The kids and me. Me and the kids.

In brief, we have had a rough summer with Z. I think a lot of it is just being 9 (or so I'm hearing from other parents of 9 year old girls), but a lot of it has been the disruption of our schedule.

One of the ongoing issues I'd love to see a change in is that she's so goldurn negative all the time. Like, if we had a wonderful day, when I asked her to tell about it, she'd pick out the one lousy thing that happened. Last week while we were on our Santa Rosa trip, she wanted to go ice skating. There wasn't a lot of time, not everyone with us could enjoy it, we didn't have the right clothing, and it cost extra money (whereas we had hand stamps to return to the children's museum). She threw kind of a tantrum about it, and when I reminded her of all the fun things we'd done, she countered each with why they had been horrible. "We had fun at the Jelly Belly factory..." "Where I had to MARCH for HOURS until my LEGS FELL OFF." I think what's hardest about it for me is that I'm a positive, optimistic, glass-half-full, silver lining kind of person so I don't understand her at all. We're so unalike.

Now I should mention that not every day is just rotten awful pulling-teeth. Yesterday kind of was. Today was mostly good. Sometimes she's really sweet to her brother. Sometimes she's downright mean. Other times, she wants to be sweet, but she's overbearing and invades his space.

One thing that I wanted to immortalize here (lol, like my blog is immortal) is a funny quirk about her -- she is FOREVER in my way. I don't get mad or impatient about it, because I realize it's just not something she realizes, but the child will ask me for water while standing in front of the water tap. She will tell me how desperately she needs to get in the house to pee while standing between me and the locked door. She stands in the path of doors she wants to open. It's almost funny! Her brother has taken to sprinting away lately, and he's not so fast that I can't catch him, but you know what makes it harder? When a bigger kid is running right in front of me. In fact at the Jelly Belly factory, he ran off and I started running, too. She got in front of me and instead of blocking him or grabbing his arm, she tackled him like a football player. I mean, I shouldn't find it amusing (because it makes him cry), but she so WANTS to be helpful and she's just the opposite so much of the time. It's weird and endearing and funny and exasperating.

As for the boy, he is two, and he gets his kicks from pinching his sister, making messes, hooting into his empty milk glass to amplify the noise, and pushing our chairs away from the dining table. But he is still the sweetest kid I think I've ever interacted with. He kisses, hugs, pats, cuddles, and tells me he loves me. He falls asleep with his legs slung over me. He gives his sister suggestions for things that will "make you feel better" when she's upset. And he knows the rules and tells them to us when he fears we're in violation. He likes toot and poop and pee jokes. He sticks his butt towards his sister and says "I tooted on you."

He just loves animals (and books and shows about animals) and asks interesting, thoughtful questions about them all the time. Where do monkeys live? What do their tails do? What eats monkeys? Can they run away up a tree? Do monkeys have fur? And can they live in the desert?

As for the developmental stuff, we have good news on two fronts! First, it's been over a week since he nursed. I started realizing a lot of his continued asking for it was just boob-access-related. I mean, I tend to be... casually attired around the house. So he'd call for me in the morning, I'd be wearing a robe, and there they were! So I started putting on clothes first thing, and he sort of forgot. At first, we went almost a week with no nursing, then on Sunday morning he asked really insistently and I let him. Then in the week (and two days) since, he hasn't asked but about twice, and both times I've gently said no and he's let it go. So I think we're at the end of that phase. I might have been sad at a different stage, but it really felt like it was time.

Also, if he's going to go to 4-day-a-week pre-school this coming school year (which I think he's ready for), he has to be potty trained. I didn't want to force it, but I also did think he was ready. I bought him a potty watch (it's shaped like a toilet, dude!) and we started trying in earnest last week. He is VERY good about going when the watch alarm goes off, and pretty good about knowing when he does and doesn't need to go. He is not yet any good about just telling me he needs to go, and he still prefers to poop whilst crouching somewhere semi-hidden (preferably with his abdomen over a chair or other firm surface). We have done a few outings in underpants, and it's gone well. Today I took him to a movie, so I put him in a Pull-up, but I gave him the opportunity to use the restroom and he did, twice (and stayed dry otherwise). He still sits like a girl, and I'm not sure how to rectify that, but I also don't super-care. And since he is basically always carrying a toy in each first, I have kind of a hard time getting him to aim. But what the hell. It's a process.

