Glow-in-the-dark 3-D Putt Putt

Just what the doctor ordered on the rainy day after Christmas. Ya gotta love beach towns. :)

We might be growing out the bangs.

But it will all depend on whether or not they can keep the clips/barrettes/headbands in their hair all day at school. Evelyn had to go to the nurse the other day "because my bangs were in my eyes." I think we may be heading to the Hair Cuttery.

So much has happened in two weeks! Deep Creek...a girls'weekend away w/Jen in upstate NY visiting friends Mindy & Raleigh (they nicknamed me Rip Van Winkle because I slept until 10:15 two mornings in a row!) and lots of goings-on for work.

Tonight is Halloween! Evelyn will be a "Swooning Princess" and Amelia wants to be Snow White again so she can bite an apple and "die" on everyone's porch like last year. Seems there'll be no lack of drama tonight!

A few days away

We skeedaddled for three days to Ocean City this week. It was wonderful. We rented "The Little Cottage" again (our favorite trailer in a neighborhood on the Chesapeake Bay side of "the strip"), and made all sorts of brand new memories.

We drove up to DE and explored Cape Henlopen State Park on foot and on bikes, climbed WWII lookout towers, collected seashells, and ate ice cream in the quaint town of Lewes.

We rented a surrey bike on OC's boardwalk, ate Thrasher's Fries and Dumser's Ice Cream and played putt putt as a family for the first time. (Although I logged the day's only hole-in-one, I am wildly inconsistent on the golf course and did not even come close to beating Alan.)

We grocery shopped, cooked for ourselves, and made sure our one dinner out was at a place that had hush-puppies on the menu. A family has to have its priorities, you know.

Okay, tell us what you think!

Here is our Home Exchange listing--feel free to let us know what you think. So far...no hits. But I'm an eternal optimist!

(Update 3/16/11--we have a hit! However, I'm not sure we can afford to fly all of us to France in August...)

Trying to Travel on a Dime!

Our friends, Mindy & Raleigh, who live in beautiful, rural upstate NY in a huge, renovated farmhouse w/wrap-around porch, joined a Home Exchange website hoping to trade houses w/someone in the Portland area for as many weeks of the summer as possible. Lots of people do this kind of trade-houses-for-vacation idea and it got me and Alan excited--so we joined a Home Exchange website, too! There are people all over the world looking to vacation in other places while you vacation in THEIR place.

We still have to work on our website page, but here are a few pics we put up to advertise our very cool, pedestrian neighborhood and our nearly-100 year old house. Now...if only the lady in Versailles would want to come HERE! :)

We'll keep you posted, and I'll share the link to our house on the website when it's ready.

Junior Lutheran King Weekend

(That's what Evelyn called Dr. King--still chuckling over it.) Thanks to my parents, Shelley, and church friends Paul & Carol, Alan and I were able to visit Josh & Laura for the weekend. It was SO NICE. Taking the bus=no stress. Alan listened to music & I lost myself in "How Green Was My Valley"--and w/a couple backpacks we hit the NYC pavement. We walked The High Line, loved seeing the building Josh and Laura are rehabbing, loved visiting with them for hours, and I was in heaven finishing my book sitting in a coffee shop called "Fluffy's" as Alan was in Carnegie Hall with fellow pianist Aaron Parks listening to Keith Jarrett play his only North American solo concert in the foreseeable future. And someone mistook me for Tina Fey. :)

How to Have a Good Time in San Francisco

Take your parents. Or your in-laws. This gets the whole thing off to a really good start.

Don't give your enthusiastic five year old a glow-in-the-dark necklace on the plane. While you might THINK it would entertain her for hours, it will, in reality, burst within a few minutes and spray green, glowing, chemical goo all over the wall, seat, and window of the plane, not to mention all over your five year old.

Don't try to do it AGAIN in the rental van on the drive from Monterey back to San Fran, thinking that simply warning her not to "play too rough" with the glow-in-the-dark necklace will keep it from happening again. Oh, and be prepared for your husband's outrage that, just as he was giving all the good reasons NOT to let her play with it, it burst again. Now there is green, glowing, chemical goo all over your rental van. And five year old. Again.

