broken bikes & black eyes

"I don't feel nearly as bad about running over our son's bike with my car after you kicked our daughter in the eye."

I think that about sums up our family camping trip last week.

It was good fun, actually. I mean. You know. Considering the fact we had 7 kids 4-and-under in tow.

not a terrible view

We camped right on the beach and we were with our favorite friends and all the minis loved each other and played and played and flew kites and spent hours in the sun and sand and sea. Happy campers, literally.

little people, big kite.

One of my best friends Claire and I were pregnant with our first babies at the same time, lived a mile apart, and spent a lot of time together the first year of the kids' lives. The kiddos, Jack and Millie, were sweet little baby-BFFs. They later moved away, but we still manage to get the pipsqueaks together a couple times a year. One of DM's cousins has a PhD in child-something-or-other. She seems very wise. Recently she was talking about how children "imprint" on each other at a very young age, so even if they don't see each other often, they have these innate memories of one another.

And i feel like that must be true of these two because they get along like gangbusters when they see each other. Then there's Colby chasing after them like, "Hey guythz, wait up! Can i play too?" Poor nugget. Sadly, Jack was relegated to Millie's second fiddle when my friend DP's daughter "Button" joined the kid crew. Sorry, son. Best familiarize yourself with this feeling now. Let's revisit the issue in about ten years and talk about a little tactic called "playing hard to get" vs. "sobbing inconsolably because she doesn't want to sit next to you."

Anyway, within the parameters of family vacations, it was pretty perfect.

a beautiful mess

Though we did spend a night at the motel 6 in Lompoc, CA, which I hope was a once in a lifetime experience. *Shudder.* Colby did barf on the winding drive there. Apparently she shares her mother's propensity for motion sickness. I did expose my latent heteronormativity by asking Claire to pick up a coloring book with "boy stuff" for Jack (i.e., super heroes and ninjas versus the puppies and princesses we had on hand). DM did run over and destroy Jack's bike with the car. And I did kick Colby in the eye. (She was roasting a marshmallow and leaned too far forward in her cheapo camp chair and tipped toward the fire pit. She was out of arm's reach so I threw up my foot to stop her from falling into the flames... aaaaand, kicked her in the "eyebowl." She had a shiner and everything ;-/)

There were ruthless seagulls and fearless bees to contend with. And a bunch of brazen raccoons ransacked our camp the first night. They got into the coolers and broke/ate/tossed four dozen eggs all over the place so, not only did we not have anything for breakfast, we essentially got egged by rodents of unusual size. They destroyed a box of graham crackers, too, so at one point Claire resorted to making s'mores with tortilla chips. Coming soon to a Pinterest board near you ;) She tried to liken it to salted caramel but I wasn't buying it. And of course it wouldn't be a real family vacation without a sick kid. Colby was a total snot faucet the whole time, poor bug. I'm not sure a kleenex was used once. "Roughing it." Oh! And I got so much grief for my headlamp! You people don't know what you're missing!

BETTER than sliced bread. y'all are crazy. it is an incomparable tool for eating pizza in the dark, and other essential activities.

In spite of all that, though, the kids were on cloud nine. I remember one of the first times we took Jack camping, and after one day he was like, "Can we go home now?" But this time they both decided they want to live in a tent forEVAH! It was so cute. And though I've never been an advocate of the family bed, it is sorta fun to wake up all together in this cozy little cocoon. (I actually wish I'd taken a pic of our crooked cocoon. It was a sad, lopsided little thing, listing dangerously to the left, probably from the gale force winds that nearly blew us off the cliff into the ocean last time we went camping.) We even had themed dinners! And of course there's nothing like drinking beers around the fire with friends (once the kids are asleep and the threat of toasted children is no longer imminent). It can't be beat.

