had to clean up the kitchen, so that was good, because otherwise I might have found a way to put it off until dinnertime. Then I made the dough, while boos stood on their stools and watched with great interest (and sneaked tastes). Then I dropped teaspoonfuls of dough on the cookie sheet, and gave the boos little plastic cups to dip in sugar and flatten the cookies. Then we baked them (in a 400 degree oven, oh my poor air conditioner). All well and good.

Then it was time to start decorating. I fumbled around in my baking cupboard and found a box with little tubes of icing that you can write with. I wrote on some of the cookies and boos wrote on some of the others.

The tubes of icing were almost all used up, though, so I went back to the cupboard and got another box of tubes. OK, now here's where it gets interesting. If you saw two boxes like this in YOUR baking cupboard, wouldn't you think the red box contained the same thing as the yellow box?

Or would you be smart enough to actually READ what it said on the red box? If so, you're smarter than me. I gave the boos the tubes in the red box and they started working with them. I was cleaning up the mess they'd made with the sugar and not paying attention. When I came back to them I noticed that now some of the cookies had huge blobs of dark colored gel on them. "Oh no," I said, "what are you doing? Don't put so much frosting on the cookies!"

Boos apologized vaguely, and then I looked more closely at the blobs. They weren't icing. And then I went back to the red box and actually READ what it said on it: "Betty Crocker Classic Gel Food Colors." Food colors!!!!! Boos were squirting big blobs of food coloring on the cookies. Cue blood-curdling scream from Mom.

I didn't want to throw away a third of our cookies, so what I did was wipe them off, one by one, using Kleenex. Made a big mess, and afterwards the cookies looked weirdly stained. But food coloring isn't toxic, so oh well. I found one more tube of icing and let them finish off the last of the cookies. (The picture above was actually taken at that point -- you can see just a few of the more lightly stained cookies near Baby B's elbow.) By then it was 10:30 and we needed a break, so we went back to their room and read some more Ladybug magazines.

Oh, and you want to know the worst thing? The cookies are terrible! What a bad recipe! Only good thing is that I'm not going to eat them all while the boos are at daycare.

Vacation -- Mammoth

OK, here's Part 2 of our late summer vacation, with lots of photos. Yes, by the way, I do have a new camera. I don't like it much, but maybe I will learn to like it. Rocket Boy also brought his old camera which still takes very nice pics -- some of these are his.

Anyway, as I was saying, on Tuesday, August 21st we packed up all our stuff and moved down Highway 395 about 20 miles or so to the Westin Monache Resort in Mammoth Lakes -- the hotel being courtesy of my little sis, who gives me a couple of nights in it each year for my birthday. Outstanding choice of gift!

 This year we had a 2-bedroom, 2-bathroom suite with kitchen, so luxurious. Of course we messed it all up immediately, but it was still great.

In the photo you can see the master bedroom door to the left, the second bedroom door to the right, the living room in the middle, the dining table, and a bit of the kitchen. The suite was bigger than some apartments I've lived in.

We put the twins in the master bedroom because it had a king-size bed. I tucked pillows under the bedding on both sides of the bed, to keep them from falling out, plus some long skinny pillows down the middle to divide their space (it was the kind of hotel that had thousands of pillows available -- after the first night, when the maid saw what I'd done, she brought us MORE pillows). We also put a long ottoman thing by Baby A's side of the bed, and another pillow on top of that, so that if he DID fall out, it would be a soft landing. But he didn't fall out, thank goodness. We had two very good nights of sleep.

The best thing about the hotel is the pool and hot tubs. Here's the view from our room (we were on the 5th floor).

It was fun to look down at the people in the pool. Here are the boos looking down (I found them here the second morning):

Of course, it was also fun to take the elevator down to the second floor and SWIM in the pool, and we did that multiple times each day. The first day, after we got checked in and somewhat settled, we went down to the pool with Aunt Nonnie and had lunch delivered to us as we lounged around on deck chairs. So decadent. Nonnie ordered a drink, but got out of the pool to imbibe it, at which the attendant said, "Oh, you're no fun."

