Jess and Michael's Window

I just had to share this.  Evan got these tub crayons for Christmas and the first few times I showed him what to do, he didn’t really get it.  But this time he did!  And so here is his artistic debut in the world…  WOO HOO!!  I am so proud! (wiping away a little tear)    I even made Mike come up the stairs to see him coloring for the first time… I don’t think he was nearly as excited as he should’ve been.  Pppbbbbtttt!

Wow!  It is a good thing that today had a happy ending or Mike and I would really be in trouble.  We kept glancing at each other the whole first 3/4 of the day with looks that said “Please don’t let this be an omen for the year to come!”  It started out all right…at midnight we toasted the new year with wine glasses full of milk (neither of us had a taste for alcohol after our date night earlier in the week) and even managed to get our camera setup for a picture in time for the countdown.  Then we had a good night’s sleep, which is always a blessing with Evan around.

But by morning the poop monster was rearing its ugly head.

Now, if you are a parent, you know exactly what I’m talking about without reading further.  But if you are not, I will explain as non-offensively as possible.  When you have a kid, sometimes your entire day can be about poop.  Especially, if the poop fairy is not good to your baby.  You may think that not having a poop is great, “woo hoo no poopy diaper to change!”  Right? Au contraire.  No, instead of the poop fairy…we got the monster.  The one your baby tries to defeat with many a grunt and strain, till the vein on his head pops out and his little face is contorted and red.  Just to spite all, the poop monster might allow a small token (aka diaper rash grenade) to be released every 10 minutes or so.  No poopy diapers, my own butt.  Try changing one every 10 minutes for hours, and dealing with an extremely cranky and sore-bottomed baby in between.  So that is what poor Evan was dealing with this morning.  Thankfully, the poop fairy finally came around 2pm, resulting in a near miss with the bathtub and a change of clothes, but a VERY happy family!! YAY!  (Is Evan going to kill me when he’s older for writing about this stuff?)

Anyway, that was just the major source of our trouble today.  We also had the following happen:  multiple spilled food containers, a mommy-meltdown resulting from too long of an exposure to a house that looks like Mt. Vesuvius threw up in it, (1/2/10 – I forgot to mention Evan peeing on the carpet, Daddy and his changing mat and clothes), getting lost on the way to our hiking spot, not having cash to pay the parking fee, not having correct change to pay the parking fee, two trips from the trail-head to the gas station to get said money.  We knew our luck was finally turning around for the day when a guy in the parking lot who wasn’t paying attention finally heard Mike blaring the horn at him for 30 seconds and he didn’t hit us after coming within millimeters of doing so.  I LOUDLY declared that to be the end of our bad day, and it was.

The rest of the day went wonderfully.  We went for a hike along the river, over some wetlands, up into the woods and back again…making some great discoveries for future tadpole/frog hunting expeditions.  Evan spent most of the time riding in his backpack chattering away at all the new sights and sounds with his usual 100 variations on the word “Da-da.”  At the end, we took him out of the pack to hike a bit on his own, which meant toddling up to a log and patting it, sitting down in the dirt and almost eating a rock, and examining a spikey gum ball Mommy found.  The whole time we were out (about 1 1/2 hours), he didn’t complain once!  Not even about his little hands being turned into little blocks of ice by the windchill!  This kid is going to be an outdoorsman for sure (yay!).  I was just so glad the poop fairy came so he could enjoy his first New Year’s Day hike!

So now, here I am, doing what I wanted to do today!  We satisfied my New Year’s Day hiking tradition and now I’m writing.  A success in the end, thankfully.

So 2009…

Awesomes:

• Survived Evan’s first year and I threw a mean Cookie Monster party to celebrate!
• Evan survived his first year and celebrated elbow deep in blue icing and chocolate cake!
• Discovered a new side of myself as Mommy
• Discovered Mike’s new side as Daddy
• Loved (almost) every minute of it
• Got to take many wonderful trips:  Marco Island, D.C., NYC and Catalina Island!
• Got to show Mike the huge part of my life that was working for CIMI, playing on the ocean and diving the kelp forest
• FINALLY achieved my goal of getting something I created up for sale
• Made my first sale (it was my mom, does that count?)