Oh YEAH. Also the part where we taught the littles how to play beer pong. RELAX. They didn't drink the beer or anything. They were just our ping pong proxies. I swear I read about it in Parenting Magazine or something. Teaches valuable skills like teamwork and hand-eye coordination. Anyway. Jack was a natural. Pretty sure we created a monster the second he sunk that first ball. His eyes fairly gleamed in triumph. We didn't think much of it at the time, but the next day we got onto the topic of "things you can do when you're 16," like drive a car (because DM also let him "drive" the car down to the camp store - permagrin!) DP asked, "what else are you going to do when you're 16?" and J says, "DRINK BEER!" Aaaaaand, we just created an alcoholic. Wonderful. Can't wait to hear how this gets translated to his teachers. Up until now we had duped the kids into calling anything alcoholic "gwown up dwink." I felt much safer cloaked in that gauzy ambiguity. Oh well!

Anyway, the point is, (mostly) good times were had by all. But. Holy shit, man. The amount of crap we brought? Unreal. I don't even know how we fit it in our car. My parents, who could hike for ten days with nothing but what they could carry on their backs, would be appalled. Seriously. I felt like I was preparing for The End of Days. And of course, we wouldn't want to venture to the end of days without our iPads. (Again, the shame! My mom and stepdad are rolling over in their graves. Even a year ago we SWORE this was something we'd never-ever do: camping and i-anything. But really by now we should know better than to say "I never.")

provisions for a normal human to survive for 4 months,
or my family to camp for 4 days 

precious cargo! it feels like we're forgetting something though.. 

And then there was the great glow stick fiasco of 2014. One night we handed out glow sticks for the kids. Jack and Colby both got green ones, and we fashioned them into necklaces with twine. But THEN. Jack noticed that Button had a PURPLE glow stick, with a soft black lanyard. OH, the injustice. THE HORROR. Well. Button's dad, JP, overheard the ruckus and assumed that it was Colby, not Jack, who was squealing like a stuck pig over a purple glow stick. So he managed to wangle a coveted purple stick out of thin air, and gave it to Colby. Oh dear lord. You can probably imagine where things went from there. Or maybe you can't, because your children are not psycho-beastie-babies. ANYWAY. Jack starts LOSING HIS EVER LOVING MIND because Colby got a purple glow stick and he didn't. Then he tries to snatch it from her, which of course sets Colby off. Talk about end of days. World War Z erupts and I promptly fireman-carried both children to bed. Colby finally decided to be the bigger person and trade her purple for his green, but naturally, that was TOTALLY insufficient, because jack wanted a purple glow stick with a BLACK necklace, not a scwatchy, twine necklace. "Everything is terrible. What is the point of going on??? HOW CAN I BE EXPECTED TO LIVE LIKE THIS?!?" (< I'm paraphrasing.)

Poor JP felt bad for exacerbating the histrionics but I assured him he could not possibly have anticipated the depths of my children's despair over WHAT COLOR GLOW STICK they received. I mean, come the f*ck on. After I finally got the crazies to sleep I was commiserating with my friends over the fire. Are we just raising complete and total terrors? I think the answer is pretty clearly yes. But everyone made me feel a tiny bit better, reminding me that they're just kids. (Though I feel like this is the same argument people use with extremely large puppies - oh, they're little, it's fine, and then suddenly you have a 300 pound dog leaving Everest-sized piles of poop on your bed and using your head as a tiny pillow.) Claire said "Your kids are kind, which is the most important thing, right?" ("Kind" with the caveat that they occasionally torture their parents, each other, and unsuspecting State Park patrons.) Or maybe that's just what delusional, overindulgent parents of spoiled little bratwursts tell themselves. But then JW reiterated my favorite parenting mantra: compared to the vast spectrum of shitty parents, we are most likely at the high end, e.g., only very slightly shitty. And then I felt pretty okay.

good thing they're so cute.

family vacation and other oxymorons

okay. this is a well-worn topic over here at cheesy-town, but that's not going to stop me from saying it again. traveling with children is (or can be): fun, adventurous, entertaining, rewarding, and worthwhile. traveling with children is not: relaxing, rejuvenating, restful, quiet, or serene. traveling with children is not a "vacation."

