Ah, Christmas On The North Coast

Four years ago, when we moved to Crescent City in the fall (for the first time), we stayed here for Christmas and spent Christmas day on the beach. Darcy still had curls (I miss them!!) and she played with a stick on the beach:



So today we made it into a tradition: Every time we move to Crescent City in the fall, we're going to spend Christmas day on the beach and take a picture of Darcy with a driftwood stick:

Yes, it was warm enough to be barefoot on the beach. I didn't even bother to bring shoes at all. She's taller, her hair is straighter, but she is still our beach-loving girl. With an afternoon visit with friends, she got her feet in both the Pacific AND the Smith River for Christmas. Life is pretty darn good.

Merry Christmas to all, and I hope you are making great family traditions, too.

An Old-Fashioned Fourth of July!

I'm not sure why, but it bugs Michael that Crescent City's independence celebrations are always billed as "old fashioned". Maybe he thinks that bounce houses and portable climbing walls weren't part of early 20th century Independence Days. He's probably right, but they no doubt had their equivalent.


Old fashioned or not, we had a great Fourth of July. Darcy and a couple of her troop mates marched in the Girl Scout contingent -- I was very proud of them all. They may be young, new scouts, but they kept up with the float in front of us over the whole course of the parade!

It was a smallish GS group that marched, but they got lots of cheers and the girls loved seeing their friends in the parade crowd. And what a crowd! Block after block of people five or six deep. The main viewing stretch is about eight or ten blocks, with another five or six blocks with fewer spectators. We were in the first third of the parade, so Darcy got to watch a fair bit of the parade, too. Then it was off to sample the afternoon fun.


Darcy hit the bounce houses before lunch and then waited -- reasonably patiently -- on line for quite a while to get to climb the wall:

She got to climb twice and did a good job! There was more fun in the park before we headed home, stopped by our neighbor's party, and then attempted some rest so we could make it to the fireworks with some remaining energy. We needn't have worried. Darcy still managed to run circles around everyone and every thing. Michael turned around for a minute and turned back to discover her at the other end of the beach watching "the pelican show", seven pelicans repeatedly diving for some kind of dinner. We set up right by the Pastels in the Park, part of the old-fashioned Fourth. They had been walked on a bit by this time of night, but still beautiful. This was my favorite:

The fireworks were wonderful, as always. Crescent City really does them well. It doesn't hurt that there are private fireworks shows (legal and illegal) all around you for an hour leading up the the real thing. Some of the illegal shows rival lesser municipal shows. Not ours, of course, because it goes on forever and includes many different kinds of fireworks. I suspect the whole thing is an environmental nightmare, but it is at least a beautiful one. Hard to get good photos of them, of course, so I'll leave you instead with a picture of our girl dancing around someone's sand castle while waiting for fireworks to begin:

A New Year Begins

We have been very fortunate in the past year, despite some blips here and there, and we ended the year with the great fortune to spend the night with good friends in an absolutely beautiful spot. Our friends who own the beautiful Requa Inn brought us all together in a wonderful house further up Requa Hill. It is rented out to guests as a sort-of extension of the Inn. The views are unbelievable. We saw only a glimpse of the splendor last night, as we drove to Klamath while the sun was setting, giving us only a little light to see the view as we unloaded the car.

All of the children involved tend to be early risers, but they had had so much fun and stayed up so late before falling asleep on a strata of blankets laid on the floor of the (empty) master bedroom walk-in closet, that they slept in a bit later than usual. Our child was the first to rise and stay risen, climbing into our bed just before 6:30. We had turned out our light around 1:30, so this felt too early. As it turns out, it was worth it. We got to witness the full glory of the sunrise, viewed in one direction up the Klamath River and eventually, in the other direction where the Klamath meets the Pacific. Here's a poor copy of the real deal -- the colors in the reflection on the window are closer to reality:

 I'll provide a better photo of the mouth, not quite seen here next to the house, with the white line of surf crashing on the spit, another time. Now I need to wake up my sleeping beauty who fell asleep sitting up on the couch because she was Just Too Tired. Michael is busy felling trees with two of his fellow rangers. Hopefully, the all end the day completely intact, with loads of firewood for everyone.

Happy New Year to you all. I hope the beginning of your year was as magical as ours. I have a hard time beating this location as a place to wake up and start a new year -- I'm not sure how we'll face the end of 2012.

