Camp & Stitches

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(This trip actually happened the last week of June…)

The title of this post sounds like a hipster housewares store in Brooklyn. Anyway.

This summer we went up to the Estes Park YMCA for a week and stayed in one of their cabins.  If you live in Colorado (or even if you don’t) it’s a great place to stay for a visit. We’ve never stayed in the lodges, the reviews aren’t so great on those, but the cabins are simple and spartan and just great for a little time away without feeling like you’re really roughing it. Every time we drive in and pass the yurts  and tepees Eric says something like, “Wouldn’t it be so great to stay in those one time?” Personally, I prefer to be closer to warm running water and doors between me and the bears.  (Side note-according to the rangers, there are only about 35 bears in all of RMNP! They say that they have names for them all and know their behavior.)

The first night we camped so it’d be easier to get the kids to their daycamp in the morning.

snacking by the fire

snacking by the fire

It was so pretty I thought we could get a nice picture of us and the girl.

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so much for that

And look! Eric singlehandedly increased the bear population to 36!

The kids were in camp all week, which left Eric and I time to do fun grownup things like hiking, and road biking, and mountain biking, and drinking beer at lunchtime.

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So many beautiful wildflowers (and some invasives) along the path

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Wednesday evening, I was sitting outside the cabin reading a book and had just gone in to start dinner when I heard the girl yell “Brother hurt himself!” I went outside and found the boy at the bottom of a tree, with blood streaming down his shirt and face.  He was screaming, too, which immediately calmed me down.  My general feeling is if my kids are screaming in pain, well, they’re not a) dead or b)unconscious, so whatever it is is probably fixable.  He was able to get up and walk over to the cabin (ruled out broken legs, arms, good).  His chin was split open and he was complaining of not being able to open his jaw. A branch had broken in a tree he’d been climbing and he’d tumbled 7 feet or so to the ground.

As a medical person, it’s surreal when it’s your own kids or family that gets hurt.  I mean, you’re supposed to know what the right thing to do is, but it’s impossible to really be objective.  Most medical people I know downplay any injury their kid has-I’ve known parents that thought their kid was fine when they had a broken nose, or even a broken arm or something.  Part of it is that so many parents freak out when their kid has something minor that you get somewhat immune to it.  So he’s screaming, I murmur something about maybe needing stitches, which only made him scream louder ” NO STITCHES!! NO STITCHES!! CALL 911!! CALL 911!!”  Eric stared at me and said, “You’re the doctor! What do we do?”

I hesitated to have us take him to the ER, but what turned my mind was that he’d fallen into dirt and the wound needed to be cleaned. In hindsight, this was completely idiotic and he clearly needed care, but that’s what did it at the time.  On the way over he kept screaming and whimpering. The folks at the Estes Park Med Center were just wonderful-they got us in quickly and most gratefully, gave the boy some Versed.  This was fun as he kept asking what was wrong with his chin every 5 minutes. Because he couldn’t open his jaw, they did a CT of his face and found that he had a nondisplaced jaw  fracture. He ended up with eight stitches in his chin and a liquid diet.

Eight stitches!

Eight stitches!

The next morning, we bought a bunch of smoothies for him, gave him a couple ibuprofen and sent him back to day camp. I mean, he was walking around, clearly not feeling bad, and Eric and I had massages scheduled for our anniversary. The best part of this story is I ran his case by a maxillofacial surgeon at work who casually said something like, “Well, he’s 7 so it’s fine for now, but it could have damaged the growth plate. So when he starts going through puberty, watch and see if his face starts growing asymmetrically and then he might need a corrective procedure.” Fantastic.  So I’m going to start staring at his face obsessively when he turns about 11 or so and won’t stop for the next 10 years.

The last day we all went for a short hike before packing up and heading home.

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 The boy’s chin has healed up fine, as has his jaw after a few weeks of soft food.  One of saddest things was watching him use his lower teeth to scrape a carrot to eat, saying, “I just miss carrots so much.”

Overall, a great trip that I think we’ll do every year as far as we’re able! Without the ER trip this time, I hope.

