Blizane's Wish

Little's dear friend Blizane had a very special wish for his birthday. He wanted to go camping with Little; an inspired choice. So we spent a few days camping with the Tahlbows on Whidbey Island. There is some mutual adoration:


For the most part we just let all the kids explore and play. Littler and her partner-in-crime Luke mostly wandered beyond view, doing who knows what. So there won't be a ton of pictures of them. But here's one of Luke, in a rare moment of non-absorption in something hilarious and destructive with Littler.


The kids discovered a small clearing in the forest which they did a bunch of weird stuff in. I'm not sure what's going on here, but Wilhelm is eating bark for some reason. There was lots of hilarity.


We also discovered them having an impromptu concert back there at one point:


We walked down to the coast and spent a good chunk of the day just kicking around there. The kids found a large deposit of pure clay which obviously held endless possibilities for fun.









Bud and his arch-admirer Banan spent most of the time with Littler and Luke way down the beach. We aren't really sure what went on down there.


There is a great symmetry between our family and the Tahlbows. Bud and Banan love each other and are close in age; Littler and Luke are also close in age and completely inseparable. Little and Blizane are the same age and love each other. But there's one more! Wilhelm is older than anybody else. But it's not a problem: there's room for that goofy, fun-loving kid:




We spent most of the next day at Fort Casey. It's a sprawling pre-WWI naval battery with absurd 10" guns and unlimited exploration opportunities. Again the kids just basically ran around and did what kids do.






See there's a picture of Banan there at the end? Apparently that's all we got...

What can we say? It was a great time with wonderful people. Moving away is going to be painful--thinking about it already is. Thanks Tahlbows for such a great trip!

Okanogan 2013

We're just a bunch of feral animals over here [Mommy excepted]. To decompress after a couple of extremely busy and stressful months we decided to uncage the beasts and go kick around the open country for a while. So we planned to take 5 nights open-endedly exploring around the Okanogan area of north-central Washington. We had to cut the trip two nights short due to rain, but we had an absolutely phenomenal time. It's hard to describe just how good this trip was for us.

The Okanogan area is a biological and geological crossroads with lots of varied habitat and open country. It also has extremely few people and an abundance of public land to throw tents down on for free. We visited for a few days in February but really wanted to come back with the early summer cohort of green and feathered things. Our plan: (1) see lots of birds, (2) be outside, (3) find wild and empty places to camp, (4) drive minimally and (5) rehabilitate, psychologically, from the grind. Here are a few pictures, mostly of the kids doing what they do.

The first night we camped in a meadow near a stream in the northern Methow valley.

We awoke to an impossible cacophony of birds and saw a few lifers right there around our tent site.

We went on a hike [and from here on out, a hike is defined as a very very slow meander with no particular destination in a beautiful place].


The girls just ran around and played with green stuff. There were dozens of stunning lazuli buntings, Bullock's orioles and western tanagers sporting late-spring vibrant plumage.


"Ornament Target Lewis" getting packed in by Little.


Bud is obsessed with birds. Everything is a "great great owl" or a snowy owl. [His other two obsessions: orcas and ninjas. Tonight he asked for Daddy to sing "[Little] and [Littler] and [Bud] and ninjas and orca song!"]


That night we stopped at a little lake in the Simlahekin valley, a steep crease west of the Okanogan valley. There were catbirds racketing right next to our tents. Little found some cattails and fell in love, using them first to create clouds of cotton, next as a great sand-writing tool with a built-in eraser and next as a torch. We saw a short-eared owl, the second that the wildlife area manager had seen in 15.5 years.








This is a castle for Blaine for his birthday.






In the morning we explored behind the lake for hours. The kids just did whatever--we have no idea.





They did their whatever for hours.

No explanation necessary:

We can't show the picture of Littler peeing but she does it exactly like this. Her jet is straighter, cleaner and more powerful than the two dudes above and reaches twice as far. Thought you should know.

We slept at the same place that night and in the morning drove to McLaughlin canyon to hike. Littler did what she has always done, which is to orient herself to the highest gradient and just walk straight up without a word. Eventually some drama unfolded involving some stuffed animals and a "cliff." Bud bravely saved the bear but the horse required some inspired ingenuity by Little [and a very long stick]. But that's only after her original plan, below, failed.


