The bad by-du

This morning I was standing at the kitchen counter fixing bowls of cereal for myself and the twins, when Baby A suddenly said "By-du!" A spider? I looked around. Baby A was pointing at my feet. My bare feet. I backed up and looked at where I'd been standing. There, hanging upside down from the bottom of the counter, inches or maybe not even that far from where my feet (my bare feet) had been, was a big black spider. Not as big as the one in the garage last weekend, but bigger than I like to see in the house. And worse, it had a particular look to it that I didn't like. It looked like the by-du that lives right outside our front door, and the by-du that lives on our patio, the by-dus that only come out at night.

I called for Rocket Boy but he was in the bathroom, getting ready to go to work. "Stay here with Mommy," I told the babies. "Don't touch the by-du. It's a bad by-du." I felt sad. They have no fear of spiders yet. They like to pick them up and play with them. I have tried hard not to transmit my own arachnophobia to them. But some by-dus ARE dangerous. Some by-dus can kill you, especially if you are only two.

The moment RB emerged from the bathroom I said "We need you!" and he came right in. "What's the problem?"

I pointed. "You need to get rid of that by-du."

He looked at the spider. "Is it a widow?"

"I don't know, but it doesn't look good."

RB captured the spider using two plastic cups, and then studied it through the plastic. Sure enough, there was the red hourglass. He took the bad by-du way out to the far side of the front lawn and released it.

A black widow spider in my kitchen! What is it eating? Cockroaches? Black widows usually stay outdoors. I've never worried about them in the house before. Guess now I have to worry.

The babies were very interested in the whole proceedings: the by-du itself, what Da-da did with it, and those cups he used.

Late in the afternoon, after their nap, they came out to the kitchen again. Baby A said "By-du!" I looked around nervously, but then realized he was pointing to the two plastic cups which RB had put back on the counter. "That's right, Daddy used those cups to catch the by-du," I said. "He put the by-du outside. That was a bad by-du. It needed to go outside."

The babies listened to me solemnly. "By-du," they murmured. Thus is innocence lost.

Vocabulary development

First, for anyone who was worried, the nickels are gone -- that is, most of them vanished on their own, but I intentionally "vanished" all the ones I could find. The babies have temporarily forgotten about them (out of sight, out of mind), and maybe by the time they remember, they will have moved beyond the stage of putting everything in their mouths. We are really looking forward to that milestone!

Speaking of milestones, I think we may be starting to see that "language explosion" that was supposed to take place around 18 months (the boos are now 25, almost 26 months old). Almost every day we notice new words and phrases. Baby B, who doesn't have quite as much language as Baby A, has acquired a useful phrase: "I don't want that." He says it quite clearly. The problem is that he says it about everything, including things he wants. We don't know what he thinks it means.

Their collection of nouns is increasing too, and we are amused by what's being added to the list. The other day Baby A brought me one of their stuffed Audubon birds, a quail, and said to me "Kayu." Startled, I agreed that it was a quail. A day or so later I was holding him as we walked past a metal quail sculpture that we have, and he pointed to it and said "Kayu" again. So I have to accept that not only can he recognize a quail, he knows the word for it too. How many two-year-olds who don't even know their colors know the word for quail? Baby A also knows the word for crow: "Coh" -- but that's because we have a children's book called "A Crow's Journey." Confusingly, there aren't any crows in Ridgecrest, just ravens. I don't think he has a word for raven yet.

Another new word that both babies have is spider: "By-du." We thought this was mostly based on pictures of spiders in books, although we certainly do have spiders around here, oh yes we do. Today we went back to the Desert Tortoise Natural Area, and while we were taking a hike, Baby A pointed to a tiny scurrying thing and said "Bih by-du!" I said "that's not a spider, is it? isn't it an ant?" (The babies know about ants -- they call them "bees.") Rocket Boy and I peered with our aging eyes at the itsy-bitsy little thing. "By-du," Baby A repeated. Sure enough, it was a by-du, though not a bih by-du -- it was one of the tiniest by-dus I had ever seen. Somebody has very good eyes!

