Archive for the 'Family Adventures' Category
February 22, 2010 @ 8:35 am | Filed under: Betsy-Tacy, Family Adventures
“…What are you looking for?”
“Presents. Five of them.” She explained, talking very fast, that no Ray ever came home from a visit without bringing presents. “It’s an old family custom,” she said.
“Hallelujah!” he exclaimed, shutting the book. “That’ll be fun, picking out five presents. I hope you have a brother. There’s a corking jack-knife here.”
—from Heaven to Betsy by Maud Hart Lovelace
Our “Betsy” came home from her trip yesterday with presents for everyone, in the grand Ray tradition. We tried to keep up our end of the tradition with a massive housecleaning, but I’m afraid I did not go so far as to scour the metaphorical coal scuttle. Jane’s equivalent of Willard’s Emporium was L.A.’s Little Tokyo: sky-blue chopsticks for Rose, stuffed Mario Kart mushrooms for Bean and the boys, and a pink piggy bank for Rilla. For her daddy, a Totoro keychain and a pack of Black Jack gum. And a bag of dark chocolates for me! That’s my girl.
Plus homemade cookies all around. Customized chocolate-chip cookies—extra dark chocolate in mine. I may have to send all my kids up to Kristen for cookery lessons. I hear Jane got a tutorial in baked tomato sauce. I look forward to sampling her homework.
And yes, I am giggling over equating L.A. with sleepy, one-horse Butternut Center. Then again, San Diego ain’t Deep Valley!
(Just ask Larry Humphreys.)
February 19, 2010 @ 8:43 pm | Filed under: 21st Century Motherhood, Family Adventures
Yesterday the five younger kids and I stood on an Amtrak platform in downtown San Diego, waving wild goodbyes as Jane’s train pulled away, headed for L.A. Big moment for us: the first venturing-forth-alone of one of my chicks. Jane is spending a few days with my friend Kristen and my soon-to-be-goddaughter, who is seriously the most beautiful baby you ever saw. (And I don’t say this lightly. I’ve had some mighty pretty babies myself.)
I thought I would be more freaked out about putting Jane on a train alone, going to Los Angeles for pity’s sake, but to my surprise I was more excited and happy for her than anything else. Maybe it’s all the time I’ve been spending in the high-school Betsy-Tacy books lately: I feel positively Mrs. Ray-ish about this trip: just tickled pink that Jane gets to have such a fun adventure. (Though of course we are missing her like crazy.)
Betsy was just Jane’s age, fourteen, when she went off to Butternut Center for a week on the farm with friends of her father’s. I was exactly Jane’s age when my parents sent me to Germany for seven weeks with a few other kids from school, to stay with some families who had known my English teacher when her husband was stationed in Kaiserslautern. Germany! With no cell phones, no internet! Mom and Dad, now that I know what it’s like, you amaze me.
It was an incredibly fun trip and I am so glad they let me go.
Jane seems to be having an incredibly fun trip, and I am so glad we let her go. 
But I had to laugh at myself just now, when I checked her Facebook page for about the tenth time today and saw no new update. Yes, I am actually complaining that my teenager doesn’t spend enough time on Facebook.
December 21, 2009 @ 7:24 am | Filed under: Advent & Christmas, California landmarks, Family Adventures, Holidays, Photos
One of the many treasures of Balboa Park is the Spreckels Pipe Organ—the world’s largest outdoor musical instrument. San Diego employs a civic organist and offers free organ concerts on many Sunday afternoons throughout the year. I’ve been wanting to attend one ever since we moved here, and yesterday we happened to think of it just in time to catch the Christmas concert and community sing-along. The timing was perfect; my mother was visiting for the weekend. (She comes out for my birthday every year, which is the best possible present.)
We wore our new Christmas hats that my sister Merry made for us.
It was really too warm for them, but we were full of Christmas spirit.
As were the many doggies who attended the concert along with enthusiastic carol-singers.
It was all very merry and bright.
Possibly a little too bright.