Be amazed that your parents can play the Alphabet Name Game for two straight hours on that same road trip from Monterey (after your friend Amy, sitting sacrificially between your children in the "way back" has cleaned up the green, glowing, chemical goo and has fallen asleep with their heads in her lap.)

Eat at a Chinese restaurant. It's chopsticks only, and the wait staff speaks very halting English with very big smiles. Eat early and have the whole place to yourselves, and put all the food on one of those giant, lazy susans and let your kids spin it around.

Climb the glittering, mural-covered stairs (330-odd of them) just behind your rental house. They lead to a nearly 360-degree view of the city, and in the fog, the whole peak transforms into a glowing haze of giant, weeping, shadowed trees.

Take everyone to Golden Gate Park. Tour the Japanese Tea Garden, then let your kids play for hours on the curvy, cement slide at the playground where they also have a magnificent--and cheap--carousel.

Drink coffee and eat sourdough bread in a bakery under a huge banner that says, "Make Loaves, Not War."

Watch the sun set over the Pacific. Do this as much as possible, and as often as you can in the company of your parents, your husband, your children, and one of your closest friends who's flown down from Portland to spend the second half of the week with you.

Tour the Mission Delores, the first building in San Francisco. Tell your children what the kneeling bench at the altar is for, and then stifle both your giggles and your tears as they very naturally and spontaneously kneel and pray. Enjoy local church history with your parents, your husband, and your kids.

Ride on the top level of the double-decker bus and try really hard to enjoy it even though it's freezing, your kids are begging to go home, and you're trying not to think about the steep grades of the streets vs. this bus's brakes. Then retreat to the first level, where you, your mom, and your kids will enjoy the rest of the tour, stopping for an hour or so to play at another playground and eat sourdough rolls in the shapes of turtles.

Wear all your layers all the time. Quote Mark Twain a lot, who said, "The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco." It will be in the 50's during your whole visit.

Play the jukebox in your rental house and let your kids discover that their favorite songs are "Hound Dog" (Elvis) and "I Feel Good." (James Brown) Do not let them discover that too early in the trip, lest the rest of the visit have a very simple, repetitive sound track.

Hike Muir Woods. Sit on Muir Beach. Walk the trail along the ocean at Coyote Point State Park. Walk the trail along the ocean at Lands End. Walk the trail along the ocean at the Presidio. Smell the salt air, feel the wind on your face, be together with your family and your friend.

As you park that evening to go to a restaurant, prepare to avert your eyes. A local bike race happens to be using that same street. One of the riders will be naked. Oh, and avert the eyes of your children, because the rider will see them, and they will see him. He will laugh and yell, "Whoops! The kids got an education tonight!" Your four year old will look at you with a big, goofy grin and say, "Mommy! I saw his BEETIE BOTTOM!" And your friend Amy will add, dryly, "Do NOT borrow that guy's bike." Your parents will wonder how anyone would possibly want to ride a bike naked when it is that COLD.

Let your husband and your dad go to a baseball game. Let your husband play golf at Pebble Beach. (But do not--I repeat, do NOT find out how much it costs until AFTER you've had the most blissfully restful and relaxing day of the trip, lounging for hours with your parents, children, and Amy on a peaceful Monterey beach. Then be glad for him that he got to do something so once-in-a-lifetime.)

Cook meals in. You have a great rental house on a hillside and it's so fun to make dinner for each other and share around that long table.

Go to Alcatraz with your parents and Amy. Your husband will take the girls to Golden Gate Park while you go, and you can be immersed in the awesome audio tour, the ferry ride back and forth, and the pleasant hour together in the cafe chatting afterward.

Be thankful your husband is such a gifted and motivated trip planner and tour guide.

Be thankful that you can log all those stories--and more--into your personal memory bank. Oh, and journal about it, because if your personal memory bank is like mine, your memory retrieval system might fail you more often than not, and you'll want to have everything written in your passbook. :)

San Fran Withdrawal

We are totally missing THIS! We saw a lot & did a lot, all of it in the company of one another. What a great vacation. :)

Boardwalk, Beach, & Ice Cream

It doesn't get better than this. (More pics from our mini trip in June.) This year's trip was the best yet because we bought the ride-all-you-want bracelets, unlike last year.