We had a real treat at the DTNA today -- there was an actual tortoise there! This was our third visit, but the first tortoise we had seen there. The ranger greeted us as old friends and took us right out to see the tortoise. He's in the photo at left (the tortoise, not the ranger), hiding under a spiny hop-sage bush. Later, after everyone stopped staring at him, he came out and walked down the trail. The babies have seen a number of tortoises recently and they both have a word for them, which sounds something like "tor-teel." They keep hearing people say both tortoise and turtle, and this is what they've worked out as a word for these creatures.

On Friday the babies and I visited the home of another tortoise club member to see how he's built pens for his adopted and foster tortoises. I studied the pens for a long time and took photos, so that RB and I can build similar pens in our yard. The babies were intensely interested in the tor-teels and their pens, and that night there was a lot of fighting over their two stuffed turtles and their one little plastic turtle.

On Saturday, during the babies' nap, RB and I laboriously built our first tortoise pen. This involved, among other things, getting some bricks out of the garage. Several by-dus were displaced in the process, including an absolutely enormous black one -- I think it was four inches long. When the babies got up from their nap, we took them outside to see our handiwork. They inspected the pen with great interest, then looked up at me questioningly. "Tor-teel?" said Baby A.

Stay tuned...

Money

So we're still getting requests for our dear departed friend Clifford's money, several almost every day. And the requestors keep sending us trinkets, and notecards, and pictures "suitable for framing," and address labels by the thousands. And nickels. Nickels! Sometimes as many as 3 to an envelope! You're supposed to feel guilty and send them back, plus a contribution. I just take the nickels off and put the letters in the recycling bin. Thus we have a lot of nickels lying around.

Well, guess who in the household likes nickels? That's right, Baby A and Baby B. They like to put the nickels in their mouths and suck on them. This freaks me out, because I am afraid they're going to choke on the nickels. If I put 2 or 3 nickels in my mouth and went running through the house, I'd choke on them. "We don't eat money, spit it out!" I say, holding my palm underneath their mouths. They run away, furiously sucking on their money.

A few days ago, Rocket Boy and I were going to take the boys on an after-dinner stroller walk, but first I took away Baby B's nickels. He cried desperately: "money! money!" RB took him back in the house for a moment and when they returned, Baby B was suspiciously happy. I couldn't look at his mouth. "You gave him another nickel, didn't you?" I asked. "Sort of," RB said. I gave up.

The next day both babies had several nickels in circulation (from hand to mouth to floor to hand to mouth etc.). I had an idea: "Let's not eat money, let's find something to put your money in!" I said, rummaging through the cupboard. What I found were plastic snack bowls, which I usually give to them full of fruit or crackers. The irony of this did not hit me until I saw the boys spitting their nickels into the snack bowls, then scooping them out and eating them again.

At one point all the nickels had mysteriously vanished (I don't want to think about where), so I hypocritically got out my purse and gave them more nickels. What an awful little coin nickels are: so large and heavy. I'm secretly happy to get rid of them. But now the babies know that I have money in my purse, so they keep reaching for it, up on the counter, grabbing at the strap. Before, they were mildly interested in it because they knew it sometimes contained pens, and my car keys, plus the exciting clicker that makes the car go "beep-beep" and flash its lights. But those treasures are nothing compared to money. Cold hard nickels, that's all we want now.

On a somewhat related note, I went to a job fair at the base today. RB talked me into it; I didn't want to go. For one thing, I don't really want a job at the base. But it would be good for us financially if I had one. For another thing, I had nothing to wear. But the weather suddenly got cold this week, and I do have a cold-weather outfit that just barely "passes" for interviews, so there I was: no excuse.

The job fair was from 10 to 2. The babies and I got there around 11:15 and met RB, who came over from his office to babysit. "So we'll be over at the playground, and you think it'll be about an hour?" he asked. "Oh no, I don't think so, maybe 15 minutes," I said. Turned out it was more like 10 minutes. The space was packed. Most of the booths had long long lines of people waiting to talk to recruiters. I plastered a smile on my face and stopped by some of the booths without long lines (they were the ones not accepting resumes or doing interviews). Then I accidentally stopped by a booth that did have a long line. "Can I help you, miss?" the recruiter said, giving me a funny look. I noticed the line behind me. "Oh sorry," I said, blushing and getting out of there as fast as I could. My smile was starting to feel desperate, so I decided it was time to go.