More Chatter

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Another installment in “Tales…from Parenting….” (cue spooky music)

We were driving and the girl started to have a nosebleed.  This is not an uncommon occurence here as it is so unbelievably dry. The kids are both pretty used to it and she exclaimed “Mommy! I have a bloody nose!” I looked in the rearview mirror and indeed, there was blood dripping out of her nose.  I looked in the center console of the car for a tissue or napkin or fabric anything and couldn’t find anything.  Anything, that is…except a tampon.  Aaaaaand, yeah, I did.  It was one of those ones without an applicator.  I unwrapped the plastic covering and handed to her, telling her to stick that in her nose but not push too far. Given that it’s meant to soak up blood, the device worked quite well and the bleeding soon stopped. (Medical aside–this is really not all that different from the actual medical device used to stop serious nosebleeds, but those are generally a bit smaller. And come with more appropriate names like, “Rhino Rocket.”) Of course, the boy asked me what that thing was, and so I told him as simply as possible. “Oh, okay,” he said.  And the day proceeded.

Later, the same day…we’ve been listening to the “Lord of the Rings” trilogy audiobooks while we drive.  We’ve listened to “The Hobbit” (11 hours) and “The Fellowship of the Ring” (19 hours) and are now on “The Two Towers.”  (about 8 hours in)  The boy loves the stories (as do I, a longtime fan) and I’d always thought that the girl did too, though I’ve always thought her comprehension of the books was around fifty percent or so of what was actually happening. The other day we were heading home from the Art Museum and I started to put on the audiobook. I was really looking forward to it as we had just finished the Battle of Helm’s Deep and I wanted to hear what was going to happen next.  As the narrator started to speak, the girl exclaimed, “Not Lord of the Rings AGAIN!!!” I said, “Girl, I thought you liked listening to these books!” She replied, “Not anymore! They are boring, boring, boring!! All they do is walk and walk and then fight a battle and then walk some more!!” I burst out laughing-even I have to admit that that is the most succinct and accurate book review of the entire series that I’ve heard yet. (We still kept listening to the book anyway, despite the howling protests.)

We were in the pool and I was playing with the girl.  We started to sing “Ring Around the Rosy” and spin around.  “Ring around the rosy, pocket full of posy, ” I sang, “Ashes, Ash—” “NOOO! YOU CAN’T SING THAT PART!” The girl interrupted. “Um, why not?” I asked.  “Because,” she replied, matter-of-factly, “the Wanderers will come.  And they will kill us.” Now I was slightly terrified, in a children-of-the-corn sort of way, so I modified the song.  Now we sing “ring around the pool,” and instead of ashes it’s “elephants, elephants, we all fall down,” thus confunding the Wanderers away from our souls.

and lastly, just to throw a picture in there…

Beware the toothless vampire!!

Beware the toothless vampire!!

Manu from Heaven

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This is, hands down, my favorite knit so far

IMGP4527Pattern: Manu

Designer: Kate Davies

Yarn: Madelinetosh DK in Olivia, 6 skeins

I loved everything about this.  The pattern is so well written and comes in a bunch of sizes so it fits perfectly.  The only modifications I made were to mirror the pleats, which you can see clearly on the back detail photo, and I had to shorten the pockets by an inch because I very nearly ran out of yarn.  In the original pattern the pleats all go the same way around the neck, and I much prefer the look of the mirrored pleats. Here is where I am so grateful to the internet else I never would have been able to make it look like that! I loved the i-cord edging even though it took a while; it adds such a nice, finished look to the edges.

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This was the yarn I picked up in San Francisco after my long airport stay where I used up all the yarn I’d brought with me. Because the yarn is hand-dyed, there can be big variations between skeins, so they lay out all the skeins they have in a particular colorway so you can pick the ones that are most similar.  5 of them were almost identical, one was darker, so I used that one and alternated rows for the sleeves for a perfect blended look with no pooling.

Picking out buttons is always tough-I had a hard time deciding between the yellow shell or wooden buttons, but I thought that these echoed the overall feel of the sweater and brought out the lighter tones.

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Anyway, I love it and want one in another color!

Snow Mountain Ranch

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What a fabulous Memorial Day weekend we had.  My high school friend Geoff and his lovely wife Karen and their twins came out to visit and we went up to Snow Mountain Ranch for the weekend.

I love that place-if you live in Colorado and haven’t been, you are missing out.  Here’s the view from our cabin:

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ah, mountains!

Not too shabby, eh?

Later that afternoon some of us went for a hike.  There’s been a lot of snow and a lot of snowmelt so it was a bit muddy, and someone slipped and got a muddy butt, which didn’t bother our intrepid explorer one bit.

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just keep hiking, just keep hiking

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what’s in the water?

The next day we rented mountain bikes and tagalongs and went for a ride!

