Weekend at Opal Creek

More photos from the weekend.

Notes

Duchess is off to a week of overnight camp. We left her (dressed in a white blouse, knee-length shorts, white knees socks pulled up all the way, and hiking boots, holding a black cloak she was going to put on if the weather ever cools down) amongst a gaggle of other nerdy kids with their own cloaks. I expect she'll have an excellent time.

Cook, Skipper, and I spend the afternoon lounging. Skipper is enjoying being an only child, and we ate ice cream. Skipper insisted on getting the wading pool out.

That's not a real baby. 

I have not been taking photos with the camera lately (just as I have not been blogging), and I do not have the sort of phone that takes high-quality photos. Here is a phone photo of Duchess from a few weeks ago, about to say something witty to me.

No executive function

Last weekend, we went on a rafting adventure with extended family. The rafting trip was great fun, but I found myself, over and over, standing or sitting around doing absolutely nothing, often while other people swirled around me doing things. This is obviously partly because I'm just lazy, but it's also because I have no brain capacity available. My job is absorbing so much of my executive function right now (PLUS I have to exert the willpower to exercise every night) that I have nothing left at the end of the workday, and by the end of Friday, I'm a zombie. I have no initiative, and no ability to translate cues into action - I can follow specific, direct orders, but that's about it.

Which is why I haven't written any blog posts lately. However, I can reassure you that we are all well (even though one of us is a zombie). Summer has started, and is already shaping up to be the kind of scramble of activity that I suspect is typical of white overeducated upper-middle-class families with two working parents. The girls are wrapping up their first week of day camp, and Duchess is off to sleepaway camp next week. Between the prep for camp each day (snacks, lunch, change of clothes, sunscreen, etc), preparing for/cleaning up after camping trips on weekends, and extracurricular classes (kung fu! piano!), there's no time. But it's pretty fun, when I have a minute to think about it.

Rafting trip redux:

• Skipper learned to pee in a river.
• Duchess learned to help paddle a canoe.
• Cook learned how to row a raft.
• I ate jellybeans.
• We all had a lot of fun.

Things Duchess and I Say to Each Other Lately

Yesterday, hustling for the bus stop, Duchess freaked out because she thought she heard a bus coming, and started yelling frantically for Skipper to run. Skipper, predictably, completely freaked out, too, and I (tired, grumpy, and already irritated at Duchess, who had been a piss-ant all morning), said angrily "Shut up, Duchess. YOU KNOW NOTHING."

Tonight, at dinner, Duchess said, half amused, half-appalled,  "Mom, you're such a clown! My whole family is a clown car!"

Pioneers with technical backpacks

Not a lot to say right now. Everything is fine, but busy.

Duchess is off on an overnight fieldtrip - it's Oregon Trail-themed. I left her at school yesterday dressed like this. (She's using her brand-new enormous backpack that we just purchased for the backpacking camp she's attending later this summer. It has very little in it, but she wanted to try it out.)

Also, here is another photo of Duchess's haircut. 

Just punching my card today

• We're busy. 
• I just finished a big deadline at work, and am picking up all the other things I abandoned in order to get the big one done. That feels both pretty good and also scary, as many of those little things have become bigger things...
• The weather is gorgeous. 
• Yesterday Skipper started plucking at the strings of my very-neglected guitar, crouching beside it and listening intently to each note ring out and fade. "Mom, I'm listening to The Whole Sound!" she said. 
• Skipper has been enthusiastically playing a game she was given for her birthday, which is like Uno in that all her family members are willing to play it; it's a pleasant, not-too-taxing mix of luck and strategy.
• Duchess has nothing to show for hours spent working with her partner on an engineering-y science fair project, because neither of them are interested in taking the time to READ THE DIRECTIONS or to be at all careful in construction, so their constructions keep disintegrating. I'm happy to go with natural consequences here, but Cook pointed out that Duchess, due to her tendency to be satisfied with pretty much anything, never actually learns anything from natural consequences. That is why he is in the living room with her while she builds, monitoring her for slap-dash heedlessness, and I am in here, blogging.
• Last week Duchess and I had a terrible morning (Skipper and Cook usually leave about 20 minutes earlier than we do, because the girls' schools are on different schedules) in which she aggressively and irrationally blamed me for the disappearance of the raincoat which she wanted to bring in case of rain. I totally lost my temper. On the walk to school, she was trying to chat about something, and I told her "I'm having a really hard time just conversing with you right now, because I'm still feeling pretty mad about being yelled at and blamed for stuff that's not my fault. I need to finish being mad before I can be pleasant. Do you understand how I feel?" and she said (I'm paraphrasing, but this is pretty close) "Yeah. You were trying to get lots of stuff done and you were doing stuff for me, and you were stressed out and it makes you angry when I blame you for stuff that's not your fault. I can see why you're so mad. I'm sorry I did that." I was pretty staggered. Duchess's deep flexibility and willingness to see other perspectives, while sometimes worrisome (as when she sees the perspective that an extremely sloppily-executed science fair project is really no big deal), allows her (when she's in the mood) to be sincerely sensitive and generous in her relationships in a way that makes her sound like she's read a bunch of therapy books.
• However, I still don't know what she did with the raincoat. I suspect she lost it, which is why she so badly wanted it to be my fault...