I found RB and the boys at the playground. My happy little men were running back and forth on a jungle gym shaped like a ship. I'm glad no one choked on a nickel this week. I just need to do some more thinking about how we're going to provide an ongoing supply.

Garden club tour

We're planning to make the trek to Los Angeles tomorrow, so today we stayed in Ridgecrest and partook of the local offerings, specifically the 48th annual garden club tour.

We went on the 47th annual tour last year and enjoyed it, so I was pleased when I saw the ad for this year's tour. I completely adore this sort of thing -- house tours, garden tours -- the chance to poke around in someone else's home, someone else's life. In Boulder around Halloween they used to have the Ghost Walk, which was essentially a house tour except that at each house, while you admired the lavender walls and granite countertops, a psychic told you about the ghosts that lived there.

That would probably be a bit much for Ridgecrest.

I bought our tickets ahead of time, and Friday night I read through the descriptions of the gardens, planning our route. Last year several gardens on the tour were within walking distance of each other, so we pushed the stroller from house to house. This year, unfortunately, almost none of the 9 gardens on the tour were close together. I mapquested it, and we COULD have walked from our house to 4 of the gardens and back again, but it would have been 6.5 miles. A bit much for us in our current out of shape state, and a whole lot too much for the young gentlemen who would have been sitting in the stroller.

So we had to drive. Oh well.

The garden description that really caught my eye was for a house on Wildflower Street. In bold letters it read: "Please be sure to close gates so the dogs and tortoises do not get out." Naturally that was our first stop. It was way out to the west of us, on an unpaved road. We parked in the dirt, got out of the car, and walked to the house. Opened the garden gate, went in, CLOSED the gate so no tortoises could get out, started walking around the house. No tortoises. Looked politely at the plantings and the rocks (rocks are important in desert gardens), walked further around the house. No tortoises.

Finally we got all the way around to the other side of the house, met the very pleasant owners and their two dogs, and Rocket Boy got up the courage to ask "Were there any tortoises here?" "Oh yes," said the man, "there are three of them. I saw Mojo out here earlier, now where is he?" We all looked for Mojo. And suddenly I saw him, walking across the patio. He was enormous! Twice, maybe three times the size of the desert tortoise I grew up with.

Nothing improves a garden like a desert tortoise.

A few gardens later we found ourselves on Willow Street. The house was modest, with an enormous garden. Toward the back of the yard was a big pond, and as we looked into it, we realized it was full of tadpoles. RB asked the owner about them. "Those Mojave toads just come right out of the desert if you put a pond in," he told us. In the summer, he said, the full-grown toads hide in the bushes and come out in the evenings to frolic on the lawn and in the pond. (OK, he didn't say frolic, but that was the general idea.) There were hundreds of tadpoles in the pond, but he said the birds would eat most of them -- maybe 50 would survive to frolic in the garden.

I wonder. If we put a pond in our yard, could we attract some of those desert toads?

It was about 80 degrees today, bright sunshine. All the gardens we saw were idyllic and tempting -- they made the desert seem very appealing. Almost made me want to settle down in Ridgecrest permanently.

Then I think of July, day after day over 110 degrees. Even the image of 50 desert toads coming out to frolic in the evenings can't quite fix that picture. And the tortoises would be estivating.

Death Valley in springtime

We've been meaning to take another trip to Death Valley, to view the wildflowers before it gets too hot. The weather didn't look good this weekend, but next weekend is busy, and by the weekend after that the flowers might be gone, so we decided to go while we could.

The forecast Sunday was for high winds, but they weren't going to start until after 10 am, so we thought: we'll get an early start! And we did, for us -- we managed to leave by 9:15. Of course then we had to get gas. But we were on the road by 9:30. Of course it takes about an hour to get to the park, so by then the winds had started. Oh well.