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badass mountain biker

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actually having fun

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mountain biking with a trailer, not for the faint of heart

It just couldn’t have been better. Nights were filled with good food, good drink, and a few rounds of Cards Against Humanity. I wish I could post some of the funnier game responses, but then this wouldn’t be a family blog, now, would it? The other thing that was great was that all the kids were old enough to explore on their own.  There were many hours where they would simply head off into the woods next to the cabin and create their own secret games and just play while the adults would relax in the cabin. If it sounds too idyllic to be true, well, I can’t help that.

The next morning we went for one last hike

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The whole crew

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Walking stick in hand

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Hiking children

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Running to catch up

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Careful apple slicing

And then the trail got super super muddy (as the girl would say) and some of the hikers took off their shoes to squelch through the mud.  One of the hikers simply squelched through with her shoes on.  I’ll let you guess which one that is.

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muddy paws

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barefoot snow survival

When the trail got snowy, the barefoot hiking came to a quick end and we headed back.  By this time I had started to recite the poem, “Mud, Mud, glorius mud! Nothing quite like it for cooling the blood! So follow me, follow me, down to the hollow, where we will wallow in glorious mud!” which is from a children’s book of poems we have at home.

The girl, of course, began to sing this over and over again and then began to take it quite literally.

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mud bath

Sadly, vacation was over after this.  Our friends had to head south and I had to head back to work a night shift at the hospital, which was even less fun than usual given what I’d just been doing.

I know I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again–there is something that is so wonderful about seeing your kids become friends with your old friends’ kids. It makes me feel hopeful and gives me a sense of generations and seeing the future being created now, and it’s good.

Chatterboxes, next up

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Another installment in the “kids say the darndest things” episodes of this blog.

So, the boy has a best friend at school, who I’ll call Jake.  I tried writing this with just the kid’s first initial but it ended up sounding vulgar, you figure out which letter it is. One day Jake’s mother tells me that Jake told her that when he grew up, he was going to marry my son and they were going to “live in a house, shaped like a cake, surrounded by a lot of mist.” That in itself was adorable, and then a few days later when I was talking with the boy, I said, “So, I hear that you and Jake are going to live together in a house shaped like a cake, surrounded by mist.” And he replied, with a sigh, “We just love mist so much.”

Recently I posted on Facebook that I’m teaching the girl that leggings are not pants, which was tested not long after. One morning, after getting dressed, she came to brush her teeth.  I noticed that she was wearing a tshirt with leggings only. “Girl, you’ll have to put a skirt on.  You’re only wearing leggings.”  She got very, very serious, and said, “Mom, I need to tell you something.” She sat down on the bathroom stool and had me sit down on the edge of the bathtub to make her point. “I’m a kid,” she continued, looking me straight in the eye, “And kids wear leggings as pants.” I raised my eyebrows and replied, “Not in this house they don’t!” and went off to find her a pair of actual pants. The boy, later hearing me tell this story to Eric, said offhandedly “That’s spooky.” “Huh?” I said, not really understanding, “what’s spooky about that?” “Well, it just means that she’s growing up,” he said sagely.

We were out of coffee one morning (quel horreur!) and I took the boy with me to walk to the corner coffeeshop to get some. As we walked, he looked up at me and asked, “Mom, can I ask you something?” “Sure,” I said.  “Well, who are robbers, usually? Are they people like us, are they homeless people, or are they really really rich people?”  (?!)

And finally, one day after a rather tough afternoon for the girl, and then a tough dinner where we were kind of yelling at her for misbehaving, she just lost it.  She burst into tears and sobbed out, “I’m just a little, little girl, and my life is SO HARD!!’

Backyard living

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We have a small little backyard that used to look like this:IMG_0096

Nondescript patch of grass, concrete walk from house to garage. Eric insisted last year that we take out the lawn and put in a patio instead, which I was initially very against. Where will the kids have lawn to play? I asked. I eventually relented, and I am ever so glad that I did.

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We ripped out the grass and had a paver patio installed.  I  (or, erm, the contracters) used two different colorways and mixed them together–Borgert Holland stone in North Shore and Autumn Blend.  It’s laid in a herringbone pattern and edged in a solid color charcoal stone. This took a lot of work and I am so happy with the results.

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Along the side are 3 aspen trees-typically you can’t plant aspens in a yard because they crop up everywhere and take over, but since we have stone and the neighbors do as well, it should be fine. I can’t wait for them to leaf out and start rustling in the breeze.

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Along the garage wall are shade friendly plants-hosta (generic, but they work and look good), columbine, begonia, forest grasses.

The sail shade  and furniture are from Costco and have been great.  It took a few doings to figure out the best way to hang the shade, and it now is just right.  The furniture is modular which is nice because we can shift it around as needed to take advantage of the shade and also for various entertaining needs.

