The Kiddie Cocktail

Scenes from out west

So, now that we are on the school calendar for the forseeable forever, we planned a trip out west for Spring Break. My mom was long overdue for a visit in Idaho, and we managed to roll in a road trip to Bend, OR to meet up with Seth's aunt, uncle, and cousin. I grew up out west, in New Mexico. But I have been in an urban area of some sort for a pretty long time now, and I totally have developed a city dweller's mistrust of vast, remote, open spaces with no cell service. WE COULD DIE OUT HERE AND THE COYOTES WOULDN'T EVEN FIND OUR BODIES. But isn't it gorgeous?

Toto, I don't think we're in Washington anymore.

*Edited to add what was my very favorite sign of the entire trip, sighted on the side of Rt. 20 about 30 miles outside of Bend: "BEETLE CLEANED SKULLS - TAXIDERMY."  Now, THAT is not something you see every day.

Route 20, the Central Oregon Highway. First we saw lots of cattle and horses, then we didn't even see those, so much. There are ah, not many places to stop along here, so plan your gas & bathroom stops wisely, and bring snacks.

 

 

 

Remote, y'all. But look at that sky, and those hills.

Our awesome road-tripper. Snoozing, feet up, still holding the iPad.

The road to Mt. Bachelor. This isn't even a particularly good snow year. Ridiculous.

Seth, outfitted to ski. Both of us ski, but this is the first time we'd ever skied together.

Me, looking a little squinty in the blowing snow. Despite that, there was plenty of fluff over good hardpack. I wish I could have skied longer that day, but I am old and don't ski at all as much as I used to, so my legs were BURNT after a half-day. Still, skiing made me want to move out west again, to big mountains.

Rock climbing at the High Desert Museum in Bend.

Collared lizard at the High Desert museum.

It's good to be three. You can fly in your PJs and no one bats an eye.

Some days it is like this

Some days, it is like this. I step outside, and the breeze flows over me like water. I inhale, drinking, the air, and it quenches a thirst in me as deep as that for water, and my feet begin to irresistibly step, step, step. I feel twitchy with energy, with the need to be out here, with the need to stretch my legs, to run. The sun dazzles my eyes, and I step, step, step, and turn my iPod up louder. "Success is my only motherfucking option, failure's not." My feet pound through the pavement, feeling loud and heavy and strong as bombs, as I plant them down in time to Eminem. Lose yourself.

Some days, it is like this. My feet turn over almost of their own accord, carrying me up and over the 11th Street bridge, rhythm never slacking. The breeze picks up as I crest the bridge over the Anacostia, and I drink it in. Today, I am strong. Today, I am fast. I am at the top, and flying down the other side, light on my feet, agile as I navigate the sharp turn in the path at the bottom of the bridge, my feet tapping the pavement.

My iPod conspires with music that makes running feel like dancing, my legs springy, as I step, step, step, dance, step. I shake off a muscle beginning to knot in my shoulder, I ignore my hard breathing, drown it in the music and the strength in my steps.

Even at the end, slick with sweat, breathing hard, my legs feel they could just keep going, the sun dazzling my eyes, swallowing the wind like water. Some days it is like this.

Lessons learned

This is what I learned this weekend:

1) Do not, under any circumstances, give a small child a rather large cup of fantastic, intensely flavored, delicious, double dark chocolate gelato in the time between dinner and bedtime. You will regret it and want to call in an exorcist. Because what you might have forgotten about chocolate is that it has caffeine in it. I am sure that the lovely, intense dark chocolate gelato had, ah, more than the usual amount of caffeine than regular old chocolate ice cream. Your child weighs 27 pounds soaking wet. There could be some math involved here with grams of caffeine per pound of body weight, but it is not necessary, because res ipsa loquitor: the thing speaks for itself. Specifically, the thing ran almost all of the half mile home from the gelato shop. Then, when the thing was put to bed, it yelled, wailed, howled, begged, screeched, pleaded, thrashed, and kicked to be let out of bed. For an hour and a half. And then the thing also woke up at 1:00. 4:00 and 5:30 am, until the thing was hauled into Mama and Papa's bed in the faint hope of everyone getting more sleep.

The answer to this is obviously to administer the chocolate gelato at breakfast, when there is ample time for its effects to wear off before bed.

2) When hiding child bribery/Halloween candy, put it in a safe hiding place, where your children and husband will not find it. However, do not put it in so safe a place so that you completely out-think your own dumb-ass self, and then you cannot find the candy when it is desperately needed for life-saving bribery purposes. The same thing goes for hiding precious jewelry when going out of town. Popular places to hide such jewelry from the odd house thief are in a shoe box, or the toe of a winter boot.

The candy finally turned up stashed inside the corner cabinet tucked inside the salad spinner. The pearl necklace has not made a reappearance. I'm wondering if there are things like truffle pigs that could sniff out pearls?