Me! I'm in the title! I'm actually going to write about myself! Yeah, so... You know I like to write (er, obviously). Poetry is really my preferred genre, and for a long time I was having these pangs, like "I should go back to school and get my doctorate" or "I should enter a chapbook contest and see if I can get published." But everything was really just about getting some work done as a poet, and so I came up with a project. Years ago, while looking through some pictures with my grandma, I saw a picture of a little house with the words "Fortune's Cafe" on it. She said it was her childhood home, so obviously I had to ask about the sign. After her father had built (and lived in, with my great-grandma) a dugout home, they bought this structure to use as a house. Something about the name just evoked a lot of ideas for me. I asked her about her childhood, and once I mentioned The Grapes of Wrath. She told me she'd never read it, but from what she had heard, it sounded a lot like their life. I had wanted to write about it in prose, but never got more than about a page done before I hated it and myself. So I started writing about it in poetry, and I liked it. I wrote more. And then I lost momentum and didn't write for a while, but then I met with my writing group, who encouraged me to get moving again.

I've been writing a lot -- I have about 23 pages -- and doing some sort of background research into the Dust Bowl, passenger train routes in the 1920s, Chico and Bidwell Park, Depression Glass... And I've just been looking at a lot of pictures and maps and things. I discovered that there are two pictures of the Fortune's Cafe house, one with a flat roof and one with a gabled roof, and I liked the idea of my great-grandpa putting a new roof on the place, but the irony that you wouldn't really have to worry about rain leaking in for years to come. I found a charming picture of my great-grandma in about 1927 with a very fashionable bobbed haircut.

I hope I can get it written, edited, and in some sort of final shape. I'd like to give it to my grandma. I don't know how she'll like it -- she's finicky and crabby and not known for reading poetry. Plus, I've had to make a LOT of stuff up. I mean, who could know what my Granny was thinking about when she hopped on a train to meet my great-grandfather two states away? But I hope she'll like it. And I've had some very flattering feedback from my writing group, so maybe it's something. I don't know. I'm enjoying the process of writing it.

Okay, I've got to head to bed. My best to you folks.

--CM

Santa Rosa trip

Have I told you how great my mom is? She's pretty great. She took Azadeh to Santa Rosa a while back to visit the Charles Schultz museum, and they spent just a couple hours at the Children's Museum on the next block, and it was super cool. 

So she has informally adopted a couple additional grandkids (their grandparents live far away, and Mom has a close friendship with their mom), and she wanted to take them down there. But she figured it might be good if we could sort of all go and tag team a bit. We needed it, too! We hadn't been there five minutes before Lochlan ran out of the motel naked and ran laps around the pool.

Anyway, on the way down we stopped at the Jelly Belly factory. No candy was being made because they shut down once a year to clean and inspect everything. But I actually went once before during the shutdown, and it's not that bad -- they still have a lot of machinery to see and videos to watch (and they were still sorting and bagging candy that was already made), and they've added some interactive features like games, Snapchat filters, and smell stations. 

Pretty much the only one of us who managed to look cute in a paper hat. 

I only took a picture of the Whiz-lifter because it sounded like something you'd find in an old man's medicine cabinet. 

Then we drove to Santa Rosa and checked into the Best Western. It was nice! We had adjoining rooms, and the gated pool was right outside our sliding glass door. 

To quote Steve Carell, "I love lamp!" (Seriously, though, you could plug your devices into it!). 

I'll mostly skip over the evening and morning, but it involved a LOT of running, yelling, turning on of staticky Mexican music, a restaurant with dark wood paneling and a lot of beer steins and pictures of children hunting, some puking, multiple doors through which toddlers could escape, someone very small who rolls and farts in his sleep so that I must play flatulence goalie so he doesn't fall off the bed (he did once anyway), and... very little downtime. Luckily, Boompah had sent a care package of airplane booze.

After breakfast, we went to the Children's Museum of Sonoma County. IT. WAS. AWESOME.

I mean... it was like if the Exploratorium was a bit more focused on smaller kids, only cost $12, and there was no line. I couldn't even begin to tell you how many things there were to explore, play with, climb on... and Lochlan and I didn't even see 50% of it, I'm sure.

Highlights were the train play area, the garden, the ornithopter, the "river" (and other water play), the dentist and doctor offices, the puppet theater, and -- though I only saw it from afar, the bubbles. I kept trying to get him to go in there, as there was a thing where you could pull a rope and pull a giant bubble wand UP AROUND YOU LIKE A BUBBLE ROOM. A bubble room, is what I'm saying, and he wanted to sit in a helicopter. Whatever.

Lochlan declared this pillowy area the eagle's nest. 

This was his favorite. He played on it for ages. The funniest part was when another little girl and he had an argument over whether they were really flying or just pretending (Lochlan took the "really flying" stance). At one point, she marched down the ramp, crouched down to look at the front wheel, then called him to come out. He marched down the ramp, crouched next to her, and she pointed. "Look, the wheel's stuck." "Oh," he said, "the wheel's stuck." 

At one point when I tried to get him to come out, he said, "I can't; I'm flying right now." 

I probably should not have let him take this puppet out of the puppet theater, but he LOVED it. 