And we forgot the camera, so no lovely photos this time. Sorry! Rocket Boy and I had a heated discussion in the car about whose fault that was (it was mostly mine). By then we had driven 13 miles, so if we'd gone back and fetched it, that would have added 26 miles to the trip. By the end of the day we'd driven 334 miles, so would an extra 26 miles really have mattered? Probably should have gone back.

To get to Death Valley, we drive from our own Indian Wells Valley to Searles Valley (where Trona is) and thence into Death Valley. At that point we have two choices of roads. This time we took the road through Wildrose Canyon, which is narrow and not in very good shape. It leads to the road up to the Charcoal Kilns, which RB suggested we visit. I had not seen them before. They're fascinating: ten beehive-shaped structures in a row, built in 1877, each 25 feet tall and 30 feet in diameter. They are so perfectly symmetrical, so perfectly aligned, and so large and so old, that they are actually a bit creepy. Baby A was afraid of them, as was I. Baby B thought we were being silly, as did RB. Baby B ran from one to the other, stomping his feet inside each one to create an interesting echo. Baby A cried and insisted I carry him. I carried him back to the car and we had a snack.

From there we went on to Stovepipe Wells, where we had lunch, and then past Furnace Creek all the way to Badwater (don't you just love the names?). It was in the 50's at the Charcoal Kilns, which are at 6800 feet elevation, but the 70s and 80s elsewhere. But the wind was blowing at roughly 500 miles per hour, so it didn't really matter what the temperature was.

At Badwater, which is 282 feet below sea level, the lowest point in North America, we got out of the car, planning to push the boys in their stroller down to the boardwalk and out to the salt flats. But the wind! The boys wanted to wear their hats, but we couldn't let them -- anything that wasn't tied down blew away instantly. After a few minutes we realized this was crazy and we all got back in the car.

Our last stop was the Visitor Center and museum at Furnace Creek. We spent quite a bit of time there because it was inside and thus out of the wind. I pushed the boys in their stroller around the museum. At the desert tortoise exhibit I said "Look! Desert tortoise!" and Baby B said "Rock!" "No," I said, "desert tortoise!" "Rock!" insisted Baby B.

The wildflowers were nice. It's not a great year, we're told, but it's OK. We saw mostly Desert Gold, a yellow flower, Gravel Ghost, a white flower, and Notch-Leaved Phacelia, which is purple. Near the Charcoal Kilns we saw Desert Paintbrush, which is red. We had a wildflower guide, a pamphlet with good photos, and from time to time I would pull over to the side of the road, RB would open his door, and we would compare the flowers growing there to the pictures in the pamphlet. By the time we left the Valley we had memorized half a dozen wildflowers, but it was the sort of memorization you know won't last. Six months from now I'm not going to remember "notch-leaved phacelia." That's OK, I can always learn it again.

For some reason, all through the trip I was thinking about marriage and the compromises it entails. When two people marry, or enter into a similarly entangled relationship, they each make concessions in order to arrive at a settlement, i.e., married life. Often the two parties do not make an equal number of concessions. Sometimes the concessions appear to be quite detrimental to the people involved.

Rocket Boy and I have been married for 7 years and 8 months; we have two children. During our marriage I have given up many things and gained many things. Since our move to Ridgecrest I have been more aware of what I have given up.

When we take a trip like this one to Death Valley I am more aware of what I have gained: not only a family, but a partner who loves to explore, to take off at a moment's notice and go anywhere and do anything. It drives me crazy, yes, and it also feeds my soul.

Springtime continues

To me, April is the quintessential spring month, yet in some of the places I've lived (Ann Arbor comes to mind, not to mention Boulder), it's still very wintery. Here in Ridgecrest we're right on the cusp of summer in early April. Today it's supposed to get to 81 degrees, which is summer in my book (though not in Ridgecrest's book). We're thinking about a Death Valley trip this weekend and it's already in the upper 80s there.

It's actually very pretty here right now. The big fields near us are full of wildflowers. (Can something be a "field" if it has no grass? My dictionary defines a field as "a broad, level, open expanse of land" so I guess so, but I think the quintessential field would have grass.)