Happy Mother's Day Weekend!

In honor of Mother's Day, here's the earliest picture I have of me and my mom, Kathy. And in honor of the great weekend I had with the small beast who brings me mother-status, I'll add some pictures of Darcy at play in Fort Humboldt.

Fort Humboldt is in Eureka and was the site of, you guessed it, a fort! Not-yet President Grant served as quartermaster, which gives it an extra claim to fame. For the second year in a row, Michael spent three days at the fort playing "town ball", an old-timey version of baseball. It requires you to hit a player with the ball to get them out. Michael got Darcy out a couple times.


The surgeon gave a demonstration of field medical techniques.

Surprise! They wanted a very small patient to carry around in the stretcher and Darcy was perfectly happy to play the part. For long after they put her down.

Ah, town ball! Two batters, one pitcher, and a very short pitching distance. Maybe not always, but that's how our girl plays it -- and she got a hit! You can just barely see the ball coming off the bat.

Darcy played in the grass and rolled down hills after her last round of town ball while we were waiting for Michael to change back into modern clothes. She was a very happy and smile-filled girl.

Snow! But No Snow.

Poor Darcy! Colds linger forever here on the North Coast and just as she had two days of virtually no coughs after a MONTH of endless coughing...she's sick again. Feverish and just all around sad. The worst part is that her preschool is having a carpooled trip to a snow park tomorrow and she was so excited about going to play in snow with her small friends. It's not going to happen.

But lucky Darcy did get to play with snow on our drive home from Christmas visiting. We stopped at an overlook and she and Michael threw snowballs at me. They had fun, I stayed warm, and we all get the memories caught on film.

Darcy was very, very proud of the snowball sliding off my window.

And I managed to catch Michael right at the impact!

I'm Thankful For...

...the sweetest rainbow girl in the world...

...my dear husband who did yardwork all morning...

...and the view from my kitchen window. Redwoods, ferns, and sunshine!

Happy Thanksgiving Eve!

So I'm starting to figure out a cooking schedule for tomorrow. We're having a grain-meat roast (I love their sausages, so I'm very excited to try the roast), stuffing, creamed spinach, salad, roasted potatoes, and cran sauce. Darcy came home from preschool today and announced that she had pumpkin pie for snack and loved it and wants one for dessert tomorrow. So now I'll be making a pumpkin pie -- my first, because I don't love it. I had planned to make a lovely cranberry/apple crisp with organic, local cranberries I bought at the Arcata Market and apples from our tree. I might still make that. It depends.

Oh, and I have a loaf of no-knead bread rising now.

What are YOU making or eating? Comments?

Beach And Lighthouse

Christmas Day dawned sun-shiney! We walked on a pedestrian/bike path downtown and ended up on this stretch of beach at low tide. Darcy had to be carried part way on the trail, but once we got to the beach, she miraculously found more energy and ran around like a maniac.

We wrote and drew pictures in the sand with sticks and Darcy enjoyed playing with them.

While our stretch of beach was still sunny, there was a fog bank working its way toward us. It caught up with us before we got back to the car and it was chilly-brrrrrr.

Since we got here, we've been meaning to go out to the lighthouse. It is still operational and lives on an island that is accessible by causeway at low tide. The problem has been getting the perfect combination of a day with decent weather with a low tide that is not at five in the morning or during Darcy's nap, etc. But there it was! Low tide. We were within sight of the lighthouse. The weather was deteriorating, but manageable. So off we went.

It's a very nice island and a very nice lighthouse. During the summer, they give tours, but we just enjoyed the outside and all the decorations that the keepers had put up. All in all, a very nice way to spend Christmas morning.

In Search Of The Wonder Stump

When we drive north to Oregon, we cross over a road called Wonder Stump Road and ever since the first time we noticed it, we of course wondered just what the Wonder Stump(s) is (are).

Our local paper has a column once a week that consists of short reprinted articles from past papers. Shortly after we got here, it included a story about the origin of the Wonder Stumps. I told Michael about it, because we'd discussed this question already, but he had heard something different at work. We kept meaning to go in search of the Wonder Stump/s, but hadn't.