Az was doing her own thing the whole time, and we rarely crossed paths with her, so I only really got this crabby I-have-to-wait-in-line-for-the-bathroom picture. 

L declared this his "office." 

Anyway, we had a great time, and if that museum was closer we'd definitely visit more often.

Grover Hot Springs

I have mentioned that my favorite hot springs, Harbin in Lake County, burned down in the big fire almost two years ago.

People had mentioned going to Grover, and that it wasn't much more of a drive, so I looked it up and saw that it was located in a state park, and camping was available.

Since I'm trying to take the kids camping more than once a summer, I decided to try an overnight at Grover.

I threw our things together on Sunday morning and packed up the kids. Sweetie had an optometrist appointment and couldn't join us, but he's also not a hot springs type of guy.

We hit the road and stopped once near Apple Hill to get In N Out for lunch. While there, I remembered that I hadn't packed towels, and there's a Big Lots right across the street, so I stopped and grabbed us towels as well.

Almost immediately after that, you enter national forest area, and with the exception of a couple very small towns (a sign on one store read "Now entering Kyburz. Now leaving Kyburz.") and a few ranger or fire stations, it was all mountain. In fact, I thought there might be a rest area to stop and go pee, and instead we had to pull off onto a side road so Z could use our travel potty.  Good thing I had it set up! I held up one of our new towels as a privacy screen.

It's hard to overstate how pretty the drive was. I mean, if you like meadows, interesting geologic formations, little crashing streams, waterfalls, and snow-capped mountains. I don't know why, but I also get a real kick out of the retro national forest signs.

We got to the campground at about 1:05, and we checked in. Unfortunately, Z saw a sign (I swear I have seen them at EVERY campground we've ever been to, but she swears up and down that she always reads the notices and has never seen it before) that said to be aware of the plague, which you can catch from infected flea bites, handing dead rodents, and cats coughing on you. At least two of those seemed pretty unlikely, and I figured we'd throw on some DEET spray and be good to go. She did not feel that way. In fact, she went into freakout mode for about 90 minutes, while I set up camp. Even Lochlan was telling her, "It's okay, Az. We're going to be fine. Calm down."

Finally I drove back to the visitor's center (we would have walked, but it was hot and it was kind of a big campground with a lot of hills) and asked, in front of her, how common it was for people to get the bubonic plague at this campground. The ranger looked so taken aback, and assured us (her) over and over that they had to post the sign, but she hadn't even heard of it happening, that I think Az did feel somewhat reassured. Plus, we got popsicles. Incidentally, the center was not nearly as well-equipped as most we've visited. It had a few shirts, hats, compasses, maps, books, and walking sticks, but it was about the size of a large bathroom, and really didn't have anything educational. However, it DID have about 100 Folkman hand puppets, which Lochlan was obsessed with, and the experiencing of trying on several was probably the best part of the trip for him (it was certainly the only thing he told his dad about at length).

We overheard while there that the line for the hot springs was 30 deep. I had read that they only let a certain number of people in at once, and I prepared the kids for the eventuality that we might not even do the hot springs. We went back to camp and tried to take a nap, but it was way too hot. (Loch had fallen asleep briefly in the car, but Az, worrying for some reason that he was dead, poked him.)

We got up and tried to walk down to see the creek, but again, it was hilly and hot, and I was getting a case of chub rub (what.), and Lochlan kept running off and climbing up piles of rocks. When I'd call him to come back to me, he'd laugh maniacally and keep running. Finally I strapped him into the stroller and pushed him right uphill back to camp. "Why are you panting, Mom?" Az asked. "Because  everything's uphill, I'm out of shape, and it's hot as balls!" "Um, what is that?" "I shouldn't have said that. Sorry. I'm cranky."

By then, it was later in the afternoon than when we'd first heard how long the wait was, so we drove up to the pool area just to get an idea where it was and see if it was still crowded. It was a mile from our site, but it didn't look like there was a line, so we went back to camp again, put on our suits, grabbed our towels, and headed for the pools.

While I got Lochlan out of the car, Az ran to the fence and peeked through. "What does it look like?" "The best pool in the world!" Turns out her standards are low, and she believes the best pool in the world is our local public pool.

I actually like the place and we had a good time. There are two pools -- a cold one, and a warm one (102 - 104 degrees). The cold one is, yeah, basically like a neighborhood pool. The warm one is like a nice soaking tub with hot springs-fed mineral water, and it had a bench around most of the perimeter. It was 2.5 to 3 feet deep, so most people were just sitting on the bench with their feet on the bottom. Other people had their kids there, too, so it was pretty family friendly.

The nicest thing about it was definitely the view. It was in the middle of a valley with a gorgeous meadow.

