Sunday, September 26, 2010

over the river and through the woods

to grandmother's house we go...

This time, we flew.  And because I'm too cheap to pay $25 for a checked bag, I lugged a 22 pound kid, a suitcase, a diaper bag and a backpack all over the Denver airport during a 4 hour layover.  (The stroller and carseat they let me check for free.)  So, no, I was not the pretty picture of the slim, A-line dress-wearing stick figure with the one rolling suitcase they have pictured on the "experienced travler" poster at the United Airlines counter.  But it worked.  I've always had a knack for packing a lot of shit into a small space and wielding it all around like it was made of air.  Really, it all felt effortless despite the sheen on my upper lip.

When we arrived in Oregon and strolled into the small airport lobby, my mom was the one jumping up and down, throwing her arms around and kicking one leg into the air, she was that excited.  They're here!!  Yee-ha!  

It's kind of a long story, but the first thing we did at the airport was lock the keys in the car, along with Juniper.  And that is how we started the visit: dancing around the car window singing every nursery rhyme we could think of until AAA arrived.  Juniper watched us from her carseat at first tired and pissed off, then thoroughly amused.  Fortunately, the rest of the trip was smooth as silk...

::  So.  To grandmother's house:

Mom's house was like the second-coming of summer: outdoor dining...

Oversized (and some mystery) garden squashes...

A love-at-first-bite relationship with grandma's sweet and abundant cherry tomatoes...

Meeting the new puppy and learning about small versus big dogs...

And totally loving on each other, especially with the mitigator gate...

And ooooh, grandma's flowers...

And crawling in her perfectly green, heavenly soft grass...

Shopping at the Saturday Market, drooling over vegetables... 

And buying J bug some token hippie clothes (note the pants)...

(And, yes, there is a good reason why western Oregon was the pot of gold at the end of the Oregon Trail...)

A day-trip to the coast...

Discovering how some things in life just slip through your fingers...

but also stick to your feet...


Then learning to climb stairs...

And, yo!  Crawling from one piece of furniture to the next for the sole purpose of pulling oneself up to standing...

Wishing for more time with Grandma...



Monday, September 20, 2010

a royal collection

As promised, a little bit of this and a little bit of that.

The tail end of August found us up north once again.  Another camping trip (Juniper's fifth time tent camping: hoo-yah!), this time up to Yellowstone Lake where the men folk volunteered on a gill-net boat to capture and remove (yes, kill) non-native, cutthroat-munching, lake trout.  


The sis-in-law (argh...I hate having to type out that whole "in-law" part; really, she's just sis) and I hung out in camp which, in Yellowstone, is tantamount to hanging in a mid-sized Wyoming town.  We walked Osa round the block a few times, watched Owen throw rocks in the firepit, regularly swiped pebbles out of Juniper's mouth and kept an eye out for the neighboring camper who was parked at his picnic table with satellite dish and laptop and laughing his ass off.  And smoking.  In his underwear.  (And I thought New York City was an fun place to people watch.  Just goes to show that it's easy to overlook your own back yard.)

But mostly, we just hung.  June bugs nursed by the fire.

Nights were COLD and I forgot to bring a stocking cap (or, as my man would say, a toboggan) which is very unlike me.  I'm usually a nagging mule when it comes to toboggans.  Don't forget your toboggan.  Where's your toboggan?  You should have brought your toboggan.  That sort of thing.  But like the stereotypical mom, I took care of every other mammal but myself.  And so, I had to utilize my rudimentary turban-wrapping skills.  In this photo, Juniper could be wearing one of those "I'm With Stupid" shirts.    

After two nights of camping we quick jaunted up to cousin Owen's pad where the cousins are truly getting old enough to act like cousins: fighting over toys with an air of civility (verses the no holds barred wickedness of siblings).

Oh.  And the train.  Imagine: Pee-wee Herman's voice and, All aboard!  It's the alphabet train!  Over and over and over and over again.  We only have one battery-operated toy at our house right now--the sit and spin--which Juniper tolerates, but it's not a favorite or anything.  And for the most part, those are the types of toys we're *trying* to avoid.  But oh, that train.  She'd pull herself up to standing and push the little button that made a chug-a-chug-a-chug-a-chug-a sound and she'd squeal and laugh and bob up and down to the chug-a-chug-a beat like she was dancing.  I've never seen her so enthralled with a toy.

::  The tail-end of a huge rain storm put a bit of a damper on the music festival my sis had organized.  But alas, when there is good music and beer nothing else really matters.  And, you can't have this sky without the storm:  

:: On the way home, we lunch-stopped at Grant Village where my husband had once worked, a hundred years ago, when he first moved to Wyoming.  As an employee he never could afford the restaurant, but this time we ate in style.  And speaking of style, check out her hair.  (Yes, it was windy.  My own hair was probably too greasy to budge.)  