Yucks (grateful only to have two major ones):

• Had to find a new home for Kite.  The bright side is that her foster mom is so in love with her that they may end up keeping her and she is definitely getting the toddler-free love and attention she deserves (and requires!) now.  In fact, she’s even got her own blog about her quest for a new home… here it is:  Kite’s Blog
• Didn’t sell our house this year.  But thankful we don’t have to move…it would just be nice if we did.

Hoping for in 2010:

• Another great year of watching Evan grow
• Continue to move forward with my Etsy store:  Maker of the House
• Dare I have a goal of making $500 in sales?  That would be motivating…it wouldn’t have to be profit.  Hmmm.
• Sell the house and move!
• Develop superhuman abilities for keeping the house clean and organized while entertaining Evan in both fun and educational ways and still have time to work on projects that result in scores of sales, and work out (hey it’s called “hoping for” not “will happen” right?)

Hi everyone!  Guess where I am writing this?  We are driving home after a visit with Mike’s family in Kentucky and I have the computer tethered into Mike’s cell phone!  Isn’t that neat?  I’m such a dork I know…but I just thought it was cool that my techie hubby knows how to do that stuff so I can be entertained on the long drive home.  Is it my reward for having to sit in the back and entertain a cranky toddler for the second half of the trip?  Probably.  Anyway, it is totally guilt free computer time… what else could I be doing but sit and be bored?

So I have some time to write!  Ah, New Year’s Eve… I LOVE NEW YEAR’S.  What is it about this two day holiday going from the old year to the new that is just SO completely and utterly satisfying?  It must have something to do with the fact that you could’ve had a totally rotten year and suddenly you have a chance to start over fresh… OR you could’ve had the best year ever, and here is your chance to reflect on it, celebrate it, and start over fresh again.  It just makes me so happy no matter what.

I have spent many a New Year’s Day relishing the bliss of a fresh new year.  For a while now, it has been my personal tradition to spend the day exploring a new place, usually hiking, and reflecting on the past year and looking forward to the new.  I usually spend a chunk of time writing my thoughts down in some way as well for the record.  That part of the tradition has lapsed for me in the past few years, but as you can see, I’m getting back into it through this blog.

Right now this tradition is morphing a little in the presence of my new family.  I want to include Mike and Evan in this tradition now…it is no longer just about me.  Last year we had a newborn so we couldn’t go hiking…looking forward to getting back to that this year.  We’re planning on staying close and exploring the Chattahoochee National Recreation Area, which for me has been sitting unexplored under our noses ever since I moved to ATL.  I am so excited…I just hope it doesn’t rain!

Well, I will write some more tomorrow after we’ve taken our hike and probably after Evan is tucked in for the night.

As for tonight, Mike and I will be spending it at home, relaxing!  Finally, all our holiday visiting is over!  Lots of fun, but so busy!  We already celebrated New Year’s on our own anyway.  This past Tuesday I spent my first night away from Evan in 21 months (if you count pregnancy ) and boy was I ready for it!!  Mike’s mom and dad kept him overnight for us while we spent the night in downtown Lexington.  We had a great dinner out, met some of Mike’s highschool friends after for drinks and then took off on our own to shoot some pool.  Playing pool with Mike is so fun, even if he almost always beats me, because we are always making up our own rules for slop and accusing each other of cheating.  It was a great time and the next morning we wanted it to last longer.  Mike promised it will not be another whole year before we get to do that again… and I don’t think it will be because Mike’s mom and dad volunteered to stay with Evan for a whole week this summer!! SWEET!  I’m just writing this down now, for the record, as proof.

Happy New Year everybody, I hope you are all celebrating your own special traditions and enjoying every moment!!