Note the ride where the girls are in a car w/another girl. My kids are notorious for climbing into rides w/other children (when other children are hoping for rides TO THEMSELVES.) We weren't quick enough to catch them before they added themselves to the car of this full-of-attitude gal who spent the whole ride gesturing to her friend (alone in her own car) about her demise. My girls, as you can see, were too absorbed in the pure ecstasy of the moment to realize that their new friend wasn't crazy about having passengers.

I'm so glad they are, at this point, still living in a fairly self-conscious-free zone. :) Besides, it gave Alan and me an awfully good laugh.

Five hours (yes, five hours!) of riding boardwalk rides, followed by, the next day, six hours on the beach, followed by ice cream at Dumser's (Alan said he can't look at the name w/out thinking "Dumpster's"--I'd never noticed that before! It's always just been this iconic, Ocean City landmark place to knock back a couple of melting, sprinkle-coated cones!)

That's the way we like to spend our beach vacations.

A Coupla Days Downee Ocean, Hon

We love trips to the ocean. At this point there are only two things we feel the need to do: go to the boardwalk and play on the beach. And have races on the lawn outside the Princess Royale, where we splurged our yard sale earnings on one night--a two room suite and a dip in the hotel pool, but the girls still said they like "The Little Cottage" best. That's the trailer on the bay side we've rented three years in a row now, and the girls love the tradition.

We vacation on the cheap by cooking our own food, living up the freebies, and spending money on the things that are guaranteed winners (like the all-you-can-ride bracelets on the boardwalk. Totally worth it for our thrill-a-minute family!)

More pics will follow, but I'll start with these: the decapitated portrait Evelyn took of her parents, and her current I-hate-to-have-my-picture-taken attitude caught in, well, a picture.

The videos are evidence that Alan and I have a slight mean streak. Poor Amelia gets SO upset when she cannot win a race. So does Evelyn. You can see her trying to push me out of the way in one of them. But poor Amelia. Some lessons are hard learned--there's always someone faster!

Blurry Days

Just got back from three weeks at RVR. (What?!? It was only four days? Yikes. That helps explain my fatigue. Fit an awful lot into those weeks. I mean days.)

I WILL catch up here. I must. My sanity has become somewhat dependent upon it. Some of you may question whether I have any sanity at all, as I spent those days at RVR sleeping in a tent, and the last night was spent w/my kids in there, too. We did this last summer, but last summer was cooler and my tent was pitched in a breezy spot right next to a delightful, gurgling stream under a huge shade tree. Unfortunately, since that particular spot was under seven feet of water during last August's flash flood at RVR, we decided I should find myself another spot.

So I did. Barbara and Kevin are RVR staff & have a wonderfully secluded spot most folks would never find while visiting RVR. However, their property has nary a flat spot that is also shaded, so I picked the least sloping place I could find and went for it. This was decent when I was sleeping alone, but was like sleeping on a ship tossed on a stormy sea while sleeping w/two sweaty girls in their underwear. It was also ridiculously hot, so I whipped off the rainfly at about 10pm Sunday night to cool it off. This was nice, but when I saw lightening about 2 am, I decided I should probably put it back on. I'd almost forgotten what piece-meal sleep was like. You w/little babies are smiling and nodding.

One gets fairly dirty at RVR, and kids get downright filthy. And I forgot to bring shampoo. It was after midnight my second day (Saturday), that I was trying to wash my hair w/a bar of soap and wondering when I am going to learn to be a better planner. I need my own intern. I didn't even bother to bathe the kids when they were up there Sunday and Monday, just let them play in the stream.

Now I'm home. Feels great. I know I'll look forward to my upcoming weeks at RVR in a tent, but right now I'm looking forward to catching up on my rest, using shampoo, and sleeping completely horizontally.

And, for those who read the last post, I should mention that I actually own, listen to, and enjoy CDs by Nora Jones and Harry Connick, Jr. ;0

A Winter Retreat

Last month Alan planned a wonderful few days away for us at the Hillbrook Inn, a fabulous B&B in WV. Taking advantage of a January special, we enjoyed quiet times at our own fireplace, hiking around historic Harper's Ferry, and something truly special--uninterrupted hours of one another's company. Thank you to all whose hands & hearts held our girls while we enjoyed this wonderful time away!