Road Trip Redux

I think I used the title Road Trip on a previous post... but I am too lazy to come up with another one. Too lazy, also, to write much about it other than to say that last weekend we went to Port Angeles, on the Olympic Peninsula, and attended a jazz festival for geezers (and if I am lucky enough to be anything like these people when I am their age, I will be oh so grateful- except for that one grumpy guy on the dance floor). We ate doughnuts, played at a fantastic playground, enjoyed some room service, saw a beautiful lake and the top of some beautiful mountains, spotted some deer and some eagles and a chipmunk, and... I think that's about it. Good times, baby.
This wonderful place is actually called the Dream Playground. Dreamy!
This wonderful place is called Lake Crescent. Also Dreamy!
Muriel liked it when we called her burrito girl. She has a sense of humor about things.
Jim's giant crab omelet in the foreground. Sparkling Red Lion Hotel parking lot view in the background.
The girls stopped in a coffee shop to catch up on some magazine articles.
Naomi got the best tattoo at this place...
Senior Prom
Naomi and her friend Carmen commune with the Port Angelenos of yestermural.
Hurricane Ridge: Not too chilly for walking around, yet completely snowed over, so forget it. Pretty, though.
The ferry was windy, but you can see we had some nice sunny weather on the way home. Woo hoo! I'm ready for another trip.

Dragon Lady

We are on the last day (wah!) of a four day streak of beautiful weather, which has been a beautiful, motivational health tonic for the whole family. Dinners outside, garden planting, sandals, the whole shebang. I have even been getting the urge to clean out drawers and closets...something about the unusual appearance of our home with natural sunlight makes me want to sweep out the corners.

We kicked off the streak Saturday morning with a trip to the zoo. We headed off to the "Northern Trail," the one part of the zoo we had never managed to get to on previous visits. On the way we saw the Komodo Dragon, another stop we'd never made, and watched as he favored us with a weird giant lizard bowel movement and a slow march across his enclosure. Another mom assured us that this was indeed a special day, as she and her children visited the KD frequently, and it NEVER NEVER moved. So, woo hoo, I guess.

Muriel had specially requested to see an elephant, so we stopped there as well. This trip firmed up something that has been percolating lately- Muriel's fomer fearlessness is giving way to total Chicken Littleness. Just seeing the elephant from two hundred yards freaked her out. It only got worse at the brown bear enclosure. They had a window that let you peek into the nap cave, and we saw the two very large bears from about two feet away. Muriel was really unhappy with this. When we went around the corner to the glassed-in pond view, she enjoyed watching the fish down at her level, but when I picked her up to show her the front-side view of the sleepy bears, she said, and I quote, "No! No! No! No Bears!"

After the bears, we enjoyed a picnic lunch and a ride on the carousel. Good Day, Sunshine! Tomorrow the clouds and coolness are back, but it was a good ride.

Yea, potty jokes in the Komodo Dragon exhibit!

The Malayan Tapir- another gorgeous creature for Muriel to fear.

Cheesy chips make for cheesy picnic snapshots!

Naomi's not afraid of dragons!

And this one is just a funny picture. Jim was trying to teach Naomi how to do the wave dance- this was her final move.

The Mother Tongue

Remember when you were in grade school and your parents used to take you to the Saturday night "charismatic mass" at St. James cathedral, and there was that part where people began to pray their repeated chant-type prayers of humming adoration of our Lord, and before long all the people around you including your parents were speaking in tongues, or kind of singing in tongues, and you tried to get there, you invited the Holy Spirit in, but the Holy Spirit was otherwise occupied or just didn't feel like you were in quite the right place, Spiritually, and no matter how bad you wanted it, you never quite managed to hear whatever that was come out of your own self? And all you could do was stand there and sway quietly, with your hands raised like everyone else, trying not to feel disappointed?

Wait, you don't remember that? Hmm.

I bring it up because I am reminded of it all the time now, thanks to a little habit of Naomi's I like to call "Faux Hindi." I have maybe referred to this before, but a lot of kids at Naomi's school speak Hindi. It is a regular UN preschool- we are trying to coordinate a play date or whatever with another classmate of hers, and the girl's dad just texted me to say no can do, this weekend is Ethiopian Easter. Neat. Anyway, lots of real Hindi is spoken. So Naomi comes home, speaks a bunch of Hindi-ish gibberish, and tells us that it is Hindi. She does so with conviction, she does so with aplomb, but most of all, she does so constantly.

I was going to say half the time, I mean, half the time she talks she is speaking Faux Hindi (Fauxndi?), but I must acknowledge that is an exaggeration. It's more like a quarter or a third of the time, when she is playing, talking to us, talking to herself, talking to Muriel, singing, it is happening in Fauxndi. We are pretty blah about it- what do we care? Not like we don't know whether or not she has mastered English (mastered on a four-year-old scale, that is).