Later that afternoon, we decided to go see some sights, so we drove to the Mammoth Mountain Adventure Center where we purchased tickets for the mandatory shuttle bus that would take us to the Devil's Postpile National Monument, and also muzzles for Nonnie and Rick's bulldogs, because dogs are only allowed to ride the shuttle bus if they're wearing muzzles. Unfortunately, there were no muzzles for sale that actually fit over the bulldogs' enormous faces, but they wore their Size 5 XL muzzles around their necks and it turned out that was enough -- the shuttle drivers understood the problem and also understood that bulldogs don't bite people.

The shuttle ride was pleasant, and we got off at the Devil's Postpile stop and walked down the trail a little ways until we came to the actual formation.

The picture doesn't do it justice. The formation is simply amazing, but it's hard to get the scale right in a photo. According to the website, it is "a rare sight in the geologic world and ranks as one of the world's finest examples of columnar basalt. Its columns tower 60 feet high and display an unusual symmetry."

 

The bulldogs are not big hikers, but they did quite well. Better than me, really. I was so tired from three disturbed nights, not to mention cleaning the June Lake house, that I could hardly walk. Even the twins were a bit subdued.

The shuttle was very full on the ride back to Mammoth, and Baby B and I ended up sitting in the back with a whole lot of German speakers. I whispered to Baby B that the "big boys" sitting right next to us were speaking German, and he nodded, and then he said, "Mommy, do big girls speak German too?" Behind us were some "big girls" speaking German, and I realized that he was actually aware of that, which impressed me. Rocket Boy has worked SO hard to try to teach the boys a little German.

Our second day in Mammoth, we split up after breakfast. Rocket Boy, Uncle Rick, and the twins went off to see some sights together, and Nancy and I took the bulldogs for a very low-key hike.

We all met up again at lunchtime and went to a kid-friendly eatery called The Base Camp Cafe. This would have been great except that Baby B suddenly felt sick and threw up in the parking lot. What do you do in that situation? Everyone else is already in the restaurant, ordering. I suppose I should have pulled Rocket Boy and Baby A out and insisted we go back to the hotel (couldn't have just taken Baby B because then Baby A would have been stranded without his carseat), but instead I took Baby B into the restaurant and ordered him a quesadilla. I knew he wouldn't eat it -- it was just so he wouldn't feel left out. But probably not my finest hour as a mom. We also ordered him a Sprite mixed with lemonade, which he took one sip of. All of us sat around eating our lunches, wondering who would come down with stomach flu next.

But no one else did, and Baby B recovered quickly -- by mid-afternoon, he was eating again. We all agreed to have a quiet afternoon, so the boos spent it watching "Toy Story," which Aunt Nonnie had given them, on the DVD player in their bedroom, I spent it reading, and Rocket Boy spent it driving around looking at nearby hot springs (each to his own). Here's one of his photos from his jaunt:

For dinner we had decided to go back to the restaurant at Convict Lake (we ate lunch there 2 years ago).

It's a very nice restaurant. For lunch you can eat outside, which we did, with your dogs under the table if you like, and it's all very casual. But for dinner you eat inside (the bulldogs stayed in the car) and it's a bit fancier. That is, there were plenty of people wearing shorts and hiking boots, but the prices of the entrees were pretty high. That immediately makes me nervous -- people are paying all this money to have a nice dinner, and here are our children, ruining it. But Rocket Boy and I tried to keep things from getting out of hand. We took turns taking the boos on little walks when they got rowdy. Also, I took them to the bathroom about eleven times. Finally it was time for dessert, and Rick suggested that we have Bananas Foster. The waitress told the boos to sit on their bottoms (so that they wouldn't catch on fire) and they actually obeyed her.

And here are the flames!

Wow, it was exciting! Boos couldn't stop talking about it. Great fun.

The next morning we went for one last swim after breakfast, but then it was time to pack up and go home. We took our time, didn't check out until nearly noon, and then spent 5 hours making our way down 175 miles of 395 -- lots of stops. When we finally reached Ridgecrest it was so hot, we couldn't believe it. Mammoth and June Lake had been so deliciously cool. But actually, the last few days here haven't been so bad. And we have our memories of one more lovely vacation in the Eastern Sierra.

Vacation -- June Lake

We're back from our second big summer vacation and now I think it's time for summer to end. Summer has other plans, of course -- in Ridgecrest it usually stays pretty hot until November -- but we're grateful for the fact that the high temperatures have been right around 100 since we got back. Oh, maybe as much as 103. But that's nothing like 113, it's really not. The water from the cold water tap is still hot, but I'm trying to ignore that.