Last Sunday of course was Easter, and some of our neighbors put up Easter decorations.



The big cross in the middle went up at Christmas and they left it up until Easter, when they added the other three symbols. I drove by the house today and noticed they'd taken everything down, unlike this house:



which keeps its cross up all year. No, this is not a church. The sign in the window is the Ten Commandments, in case anyone passing by needed a refresher course.

Ah, spring. Ah, Ridgecrest.

Just like last year, the weeds in our backyard are getting completely out of hand, but we are hoping to deal with them ourselves rather than hire someone to weed-whack the whole yard at great expense. This is probably unrealistic, seeing as how Rocket Boy has that broken elbow. I keep waiting for our foster tortoises to arrive, so they can eat the weeds, but I need to remember that a tortoise is not a goat.

Yesterday our neighbor to the rear of us was digging up his backyard using a backhoe (the babies found it fascinating of course) and he offered to pull up some of our dead trees. We have more dead trees in our yard than live ones -- there's something you probably wouldn't experience anywhere except the desert. I said sure, go ahead, so he managed to pull up two dead conifers (he just reached over the fence with the backhoe and grabbed them).

Some of our landlord's fruit trees died last summer too. We need to go through the little orchard and pull up the dead ones. We also managed to kill 2 or 3 rosebushes, so those need to come out. Our agreement with our landlord says that we will maintain the plantings, but since he won't fix the sprinkler system (or for that matter return any of our phone calls), we're not too concerned.

Sign at the Indian Wells Valley Water District office: Brown is Green. We're doing our part.

I saw quail in the arroyo almost every morning this week. No lizards yet. Spring is here.

Poppy Reserve

Spring is flying by and we feel like we aren't appreciating it. Spring is the beautiful season in the desert, spring is when you need to get out and look around. Spring is also, we have learned, the time when the winds blow something awful and if you do go out, you'll be blown to bits. But we're doing our best.

Another storm is blowing in on Easter Sunday -- and out here storms really do blow in -- they don't rain, they just blow. So we decided to make the most of today, even though the wind was already howling, and went to the Antelope Valley Poppy Reserve to see the hills and fields covered with California poppies.

The day got off to its usual inauspicious start. We left late (duh), around 10:15, and drove to Lancaster, getting off Highway 14 at Avenue I around 11:30. So then we had to think about lunch. Someday I am going to be the kind of mom who packs her family a delicious picnic lunch, not the kind of mom who drives around looking for a restaurant, but that is off in the distant future, around the time I also become the kind of mom who cleans her own house, makes salads out of heads of lettuce instead of expensive bagged lettuce, and gets her nails done instead of being a Bad Example by biting them.

We saw a Jack in the Box. No. We found a huge dreadful dying strip mall called the Lancaster Marketplace that had about 3 stores still open, including a Chinese buffet and a Mexican buffet, but Rocket Boy said No. We saw a McDonalds. No. We ended up at a restaurant called the Primo Cafe, sort of a cross between a Denny's -- and a Hookah Bar. I am still puzzled about this. Are hookah bars legal in California? How is that possible? What about the anti-smoking laws? The waitresses wore t-shirts that said on the front "Do you hookah?" and on the back "Come for the food... stay for the hookah." I did not smell tobacco, incense, or anything else that might have been from a hookah, so I'm still confused.

After a mediocre lunch accompanied by a lot of bad behavior from those in the party under 3 years of age, we drove another 15 miles to the Poppy Reserve. As we approached it, we started to see individual poppies, then patches of orange, then larger patches, and then off in the distance, hills covered with orange. And then, as we came around a corner, fields just drenched in poppies. People were pulling over, getting out of their cars, and plunging into the poppy fields. I kept thinking about the Wizard of Oz.

We didn't stop but drove on to the actual state park, where we paid $8 for the use of the parking lot (but that was OK with me, because the California State Parks need all the money they can get). The temperature was pleasant (maybe 65 degrees?) but the wind was blowing mightily, so we packed the babies into their BOB stroller and fastened down the weather shield. They like the weather shield -- it seems to make their stroller into a little tent, or cave, and protects them very well from either rain or wind.