Christmas Eve day was sunny and pretty nice, so we decided to begin our search. Michael found an article from the Daily Triplicate's sister paper, the Curry Pilot, about a reporter, new to the area, who went searching for the Wonder Stump without success. It contained more information and seemed to clear up the question of whether there is more than one. It also included an old photo and vague location, so we thought we'd be able to find it.

As it turns out, we couldn't. It didn't matter, though, because we had a beautiful drive through second growth forest on Wonder Stump Road and saw gorgeous old-growth stumps left from logging a hundred or more years ago. In particular, we found this cluster of burned (very tall) stumps. I spied them from the road and they are unbelievably massive and beautiful.

Michael in front of the fire cave at the base of one stump, in the "front".

Michael and Darcy in another fire cave in the "back".

Michael and Darcy, again for scale, because it's hard to appreciate how massive these things are even when you're standing in front of them.

Looking up from the base of one of the stumps. It's hard to tell if these were logged or burned as living trees (as described in the first article), but redwoods don't burn easily. They just seem like very tall "stumps" for logging.

We're hoping to find the Wonder Stump one day. In the meantime, there are some historic and modern photographs of it here (you'll have to scroll down to the part about the "Del Norte Wonder Stump) and here.

Bootcorn

We had another movie night last weekend. It was very successful and Darcy got a little slap-happy at the end. She loves to wear my rain boots, which look just great on her. After wearing them for a while, she took them off and tried to stack them in a tower. When one of them almost fell into the remnants in the popcorn bowl, she then made it her mission to stack them in just the right place so the top one would land in the bowl. She succeeded after a few tries and christened the resulting product "bootcorn" while giggling uncontrollably.

She didn't do much giggling when we went to meet Santa yesterday afternoon. She was perfectly willing to get on his lap, but completely unwilling to look in his direction. I had talked to her about meeting Santa Claus a week or so ago and said that he'd ask her what she wanted for Christmas. She told me she'd ask for candy. Sure enough, Santa asked her and she said, "I'd like candy." He pointed out that he was going to give her a candy cane right then and there, and wasn't there a toy she'd like? Nope. Candy. If we were willing to indulge such a wish, this would be the easiest Christmas ever.

Ah! Christmas And Nostalgia!

So Darcy has been all about Christmas recently. Not because of all the Christmas decorations popping up, but because we borrowed Olivia Helps With Christmas from the library again and this time, she recognized that Christmas is coming (she saw the fat goose). I had to create a countdown on our calendar so she could visualize how many days until Christmas and I could stop explaining that Santa was not coming tonight.

Whenever we see Christmas decorations or Christmas stuff in stores now, she says, "I see Olivia things!" At the Family Resource Center last week, one of the employees was doing some decorating and had an extra string of lights lying on the floor. Darcy picked them up, wrapped them around herself, and said, "Look! I'm helping with Christmas! Mooommmmmyyyy!" Because that's what Olivia does. You know.

I've recently been trying to record the classic Christmas specials along with the Christmas versions of her favorite shows (I missed a Sesame Street Christmas today -- too bad). So tonight, we recreated one of my childhood memories. We watched two Christmas specials while eating popcorn, hot cocoa, peanut butter toast, and sliced apples. The fire (well, pellet stove) was roaring, we laid down a quilt, and we all had fun.

In my childhood version, my sister and I were watching The Wonderful World of Disney and we were required to be in PJs before the watching and eating started. In Darcy's version, she was naked from the time she got up from her nap until the time she got ready for bed. Why? I have no idea, but she was very, very insistent. It turns out that Darcy is also the world's biggest popcorn fan and on the second pot I popped, Michael and I were done with it and she sat on the quilt on the couch, naked, with a big mixing bowl of popcorn resting on her lap. That child had a distended belly by the end of Rudolph.

But she had a great time and so did we, so it's all good.

"I Don't Want The Candy To Go Away!!"

Despite being alive through three Halloweens now, this was Darcy's first real experience with all that goes with Halloween. Her first one was spent in King Salmon and we sort of trick-or-treated to two of our neighbors. Last year, we were in Cima and we did take her into Las Vegas to a Halloween event, but she didn't actually go trick-or-treating and, of course, nobody came to us to trick-or-treat. She's been very excited about the whole concept and was thrilled when the first trick-or-treaters knocked on our door while she was still getting into her costume. She helped put candy in their bags and then was even more motivated about finishing getting dressed herself.

