Why does summer have to fly?!
June started with Betsy turning 6 on June 1st. I can never celebrate her birthday without recalling our friend and preacher saying rather mildly, "Do you know what else begins June 1st? Hurricane Season." And then after a pause. "Do you think the two are related?"
Betsy had an apple pie for her birthday, with three kinds of ice cream.
I also had a birthday, and received what I (apparently) always secretly wanted: a Ridgid 18-Volt Compact Drill and Impact Driver Combo, with a bonus of a Battery-Powered Radio. I got a lump in my throat as I opened it, similar to the one I get whenever the girls are watching me primp in front of the mirror and one of them asks tenderly, "Mommy? Why are you so old?"
Lucy has begun assisting Betsy in collecting the eggs each day, a task which requires them to race with multiple eggs in their hands through our obstacle course, er, garage, pushing and hollering, "Me first!" as they slam the back door into the wall and plunk the eggs onto the counter. Well, except for that day when I was straightening up their toys and came upon one of Lucy's purses which contained an oddly bulky, yet light, cargo. Sure enough, it contained three eggs, unbroken, but who knows how long she'd been carrying them around in there? I dropped them in a bowl of water, and they didn't float, so I assumed they were good. At least nobody got sick from eating them ...
Most mornings the girls and I go out while it's still cool to weed in the garden. By that I mean I pull out weeds and sometimes legitimate plants, and Betsy stands one foot away and showers me with her latest "stories" involving orphans, widows, and umbrella birds (she saw one on a pack of Go-Fish Animals of the World playing cards). One morning she talked for 45 minutes without stopping. Lucy, meanwhile, proceeded to strip down to her underwear and stand patiently next to Betsy, or else chased after the chickens, trying to force feed them bugs she caught in the garden. They wisely refused. When I announced it was time to go in for Lucy's nap, Betsy broke off from her latest story, sighed heavily and said, "FINALLY! I can get some peace and quiet!"
While this is going on, Jack and Woody are finishing up short school indoors. I recently had to get onto Woody for asking for help on his math problems before he even attempted to get the answer, so his diplomatic approach to a multiple-choice question was this: "Mom? Can you help me with this math problem? It's pretty easy, but there's a lot of good answers."
We took a break to go to Wyoming last week, and stayed in a cabin at Half Moon Lake Resort in Wyoming, which boasted hiking trails, boat docks and a fully-stocked fishing pond. They also, Jim observed after a few fishing trips, stocked their own mosquitoes. Luckily, they preferred Jim and Jack's blood to Woody's and mine, so at least the two of us didn't suffer much.
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| Half Moon Lake |
Oh. And the resort was in "high country" which is code for "bears". So Jim spent much of his time looking over his shoulder when he was outdoors, and locking cabin windows when he was indoors. Fortunately, we didn't see any bears, even though we drove through the Grand Tetons and Yellowstone with our eyes peeled.
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| Chipping away at rock and looking for fossils in Kemmerer, Wyoming. |
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| I got one! |
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| Lucy "helps" Jim |
We hiked a couple of times with the kids and on both occasions Lucy insisted on carrying her Dumbo stuffed animal, which meant Jim ended up carrying it, along with her, and Betsy when Betsy got tired. He also got to carry Woody's sweatshirt and sweatpants, which Woody stripped off 5 minutes into the hike, bottles of water, a bottle of mosquito repellant, and some juicy, heavy oranges, which nobody ate while on the hike.
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| Is that a bear I hear?! |
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| Touching the Grand Tetons |
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| Every time he saw bark peeling off, Jim told the boys it was "bear sign". |
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| Hiking is FUN for dad! |
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| Break time |
I'd like to apologize to all the hikers we encountered that day in the Tetons, the ones who anticipated communing with nature in a peaceful environment. You see, we had Woody with us. Which is kind of like hiking with Daffy Duck: you know, when Daffy bounces head over heels down the hill hooting and hollering, "Woo! Woo-hoo! Woo-hoo!" That's Woody on a hiking trail. On the brighter side, we probably saved countless hikers from bear encounters.
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| I think Woody may have learned his hiking technique from Jim (running away in the far distance). |
We finally saw a moose in someone's back yard when we were playing in Pinedale's public kiddie park. Naturally, Jim took this as his cue to creep stealthily up behind it with the camera, and the children crept up behind him (not so stealthily), and I hissed ineffectually at all of them from a safe distance, "You have flip flops on! You can't run in those!"
At Yellowstone, Jim and Lucy were the only ones to witness the miracle of Old Faithful since the rest of us were in the gift shop, picking out pocket knives, plastic binoculars, stuffed animals and tee shirts, but Jim did offer to buy the kids geyser-flavored soft serve as a consolation prize.
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| Not Geyser-flavored after all. |
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| Hurry up and take it before the mosquitoes come back! |
There's only so much outdoorsiness we can handle, though, so Jim wisely chose to stay in a cabin close to the town of Pinedale, which has its own fitness/aquatic center where the kids could swim in the safety of chlorinated water, and scale a rock climbing wall while tied to someone other than me.
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| Notice Betsy's creative approach of not using her own legs, and probably hands, to haul herself up the wall. |
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| Slam Dunking with Lucy |
And then there was the last day where we woke the kids up at 4:30 a.m. for the 15-hour drive back, which prompted me to inform Jim that sometimes I fantasize about a vacation when I'm not strapped in a car within five feet of all our children, their video games, the latest "Winnie the Pooh" movie playing, and they're not all saying, "Hey, Mom, can you get me ... (insert any random request here)" at 20-second intervals.
But in all, it was a good June. Hope you all are having a great 4th of July. Try not to blow too much up!