we went camping last weekend. and by "camping" i mean car-camping at a site overlooking the beach with hot showers and a well-stocked camp store 5 miles from our home and the nearest target. (my parents were actual, legit campers so i feel like i have to add that caveat as they're snickering at me from their perfectly pitched desolation wilderness camp in the sky). it was a really great trip. my brother and sister and her family came along, which was a special treat, and the kids barely lost their minds at all, which was a minor miracle. but i was just chuckling to myself about my mind's stubborn refusal to accept the fact that our lives have changed, a lot. not better. not worse. or, maybe, better AND worse. but mostly just ... different. :)

i had to work friday but DM took the day off to finish packing and setting up camp. i left him and my brother a list of last-minute things they needed to gather, including the following:


"other shinguard"
(jack had a soccer game saturday morning, and one of his shinguards had disappeared into the "other" black hole of children's things, along with other socks, other shoes, and other shreds of mom's sanity)

i also said on my way out, "oh, don't forget to bring cards and other grown-up games." see, in "the old days," DM and i vacationed like it was our job. these adventures usually involved secluded beaches and white sand and rum drinks and naps in the daylight hours. this was also in the era before cell phones and social media ruled our lives. we never watched TV or fell down our individual internet rabbit holes on our smart phones while sitting side-by-side. we played endless games of gin rummy and scrabble and backgammon and chess, and read books and listened to the waves or the wind in the trees. and there was no more perfect place for cards and games than on a camping trip. once DM had exhausted his four-song repertoire on the guitar, we would spend the evenings drinking wine out of plastic cups and playing travel scrabble or rummy by the firelight.

while i know, logically, that trips with the kids are very different than vacations from the days of yore, my subconscious is a little slow on the uptake. hence the request for an array of old-fashioned entertainment for our family camping trip. i get this selective amnesia every time we go on "vacation," and then i am reminded again of the reality that the days of reading on the beach or drinking cold beer while playing lazy games of poker by the campfire, or hell, even just sitting - i really miss sitting - those days are gone. or at least, on sabbatical. by the time we wrangle the crazy kidlets to sleep, which is no small feat when they're hopped up on s'mores and fresh ocean air, and finally succeed at exiting the tent (on the tenth try - our finely honed silent ninja skills seriously compromised - there is no "sneaking" out of a tent), we are so beat it's all we can do to keep our eyes open while we nurse our beers in stunned silence. scrabble?

that is not to say we didn't have a good time. we absolutely did. i think it was one of our most successful trips yet, despite the fact that we were nearly blown off the cliff into the ocean by gale-force winds friday, and spent the night in soggy tents and sleeping bags. but the definition of a good time has definitely been revised for the 21st century ;)

wind: 1, EZ-up tent: 0

"quick! someone take a picture of us! everyone act natural! hurry, before we have to return to our regularly scheduled routine of preventing small children from falling off the cliff into the ocean or getting run over by a car or burned in the campfire or stabbing each other in the eyeballs with marshmallow roasting sticks."

at the end of the day, though ... life is not terrible.

insert requisite inspirational family travel quote here:

"there are no seven wonders of the world in the eyes of a child. there are seven million." seeing the world again through the eyes of a child makes these harrowing, sweat- and snot- and tear-soaked adventures worth it. at least, that's what i keep telling myself ;)