::  And, as though finding out the Easter Bunny comes twice a year, the best surprise was awaiting our discovery at home in our pathetic, chizzler-munched garden:
Holy potatoes!  Seriously.  We didn't think we'd have ONE.  We had a hard frost, which--for those of you who garden in extreme climates--had the interesting effect of completely biting the Viking Purples, but not even brushing the Yukon Golds.  But anyway, as my usual garden-obssessivness (re: garden journal) was left boxed and stored along with all my canning equipment this year, we thought we'd dig the potatoes just to try and see if we could tell which potatoes were which and which were more frost-tolerant.  I never hilled, never threw any dirt on them, nothin.  We weren't expecting anything edible, just a rotton, mushy seed pot at the base of the plants.  Well.  My, oh my.  Were we wrong.  Purple and gold, a royal collection.

And here's June bugs after sucking on potatoes and sporting her Jellystone bug bites:

:: Bath that night, J bug throwing a leg up trying to scale the tub.  She is becoming a mover and a shaker.

Next post, one more catch-up: over the river and through the woods and thirty-thousand feet in the air to grandmother's house we go....      
      

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

tea & wine

Oooooh-eeeee.  It's been a while.  We've had one trip after another, gulping the last of summer, then coming home to nights dipping to freezing and hillsides freckled with crimson and rose.

In the last four days I've heard this same mantra four different ways from four different people: enjoy her, it goes so fast.  The man at the airport, the woman in the grocery store, on Facebook, in a blog.  And to me, those words are a quiet affirmation of our decision to make do with less, so we can have more.  More smiling, more laughing, more cuddling, more reading, more wrestling, more discovering, more time....  More.

And in between the crazy, end-of-summer, going-everywhere insanity days, are the slow days.  The days at home where it seems we do little more than wrestle with that slippery fish, The Nap.  And now that I think about it, those are my favorite.  The busy days make me feel like a progressive, multi-tasking, 21st century mama, but the slow days are my tea and wine.  And that is a fact I am only now realizing as I write this.

I have loads of photos to go through, laundry piled on the couch, dishes piled by the sink, two suitcases spilling onto the living room floor...but there's cooked lake trout and a tortellini peach salad in the fridge, Juniper has a stack of clean diapers, Osa's wading pool is full of fresh water and I'm looking forward to tomorrow: a day of tea and wine and a little fish wrestling.


Next post: photos from the end-of-summer, promise.

Wednesday, September 1, 2010

backpacking with a baby

The day I first realized I was pregnant I did two things.  I called my midwife and I shopped for a backpack.  It (the backpack) had to be strong, sturdy, comfortable for me, comfortable for the baby, hold extra gear and fit my husband too.  I'd spent the last fifteen years hiking and backpacking and I wasn't about to stop.

My pack was quite manageable.  My man's, on the other hand, was a little ugly.  He basically carried everything except the baby and the diapers (cloth diapers all the way, baby!).  So, yes: my sleepingbag, his sleepingbag, my clothes, his clothes, all the food, dog food, stove, pot, water filter, tent....  Yeah.  He's tough.    

But contrary to what many folks may think, it wasn't the baby that complicated this trip: it was the dog.  We had to find a specific trail that she could handle: it had to follow a stream (so she could drink and lay down and cool her heart off), it had to be a mellow grade, and it had to be short--ideally under five miles.  (But we ended up going for six.)  

WELL.  Damned if that dog didn't turn into a little spring chicken when she hit the trail and realized WE were carrying her food.  She did awesome.  She's like the energizer bunny: she just keeps going and going and going....  For her, everyday holds the promise of another meal.  And she's not one to let heart failure get in the way of that.  



:: We scouted for mule deer and listened to elk warm up their bugle's in crisp morning mountain air.  

June bug splash, splash, splashed in blood-stopping cold alpine waters,

and watched her mama entice cutthroat out of the lake and onto a dinner plate.

In the tent, our little monkey would speed-crawl headlong into our legs and squeal and wrestle and crawl all over the tent floor.

On the ground, she slowed down to a porcupine speed to inspect the delicate intricacies of pinecones.  (And sticks.  And rocks.  And grass.  And wildflowers.  And pine needles.)

Eating was a messy affair that earned Juniper the nickname "B.B."  Bear Bait.

And this here photo reminds me of something...

...when Juniper was a mere 7 days old.
    
And oh my, August is all about squeezing and wringing and gulping every last drop of summer nectar.  There is more to post about the end of August, and look here, it's already September.  More from the road.  J bug and I are off tomorrow to visit my mom.  My man and Osa will hold down the fort.  (And, free from the night-time routine of dinner-potty-bath-potty-diaper-pj's-toothbrushing-nosesucking-bookreading...he might get a few things crossed off his to-do list.)  Hoo-yah!