So anyway, just like last year, our late summer vacation had two parts: June Lake and Mammoth. I'll write about the Mammoth part in a separate post. June Lake was what we call the cousins trip, because we take it with some of my cousins. This year we stayed in this rental house, which was close to Gull Lake:

It was a very nice house in many ways, not so nice in others. The not so nice parts can be glimpsed in the photo: a weirdly curving driveway that neither Rocket Boy nor I could back out of successfully and STAIRS -- a steep flight of stairs to get from outside to the first floor (where our rooms were) and an even steeper flight of stairs up to the top floor where the living room, kitchen, dining room, and master bedroom were. One of my cousins counted them: THIRTY steep stairs up to the living room. When I was in better shape, 30 stairs would not have bothered me, but that was then, this is now. Plus, we were at 7500 feet. Suffice it to say that I would NOT stay in this house again.

But it had nice aspects too. Here's the lovely kitchen:

And here's the room that the boos slept in:

I was very firm: they could PLAY on the top bunks (when parents were around to supervise) but they had to SLEEP in the bottom bunks. It didn't matter: Baby A fell out of his lower bunk all three nights we stayed here, at 2 am, 4 am, and 4:30 am, respectively. Each night I either couldn't get back to sleep afterwards or was up for a couple of hours at least. As the days progressed, I became more and more zombie-like. This is not supposed to happen when your children are four!

We arrived at the house on Saturday, August 18th -- much later than planned, but just in time for a delicious salmon dinner. The next day, Sunday, we drove to the Mono Pass trailhead, just inside Yosemite, and attempted to hike the trail.

Rocket Boy and I hiked this trail seven years ago with the cousins and thought it was wonderful. We call it the Blue Frog Trail, because we saw some little blue frogs in a pond along the way. It's probably still wonderful, but we didn't see much of it. First we got a very late start, didn't start hiking until after 10 am. Then, after we'd gone about a quarter mile (if that), I got nervous about where we'd parked (in a space with lines across it). We knew it was illegal, but it was the only space left. "What if the ticket we get is $300," I said to Rocket Boy. "What if they tow our car?" Eventually Rocket Boy agreed to walk back to the trailhead and move the car to the side of the road.

While he was gone, the boos' Aunt Nonnie and Uncle Rick showed up (they were staying in Mammoth and had to wait for the pet-sitter, so had gotten an even later start). We hiked along with them until we came to a rushing stream. Streams on this trail are not supposed to be rushing in late August, but there had been some recent rains... anyway, the stream was rushing and there was no obvious way to ford it. I won't go into all the details, just say that Rick, Baby A, and I ended up with sopping wet shoes and socks. We wrung out Baby A's socks, Rick wore his on his head to dry, and I just sloshed along. Rocket Boy caught up with us right after all this happened, and after a bit we continued our hike.

But not for too much longer. Even though we knew there were beautiful sights ahead, we also knew we had little people with us who would not be able to get there -- and more importantly, get back again. Baby A kept asking me, "Do we have to cross that river again?" Plus, storm clouds were gathering. So finally we sat down and ate some of the lunch we'd brought, and then headed back down the trail. I think Rick, Baby B, and I were the ones who got wet the second time across the stream (I didn't have a lot to lose at that point). But it didn't matter. We saw two frogs -- neither was blue, but that's OK. And we all made it back to the trailhead in one piece. Someday we'll do the whole trail again. I have faith.

After the hike, Nonnie and Rick went to the Whoa Nellie Deli for lunch and we joined them at an outside picnic table (we had snacks).

Then we drove back to the house in June Lake, but since it was only mid-afternoon, and four-year-olds don't understand about chilling out for a couple of hours (like we wanted to do), we headed out to the swimmers beach at June Lake to go swimming. I don't have any photos of that episode because it was so chaotic, trying to keep an eye on the boos in the lake (Baby B was quite fearless), making multiple trips to the restroom, etc. But after we'd gone back to the house yet again, gotten all cleaned up and changed yet again, we took the boos for a walk down to the playground next to Gull Lake, and that was very lovely:

I should note that the boos were significantly easier to deal with this year (this was our fourth cousins trip with them), and yet still not what you would call EASY. Their energy was simply boundless: being at altitude, falling out of bed each night, falling into streams -- absolutely nothing slowed them down. At mealtimes they would eat a little and then spend the rest of the time rolling around on the living room couches like wolf puppies. LOUD wolf puppies.