The worst thing about it was that it wasn't Harbin. Which I know is not fair, but Harbin was an experience, a community -- you could sit in a hammock under a grape vine and go watch a movie later, eat in the restaurant, schedule a massage, or walk through the garden. Grover hot springs was two pools, a fence around, and a parking lot. So it was nice, and we had a good time, but I don't see myself driving two and a half hours for it again.

About 5:15, we left and went back to camp. I got out the spaghetti, sauce, a pot, salt, tongs, some fuel, and... where's the stove? I checked in the kitchen stuff. I checked in the car. I double checked both places. It dawned on me that I hadn't brought the stove. Fuck.

We got back in the car, drove 4 miles to Markleeville, and found the General Store (after passing by three closed restaurants). There was one restaurant open, according to the clerk at the store. I came back to the car. I said, "Okay, we can do one of three things. We can buy lunchables or frozen burritos here and nuke them in the store. We can buy firewood and I can still make dinner, but it'll take longer. Or we can try the restaurant." You can guess which Z picked.

This place was in the middle of Bumfuck nowhere, and there were several empty tables. The waitstaff were dressed fairly casually, and I thought it would be perfect. After about four people passed us, someone finally asked if we'd been helped. I said we'd like a table for three. She asked if we had a reservation. Really? Uh... no. It turned out, this place was sought-after fine dining, and the prices reflected it. Azadeh had a $24 salad, and no, I am not kidding. They gave us a table that had a reservation at 7 (it was quarter to six then), and kind of indicated very politely that they hoped we weren't planning on a very prolonged meal. As it happened, it was a terrific dinner! I had a pizza with feta and cherry tomatoes, and Azadeh had a flank steak salad. She ate all of the considerable portion of meat, and then gave the greens and veggies to Lochlan, who polished them off. I had intended that he'd share the pizza, but he really only wanted some tomatoes and feta. But he ate the greens like a champ. "What is this?" "Arugula." "What is this?" "A brussels sprout." "What is this?" "Cilantro." "I don't like it." "Okay, you don't have to eat it."

We went back to the campsite, started a Duraflame log (don't judge me), and did some S'mores. As usual, everyone really only wanted about one S'more, and then we were done. Azadeh insisted -- for reasons that are still unclear -- that we go to bed IMMEDIATELY.

It was almost 8:30, which is their bedtime, but it was light out and no one was acting tired. Still, we settled in and tried to get Lochlan to go to sleep while A and I read a little. This did not work. There was a lot of silliness with flashlights on both their parts, and it was still pretty hot, but now Az was insisting that I must close the door and window (I had the screens closed, but not the opaque panel). I decided to go outside for a while and try to read out there while the kids drifted off, but there was more flashlight silliness, so finally I confiscated all sources of light and we lay there until they went to sleep. It was probably around ten. I waited a few more minutes, thinking that I might sit up and read some, but I was worried that the light would wake them again, so I just went to sleep, too.

And then I heard the bear. It was far away at that point, banging on the food lockers elsewhere on the campground. I've heard this many times before at Yosemite. I wasn't really worried, but it does sort of put me on high alert, and I was listening for the clanging, trying to determine where the bear was. I had locked everything that smelled in the bear locker -- chapstick, gum, toothpaste, lotion, sunscreen --and felt sure that even if he came and banged, he'd move on quickly. And then I remembered: I had left my potty-training bribe, M&M's, in the center console of my car. The banging had gotten closer. He was probably on our loop. Could I get out, open the car, grab the M&Ms, and get them to our locker? I also had to pee -- could I get them to the trash near the restrooms? They had a carabiner locking the dumpster that would take me a minute to undo. The banging sounded farther. I reached for my car keys and waited for the next bang to see where he was. The next one was closer again. I waited in the dark, keys in hand, for who knows how long, deciding to go, then deciding to stay. Finally, I figured that if he banged on my car, the alarm would go off and scare him away, probably. I peed in the travel potty and stayed, like a chicken, in the tent.

At one point I did hear some shuffling fairly close by, but no banging, and it may have been people walking to the bathroom. Who knows.

I fell asleep again eventually, and woke before 6 as it got light.

There was NO GODDAMN WAY I was going without coffee, and I tried to stoke a fire with some pine needles and a mostly-burnt chunk of wood someone had left behind. I'll be honest: it never became a beautiful fire, but it was hot enough to heat some water for coffee.

I broke camp, had the kids look for litter, and we headed home.

Afterword:
I put L down for a nap, and finding myself expectedly exhausted, I lay down, too. When I woke up, I felt suddenly AWFUL. Stuffy nose, mild headache, a little nauseated, a little dizzy. And lethargic and weak. I went to Sweetie's office to tell him, and Az overheard me. So then I had to look up symptoms of the Bubonic plague to assuage her fears once again. Good news, folks: no buboes.

Selfie attack. 

Lochie liked this rock. 

We found toys and treasures all over the campground.