Darcy inspects our candy stash before going trick-or-treating.

A couple months ago, she had decided she wanted to be a box kite for Halloween. It's the Wright Brothers' influence, of course, because they made (and sold) box kites when they were kids and some of their first model gliders were nothing but oversized box kites. She has cloth boxes for toy organization and she's fond of putting one over her head, running around, and yelling, "I'm a box kite! I'm a box kite!" But as the great day grew closer, she announced that she wanted to be a bat. Still not entirely sure why, but she was firm in her choice and so she was a bat. She also firmly decided that I was not to make bat ears for her, but that she would wear a headband with a bat on it. And so she did.

That was pretty much ok with me. I had already had my costume-making adventures with the wings. I'm not much of a seamstress. I like the idea of being a good seamstress. I have hopes of being a seamstress. But the sad reality is that I have owned a very nice sewing machine for five or six years now (a Christmas gift at my request) and yesterday when I took it out of its box (which I've done before), it still had it's test bobbin and test-sewing strip in it. Just sad. But I managed to thread it, change the bobbin, and sew the wings. I figure that puts me well on the way to master seamstress status, right?

So off went our little bat for some early-evening trick-or-treating with Michael/Orv/Daddy while I stayed home to give out the early rounds of the TEN POUNDS of candy we gave away last night. We had been warned that we'd get lots of kids and it was true. I had the best parental intentions of getting Darcy well-snacked before she left, but she was chomping at the bit, so no snack. We paid for that when they got back with a bag full of treats and a bat full of the hunger-grouchies. While I scrambled to get dinner finished and in her belly, she cried about giving out candy to the trick-or-treaters. At one point, she sobbed in the hallway near the kitchen, saying, "I don't want the candy to go away!" A big plateful of mac and cheese (with our local award-winning aged jack in the mix of cheeses) later and all that was forgotten. I took her out for another short round of trick-or-treating, stopping the first time she asked to ride rather than walk.

When we got home, we gave her a bowl for her candy and she was content for a very long time to just move the candy from bag to bowl to other bowl back to bag in an endless loop. Just like at Easter, the candy is just as much a toy to her as something to eat. She was whining for her candy this morning and stopped when Michael took the more securely packaged and unbreakable candies from hiding and put them in her basket. She added some of her wooden cookies to the mix and then made her dinosaurs play the role of trick-or-treaters.

All in all, a very successful Halloween!

Easter!

We'll call this Darcy's first Easter, being that she was too young to appreciate it for the past two springs. The Easter Bunny visited with this "basket" of goodies. The first leg of the hunt started with a clue:

Good Easter, Darcy Jo
A hunting you will go
To find your Easter haul
Look next at your Earth Ball
-- Easter Bunny

Michael/Daddy helped with the reading of the clues. Darcy's already figured this one out and is looking toward the bookshelf for the next object of interest.

Night Rabbits! What other book would an Easter Bunny want to read?

Ok -- I know where the Easter treasure is!

Found it!

Darcy did well with her clues and really, really enjoys the end result. She has a variety of bug and Easter shaped chocolates, which she's been treating just like any other toy she has. She ate one Easter egg, which was dark chocolate with caramel filling. I think it's safe to say that she liked it. A lot. We're going to attempt to color eggs when Michael comes home from work. It was just a little crazy to try to do it this morning. Darcy had a rough night of sleep and made up for it by sleeping in. We woke her up to have Easter breakfast and find her basket with Michael. She's usually cranky when woken up, but when we mentioned French toast and "bacon" for breakfast, she smiled a little and said, "I love those". And got up.

Happy Easter, everyone!

Obama's Day of Service: Toddler-Style

President-Elect Obama, as most of you no doubt know, called for a day of service today, and Darcy and I answered the call! Friends of ours through our Meetup group announced that they were going to help clean up some dunes near the Las Vegas airport, so we decided to join them. Darcy and Freyja helped a lot -- by carrying small trash bags for a hundred feet or so and losing most of the small pieces of trash they put in them. Good work, toddlers! The rest of the time, they played in the sand or, in Darcy's case, followed dogs.

After all that work, they were tuckered out, so they took a well-earned rest in the shade of a creosote bush. It was a pretty warm day and due to an exploding juice box that left a sticky lake in my backpack, we weren't carrying water with us.