The second full day of the trip, Monday, we went to the great county park next to Mono Lake and spent a few hours there with the cousins.

Next we drove to the Mono Lake Visitors Center and explored the museum there.

Baby A particularly liked playing on the stone wall in back of the Visitors Center, where you can look out at Mono Lake.

Then we killed some time in the town of Lee Vining (another park, a museum, an ice cream place), and finally it was time to drive to Saddlebag Lake, where some of the cousins were camping. Nonnie and Rick joined us here again, this time with their bulldogs:

We walked from the campground down to Saddlebag Lake close to sunset:

And came back up for the campfire with all the cousins.

That was fun. My mother and her three siblings had ten children among them, and of the nine who survive, five were present at this campfire. Maybe not a huge percentage, but I thought it was pretty good, especially because I never see any of these people anymore (except my sister). It was fun to look around the group and think, we are here because of John, Helen, Bob, and Laurel. I really loved my uncles and my aunt -- and of course my mother -- and I miss them all so much all the time. I couldn't help thinking, or maybe just hoping, that their spirits were with us that night.

The next day we packed up our stuff, cleaned up the house, and drove to Mammoth. And that's the next post -- soon, I promise.

Happy 10 Years

Yesterday was our 10th anniversary -- isn't that amazing? We were talking about it -- does it feel like ten years? Yes and no. In some ways no, because time goes so fast now that we're older. In other ways no, because it's been such an eventful ten years that it feels like about TWENTY. But I guess mainly it does feel like ten years, ten very memorable years.

We spent the first five years getting to know each other, learning how to live together, surviving death after death after death in my family and Rocket Boy's, and struggling with infertility. I got pregnant about a month before our fifth anniversary, so the last five years have been BABY BABY BABY BABY TODDLER TODDLER TODDLER TODDLER, not to mention Ridgecrest. It's been a busy time.

And NOT an entirely happy time, to say the least. I had such a hard time choosing an anniversary card. There were no cards that said (as my sister put it) "marriage is so much harder than we both thought it would be but we're in it for the long haul" or (as I put it) "it's been a bit rough but I'm glad we've stuck it out." All the cards (at K-Mart, OK, maybe they would have been better at Wal-Mart, not) were super flowery, to the point of being very annoying. I finally found a card that was short and sweet -- no mention of the tough times, but nothing about "every breath I take I think of you I was nothing until I met you blah blah blah."

It was beastly hot yesterday (over 110), not to mention humid (there are storm clouds around, though no actual storms), and even our air conditioner couldn't handle it very well. I had it set on 75, but it registered 80 all day (and wouldn't shut off -- kept roaring on and on, trying to get to 75). When getting ready to go out, I put on a white dress with a little blue shrug and immediately started to sweat. My hands were so puffy I could barely get my engagement ring on (I don't usually wear it). But I persevered.

The babysitter arrived -- actually two babysitters, teenage sisters a year apart, very nice girls. Boo bears were overwhelmed and delighted and flirtatious, so we felt comfortable leaving them. (Later we learned that the girls actually gave them a BATH -- in the morning we asked them about it -- you got naked with those girls? Yes, they said, pointing, our clothes are on the floor. So nice to be so innocent.)

Rocket Boy and I went to Maddy's Cottage, which we think has some of the best food in town. We both had iced tea, garlic tomato soup, and shrimp scampi, and for dessert we shared chocolate mousse and creme brulee. We brought our cards and gifts (I had gotten some little things in tins, since tin is the traditional 10th anniversary gift) into the restaurant and opened them there and displayed them on our table, so the waitress asked us what the occasion was, and for that, our chocolate mousse was free. Rocket Boy was concerned that someone might think we were faking having an anniversary in order to get free chocolate mousse, but I pointed out that the two anniversary cards together cost as much as the chocolate mousse, not to mention the presents, so it would have been a rather expensive way to get a free dessert!