3) Apples in your house are approximately 837 times larger and more numerous than they appear on the farm. Pick-your-own fruit places are fun weekend family outings. You get to be outdoors, where city children can run around a farm, pick apples, and see that they really do grow on trees and Mama was not making that crazy shit up. You're issued a basket, and you can take a wheelbarrow if you like, which is handy for hauling apple baskets, small children, etc. up and down the rows of apple trees. The sky is blue, the sun is shining, you're with good friends, the children have got the hang of this apple picking thing and are happily putting apples into baskets, and eating one here and there. You go up and down the rows, just getting a few of each kind that you want to try: Fuji, Honeycrisp, Jonagold. Your bucket doesn't look that full. You pet the farm animals, have a picnic, bag up your apples, and pay $12 for the privilege of hauling them home. You plan to make an apple pie for tonight, and imagine that will take care of a good number of the apples. When you carry the bag of apples inside, it seems much larger than it did on the farm or in the trunk of the car. The apples seem to have multiplied. Exponentially. You pick out six good looking pie candidates, and make your pie. The pie crust barely fits over the pile of apple slices in the pie pan. You wrestle the top crust into place, put it in the oven, and go back to inspect the sack of apples. It does not appear smaller since you removed six for the pie. You suspect it is actually larger. You realize that you also already had apples in the fridge, from the farmer's market, and that you are supposed to get more apples on Tuesday from your CSA.

You slice up an apple to accompany dinner. The small child refuses both the apple and the apple pie. You sigh, look up recipes for applesauce, store the apples in a cool, dark corner of the basement, and wonder if apples would go as fast as doughnuts if you put them in the kitchen at your office.

Monday random

When all the world is a hopeless jumble, and the raindrops tumble all around, it's time do do a random blog...*

Last week, all I planned to do was wallow in post-vacation depression, procrastinate a lot, and work my way slowly up to full-blown panic at the fact that my tiny little baby is going to preschool soon (PRESCHOOL!), but, well, other things intervened.

1. The Earthquake. Holy crap, we had one! I was in my office (probably procrastinating), when there was some shaking, some rumbling. The hell? I thought. The first thing that I concluded was that there had been an explosion at a nearby construction site. We are in a "redeveloping" neighborhood, and are utterly surrounded by huge construction sites. More shaking, more rumbling, the floor actually rolling, light fixtures waving away on the ceiling like perverse flowers in a breeze. Then, the second thing I thought was BOMB. We live in DC. I work on security issues. I am an obnoxious building emergency warden. This is how I think. BOMB. And then the rumbling and shaking kept going, got stronger. I almost laughed, realizing, oh, I GET IT, it's an earthquake! An earth ride, as one of my friends from San Francisco used to call them. I was honestly relieved that it wasn't a bomb, because again, this is DC, this is how we think. Of course, I shot off a Tweet, because I am a social media whore:

@DCZia Roberta

HOLY FUCKING EARTHQUAKE IN DC. Or something. For serious.

23 Aug via web

I ditched my heels for flip flops, and grabbed my handbag, making sure I had phones, wallet & keys. I donned my orange emergency warden vest (which is in serious need of some Bedazzling) and shooed my fellow employees out the stairwell and to our evacuation rally point. Once out there, of course I turned to Twitter, which had all the best info AND kept working fine, thanks for nothing AT&T. I also realized that I had a bottle of champagne in my bag, because I'd done some errands over lunch, including a wine store stop. That's right, if you evacuate with me during a natural disaster, I bring teh interwebs AND the booze.

All kidding aside, everything was fine. I left work when The Powers That Be excused us, and scooted home. I live a mile and a half from my office, so no traffic snarls for me. The worst casualties were a very tired child (earthquake disturbed her nap) who was falling asleep in her tacos at dinner, and some crooked pictures around the house. Nothing even fell off of a shelf in our 115 year old house. Unreal.

2. The Hurricane. Like the rest of the more northerly East Coast, we were in the path of Hurricane Irene. Here is what we did to prep: (a) bought propane; (b) and beer; (c) starting drinking shortly after lunch; (d) charged up all the iDevices; (e) drank too much wine, went to bed early and slept mostly soundly, waking up a few times to marvel at the howling wind and pounding rain. That about covers it. Woke up Sunday morning to gawk at all the downed trees, and felt grateful, since it's exactly six years since Hurricane Katrina. It could have been a lot different.

3. Regularly Scheduled Panic. My wee tiny baby is somehow almost three years old and starts preschool on Thursday. PRESCHOOL. I coped by applying name labels to everything in sight, getting hysterically indecisive about which after-school activities we should register for, and drinking before 5:00 pm.