I did not expect to be up at the same time this year as I was last year…right around 5:50am!  That was when Evan finally decided to join us in the outside world (after 32 hours of trying to stay in!).  This year I am up b/c Evan had a fever last night and so Mommy is on high-alert status.  He made a very small sound at 5:30am on the monitor, which is behind a closed door with the volume turned up only slightly higher than normal, and b/c of my high-alert status…I’m insta-up.  That’s ok…I thought it was kind of neat to lay in bed as the time ticked closer to the actual moment I became a Mommy and Evan changed our world forever.  That is such a cliche thing to say I know, but is there really any other way to describe what happens when you go from your regular everyday self you’ve known your whole life to this new person?  Sides of me came out in those first few weeks of Evan’s life I never knew existed.  It is such a crazy time.  I have two friends going through that time right now and reminding me just how emotional it can be.

Reflecting on this year (wondering if this will now become my new New Year’s Day…until the next one comes along)… it has been both warp-speed fast and agonizingly slow.  Every age of Evan, like any baby, has had both its challenges and its sheer joys.  I’ve never been so happy and in love with my family and so exhaustingly tired at the same time.  If Evan slept well at night, which he still doesn’t, I think he would probably be too perfect.  I think all babies have to come with some challenges just so you can learn what true, unconditional love really is.  I think they also come with challenges so you finally realize just how much of a pain you were at multiple points in your life so you can finally thank your parents properly… thank you mom and dad!!

Evan, despite his sleep issues, is an easy baby.  So easy, that the next one is probably going to sleep like a rock and be a complete terror.  Let’s hope not, but it seems to work out that way sometimes.   Anyway, I have had so much fun watching Evan’s little personality emerge.  I remember being caught completely off guard one day when he was only a few weeks old.  He had just had a bath and I was drying him off, when he looked up at me with this little glint in his eye and just grinned from ear to ear.  And I don’t care what anyone says about how old they are supposed to be the first time they smile…this was a REAL smile, meant just for me, and that was the beginning of our happy go lucky little guy!  By two months he was cheesing for the camera and I have a ridiculous number of photos to prove it!  By the way, I know all of you already know we have a ludicrous number of pictures to prove every moment of the past year, and I will take the time now to publicly apologize for our blatant new-parent photo-taking and sharing mania.  I’m sorry!!  Just ignore us if we get too annoying.  I will have to say though that I think all of my friends babies are just as adorable and I always look at every single picture they take with delight, so maybe it’s just a mommy thing and I’m only annoying my single and dual-income-no-kids friends.

But getting back to Mr. Social… I know I am lucky because yours-truly, Mommy Social, would not have survived the first year of SAHM-ness without being able to drag him all over the place to meet new friends and participate in all manner of activities.  But I don’t think “drag” is really the right word.  The older Evan gets, the more apparent it becomes, that the more days we have to stay at home by ourselves, the crabbier we both get.  So many babies thrive on routine, but for Evan, variety is elixir of life.  This in itself can be a challenge for me as I constantly need to come up with different things for him to eat and do to avoid the crankies…but given the alternative, and my own personality and need for creativity, I am extremely grateful.

Evan the baby is leaving us for Evan the toddler.  Just writing that sentence creates all kinds of emotion in me…happy, sad, proud, amazed.  I love you Evan!  Happy Birthday!

BTW, in case you missed it and are interested, here’s a link to E’s birth story!

I never in my life planned on being one of those people that got rid of the dog after the baby was born.  In fact, before I had a kid, I looked upon those people with such distaste…never wanting to hear what I thought were lame excuses.  Except in cases of extreme aggression, I could just never stomach why anyone could dream of packing off their pup as soon as the baby was born.  And yet, here I am, facing the fact that Kite will never again be as happy in our house with us as she was before Evan came and turned her life upside down.  We have to find her a new home and I’ve been an emotional wreck ever since I came to this conclusion.