Muriel is a good sport too, although I feel a little bad for her as she is really learning to talk now, and always trying to understand what we say and clearly communicate what she's thinking. Must be a drag to hear her sister bend down and peer kindly in her face and say a bunch of sounds that she cannot possibly make any sense out of. She does love to repeat whatever Naomi says, which is great if Naomi is in the right mood, and which is tell-on-able "copying" if Naomi is in the wrong mood.

So, yeah, no evangelical church camp for Naomi- she will be hotdogging it all over the praying in tongues sessions.

On a completely different note- Naomi has been telling me ALL THE TIME lately how fantastic a mom I am. She has similar praise for Jim (except, you know, dad-praise). Don't get me wrong, it is gratifying to hear how great I am, how I make the best dinners in the whole world, and so on. But I sometimes get the feeling of being in an awkward, lopsided dating relationship, where one side effusively proclaims her love while the other side tries to keep up. Not that my love is not as effusive as hers, it is effusive beyond my own ideas of love. But I am a little more restrained than to tell her every moment how spectacularly amazing I find her. Since you asked, yes, all her love proclamations are in English.

But how swiftly opinion turns! This morning I was changing Muriel, and Naomi came in, holding the pair of socks I had taken out for her last night. She said, "It turns out you are not the greatest Mommy in the world- Look, these socks are actually Muriel's." Yep, best not to pay too close attention to the poll numbers at any given point.

Ahead 14 Years, Back Two Days

Today in the work kitchen I ran into someone I used to chat with in the kitchen at the old building. He now sits on the posh side of the building, overlooking the lake, and as I am an interior burrow dweller on the land side of the building, we haven't passed in the hallway or seen each other at all for months. He told me he had taken some time off during his daughter's spring break to visit some colleges. I said, "Wow, college!" or some nonsense, and he took that to mean that it seemed so far in the future that I couldn't get my head around it. "It'll be here before you know it," he said.

But no, it wasn't that I couldn't conceive of it, it was that I felt it, right there with me, when he told me about the visits. I know my kids are growing up. They really are nowhere near college age, I get it, but it is so easy for me to look back at the changes in Naomi since she was born, and think about another fourteen years of changes rushing past us. I always assumed that a parent is in a state of constant nostalgia, missing the past incarnations of their child. I thought that's how it would be for me. In fact, though, I am wild about each new incarnation. I loved the newborn version, the baby versions, the toddler versions. True, I got a little teary when I saw a picture of how super tiny Naomi looked the day she was born. But the girls I have now, it always feels like, are the ones I like the best.

So it's weird to me that my nostalgia seems to be forward looking rather than backwards. I guess leaving home is a bigger event, a bigger impact than the changes I embrace every day or every week. It's kind of THE event, in a way. Funny that hearing about someone else's kids getting ready to do it makes my throat catch.

Anyhoo, Easter weekend was fun and Eastery. We had an egg hunt at church on Saturday, which was rainy and way too easy, but enjoyable. The woman who organized the thing warned us parents that although tinies were welcome to hunt eggs too, the prizes inside might not be appropriate for them. How those words rang in my ears later that day when I came around the corner and was greeted by the sight of Muriel using the hot pink Easter-themed ink stamp (from one of the eggs) over and over on her forehead. That stuff did NOT come off.


After the church egg hunt, it was home for some egg coloring. Jim's was the nicest, as Naomi agreed.


On the way to church on Sunday, I rolled the dice and told Naomi the Easter story. The preschool cliff's notes version. No particular gospel leaning, just the facts. She constantly demands that I tell her stories when we're in the car, and there was a good chance she was going to hear about it in church (no Sunday school on Easter!) so I thought I would mention the bad news, emphasize the good news, and see what happened. She was fascinated, of course, by the part where the main character in all her Sunday school lessons gets killed. But she doesn't really grasp what it means, so it wasn't too disturbing, I don't think. Hmm. Oh, and also during the church part of the day...they like to welcome new members on Easter, so despite having attended there for two years or something, we got to stand up on the altar and have everyone welcome us. Welcome, us!

We had more egg hunting at home...


and still more at our friends' house, where we also had a beautiful dinner. That guy can cook, I'm telling you.


We brought the disturbing bunny cakes, which, covered with cream cheese frosting, sweetened coconut, and candy, were like a diabetes bomb. Kaboom!


And that was that. Our house is now slightly more full of candy, little gewgaws, and stickers, stickers, stickers. So, a little late, Happy Easter to you all.

The Past is Now

Every so often, I have this realization, usually when I'm watching a pharmaceutical ad, or seeing someone watch a youtube video on some little teeny hand held device, that the future has arrived. It's the gleaming future where a pill can calm your restless legs and you can see and talk to someone halfway around the world on your laptop computer, as we sometimes do with Jim's parents. Any question, no matter how trivial, can be answered with a few keystrokes and a couple of clicks.