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We’ve already been out here much, much more than we ever were last year. Still to come upgrades: restaining the fence, planting pots along the brick retaining wall behind the furniture, and an improved dining corner since it’s harder to eat while sitting on the couch than we thought it would be.

So I’ll say it here, in public, but JUST THIS ONCE.

Honey, you were right.

Alpaca Poop

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Catching up on blogging with some rapid sequence posting! It’s gardening season again! Last year I mentioned that I obtained alpaca poop from a cardiologist colleague who also happens to own and live on an alpaca farm. He is just one of the nicest people I know, to boot. This year I went back for more and brought the kids with me. IMG_1911 Just look at that face! On the farm they have alpaca, llama, and paco-vicuña, all used for their wool. They sell the fibers out of the farm and at various fiber festivals across the country.  Paco-vicuña in particular creates a lusciously soft fiber. The kids had fun getting to know the animals IMG_1917 Well, the girl did.  The boy, hilariously, was TERRIFIED of the curious but skittish creatures.  IMG_1910 That didn’t stop him from standing on the sidelines, shouting out instructions to the other kids and telling them the right way to interact with the animals, even though he rarely got within spitting distance of one again. IMG_1955 There’s the girl, helping to shovel some of the steaming pile of…poop. And once we got home, more shoveling. Thankfully I had some dedicated helpers. IMG_1963 IMG_1966 Pictured with the boy is one of his neighbor friends from down the street. He and his brother always run up and help us whenever there’s any gardening to be done, and are actually very good and helpful! Given that this post is a month old, most of the garden is done and planted at this point-will take pictures of that when it’s had a chance to grow a bit. Differences from last year so far–I’m not bothering with corn or any bell peppers.  I like the look of corn but it had too many creatures last year and not enough yield.  As for the bell peppers, I can’t get them to grow even remotely well.  I’m doing more beans this year and hoping to have some dried ones for winter, and I’m trying brussels sprouts for the first time. The boy also said he wanted his own plot so I’ve given him one of the boxes by the street-he thus far chose a broccoli plant, a green zebra tomato, a brussels sprout, and some flowers.  He’s responsible for the weeding and learning about the care of the plants, which will be a great summer project for him, I think.

Paper Marbling

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Not too far from our old house is a large building with the words, “Denver Bookbinding Company” on the side. I’d always wondered what they did exactly, and I noticed that there was smaller lettering that advertised classes.  As we drove by one day, I mentioned to Eric, “Hey, if you ever wanted to get me a present, you could buy me a class there.”

Next week, I get a certificate for a paper marbling class! Good husband.

I showed up a bit early to the class, which I was so glad I did.  It is SO COOL in there. They have so many unique, vintage bookbinding machines and presses.

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Big old book press

letters

letters

More cases of old letters. I just loved these

More cases of old letters. I just loved these

Old phone books, used for weights. I love how small the Seattle phone book is.

Old phone books, used for weights. I love how small the Seattle phone book is.

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Book stitching machine

The class itself was so fun. Paper marbling works like so:

You have a specially made bath and float pigments on topIMG_1848

Then, you swirl and comb them into cool patterns

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Then, you lay a piece of prepared paper onto the surface, and when you pull it up,

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You have this beautiful, gorgeous marbled paper!

Here’s a few others I made

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And my personal favorite

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There are so many actual patterns and techniques out there to get very specific marble designs, which take a lot of skill and talent to do. I also learned that it’s an international craft-with differences in European and Japanese designs, for example.

The class was great-I hope to take an actual bookbinding class there someday.  Maybe I can use one of these gorgeous papers for endpapers in a homemade journal-how pretty would that be?

Here’s what I ended up with at the end of the day-now I need to think of creative ways to use them!

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Cooookies!

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Seriously, these may be the most delicious cookies I’ve ever made here at altitude. I think the trick is the recipe calls for ground up oats as an addition, which gives them a nice density and prevents them from falling flat like every other cookie I’ve made here. Recipe is from “the joy of cooking:christmas cookies,” so I’m not sure i can share it here without violating some copyright, but a quick google search for “chocolate chip cookies cockaigne” reveals that plenty of others have no such problem.

Here’s a link-

http://yummyyummytomytummy.blogspot.com/2009/04/chocolate-chip-cookies-cockaigne.html?m=1

I didn’t use the milk chocolate since i didn’t have and had to make brown sugar from white sugar and molasses, but otherwise followed as directed. Let me know if you try these-they are unbelievable.