Our all potential Christmas card photos turned out to be outtakes. That’s okay because I’ve already abandoned hope on sending out Christmas cards this year anyway.
The best part was when the organist invited audience members to join her onstage for the carol-singing. We didn’t know we’d get to be part of the concert! Beanie, Jane, and I were eager to sing. The rest of the gang watched from the back of the amphitheater.
We thought of our snowed-under East Coast friends when we sang White Christmas.
(Out here it’s a white T-shirt Christmas.)
The best part was the final song—an enthusiastic and somewhat ad-libbed rendition of the Hallelujah Chorus. It is still ringing in my ears.
Methinks we have ourselves a new holiday tradition.
Thanks for the hats, sis!
November 24, 2009 @ 9:48 pm | Filed under: Family Adventures
There are days when your own life seems surreal to you.
I mentioned the G/I doctor has ordered a bunch of tests for young Wonderboy. For some of the tests, we needed to deliver a stool sample to the Children’s Hospital—between the hours of 9 and 11:30—within one hour of, er, the sample’s production, if you know what I mean. The first hour of the day was filled with suspense. Would he or wouldn’t he? When would he?
Suddenly, at 8:15, there it was. Cue instant frenzy of parental activity, gathering lab slips, notating the time on the side of sample containers, barking out prepare-to-travel instructions to various children. It was downright cinematic, like the scene when the transport team flies into motion to get the liver or the heart to the desperate patient on the other side of the country. You could almost hear Ride of the Valkyries playing on the soundtrack.
I’d been given three separate vials whose tops unscrewed to reveal tiny, pointed spoons with which to scoop the precious commodity. Gross. Seriously gross. Scott put his own life at risk by saying, as he watched me maneuver a loaded (so to speak) spoon into the vial’s narrow opening, “It takes a very steady hand…”
What kind of crazy man messes with a woman armed with poo?
With astonishing rapidity I found myself in the minivan, large brown bag of samples stowed in the passenger seat (ew), boy and baby buckled in behind me. Before backing out of the driveway, I invested thirty valuable seconds in tucking my Bluetooth into my ear and dialing Alice’s number because, you know, we share everything.
“Houston,” I crowed, “we have liftoff!”
Alice happened to be at a Dunkin Donuts drivethrough window and I’m sure she was just really super happy to hear all about my adventures in poop-collecting. Sorry about that, sweetie. I hope you hadn’t ordered the chocolate cream-filled.
I could go on with this, but frankly the rest of the day was a bit anticlimactic. We made it to the lab with twenty minutes to spare, happily relinquished the brown bag to the care of gentle lab techs, waited in a line that materialized out of thin air at the stroke of nine for my poor boy’s turn in the bloodletting room (more tests), and returned to our happy home in plenty of time for an early lunch.
Not that I felt much like eating.
Later in the day, believe it or not, there was yet another doctor appointment (at the ped’s office this time, not the hospital), and then I braved the waiting-until-almost-the-last-minute crowd at the grocery store to buy cream for our Thanksgiving dessert (Scott’s famous grasshopper pie) and thirty or forty other small items I suddenly remembered I needed for turkey day. (On which, as it happens, we eat ham.)
Then I cooked and cooked and cleaned and cleaned (tomorrow is Shakespeare Club), and—dare I say it?—I’m pooped.
November 3, 2009 @ 8:15 am | Filed under: Family Adventures
Well, my day went something like this:
Drove to children’s hospital for Wonderboy’s appointment with our favorite specialist, the esteemed yet down-to-earth doctor of genetics. Only one of my boy’s many many physical anomalies seems to be genetic—the albinism—but Dr. J is also a dysmorphologist, which means she takes an interest any kind of birth defect or abnormality, whether its origins are chromosomal or developmental-in-utero. She’s the doctor who laughed at my possibly insulting analogy two years ago, when I said that dealing with specialists in so many different departments of the hospital was like trying to walk a bunch of dogs all pulling on their leashes in different directions.
“I’m sure it is,” she chuckled, earning my affection forevermore.