I adopted Kite in Oregon as a retired racer who never really raced when she was just two years old.  I was dying to have a dog after I moved there in 2003 and found Kite before I even found a place to live.  But I have to admit she was an impulse on my part and if I’d done my research I may have chosen a different breed other than a greyhound.  I didn’t have a clue what I was getting into and the entire first year I had her I thought it was a huge mistake.  She was a mess.  She was afraid of everything from other dogs to slippery floors to woolybear caterpillars (though it was kind of funny to watch an 80lb dog walk a 20ft circle around one to avoid it) and even was aggressive, growling at me and my friends whenever we approached her on the ground.  But all my new greyhound friends (who’s dogs were so friendly and outgoing) told me to hang in there, that their dogs were the same way at first, and she would come around.

So I did (hang in there) and she did (become my best friend).  My constant companion, I took this dog everywhere I went (even to work while in Oregon… she hung out in the car and played with us on our lunch breaks).  She was even amazing off leash, which is not common for greyhounds, and went hiking with me all over the place.  But, she never got over some of her greyhound-isms and one of those things is her timidity around children.  In my heart, I feared this day would come early on, but I just hoped that she could get used to her own kid when the time came.

After nearly seven years of being my orbiting satellite, that time has come.  Kite has gotten better with kids and seems to know that it is our job to protect her from them so that she doesn’t do the job, but I just know I can never completely trust her.  She growled at Evan once and I put the fear of God (aka me) into her when it happened, but that was before he got mobile and I have no idea what she’d do if he ever pounced on her.  My guess is that she would just jump up and scream her drama-queen scream and at the most, Evan would be tossed across the room and perhaps have the bejeezus scared out of him.  But I don’t know for sure.

So ever since he’s been on the move, we have had to keep them separated, which means for her that I, her God, her planet, her one true love, is always behind a fence.  As a result, she has quickly turned into the most depressed and mopey animal I have ever seen that hasn’t been physically abused.  For her, this is emotional abuse.  She just doesn’t understand why, now that this little person is living in our house, she can’t be with us anymore and she has grown so despondent that she doesn’t always get up to greet us when we come home.  How heartbreaking is that?

Kite is, and will always be, my first baby.  If ever there was a dog to be the perfect training wheel for a kid, she’s it.  I had to deal with pee, poop and vomit all over the car, all over the house, everywhere.  She has sleep incontinence, food intolerances and irrational neuroses, kind of like a toddler, right?  I didn’t care, I loved her, and before Evan, I had all the time in the world to deal with her problems.  But I’ve noticed changes in myself lately.  And these changes are so contradictory to everything I ever thought I was that it makes me sick to my stomach.  Here I am, the ultimate animal lover… or so I thought.  Having a baby has brought out a side of me I never knew was there… the side that puts people first and animals second… that once treated the dog as the baby, but now treats her as the dog.  The side that made me hate the owners in Lady and the Tramp when I was a kid now has sympathy for them.  I can’t believe the guilt I feel over this change, I really, truly hate it.  It is a constant plague.

But what can I do?  The older Evan gets, the more patience I need to save for him and the less I have for Kite.  Poor Kite, who has never been yelled at (except for any signs of aggression) has suddenly found her Mommy to have the shortest of fuses.  I even slapped her on the butt one time when she wouldn’t listen to me, which I know caused her huge emotional pain (greyhounds are extremely sensitive to physical abuse and cannot tolerate it… even a harsh word causes many to cower).  After this incidence, I knew something had to change.  It occurred to me that the way things are, are the way things will be for the rest of Kite’s life.  If we are lucky with our family, we will have a toddler in the house for the next 6 or 7 years maybe.  Is it really fair to subject Kite to that kind of life when she can’t understand why it has to be that way?  I decided it’s not.  She deserves better than that.

And what about us?  Is it fair to Evan to have such an enticing animal in the house that he is not allowed to play with?  To grow up learning that dogs are something to be feared, or that they are fragile and sensitive creatures?  How do I explain to him that it’s fine to wrestle with his nana and papaw’s dog but not his own? Is it fair to us to have to constantly protect them from each other and worry about it all the time?