[source: alexinwonderland.com]

just as soon as i recover and finish the laundry from the last one
[source: one kings lane]

the end

the good ole days

we spent labor day weekend with my stepdad's family at their old family cabin in the mountains. it was, as always, pretty freaking awesome. i just love the family in general and this annual experience in particular. there are communal meals and cocktails served in 80 year old coffee mugs and campfire games and s'mores and trading memories as the fire burns to embers. there's an outhouse (not my favorite part). there's a chore chart. we take turns cooking and cleaning up and doing the dishes together. we blow an old horn when dinner's ready (it's like, a literal horn. i mean, a horn made out of an animal's horn. he's not using it anymore ;) it never occurred to me before now that this was the etymology of the word horn. learn somethin' new every day!) anyway, if someone has a new friend, we make them try to blow the horn and point fingers and laugh when they spit and sputter and fail. we play campfire games specifically designed to fluster the newbies. we play cards and (good naturedly) harass them some more. (wanna come?? ;)) we sleep under the stars and wake when the sun comes up over the mountains and eat bacon and pancakes and eggs or sometimes just cereal and drink coffee together next to the fire, planning our daily adventures, waiting for the sun to warm the air.

the kids LOVE it there. they get dirtier than they get the other 360 days of the year combined. they literally roll around in the dirt. omg, so much dirt. and they have SO much fun. but the cabin is definitely not what you would call child-proofed. there's a river on one side and a highway on the other. no fences. you can cross the river on a sagging, creaking 2"x12" board. there are steep, rickety old stairs, an unfinished, sliver-serving deck, open flames, large rocks, falling pine cones, wild and domesticated animals, biting insects, water snakes, and various other hazards. perhaps most tellingly, there are often SHARPIES left out within reach of the children - GASP! ;) the kids poke each other with sticks and swing branches wildly through the air and throw rocks too close to one anothers' heads and generally run around like dusty little savages. they "help" start the campfires and attempt to toast their own marshmallows. they play with ancient tonka trucks that would surely be recalled today for safety concerns. sometimes they play without either DM or I watching them at all, us relying heavily on the principles of community parenting.

this weekend, J went on a hike. an actual hike (well, i don't know if it totally qualifies because DM carried him most of the way) but, most importantly, he shat in the woods. if you know my anal retentive little boy, you know what a big deal this is. i'm sure anyone within a 5 mile radius thought some satanic cult was performing a ritual sacrifice, but whatever, he did it, and he lived to tell the tale, which DM keeps prompting him to do with that unmistakable glint of fatherly pride in his eye.

i don't ever really worry about J. he's got his mother's inherently concerned, rule-abiding, nature. (one of the news things he likes to say is, "if i don't do [dis or dat] den da police man wiw get me." no idea at all where he got that one. *wink wink.*) when they reached the top of the mountain on their hike, he had to be coaxed and prodded to step to the edge in order to see our cabin down below, and he was cautious as ever when we made our wallenda-like river crossings ("cautious" being code for "walking halfway across and then beginning to scream 'AAAH! HEWP MEHHHHH! I'M GONNA FAWWWWWW!!!'" he even worries on behalf of his little sister, yelling "Mama! Daddy! Save hewh! SAAAAVE HEEEEEWH!" whenever she is teetering on the edge of something tall and unstable, which is often.

at the cabin, there's a set of granite stairs. 4 steps, i think. no rails. grams and the other "elders" have assured me that, in the 100+ years the cabin has been in the family, "only two or three" kids have ever fallen down those stairs to their injury, but they still make me nervous, because C has no concept of her own mortality, balance is not her forte, and if anyone would be the "3rd or 4th" casualty, it would be her. she spent a lot of time staggering and stumbling on those stairs, causing her dad and me multiple mini heart attacks. she actually would have fallen down them more than once if one of us hadn't swooped in to catch her. i'm sure she would have survived, but it wouldn't have been pretty. so it was with good reason when J said, "Mom! [This is his new thing. "Mom" and "Dad" instead of "Mama" and "Daddy." *sniff sniff* ;)] I'm getting a littow newvous dat Cowby's going to faow down da 'tairs." haha! at least he understood. most everyone else just made fun of us for freaking out about it.