So I was looking forward to this appointment, even if it did cost Scott a day of vacation: he took the day off to ferry other children to other activities while I took the boys to see Wonderful Dr. J.
I arrived a tad bit early and found a good parking space in the garage down the street from the hospital. Our children’s hospital is a large complex with many buildings and it can be quite confusing to navigate, but I’d double-checked on the website this morning to make sure the Genetics Clinic was still where it had been last year.
(Ooh, foreshadowing.)
So into the clinic area we went, where the line was already beginning to snake, although it wasn’t yet 9 in the morning. And when we got to the front of the line, the nice check-in lady said, “Oh, I’m sorry, but the genetics clinic has moved.”
To a building approximately 714 blocks away. Or six, at least.
“You could walk,” she said doubtfully, “but you’ll probably want to move your car to the lot on Frost Street. It’s a pretty long walk.”
Since “moving the car” would have involved the whole lengthy process of unbuckling boy and baby from the double stroller and rebuckling them into carseats, I opted for the long walk.
Except it needed to be a long jog or else I’d be really late for the appointment.
I saw a shuttle bus and showed the driver my map, helpfully marked in green highlighter by the apologetic check-in lady, but he too was apologetic. “Sorry, we don’t go near that building.”
Which was a rather emphatic demurral, don’t you think? We don’t go near it? How far away could it be, if the shuttle bus doesn’t go near it? Or is it perhaps radioactive? Should I don a hazmat suit before approaching the site?
At any rate, it was clear my options had dwindled to: jog. I lasted about two blocks before my jog muscle cried uncle. And here I thought I was getting into shape with all the exercise-bike-riding I’ve been doing at the gym since we joined the Y. I guess the difference is the exercise bike doesn’t involve pushing a stroller containing a scrawny five-year-old and a nine-month-old the size of a side of beef.
(You could hide pennies under those chins.)
So I walked and pushed and jogged and pushed, and there was a hill with a great deal more on the going-up side than the rolling-down side, and finally I saw a sign for the building that holds the fancy new clinic, and with much huffing and puffing, I delivered Wonderboy and his brother, the exceptionally cute side of beef, to the reception area.
The check-in lady at this clinic was embarrassed about the wrong directions on the website. I’m not the first parent to have been misdirected, it seems. “We keep calling them about it…” We—the embarrassed check-in lady and I—agreed that They (whoever they are) should have to make the walk themselves, once for every time a family arrives late and sweaty as a result of having put their trust in the website directions.
And eventually we got to have our appointment with Wonderful Dr. J. Who is, like every other doctor we’ve seen in buildings all over that sprawling medical complex and elsewhere, utterly baffled by our most pressing and persistent Wonderboy-related question, which has to do with his being the opposite of a side of beef (despite a hearty appetite). He’s been tested for everything the docs can think of, from cystic fibrosis to allergies to celiac disease to pancreatic something-or-other. But that’s a saga for another day. The topic of today’s anecdote is not My Child Is a Medical Mystery; it’s I Had to Take a Long Walk with My Two Adorable Sons in the Beautiful San Diego Weather, Poor Poor Me.
And the sequel, They Wouldn’t Validate My Parking in the New Clinic, So I Had to Go All the Way Back to the Old Clinic to Get My Ticket Stamped, O Woe.
What, you aren’t reduced to tears of overwhelming pity by this tale? Hmph. Um, um, well, I also had a dentist appointment in the afternoon. There. Now I’ve got you.
Oh, fine. It was actually quite a nice day. Okay? Are you satisfied? The girls got extra daddy time, and (for some) a trip to Jiffy Lube where there was an arcade machine containing all the best games of the 80s. The Jiffy Lube Man said kids played free and gave them a stack of quarters. And Scott bought them donuts. Two days after Halloween, with the candy still flowing freely: this was a very good day for my daughters. Jane wasn’t part of the video/donuts funstravaganza, but her science lab is moving into a chemistry unit and she came home radiant with excitement. Chemistry is Jane’s thiiiiing, to quote Little Bill’s father.