Bud throws stuff.






McLaughlin canyon was lovely, with a well-charred forest and a stunning pair of Lewis' woodpeckers.


On the drive out of the canyon we had 4 snakes on less than 1 mile of dirt road, of 4 different species. One dead, one dying, one playing dead and the other deadly.




We found a few older pictures on our card:












We saw 92 bird species in three days of birding a fairly small area, and had hour upon hour of low-stress outdoor fun. Can't wait to go back!

Survival sans Mommy

Mommy is gone for two weeks and it has been up to me to take over her role around here. I'm not supposed to complain about this because she has to do the Daddy thing all the time. So this isn't a complaint, just... a documentation. And she has the short lenses so it will mercifully contain way fewer pictures than usual.

I've learned that there are a few Mommy things that I'm pretty bad at [and, in some cases, an apocalyptic failure].

1. Hygiene. I'm basically a bust when it comes to kid hygiene, in particular Littler's hair. We have been in public in variously embarrassing states of unkemptness. Littler has had the same hair tie knotted at the end of her locks for, uh, longer than I care to admit. Days. The last time I remember putting something in her hair was last Monday.



2. Easter. Uggh. When Mommy's here I can just blow this off and nobody even notices. I have less than no enthusiasm for this type of thing. But this time I had to try, and the results were... abysmal. Out of 9 boiled eggs, this is what we got:


For a moment there I thought I was kind of clever for just throwing a few markers and pencils on the table. Have you ever tried to draw on an egg? With 5-year-old hands? Brilliant.

As for the egg hunt, apparently hiding an egg 5 feet up in a tree isn't fair play. The kids are still pissed.

3. Crafts. To be absolutely fair, Mommy doesn't really do crafts either. But after snapping this picture and leaving the room for a couple minutes...



...I returned to find the following things artfully painted: [1] the porch [2] the carpet [3] the kitchen table [4] the kitchen floor and [5] Bud's penis and anus [a performance art piece by Bud himself]. I think that constitutes a failure. If it doesn't, my apocalyptic meltdown upon discovering this scene [apparently I hadn't heard of washable paint] certainly was.

4. Dinner. This is the odd one since I'm like the king of creative cuisine normally. But these last 10 days I've been the freaking EMPEROR of cold cereal for dinner. And... I once took the family to Burger King just to avoid having to be in the kitchen. Yikes.

5. Cleaning house. I had this great, GREAT idea that I could save lots of total work by not cleaning constantly throughout the day. That way I could avoid cleaning the same thing twice; just once at the end of the day. But I had to work at night, so... um. It's not pretty.

6. Shopping. I totally kicked butt on our grocery shopping trip, but it turns out that toilet paper is not merely a luxury. I got some pretty rad horseradish mustard though. Here's hoping our last roll lasts until Manda gets home... we've always got wipes.

So, I cut my losses and finally relied on what I do best, which is... run away.



I couldn't handle my kids so I let the outdoors handle them. We went camping.



This is along the Skagit river. They just did whatever, for forever. You can always tell when Fellinators are having fun; there's water and mud involved.





In the middle of the night--all four of us in a small backpacking tent--I moved Bud off my face and he yelled, still asleep "You're messin' me up!!" That was super cute.

Little makes a pig/cow sculpture.


For three days we just hung out outside. We went on bike rides, slacklined, loafed, looked for salamanders, played hide-and-seek and three flies up, hiked, played in the mud, threw rocks into water, and searched for ruffed grouse. Ella and I found a grouse drumming site, which was super cool. I don't know what the other kids were doing or where they were, but apparently that was ok.



I'm less than proud of how I've survived--and yes, that's exactly what I'm doing. I'm just surviving, and so are the kids. No thriving going on here. At all. On the other hand, I got like a month's worth of work on my thesis done, so perhaps I can just consider this my kids' sacrifice for my education.

And last: the Mommy thing I'm the most inept at is keeping me company. Miss you Dest!