If Kite were more outwardly aggressive, of course this would be a ton easier.  If she were more predictable, more like a dog and less like a cat, it would be a ton easier.  In fact, Tuna, our cat, is more like the tolerant dog Evan needs than Kite!  I just feel so horrible.  I made a promise to Kite and myself when I got her, that no matter what I would be her forever home.  Breaking this promise is really hard.  I am really sad and I wish it could be different.  I’m trying to tell myself, that is life.  You cry about it, then you make the best choice you can and hopefully everyone is happier in the end.

So what happens to Kite?  Well, I’ve contacted the local greyhound club and without hesitation or judgement (in fact they did their best to convince me I’m doing the right thing), they’ve agreed to place Kite in a foster home until she finds a new home.  I worry that no one will want to adopt such and old dog and all her attached problems, but they tell me they have great luck with special needs dogs.  Anyway she will not have to go to a kennel, and more than likely there will be other greyhounds to play with.  She will love that.  They tell me she will not mourn me like I think she will.  I hope that is true. 

We won’t be getting any more dogs until everyone in this house is out of diapers.  Tuna is a good enough dog for Evan till then.  Thanks for listening and I apologize to all those who came before me for my secret (or outwardly expressed) bad voodoo vibes.  I now understand the pain you went through.  And thank you to my dear husband for listening to me blubber in all hours of the night and for letting me come to this conclusion on my own… he never once suggested that the answer to all of our pain and frustration was to “get rid” of Kite (though I’m sure he must’ve though it).

I haven’t posted here in so long!  Didn’t even do a post on New York (except for captioning photos posted on facebook… does that count?).  But guess what?!  Yesterday was my birthday and Mike got me one of those teeney internet notebooks with our reward points from our credit card!! Sweet! Free laptop!  I can no longer say that reward points don’t count, I guess you really can get good stuff with them!  Anyway, now that I have one, I can utilize some of Evan’s independent playtime to write!  Which is great because I really need Evan’s naptime for doing household stuff and want evening down time to hang out with Mike or work on my projects!  We have one small room in our house that is really babyproofed so I can watch Evan easily and write at the same time.  Woo hoo!  Right now he is eating cheerios and clobbering his wobbly penguin toy.  We’ll see how long it takes before he wonders what I’m up to and comes to check this thing out.  I know I’ll have to be careful not to let him see the screen.  Lol.  I also know that this is probably a short-lived treat since it won’t be long before he starts climbing up on the couch.  For now though it’ll be great!

So what has Evan been up to?  Evan is 10 1/2 months, 21 some odd pounds, has four teeth with two more on the way and is a total comedian.  He is such a little social butterfly taking such delight in other people and kids.  Whenever we go anywhere, the more people the better, he’s in heaven.  And if there’s music to boot, watch out!  Do we have a superstar in the making?  Cool.  He can support us when we’re older!   My most recent amazement is with his new mimicking skills… show him how to put the man in the car, and he’s on it.  Show him how to roll the ball down the slide, put the shape in the box, whatever he always tries to do it.  He’s starting to copy faces and sounds we make too.  He can say “Dad” with a heavy emphasis on the last “d” so it sounds like “Da-DUH.”  He has lots of conversations with himself using only variations of this word.  We think he knows it also means Dad.  He says “Muh-muh-muh” too on occasion, usually when he’s upset.  His favorite toy is his laugh and learn kitchen which he plays with everyday…especially changing the channels on the radio.  Other favorites are a 99cent pinwheel and balls of all shapes and sizes (anything that rolls really).  He dribbles rolling objects around the room many times a day (soccer star p’haps?).

