growth

Skipper has grown four inches this year. (Imagine how much she'd have grown if she ate vegetables!) She's no longer small for her age, and with her new haircut, her sardonic perspective, and her facility with words, she doesn't really come across as child-like a lot of the time.

A few things that have happened:

Skipper and a friend attended the Scandinavian midsummer festival with me. 

School ended. Duchess graduated from middle school.

We dog-sat again. (And napping happened. There are a lot of nice things about caring for a dog who is old and willing to nap a lot.)

We said goodby to Duchess, who's off at rowing camp for a month. (A MONTH OF ROWING.) I'm not sure she'll notice we're not around. 

And we went, at last, to Great Wolf Lodge, a place Skipper has been nagging us for years to visit. Because it is a hotel - with a waterpark inside it - next to a freeway, Cook and I weren't exactly eager to fulfill her dream. But this summer, we badgered the Rockstars into joining us there, and made the thing happen. And it was pretty fun. It was certainly different than our normal weekends. Here are photos of us all making silly faces. And we accidentally ate lunch on the way home in a good Mexican restaurant in Centralia. (They have a bunch of grumpy signs posted about how they DO NOT SERVE CHIPS, and then they give you a free bowl of pickled carrots to snack on instead. It's really good.)

Cape Disappointment

We kicked off the summer with two nights at a yurt at Cape Disappointment.

We drove across the bridge from Astoria, found our yurt, and walked on the beach for a bit. There was a dead whale on the beach, which I was too sad to approach. (Duchess was interested and took a lot of close-up photos, which I am not sharing with you.)

On Saturday, Cook and Duchess went on a fairly epic trail run to the North Head light house (Duchess is half-heartedly attempting to keep in shape for a month-long rowing camp that starts in two weeks), in amusingly matchy outfits.

We walked up to a Lewis and Clark museum and then to Cape Disappointment Lighthouse. Cook gave Skipper her last ever shoulder ride. It didn't last very long; she's very large now.

We played Pandemic in the yurt, hiding out from the marauding raccoons. (They were living under the yurt, and periodically gnawed loudly on the underside of the flooring.)

 We made s'mores. Skipper enjoyed scootering around the campground and also communicating by walkie-talkie.*

Driving home, we stopped in Clatskanie to pee and throw the baseball around at a city park.




































And now we're home, gearing up for the kids' last full week of school and my first week at my new job...

* Sample communication: "Bobcat to Flamingo. Have you pooped yet? Over."

We went to a regatta.

Crew parents tend to be heavily involved. There are a lot of kids* on Duchess's team, and the regattas involve a lot of events and last all day for multiple days, and everybody needs to be fed and organized, and the parents do a lot of that. And they go to regattas, even the ones in Canada or California. We do not. So this weekend, when Duchess had a regatta locally, we attended one day. A short day. And we left early, and Duchess got a ride back to the boathouse with a friend. But we were there! We ALL got up at 5am, even Skipper, who was fairly pissed off about the whole thing, and schlepped to the lake.


















Duchess had two races back to back,which meant that she had to row out to the start, race 2 kilometers, row back to the beach, wait while four girls got out and four other girls got in, and then row right back out to the start.

A better parent than me was out in a launch, and so we have these photos.

Race #1

Race #2

Race #2, at the end... look at that face.

Actually, look at all their faces. As far as I understand, the ENTIRE POINT of this sport is to fill your WHOLE BODY with lactic acid and then row really hard for five more minutes. The appeal of this is lost on me. I will go the long way round to avoid lactic acid. However, the combination of intense physical effort, teamwork, AND spending the whole day messing around with your teammates is apparently compelling for Duchess. So there are more regattas in our future.



*A hundred? Five hundred? I don't know. They feel like an army of giants.