All the stereotypes

There are moments of my life that feel like they easily could be snippets of Portlandia episodes. Yesterday, Skipper went to a birthday party at a rock-climbing gym. The party was for the Blond twins, who turned 7 last week, and I asked their mom for gift suggestions. She said that they would really like something for their terrariums. (Terrarii?) And here's the extra-Portlandia thing: I knew off the top of my head exactly where the closest terrarium store is, and it's within a ten-minute walk of our home.

I went to the party for a while, because Skipper was pretty worried about the whole rock-climbing thing, but I biked there while Skipper got a ride with the Blonds. On my ride there (on "neighborhood greenway" streets, through painted intersections), I saw two adults I know. One was riding a bike with part of another bike strapped to the back. The other one was riding a cargo bike with panniers full of groceries, with her two (adopted) kids riding their own bikes behind her.

I do love this place, as silly as it is.

Spring, last weekend

Thank you, lice!

Duchess got a haircut!

catching a breath

We have been busy.

My work life has continued to be very busy. My job has been extended through the end of the calendar year.

Duchess is now fully healed from the Broken Finger Episode, and is cramming in a bunch of makeup gymnastics classes before the end of the season in June. This is hectic. She is also taking a programming class on Saturdays, which is hectic. And she's started extra training sessions on weekends with her kung fu friends, preparing for their Big Test this summer. Hectic!

Last weekend was Skipper's birthday. She had invited six kids to her party on Sunday, and we heard back from three, and she only had one confirmed attendee. She decided she wanted to go ahead with the party, even with just one kid. On Saturday night, after the kids had gone to bed, I asked Cook to inspect my itchy head for lice. I had a louse. Our first lice! On Sunday morning, we started the bedding-washing and kid-delousing project, and it rapidly became clear that we were not going to be able to get ready for the looming week, bake and frost a birthday cake, lay out a scavenger hunt, host guests, delouse* everybody AND still remain sane, so we cancelled the birthday party. I called the parent of the one confirmed attendee, and emailed the parents of the non-RSVP-ers  as I didn't have numbers for them. One of the non-RSVPers subsequently showed up for the party (which was confusing and hilarious and mortifying in equal measures - they knocked on the door, and Skipper, Duchess, and Cook, who were playing Uno in the living room between combings, all scattered in terror and surprise).

It all worked out okay. We seem to be louse-free, and my head no longer itches.***  And ALL six kids are coming to the rescheduled party this weekend, so it probably actually worked out for the best.

Skipper's birthday? I think it was pretty good. She got presents she liked, she ate her weight in sushi for dinner, and then she ate chocolate cake frosted with whipped cream and garnished with raspberries. Her favorite present seems to be Uno, a last-minute inspiration of Cook's. She feels old.

That's all. Hectic! Old!

*Manual delousing, using a spiffy anti-nit comb, a lot of conditioner and the magic of television.
** Skipper appears to have been the vector, which makes sense - I've heard from other parents that her class is particularly lousy. Cook was clean, and Duchess and I both had very small infestations.
*** The internet told me that the itch is the result of an allergic reaction to lice saliva. That made me feel much itchier.