(We quote members of Little Bill’s family quite a lot around here. Especially Alice the Great. That Alice the Great is one of the best characters on television. Wise, twinkling, mellow, kind, observant, gentle, shrewd. And comfortable in her pink sweater and sneakers. I love her. This is going to sound ridiculous, but I have actually thought more than once, Gosh, she’s getting old. I hope she doesn’t die. And then I remember she’s a cartoon.)
Later in the day there was a long stretch of singing folk songs on the couch with the four youngest children, Bonny Doon and Loch Lomond and all my Scottish favorites, and also Down in the Valley which I still remember my grandma singing in her kitchen with two skillets sizzling on the stove and a spatula in her hand, and the smell of fried chicken livers filling the room, best smell in the world, and a plate of fried okra steaming on the counter, grease soaking into a paper towel, hear the wind blow, dear, hear the wind blow.
I bet Alice the Great makes good fried okra.
Our little singalong was underscored by a fair amount of kid-squabbling, the usual “I wanna sit next to Mom” scuffles, but that’s just the percussion section of life, keeping the tempo lively. I just sing “You take the high road” a little more loudly, arching an eyebrow at the oldest child in the squabble. This is probably not nearly as amusing to the intended recipient of my wit as it is to me.
Much like this post. What can I say? Writing long, nonsensical posts for my own amusement is my thiiiing.
October 20, 2009 @ 6:13 am | Filed under: California landmarks, Family Adventures, Photos
Perusing my archives, I see the wonders of Balboa Park have inspired a good many posts. (And other creative pursuits.)
I draw (a little); she paints (a lot).
• Helixes (viewing mummies at the Museum of Man; visiting the Botanical Building)
We counted koi in the long lily pond outside the Botanical Building, their splotched orange-and-cream bodies undulating beneath spiky, ladylike blossoms and the notched round leaves that reminded us of Thumbelina’s prison and Mr. Jeremy Fisher’s raft. We peered inside the deep wells of pitcher-plant blossoms, angling to see if any hapless insects lay dissolving inside. How surreal, this eager scrutiny of death, the children chattering and lively in the moist green air of this palatial greenhouse, just as they had been in the domed, echoing hush of the museum.
• Got More Monet Than Time (Giverny exhibit at the art museum)
Giverny! The word is magical. It whispers: Monet, poppies, haystacks, light-streaked skies, picturesque laborers in wheat fields drenched with sun. We made a beeline for the visiting exhibit, a large collection of Impressionist works by the artists who congregated in the little French painters’ colony during the late 1800s. They took their easels out to the woods and fields in a golden frenzy of plein-air painting. All right, the wall placard describing the exhibit didn’t say anything about a frenzy per se, but it did talk a lot about plein-air painting, a term whose pronunciation I managed to fake quite passably but of whose definition I was ignorant until a kind-eyed Englishwoman explained it to Jane.
• Of Fowls and Fun (another art museum visit)
Yesterday my three oldest kids went to a workshop at the San Diego Museum of Art. A docent gave a short talk about elements of art—line, shape, color, etc—and then they split into small groups and went to look at four paintings up close. Afterward, they did an art project focusing on copying details from the paintings they’d viewed. I missed most of the workshop, because I was outside with the little ones. The girls had a splendid time, and Beanie was especially impressed by the dead chicken.
• Photos of the Japanese Friendship Garden (and other spots)
• And this month’s photoessay (Natural History Museum, Botanical Building)
San Diego Museum of Natural History at Balboa Park.
Lily Pond and lizard shirt
October 9, 2009 @ 7:17 pm | Filed under: California landmarks, Family Adventures, Photos
(A photoessay.)
September 17, 2009 @ 6:34 am | Filed under: Family Adventures
My friend Joann and five of her children have embarked on an adventure that has me green with envy: they are touring this beautiful country of ours in a motor home. Joann’s husband’s work involves a great deal of travel, and this grand plan is a way for the family to spend more time with dad.