So perhaps that is the reason I find it so fascinating that the big international news story the last few days has been about... pirates. I am as anti-pirate as that Ask a Ninja guy, and despite the accompanying stories about women moving to the coast over there to try to land a pirate husband, I certainly don't find the whole thing intriguing or romantic. It's just so...fundamentally retro, I guess. We are reading about (and watching, and listening to) the same kind of news story that people read and heard about two hundred years ago. Probably two thousand years ago.

The other day I made a new Facebook friend who used to be a coworker back in MN. She was tagged in some photos of a women-in-technology type group (I'm guessing) at my old place of employment. I recognized many of my old colleagues, and had an actual painful flash of memory of what it was like to have a job where I had friends, and where I looked forward to being at work, and being part of a group. Having meetings in person. Going out to lunch more than once every two years. I know it sounds like I am exaggerating... but I'm really not. So I felt sorry for myself for a couple of minutes, and then I remembered the Ghandi quote about...being the change you want to see in the world? I am fairly certain he didn't mean it in such a self-serving way, but the point for me is that if I don't like my situation, and I don't try to do anything about it, well, whose fault is that, then?

So, now that we're thoroughly settled into our new digs (did I mention I finally got a parking spot in the lot next to the building? Sweet!), maybe it's the right time to try to put something together, to get all the women of the company who are in disparate organizations, but all inhabiting the same fancy office building, into some kind of association. I just need to invent some mission statement, since the real one (help me like my job more!) is not exactly useful to the bottom line of the company. If you have any inspiring women-in-technology mission statements you don't need, send them my way! In the meantime, I am going to continue working out a way to make my own future look a little more like my past.

Another Month, Another Resolution....

I just know you have been anxiously awaiting news of how my March new month resolutions turned out. Turns out they turned out OK. The resolutions were... 1. Exercise for 30 minutes every day, and 2. Get three servings of vegetables every day. I was not as completely successful with these as I was with my don't buy anything new January or blog every day February. I would say there were probably 4 days (maybe 5) where I didn't exercise for 30 minutes. The veggie thing went a little better- there may have been a day or two where I was at 2-2 1/2 servings instead of three.

My main problems with exercising are... (I am noticing a numbers theme here...) 1. I have a job. 2. I love to sleep. And on that second point, I don't love sleep before I fall asleep (as Jim does, when he is on the couch, if sleep is anywhere near him, he embraces it immediately and irrevocably), meaning, I am just as willing to waste hours in the evening before getting myself to bed. No, I love love love sleep while I am doing it. Which means, when morning rolls around, the time when I was to be getting up to do my thirty minutes of exercise, all of my body and 75-80% of my brain are completely unwilling. On weekends, I really like to exercise- mid morning, in the afternoon. I am not groggy, I am ready to go. But first thing in the morning, ug. Even though, of course, it's the best time. If I exercise in the morning, right around 10 am, when I'm sitting at my desk, I notice that really good feeling. Hooray! But it's so hard to get out of bed!

The vegetable resolution has me feeling a little sheepish, because I realized that I really haven't been eating enough of them. It's easy to eat enough fruit, because you can buy it, transport it, have it on hand, and eat it quite easily. No prep required. I have a couple of apples sitting on my shelf at work. But even if you are going to eat fresh veggies, you have to do some preparation (though it does make me smile to imagine myself eating a broccoli head "out of hand"). I didn't rely on V8 more than a couple of days, I'm proud to say, though it is true that many baby carrots were harmed in the realization of this resolution. It was good to have a motivation to choose salad when I did eat out, or the vegetable sandwich. And I discovered that the good people at the Thai place at the mall food court we frequent will add extra broccoli to the pad see yew for a dollar.

I am going to try a little harder to make these two stick. The first two months were experiments, this last month has been a real effort to change my habits. I read an article recently that said just eating 2 1/2 servings of vegetables per day makes you healthier. (It was more specific than that- can't remember the details- helps prevent cancer, maybe?) I can manage 2 1/2. This month I'm adding another sort of "duh" nutritional resolution- getting three servings of dairy per day. Should be easy enough. I have already imposed a big gallon of milk on the super crowded shared work fridge.

The milk by itself doesn't seem like enough of a new month resolution. I am working on a few others...have to pick one soon if it's going to be a daily thing. Right now I'm leaning toward going a whole month without yelling at Naomi for her many prolonged lollygags, messes, water wastings, and so forth during her nightly toothbrushing time. It's weird that something so mundane makes me lose it so frequently. Yeah, that's as good a resolution as any, and hopefully will provide some zen Mommy ripples to the rest of my parental interactions...

OK, so three servings of dairy and zero servings of bedtime meanie. Done and done.