After dinner we drove over to the warehouse on the northeast side of town, where Ridgecrest's Community Light Opera and Theatre Association (CLOTA) has its headquarters. This was our first CLOTA experience, and now I think we will try to go again, if we're still here when they do their next show. It's a small space, probably room for no more than about 100 audience members (I'd say there were about 25 last night). But that's fun because it's so intimate. The only problem was that it was SO BEASTLY HOT that they had multiple cooling devices going (A/C, fans), but that meant you couldn't hear the actors. So they turned some of the cooling devices off when the play started. But that meant it got hot, plus you still couldn't hear the actors too well because some of the fans were still going. Despite all that, we enjoyed the play very much (they did "Arms and the Man" which I'd never seen), though we worried about the actors in their hot costumes.

The play ended a few minutes before 9:30 and we rushed home to pay the babysitters (their mother drove up to pick them up right then). Then we had a glass of wine and a chocolate bar and watched some of the Olympics on TV. It was a fun time.

Today wasn't, today was awful. But I'm holding on to yesterday, trying to remember that the bad times end and there are always good times around the corner. The fact that there are also more bad times around the corner is not interesting. We live for the good times. (Despite being a depressive, I am an optimist. It is an interesting combination.) So here we go for another year!

I don't like summer

I realize I've been avoiding this blog because I DON'T HAVE MY CAMERA and I've forgotten how to blog without photos. For the first week I guess I thought the police were actually going to find my camera, but now I guess I think they won't. Still, I'm dawdling about buying a new one. Canon doesn't make my model anymore, they make 50,000 other models, and it's very hard to choose. Rocket Boy tried to buy a used one on eBay today, exactly like my old one, but he didn't get it. So no photos for now.

But I was drawn back into posting anyway because it's SO HOT here, and I'm just really tired of summer. And it's only August 6th. Ridgecrest stays mighty hot through August, September, and October, though October is more likely to be in the 90s than the 100s. For the next five days, NWS is currently predicting that Ridgecrest will be 109, 109, 111, 110, and 111. To make myself feel better, I look at the predicted temps for Death Valley for the same time period: 121, 122, 124, 126, and 125. Yes, I KNOW it's a dry heat, but it's a YUCKY dry heat.

Meal planning has become impossible. I don't want to turn on the oven, I don't want to go to the grocery store, and I don't want to cook. Fortunately, Rocket Boy and the twins are being very accommodating. If I can put one food item on the table (and I'm using the term "food" loosely here) around dinnertime, they'll eat  it and not complain. Tonight we had Trader Joe's canned lentil soup (excellent!) with crackers. Tomorrow I'm thinking about a tuna salad. Wednesday... well, that's a long time from now.

On Sunday we took our quarrelsome children to a movie at the Ridgecrest Cinemas (Ice Age: Continental Drift -- much too scary for four-year-olds) and afterwards walked across the parking lot to Beansters/Pizza Factory, where we got coffee drinks and cookies. It was only 3 pm, but we decided that would be dinner. But then of course at 5:30 pm, the boys started asking "Mom, what would be the dinner?" "We already had it," I said, but they were not convinced. And then the doorbell rang, and it was a boy delivering at box of Krispy Kreme doughnuts that I had purchased a week or two ago from a little girl who came to the door (it was in support of something, maybe a cheerleading group). So I put the box of doughnuts on the table and it became dinner. I felt sick the rest of the evening, but hey. And RB fortunately took the rest of the box to work with him this morning. RB is a very helpful sort of husband in that way, kind of like a garbage disposal.

On the plus side, the laundry on the clothesline dries very quickly. On the minus side, hot water comes out of the cold tap. On the plus side, you don't have to wait for the shower water to heat up. On the minus side, it's too hot to push the twins to daycare in their stroller and thus I keep getting fatter (having Krispy Kreme doughnuts show up at the door is not helping either). Also on the minus side, my tomato and pepper plants do not have ANY fruit on them. The tomato keeps making flowers, the pepper just makes leaves. I fertilize them every week. I'm probably doing something wrong, but I think it's also just too hot.

Desert heat really is different from a humid heat. You don't sweat much in desert heat, because it just lifts all the moisture out of your body. When I went out after dinner tonight to bring in the scorched laundry I was horrified by the heat. "Yuck!" I said to no one in particular. But sweat didn't drip down my thighs. I just felt like I was being baked, like a cookie.

Well, time for bed. We turn off the A/C at night and set up a fan to draw hot air into the house and blow the previously air-conditioned air over to our neighbor's house. I don't know why we do this. One of the mysteries of the desert.