Joann’s nineteen-year-old daughter is chronicling the adventure at the delightfully named blog Anne Shirley’s Apprentice. The family’s blog names—and adventurous spirit—are inspired by Swallows and Amazons. No duffers allowed!
Yesterday’s entry ratcheted up my envy and delight even more: they visited Laura Ingalls Wilder’s home in Mansfield, Missouri.
Immediately inside the museum, so that it is almost the first thing that one sees is a large glass display case with the words “Pa’s Fiddle” written across the top. I was simply enraptured, but very quietly. The kind where you can’t say anything because it would ruin everything, because no one else could feel quite the same, and it’s no use trying to explain because words don’t cover it.
I can’t wait to see where they’re headed next.
July 15, 2009 @ 7:53 pm | Filed under: Books, Family Adventures
Summer did come, and summer was the season of Becky Jack. The kids were free (free!) from the constraints of homework and school days. And they would go stark raving insane with nothing to do, so the Jack home became a summer camp: summer projects (raising insects, quilting, coin collecting, studying kinds of clouds, family read-a-thons), sports (swimming, rafting, hiking, Little League), field trips (zoo, amusement park, bird preserve, lakes, mountains, rivers, meadows), service projects (neighborhood widow’s yard care, food bank drives), and just good hard play from sunup to sundown.
—The Actor and the Housewife by Shannon Hale (see my post and our discussion)
Well, it couldn’t be more obvious that Becky Jack, the heroine of Shannon Hale’s novel, is a homeschooler at heart—probably an unschooler. Every time I read about her exultation over summer or her dejection over the return to school schedules, I wanted to have her over for sweet tea and a heart-to-heart about how she might want to think about a more permanent freedom from the constraints she bristled against.
But I didn’t quote that passage to toot a horn for the joy of unschooling. “The season of Becky” (a recurring phrase in the novel) has been in my head all week as my children and I zoom around town to and from a series of activities which are a departure from our usual routine. We’re all of a sudden spending a lot of time at the Y for swimming and gymnastics, and I finally got around to getting everyone caught up on dentist appointments. The desert heat has settled upon our corner of San Diego County, and on the days we aren’t at the Y, we’re holing up indoors after 10 a.m., playing lots of Wii and other games until the evening shade transforms the yard into a cool and breezy haven once more.
It’s still light out when Scott gets home from work, and I’m reluctant to leave him for the two evening hours we’ve carved out as my precious and fleeting work time. I make bruschetta with tomatoes and basil from the garden, and linger in the kitchen longer than I ought, dipping crusty bread into the garlicky, lemony juice, listening to Scott’s stories of pre-Comic-Con office bustle. Sparrows and finches gossip at the feeder, and the bees are slow and undulating in their flight, their saddlebags laden. A monarch butterfly dips low, low, and lands on a rosy-orange blossom, uncurling its delicate tongue to sip from the cup of nectar. The children are playing in the grass, or else they’ve disappeared, called away by their books and their music.
Summer has never been the Season of Lissa—it’s spring that sets my heart soaring, always has been—but I am enjoying this Season of Becky, and feeling quite Beckyish indeed as the bright, hot days of July and August unroll before us. I’m a little envious of Becky’s neighborhood, with its impromptu backyard softball and kick-the-can—we used to live in a neighborhood like that in Virginia, and a very special place it was—but our summer rhythm is its own brand of nice, and I love knowing it is stretching out before us for many weeks to come, with Comic-Con (a major event in these parts, where “these parts” = both this city and this household) anchoring the middle, and a local unschooling conference waiting for us in September, promising to be a lively and colorful celebration of this lifestyle I love so much.*
*And in the spirit of not sugarcoating, I’ll add that at the very moment I finished typing that last sentence, a minor household volcano erupted, and in the space of three minutes, three different members of this mostly-happy family came at me with various shades of Bad Mood. Sometimes this wife-and-mother thing is a bit like finding yourself in the middle of a spontaneous game of paintball and you’re the one whose job it is to wipe the paint spatters off all the players while ducking and dodging the flying color-bombs yourself. But, you know, it’s probably a sign of a very successful and satisfying summer day that people are falling apart at the bedtime end of it. Off I go now to see if I can mop up some more paint.