Their rest was interupted by the arrival of these three dogs -- the same dogs Darcy had been following earlier in the adventure. Darcy wanted to pet them and invite licks, but Freyja wasn't quite so sure. Along with our two big and two small bags of trash, the group collected a few truck-loads! As we left, the organizer of the clean-up told us that they're in the process of turning that little dunes area into a nature reserve/center, so this was a good first step.

While the turnout (over twenty people came out to just this one of several service projects in Las Vegas) was encouraging, we also saw signs of the bad economy. We left a pile of "trash" that was pretty clearly someone's home, complete with a blowup mattress and cooler. We refrained from collecting the empty bottles and such that were scattered under the same thorn bush to avoid an invasion of what little privacy someone living in a park has. I can't imagine that Las Vegas is a very friendly place to be homeless. Probably the soon-to-be-nature-center would have preferred that we remove that, but it didn't feel in keeping with the spirit of Obama's inauguration or Dr. King's holiday.

Day Six In Baker

The insanity of Christmas carols at the Gordon celebration.

I got clever and called our house in Cima this morning. I got the answering machine: power is, indeed, restored. With any luck, it came on in time to save the fish. We haven't heard anything about our water, so I'm guessing the part did not arrive yesterday. Now that it's the weekend, I suspect we are sojourning in Baker at least until Monday, more likely Tuesday. Huzzah!

At Play!

One alteration was made in the plans for my parents' house once there were two grandchildren in the picture. The unfinished storage room upstairs was made a little smaller to accommodate a play area (later to be a sleeping loft for little girls' sleepovers). The play area was a hit. Here are Darcy and Liana in tutus with everything collected on the table.

Here they are playing with my cousin Gideon's daughters, Tamara and Aviva. Liana and Tamara were taking full advantage of the costuming props.

And another crew of children during the Gordon family Christmas/Hannukah celebration. From left to right, we have Daven, Dabiela, Darcy, Lilith, and Jordan. It was a loud celebration.

More Water Woes and Christmas Baking

So we are once more in Baker, camped out in our old house while another water issue is solved. This one is not actually AT our house, but at the source of our water, several miles away. We're unclear about the exact nature of the problem, and know only that it requires a part that is supposed to arrive tomorrow. With any luck, it will arrive very early in the day, be installed without problem, and there will be no need for elaborate testing of waters before we are allowed to go home. In the meantime, we have extremely minimal furniture in our giant former house. The upside is that it leaves me with few things to do during Darcy sleep periods, so I can go through more Christmas pictures without feeling guilty about not doing laundry or dishes or meal prep and without the temptation of television in the evenings.

One of the activities Darcy talked about before we went to NY was "painting" cookies. I had tried to explain Christmas cookie decorating to her and it left her with an excitement for painting and eating cookies. Here we are cutting the first round of cookies. Darcy's participation was minimal. Mostly, she watched. Until she got bored with watching and went to play with her trains again.

But the painting! She was so excited about doing it. She just couldn't wait. Again, until the time actually came. Then she painted the somewhat green crimped circle at the bottom right corner of the platter and stopped. That was it. Eating cookies turns out to be what she's really good at. Luckily, she can't reach very high, so her cookie consumption was able to be closely monitored. I suspect that next year will see more participation in cookie creation.

In the meantime, there's not much Darcy likes more than looking at books or being read to. Here, the cousins take advantage of the landing for a light morning read.

A Taste Of New York Christmas

We took well over 400 photos during our week in NY, so there are lots of pictures to document what was a very fun trip for all. It takes time to crop and resize and select and such, so y'all (I recently have been converted to y'all as a gender-neutral pronoun) will have to be patient. Here's a small sampling of the fun.

There was snow when we arrived, but it was actually raining on the drive home from the airport, so that snow wasn't very fun. But then we got more! Enough for some sledding, which Darcy enjoyed, as you might be able to see. The quality isn't great, but the expression is perfect.


The whole week was the Darcy-and-Liana show from morning to night. They had a lot of fun together and amused the rest of us in the process. Darcy took to standing at this corner, leaning into the dining/living room shouting, "LIANA! LIANA!" Here, they are showing off the matching Christmas dresses Grandma made them. Their footwear was not coordinated, but the hand-holding added a little extra something.