Aug
17
Geowhatnow?
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Ever since Dylan was born I think we’ve fallen into a rut of feeling overwhelmed by the amount of work it takes to leave the house and so our family outings are usually short and close to home, but this weekend we were pretty active: visiting Alki Beach to wander along the water, heading out on several blackberry-picking expeditions, and embarking on a geocache route that took us — heaving along one stroller and one push-bike — through a long and winding forest path.
We haven’t gone geocaching in a long time, and I had almost forgotten how much fun it is. If you’ve never heard of this activity, you can read up on it here; in a nutshell the idea is to locate containers other geocachers have hidden outdoors, using a GPS. You log into the Geocaching website to find a cache, plug the coordinates into your GPS, and head on out. Caches can be big or small, and are often hidden close to trails or parks. A cache can contain a bunch of random little items — toys, pencils, sometimes even a buck or two — you can take something, and leave a treasure of your own behind. Or just sign the logbook that’s usually inside the cache.
I’ve found that part of the fun of this is that we almost always discover awesome places that we may never have known about otherwise, whether it’s a park, a trail system, or even just a hard-to-find area of a place we’ve been to hundreds of times before. Plus, there’s the fun of actually looking for the caches, which can vary in difficulty. We’ve done some that have been super easy, and a few that were so hard I had to email the cache owner (via the Geocaching website) and plaintively beg for more clues.
A cache can be a single hidden item or a series of items, each providing clues for finding the next step. That’s the sort of cache we found today: the first two caches were very small (plastic film containers) that only contained the waypoints for the next clue, and the final item was a large cache with the logbook and treasures.
Here’s JB plugging in the next coordinates after finding the first cache.
I’m pleased to report I was the one who found the second cache, so much so that I may have performed a peppy little touchdown dance when I spotted it. Note that it was hidden inside that culvert thing, which I foolishly stuck my hand in with NO REGARD WHATSOEVER to the presence of spiders, or extremely tiny zombies.
Here’s the second cache. If you’re wondering why in hell I was wearing a churchy-looking dress in the woods, that’s a good question. It about killed me, though: cotton from head to toe is fairly miserable when you’re producing your own personal sweat tsunami.
Final cache, filled with random stuff. And now that I’ve shown it to you, I’m sorry, but I’ll have to kill you. What? Those are the rules of geocaching.
Lastly, Dylan. Who gurgled contently the whole time, even when I almost accidentally let the stroller go flying off the trail to his doom.
The whole trail led us in a big loop, and I guess if I had known it was going to be so long and steep and muggy I wouldn’t have wanted to go (or at LEAST I would have maybe brought some water, and a bottle for Dylan), but it actually ended up being a fantastic time. Riley was in high spirits, galloping along and sometimes riding his bike, and Dylan remained happy throughout, despite the dog-breath heat.
I’m feeling totally re-motivated about geocaching, especially now that Dylan’s in that prime not-yet-mobile, not-needing-intervention-every-two-minutes age. It’s the perfect sort of thing for getting out of the house, having a great outing with the kids that isn’t totally lame for the adults, and it’s free. Next time, though, I’ll wear some damn shorts.
Aug
13
Randomly, lately
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I don’t know if I’ve whined about it lately, but Riley’s eating habits have been crazymakingly sparse. He won’t try this, he won’t eat that, he’s pickypickypicky and seems to survive for days on end by nibbling on cheese goldfish and sipping juice.
We’ve had countless fights, sitting at the table arguing about why he won’t eat more of his goddamned sandwich or at least TRY a bite of [something I made just for his ungrateful ass], and I kept telling myself to stop caring, to stop butting heads, that he wasn’t going to starve and if he did, well, it would be HIS OWN STUPID FAULT.
It really has been a challenge, though, even if I try and Let It Go and Zen Out About the Whole Food Thing, but I have stumbled onto something that is actually working, and I am sharing it with you in case you have an irritatingly picky eater of your own: I don’t have him sit at a table to eat. I put his food somewhere he can access it, and let it be, and holy wow I can’t believe how much more he’s eating. Instead of bitching about how he wants to get DOWWWWN, leaving 3/4 of his meal to rot, he just grazes and goes, grazes and goes. Tonight he ate a corndog, half a turkey sandwich, a bunch of grapes, and some cheese — all over the course of about an hour as he ran inside from the backyard for a bite, then took off again.
SHRUG. I don’t know, man, I’m living in the Whatever Works camp. Maybe someday he’ll eat at the table again like a civilized human, but for now, dine-and-dash seems good enough to me.
:::
I’ve been wondering if it’s just my imagination that Dylan seems so much more grinny than Riley did, and I went back and looked at baby photos taken years ago — nope, it’s definitely true that Riley was mostly suspicious, while Dylan is mostly, well, entertained. God, he’s a happy kid right now, and since my older boy is so often treating me like pond scum, it’s an awfully nice thing. I can almost see how people keep having more children, except I’m reminded of that Ogden Nash poem:
The trouble with a kitten is
THAT
Eventually it becomes a
CAT.
:::
See? Happy-go-lucky baby, all the time. I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. ON MY FACE.
:::
One of the really nice and maybe-amazing things about the kids’ daycare is that there’s not much turnover in the folks working there. The lady who rocks, feeds, and plays with Dylan on the days he goes in is the very same woman who rocked, fed, and played with Riley when he was a baby. We sort of love her, as you might guess.
There are some teachers I don’t know as well as others, and I can’t put a face to the name behind the lovely woman who sent home these hand-made cards recently:
They read: I will miss you. I love you. And a psalm, an ode to children, written in Spanish and then translated.
I really, really wish more of our money went directly into these people’s pockets, instead of the corporation that runs the center. These teachers make all the difference. There’s a reason Riley happily yells “SCHOOOOOOL!” as we drive up, and Dylan goes wriggling with joy into the arms of the folks who work there, and it has everything to do with the amazing people that surely are getting a crap paycheck, despite the astronomical monthly fees.
:::
I don’t know if you saw Dooce’s recent high praise for the Furminator, but I pretty much clicked over to Amazon as soon as I read her entry, because DEAR GOD THE FUR. SAVE ME FROM THE FUR. It arrived today and I took it for a test brush on Cat, and holy shitballs, you guys:
That was after brushing her for maybe five seconds, after which she gave off sparks and seemed about a thousand times glossier than before. I can’t wait to try this thing out on Dog, who is to blame for the forty inches of pet-detritus on my floors at all times.
:::
Speaking of Amazon, have I ever gotten some mileage out of this box lately. Screw Toys R Us, all you really need to make a kid happy is a cardboard box. And apparently a length of severed sprinkler tubing.
:::
Lastly, the boys.
These guys. Jesus, these guys kill me.
:::
PS: I put together this video recently for the good people at 3-A-Day, it was a fun project and you should take a look — if only to mock your favorite bloggers for waxing poetic about cheese.
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