“Here mom,” Colin said plunking a rock in my hand. “I found it near the shore. When it’s wet, it’s a different color pink. I thought you could put by the window in the kitchen with the other one I found for you.”
Other one? I thought about the pebble I had found in my beach chair an hour or so ago and flicked off to the side one instant before it dawned on me someone might have put it there deliberately. Oops.
Saturday, mom woke me up by calling at some ungodly hour to ask if we were ready to hit the road.
“Nope,” I said, maybe piling on the sleepy voice a little thick, “still in bed.”
“Oh, I thought you were going to hit the road early.”
Actually that was the plan the night before, until the kids realized our destination was a four-hour drive to a trailhead and a one-hour hike into Baker Lake for a one-night stay. I could see why they balked.
First, soften a cup of butter. Because somebody said on a cooking show once that using melted butter instead of softened butter makes for harder cookies, avoid melting the butter in the microwave. Instead put two sticks of butter in a large bowl and set aside until it’s softened. This step should only take a couple of hours.
Two days later cover up the butter and put it back in the fridge when you realize you don’t have any eggs … or time to make cookies.
Jack asked Colin tonight who’d be on his Zombie survival team. After careful thought, Colin said his team would consist of:
Neither Mike Markley, with his supreme laundry skills, nor I, the child’s mother, am on that list, even though I’d bring brownies. We both, sadly, will have been eaten alive in the early days of the apocalypse. *sigh*
Spoiler Alert: or maybe not … This blog entry will deal in a roundabout way with the movie World War Z, and with what at least might be one or more significant plot points as interpreted by a 14 year-old. So, if that kind of thing cheeses you off, like it does my husband, and you plan on seeing the movie, you need to stop reading right now.
Mike wants me to include that statement because he’s been fussy about movie reviews ever since I wrote one about Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure for our college newspaper that he says totally spoiled the movie for him. I did remind him it was Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. A movie with that title – any movie staring Keanu Reeves, really – isn’t going to lose any more points by my revealing the plot. And he wasn’t going to see it anyway.
For him it’s the principle of the thing.
There are moments when I think Colin exhibits what I want to believe is latent cleverness beyond what he could have inherited from either of us. Other times I’m pretty sure his relentless questioning is actually a form of obsessive compulsivity that I’ve seen before (ahem, Mike). Since overt boasting about my kids isn’t really my style, I’m going to assume the later is the more likely possibility.
Last week, Colin suggested a family ban on cussing, including his own use of profanity.
Although I appreciate his attention to the matter, our ten year-old is more disposed to biting than swearing. I suspect the focus of his ban is probably more on me cleaning up my act. I don’t have the same kind of leverage in the biting arena. No one here’s presenting him with some bad example I can remove. I can only scold him for acting like a two year-old and try to keep snacks handy in case he’s really just hungry.
From time to time this weekend, I noticed the couple in the campsite across from us. They would get up early, go for a run, come back for breakfast, jump on their bikes, disappear again, come back late for dinner. They were fabulously unencumbered by kids and pets and all their accouterments, ready to flee at a moment’s notice. I was jealous.
Somewhere along the line our camp style has been wrenched from more of a minimalist approach to where we find ourselves today. We used to be able to stow all our gear in two large-ish Rubbermaid bins in the garage, which we could toss into the truck with a cooler, sleeping bags and a change of clothing whenever we wanted to hit the road. We might have an approximate destination in mind, but if not, we could wander from campground to campground until we found something we liked. We didn’t always need a campground, we could just take some dirt road into the mountains and happen upon a wide spot in the trees and set up our tent at dusk.
I have an embarrassing parental oversight to cop to. We’ve never taken our kids to Yellowstone. All the traveling we’ve done and one of our most cherished national icons has never even been a consideration.
Technically it’s not my fault we’ve never considered this possibility. Although I was born in Boise, we lived in north Idaho for my formative years. Our family trips were mostly by boat, through the locks of the dams on the Lower Snake River to the Columbia, all four of us crammed in a 28 foot Bayliner for hours of quality time.
I swam a lot.
When was the last time anyone wanted to push a vacuum around here? How about daily? I know, I was thinking the same thing: we have a vacuum?
What we do have is a new dog. Penny comes without papers, but with just about everything else you’d want in a dog. She’s mellow, rarely barks, doesn’t shed and never jumps on people. She knows about a dozen tricks – more than both our kids put together. She’s about half the size of either of our last two dogs (something I care about particularly after having carted an ailing dog in and out of the house repeatedly over much of the last six months). She tilts her head in a cute way when I make a funny noise at her, which I do a lot. I need to remember to keep the windows closed.