4. Death, Shock, Grieving. I found out this morning that a colleague passed away on Friday night. He had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, his health was not all that great, but it seemed he would stubbornly carry on for a long time to come. He succumbed to pneumonia. I am in shock. This man was like a foster dad to me at work; I'm around the age of his daughters. He was stubborn, and smart, and moody, and prickly, and generous and witty and knowledgeable all at once, and I got along with him well. I learned so much from him. We talked about everything from Jeeps to horses to guns to railroading to natural childbirth (you can't say that about every colleague). It is still that time where it seems impossible for this person to be gone, for the world to never hear his deep belly laugh again, for his office to be still and quiet and empty. My heart hurts for his family, who has lost a father, a grandfather, a husband.   

And so I start this Monday, in a random jumble, trying to just be grateful for what I have, here.

*With deep apologies to "Over the Rainbow" - the little known intro verses.

2.5 - postscript

After all that enraptured mother-child stuff yesterday, I thought I'd better round out the picture some more.

1. I woke up this morning with a wad of pink Mardi Gras beads digging into my back. I have no idea how they got in my bed.

2. When I tell the Olive things like "it's bathtime!" or "it's time to get into bed," she just says "no, it's not." Somehow, I find myself going back and forth with her several times -  "yes, it is," "no, it's not" - before I come to my senses, recall that I'M THE ADULT HERE AND BIGGER THAN YOU, and simply pick all 27 pounds of her up and put her where she is supposed to go. I don't even know where she learned this "no, it's not" business. I blame the other children. All of them.

3. I was awakened at 2 am last night and summoned to The Child's bedroom so that she could tell me she did not, under any circumstances, want the foam basketball in her bed. This is the same foam basketball that she has insisted on having in her bed for the previous week. I removed the offending foam basketball from the bed, because apparently, THIS HAD TO BE RESOLVED AT 2AM OR ELSE. I was then informed she needed her tennis ball instead. Fortunately, the tennis ball was already in the bed (because, OMFG, if it hadn't been....I shudder), lying by her pillow, and was easily located and tucked into the crook of the Olive's arm, where she hugged it and squeezed it and called it Wilson, and went happily back to sleep. On the other hand, I laid awake for god knows how long, and then had weird dreams about hunting Nerf balls like Easter eggs.

4. I tried to find lip gloss in my purse this morning but came up with only half of a crayon. It didn't even have the courtesy to be red.

And this is what we do.

Weathered

I am obsessed with the weather. My iPhone has only enabled it. I seriously check the weather a dozen times a day. Or more. This has to do with another obsessive need, my need to be prepared, to plan. I want to be better than a Boy Scout. I hate, hate, hate being caught wearing the wrong thing, whether I am too hot or too cold or my shoe is giving me a blister, or I am wearing a cardigan when everyone else has on a suit jacket. I revel smugly in being perfectly dressed, perfectly prepared and perfectly comfortable for the weather. Or anything else that comes along.

The temperature of the house also has to be juuuust porridge-right. During the maddening spring time, I dash about the house opening and shutting windows, turning fans on and off, turning the A/C and the heat on and off, the thermostat up and down, as the temperature insists on being so fickle, vacillating from 45 to 82 and back. I hate being hot inside the house, HATE, especially at night, when I firmly believe the only way for civilized people to sleep is in a cold room under a fluffy down comforter.

And now, of course, there is The Girl. The Olive. The amount of time that I spend worrying about whether she is too hot or too cold is absurd. I strive to also dress her perfectly for the weather each day. She has lately been thwarting me in this effort, as I put a zippered sweatshirt on her to ward off the chill in the cool hours of the morning only to have her refuse to take it off for the rest of the day, even when it gets to 75 in the sun. I fruitlessly try to convince her that she is hot, that it is time to take off the sweatshirt, which is met with flailing and an eardrum-piercing shriek.

I also have to Plan, with a capital P. Can I run outside today? Will it be better in the morning or at lunchtime? If it's a non-running day, would it be better to go for a walk at lunch or run some errands in the car? Will it be nice enough to go outside with the Olive after I get home? Warm enough for the water table? Worth filling up the wading pool? Or will we have to amuse ourselves with streaming Netflix as the rain streams down our windowpanes? What will we do this weekend? Can we go outside, to a garden or park. or will it be a museum day?

Weather.com does not help. They have hour by hour, day by day, month by month weather! For anywhere! If I check in an hour, it might be different! Maybe it won't rain on Saturday, if I just look again.... And I can look at the July averages for West Tisbury, MA to plan for a bucolic week on the Vineyard, away from the stifling swamp of DC.

Oh Information Age, oh Internet, you are enabling, and I love you so for it. Now, it's going to be approximately 64 and sunny when I get home, so yoga pants and a long-sleeved t-shirt and a fleece vest should be perfect for playing in the backyard, and we should be able to have the windows open a little tonight, it should be nice and cool......