every time i'm up there, subject to this steady onslaught of familial hazing, it gets me thinking about how wimpy kids are, these days. or rather, we parents are. or maybe it's just me. but i remember having so many adventures when i was young, catching tadpoles in a little creek behind the babysitter's house, riding my bike to go get an ice cream cone, exploring the neighborhood, construction sites, and abandoned fields with friends, playing capture the flag or kick the can in the streets long after the sun had gone down - all with no grown-ups in sight. do kids even do that anymore? and our parents' generation took even more liberties. we always hear stories about stepdad and his brothers and cousins and the CRAZY SHIT they did when they were kids. climbing the faces of enormous rocks when they were knee high to a bee. backpacking solo in the wilderness. skateboarding without pads or helmets down steep winding mountain roads, and/or being towed (as grams says, "if they were dumb enough to try it, the least i could do was drive the car.") riding wheeled things off the diving board. unicycle races on a wire suspended over the swimming pool. using the empty pool as a halfpipe. doing flips off the tops of mountains or houses or balconies or anything else you could flip off of. sometimes they broke things, got scabs and scars. but they lived to tell the tales, and they are SUCH GOOD TALES! my dad has good stories, too. one of my faves is when he and his friend were 4 years old, they somehow convinced someone at the PX to sell them pocket knives, and they played with them until my grandpa caught them hours later, hands torn to shreds. (four years old!) there are also stories involving beebee guns, roaming around england for a day before being returned home by a good samaritan (or maybe that was ben, the family dog), and possibly driving a car before achieving double digits? my mom basically grew up in footloose. there was no drinking or dancing or playing cards or watching movies or wearing nylons (at least, not that the parents were supposed to know about), so her childhood stories are of a different genre.

not that i'm advocating selling knives to four year olds or anything (though maybe the YMCA does). and obviously some changes in the way we parent are probably worthwhile tradeoffs. (i have heard many a grandparent lament the use of "those craaaazy car seat contraptions," saying, "in our day, we didn't even have seat belts!" yes, and children flew out the window in a car crash! my girlfriend actually has a funny story from when they had their first child. her father-in-law was completely flabbergasted that you are required to have a car seat for your baby in order to leave the hospital. he was like, "what do you mean, you can't leave the hospital unless your baby is in a car seat?!? it's your baby?!? what're they gonna do?! arrest you?!" um actually, yes, hahaha.) but nowadays, kids can't even play football or soccer without fear of traumatic brain injury. and God forbid we go to the park without a costco-sized vat of Purell. i don't remember my mom having to desanitize the shopping cart before i sat in it, do you? how sad if this generation of america's (okay, middle-to-upper-class america's) kids' stories are like, "i played x-box while sitting in an ergonomic chair in a HEPA-filtered, climate controlled environment. sunlight - what?! did you want me to die of skin cancer?!"

so yeah, we're safer. but. what have we given up? and is it worth it? i'm not sure. it's like when i was pregnant and deciding whether to take anti-nausea medication or puke all day, to have a glass of wine or lose my mind, etc... it's a balancing test. you have to weigh the odds that something bad is going to happen vs. how much of an asshole you're going to feel like if that highly unlikely thing occurs... if your baby has 11 toes... if your kid shoots himself in the eye with a bee bee gun... etc...

reminds me of this interesting interview from a while back with lenore skenazy, the "free range kids" guru, on salon.com. she points out the irony of us taking such extreme measures to keep our precious children safe, all the while driving them around in cars 24/7 which is the #1 cause of death in children. “Remember parents: Asteroids happen, so keep your children inside!”

of course, i have no problem leaving the children perched unattended on a bench at the edge of a small cliff above a river... if it means getting an adorable photo out of the deal!!! ;) (don't worry. J would almost certainly save C in the somewhat likely event that she'd try to "dump" (aka jump) to her death below.)



i basically wrote this whole thing
just so i could post this picture :)

our camping trip was ... not at all terrible!