May 7, 2009 @ 8:24 pm | Filed under: Books, Family Adventures
• Watched a NOVA special on bees, and watched bees outside on our sunflowers and scabiosa. I am so happy to see them buzzing around, filling those nifty leg pouches with golden pollen. Rilla stands beside me, peering so closely. Rose prefers to stay a safe distance away.
• Played lots of Harvest Moon. Such a relaxing game, I find. Planting crops, befriending forest animals, fishing. As virtual lives go, this one is quite appealing.
• Played, with lots of whooping and hollering, several exciting games of Mario Kart with my husband as the children cheered us on. We’re like a Wii commercial.
* Watched the Benjamin Button movie, which I loved, and which had almost nothing in common with the Fitzgerald short story except of course for the central conceit.
• Watched Adam’s American Idol performance three times. Fast forwarded through Danny Gokey’s, so now you know where I stand.
• Watched LOST with my heart in my throat, as I do every week.
• Watched Castle with a big silly grin on my face the whole time, as I do every week.
• Watched House through my fingers, because MOST HORRIFYING ILLNESS EVER, SKIN COMING OFF!!!
• Found an Asian grocery store that sells Taiwanese sun cakes. We were so excited. “City famous for sun cakes” was one of the clues for Jane’s Journey North Mystery Class, which (I can reveal, now that the project is over) was Taichung, Taiwan. We went to Ranch 99 hoping to find something like sun cakes to bring to end-of-project party and were dazzled and delighted by the array of freshbaked cakes in the store’s bakery counter. It was like walking into a Dunkin Donuts: so many varieties! I asked for two dozen and the clerk’s eyes got big. She asked me when I needed them. “Now,” I said, and her eyebrows went higher. “Two thousand?” she asked, obviously thinking I was crazy. “No, two dozen!” I clarified. “Twenty-four cakes!” We shared a laugh over it. She packed us an assortment including mung bean, red bean, taro, green tea, lotus, and wax gourd. The green tea filling tasted just like, um, green tea. Rilla tried a mung bean one and I’m afraid it came right back up. The taro seemed to be the favorite at the party, but “favorite” is a relative term. I think we probably came home with about 18 of the 24 cakes. The “frog cakes” from the family who had an Australian city were much more popular. Sponge cake with green sugar icing: yum.
Books I’ve seen being read this week:
Jane—
Catherine Called Birdy
Fruitless Fall (again, parts)
Chocolate Unwrapped (by the author of Fruitless Fall)
a book on Louis Braille
Babe the Very Important Pig
Either Galen something something Medicine or Archimedes something something Science, I saw from across the room and can’t remember which it was. But you know the books I mean, right? If you are homeschooling you do because they’re in every catalog everywhere. Very engaging books, even if I’m muddy on the titles right now.
Rose—
the Borrowers books
Stolen by Vivian Vande Velde (third time—guess she likes it!)
All-of-a-Kind Family (warms my heart just to type it)
Beanie—
The Princess and the Goblin
(drawing a complete blank on what else I saw her with)
Rilla—
has discovered Bob Books. “Go, Bus!” she ‘reads’ on the cover of one of them, with authority, to anyone in her path. She is also delighting in pointing to all the Sam-I-Ams in Green Eggs and Ham.
Me—
Still reading Gilead
Also George and Sam by Charlotte Moore, which I’m finding hard to put down. Fascinating account by the mother of two boys with autism and one without.
Also a whole bunch of blogs about beekeeping. Talk about fascinating!
Also the first pages of The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society, because it came in from the library and I couldn’t resist a peek. It looks like great fun. Another Semicolon recommendation, I think? Sherry, am I right?
I know I should clean up the formatting up there, put in italics, and such, but I just don’t feel like it. Got a baby sleeping on my lap and his sweet enormous head is cutting off the circulation in my right arm.