Then we pushed the stroller up and down some of the many trails in the park until the wind became too much for Rocket Boy and me (we didn't have weather shields).

We drove back to Highway 14 a different way, on back country roads, which involved passing numerous other poppy fields. In one gorgeous field, a young Asian woman in a filmy white dress was dancing and posing, while 5 or 6 Asian men photographed her.

In the actual reserve there were the usual rules and warnings: stay on the trail, don't pick the poppies, watch out for the Mojave Green Rattlesnake which is an important part of the ecosystem but will kill you. It was amusing to drive past these non-reserve poppy fields and see people sitting in them eating picnics.

Maybe next year we will skip the Primo Cafe, skip the state park, and just drive to a random field, sit down in the middle of it, and eat a delicious picnic that I stayed up all night preparing. We'll throw crumbs to the rattlesnakes.

It could happen.

End of March reading update

So it's April 1st and I haven't played a trick on anyone or told a joke all day. The babies are a little young for jokes, I guess. We laugh a lot all day long, but just at life in general -- pictures of bees in books, or Whiskers sunning herself on a window ledge, or the joyful experience of climbing in and out of cribs.

Speaking of bees, "bee" seems to be their word for any sort of insect now. We're starting to have cockroaches again -- not the horrible infestation we had last year -- we hope -- but the occasional visitor. Today the babies found one in the family room and pointed it out to me: "Bee! Bee!" So I dealt with it in our usual manner, scooping it up with the broom and dustpan and then throwing it outside (you don't want them inside in the garbage -- even dead ones attract friends and relations). However, we have doves nesting right outside the front door and we don't like to disturb them, so I threw it in the backyard instead, and the babies saw where I threw it. A moment later here's Baby A back in the kitchen saying "Bee!" and guess what, he's got the cockroach in his hand, squished. "Oh, thank you," I said, getting the broom and dustpan again and throwing the now-dead cockroach in the backyard again. "OK, come on in now, it's time for lunch!"

So, how did my reading go in March? Not well, not well. I read only six books and that was a struggle. Here is the list:

21. Good Omens by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman. Some of the people I did NaNoWriMo with last November were very into scifi/fantasy and these were two authors they recommended, so I read the book they wrote together. It was enjoyable, but long. I'm just not a scifi/fantasy person and that's all there is to it.
22. Winter Child by Margaret Maron. A mystery, my basic filler book.
23. The Well of Lost Plots by Jasper Fforde. This series (Thursday Next) is getting worse book by book. I'm going to read one more to see if it gets any better. (Oh who am I kidding, I'm sure I'll read the whole series, complaining all the way.)
24. Hard Row by Margaret Maron. Another mystery.
25. Simplicity Parenting by Kim John Payne and Lisa M. Ross. This used up a lot of my time as I plodded through it, but I thought it was worthwhile. A parenting book based on Waldorf principles. Don't let your kids drown in toys, keep them away from TV until they're 7, set up schedules, observe rituals, don't involve them in your adult troubles -- stuff like that.
26. The Cleaner by Brett Battles. Mr. Battles is a former Ridgecrestian who spoke to the Ridge Writers group last month, so I had to read one of his books. It was a thriller, and though it was reasonably well written, the main character seemed completely unbelievable, so the book didn't work for me. I'm not going to look for the other books in the series. However, Mr. Battles has a new book coming out that is partly set in Ridgecrest -- that one I'm going to look for.

Just out of curiosity, I looked at the list of books I read in 1981, the only year in my life I managed to read 100 books, to see how many mysteries there were. It's a little hard to count because some of the titles don't mean anything to me anymore, but my best guess is 21. That means I read 79 non-mysteries in one year. Also, 5 of the mysteries were by Dashiell Hammett! That's practically like reading Shakespeare! I was an undergraduate at the time, so the books on the list include class readings: Morphology of the Folktale by V. Propp, The Prince by Machiavelli, and -- get this -- the Aeneid, by Virgil (obviously not in the original Latin). I read the Aeneid???? And, not for school, I read Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte for the first time.

Of course, I didn't have two-year-old twins then.