We went camping last weekend. It was our first camping trip as a family of four (and a (furry) half). When we got back, DM, always scheming, said, "maybe we should start writing off our trips as a business expense, since you're going to write about them anyway, and obviously you're going to become totally famous and get a book deal." Riiiiiiiiight. Aside from the fact that he is on crack (and crack is whack), the weekend was totally uneventful (in the best way) and I don't really even have anything to write about. But don't worry! I won't let that stop me! :)

As with all things involving my children, it was totally great, until it wasn't. Seriously, this exact same thought process happens to basically every time we take the kids anywhere (out to dinner, across the country, to another country, etc.):

Preparing to leave - For the love of God and everything holy. This is an enormous pain in the a$$. WHY does it take 3 pounds of stuff per pound of child to get out the freaking door?

Getting there - Where's the Valium (or the Cyanide, depending on the length of the trip)?

After arriving and getting settled - Okay, that wasn't so bad. Actually this is kind of great. Totally worth it. We should do this way more often.

One hour later - This is terrible. What were we thinking?

Thirteen minutes after that - Seriously, please, somebody murder me.

Twenty-seven minutes later (after getting the kids' blood sugar levels and mom and dad's blood alcohol content up to par) - Okay. Okay. We're going to be okay. This is going to be nice. We are going to have fun, dammit! Yo! Gonna need a top-off over here! (Side story. When DM and I lived in the Virgin Islands for a short while, our landlord (who, b.t.w., had three piercings in his junkular region) had a buddy named Greggo. Greggo was 63% creep and 100% drunk, neither of which was completely out of the ordinary for a male living in the Islands ("the odds are good, but the goods are odd"). He carried, at all times, an assortment of female thongs in his backpack - new and unused (I think?) in a rainbow of colors and sizes. He was nothing if not prepared. He would try to coax/bully women into going nude at the beach, and if that didn't work, topless with a thong. "No tan lines, Mon!" If your excuse was, "Gosh darnit, I left my thong at home this morning," Never fear! Greggo had a spare! Greggo had many thongs, but two jokes. One was to say, while sitting on some of the most breathtakingly beautiful beaches on the planet, "I hate this beach! This beach sucks!" again. And again. And again.... The other was to say, "I need a top-off! Get it? Get it? Top. Off? Because I need a refill on my drink, but also, I want you to take your top off?????" So anyway, now whenever DM and I need a refill we say we need a "top-off.")

Okay. So. Anyway. Our camping trip was not at all terrible, which is basically a ringing endorsement. I grew up camping and hiking and spending a lot of time outdoors, so it made me feel really good and brought back a flood of fond memories when the kids just ate it up. Obviously, too, car camping is barely camping and makes it 900 times easier, especially with the littles. And, two of our favorite restaurants were within walking distance (one of them is right on the campground!) Plus it's a 5 minute drive from our house, and right on the ocean. So it's not like we were roughing it. My parents would probably be ashamed (they were pretty hardcore) but I kind of liked it this way :) And it was this whole little community. They may or may not have been able to survive in the wild, but man, these people were pros! They could car-camp like royalty. We definitely looked like amateurs. Our neighbors even made jambalaya with fresh seafood one night! God knows how they did that on a camp stove but God bless 'em! And there were kids everywhere, biking and scootering and running amok. It was just a really neat scene.

Of course, we had our share of public psychopathy, but that's par for the course. And despite the fact that entire forests spontaneously combust and burn to ashes in a day, it took us an hour the first night to get a fire going, with fire starter sticks and matches. Also, I don't think my kids have ever been dirtier in the entirety of their short existence on this planet, but I actually sort of loved that part (I just didn't want them to touch me :)) Especially for Prince Jackson (I mean my prince, not Prince-brother-of-Blanket-Jackson), who normally loses his sh*t when a speck of dirt, sand or water sullies his hands, and shares his mother's obsession with Clorox wipes. The novelty wore off after approximately 24 hours for J and he started saying he missed "home" (a.k.a. "his" iPad and Little Einsteins), but all in all, it was a great weekend, and DM and I both agreed that we should do it again very soon :)

Note - It has been 5 days since our return and my children still smell vaguely of campfire. I'll leave it to you to draw your own conclusions about family hygiene and the care with which we bathe our children.