So what have I been up to?  My latest project, which has really been about 6 years in the making, has finally been started!  As a birthday present to myself, I opened an etsy.com store to sell my artwork and homemade crafts!  YAY!!  I am so excited about this… it has been a dream forever, and I’m hoping I can build it up slowly so that by the time Evan starts school, I can work from home.  Right now I only have one item for sale, but it’s a start right!  More to come soon.  Here’s the store website:  Maker of the House Creations. I also started another blog to match the store for moms… mainly geared for stay-at-home-moms, but other moms may find it useful as well.  I started it as a place to keep track of what I’ve learned about being a SAHM, housekeeping, crafting and raising kiddos.  Mostly stuff that Home Ec taught our moms, but that we are having to learn on the fly!  I’m keeping it a little more businessy and this one more personal, for friends and family.  Let me know what you think!  Here is that site:  Maker of the House.

What has Mike been up to?  How about being a great husband to start with.  I’ll take this opp to publicly thank him for helping me get my business blog and store up and running and backing me up with “you can do its!”  He is just great.  I am so lucky.  I’m also so in love with the fact that he loves to cook!  Lately, he’s gotten re-interested in trying out new recipes on the weekend and usually ends up making two or three things that last us through several lunches and dinners during the week.  Gina gave him a cookbook that he loves and I wouldn’t be surprised if he goes through it cover to cover eventually.  He’s also asked for COOKING CLASSES for Xmas!! Ok, so how AWESOME is that for ME??!  Yes, I don’t know how I got so lucky.  He’s also a great Dad, and I’m sick of Evan going around saying “Da-duh, Da-DUH, DA-duh” ALL day.   sigh.

That about sums it up for us right now.  I’ll try to write shorter posts, more often now.  We’ll see how it goes.  Thanks for reading!

My how the time flies.  I can’t believe that Evan is 10 months old.  We had planned on taking him to a pumpkin patch today but he has a cold.  Jess and I didn’t want to keep him outside in the cold weather all day so we’re staying at home where it is nice and warm and Evan can recover.  Here is a quick video of Evan’s crawling and walking progress.  He’s figured out how to crawl up stairs and is taking assisted baby steps.  Hope you enjoy.

So much to post about these days.  So Evan is almost 9 months old already…wait a second?! Has he been out longer than he’s been in?? Ah this weekend he will officially be out-o-belly for longer than in-o-belly!  A huge milestone Yay!  Let’s see, he about 20.5 lbs these days, weight gain starting to slow down now that he’s mobile.  Today he finally got the hang of chewing and ate some puffs and some bread without spazzing out (that is also a huge accomplishment for us).  Lately he’s really been into music and has this adorable, severely off-beat white boy bob that he does whenever he hears something remotely sounding like he should dance to it.  It is one of those things he does that gives me a cute-attack every time!

We started our Musikgarten class at the Mable House last Friday.  I can tell it is going to be so fun.  To my surprise all the babies are about the same age, 6-11 months.  We already know two of them.  All boys and one girl…I think about 8 in all.  For the first class we learned some new songs and games and got to play with our new sticks, shaker and scarf.  All the babies were loving it, and then afterward everyone just let them roam around for a while.  Everyone was especially interested in the full length floor-level mirror.

Tomorrow I get to start my sewing class – woo hoo – the end of my creativity dry spell is near!

Well, Mike finally got to see the little piece of my heart I left on Catalina Island – my favorite place in the whole world.  If I was evil and named Voldemort, it would definitely be one of my horcruxes.  So not only did Mike get to see this fantastic setting for just about every story I ever tell, we also got to do just about everything that we really really wanted to do (but didn’t get our hopes up for due to Mr.E)!  Well, everything except take a helicopter ride! Man I want to do that so BAAAAD.   We’ll just have to keep going back until it happens and I won’t complain about that   OH OH and I FINALLY saw a BLUE WHALE!! At least that’s what my friend Kara said it was, and she’s a whale biologist, so I believer her   He/she was a little blue whale and as cute as a whale’s back and flukes can be zooming by on the ferry!  So here’s how the trip went:

Long Beach – 3 nights.  Was supposed to hang with Kat (longtime college buddy) but her leaking car couldn’t limp the trip so we were on our own.  She owes us a trip to Atlanta now .  Took Mike and E to the Yard House where the Tole Mour tallship crew used to take me on occasion, and is also well visited by aquarium folk.  I wasn’t too excited about it, but then I realized that’s b/c when I used to go there I was poor and uninterested in beer.  Now that I’ve lived in Oregon, home of many delicious microbrews, I can officially call myself not only a beer lover but a severely stuck up beer snob.  The Yard House had BLACK BUTTE PORTER!!! yum.  Also key to loving the YH is being able to afford something that costs more than $5 to eat.  Working at a kid’s camp does leave one destitute in some ways (but not in others I might add).  As a special treat, when we left the YH, we saw that the Tole Mour had returned to dock and my dear friend Captain Snark was calling out orders to his new crew.  I was sad to learn that he wasn’t able to go to the reunion since he was (no surprise here) working.  Sounds like he’s working too hard   That is one dedicated guy.  If there are any single ocean loving sailor girls out there…this guy is your dream man.  I hope he can find a way to eventually squeeze a significant other into his life next to all of his largest tallship on the west coast captaining and teaching of thousands of kids the art of sailing and loving the ocean.  Big hugs Snark.

The Disaster – The night before going to the island we hung out with Craig and Czul at Czul’s parent’s house in Redondo.  As is often the case while traveling with young children, parental distraction was high, and instead of going to dinner we went to the emergency room with E’s first boo boo.  I only call it that, b/c that is what it miraculously ended up being… at the time it was total disaster and everyone in our family cried hard and felt awful.  Dear friends that they are, C-squared accompanied us to the hospital for moral support.  Evan was playing on the exam room table by the time the doc got in and he took one look in our direction and declared us worse off.  Thank you thank you Neptune, baby Jesus, Mother Earth, Odin, Life Force (insert your god or power of choice here).  Now he’s doing fine, not even a scar… though we are still recovering from some heckling at camp and threats to call child services.

Toyon CIMI reunion – Was wonderful to see many old friends but also frustrating to be tied down at times with Evan, who sorely needed adequate napping time and an early bedtime (and was refusing to sleep by himself in the portable bed we brought).  So though I got to see my friends, I had really no time to visit with them much b/c when we weren’t taking care of Evan, we were doing stuff.  For those of you unfamiliar with Toyon, here’s a link, with a good picture of camp.

Diving – Mike and I both got to trade off boat diving, he went to “the crane” and experienced the kelp forest for the first time (and declared it as cool as I described) and I got to go to Ship Rock, an incredible dive on the west end of the island.  Mike also got to do a night dive with Craig and play with an octopus for the first time!  We even got to dive together in the bay (saw a giant pipe fish!) because one alumna’s mom offered to babysit for us!  I was shocked that someone would be willing to give up their short time to take care of a stranger’s baby, but she was so eager…her daughter said it made her weekend!  She was so sweet and we found her dancing with Evan on the dive deck upon our return from the water.

Hiking – On our last day I took Mike and Evan on the canyon loop, a hike out and back from Toyon.  I was really chomping at the bit to see any evidence of the big fire of 2007.   Much to my joy, the island has recovered quite well!  Even the endangered ironwoods were growing back!  As a special treat we got to see quite a few bison, which I almost never saw on that hike the hundreds of times I did it with kids when I worked there.  The biggest surprise was the giant metal grid erected across the base of the canyon to prevent flash flood damage from debris coming down after big storms.  The residents in camp were joking about starting a new Jurassic Park back there; it really did look like it was keeping dinosaurs out (oh the fun I would have had with that one and the elementary schoolers….kids will believe anything you tell them – can’t you see me rubbing my hands together…heh heh).  Anywho…to all of you guys that went, it was soooo good to see you even if we didn’t get to hang/chat/catch up as much as I would’ve liked!  A big ginormous thank you to Buttercup, Sasha, Mish and all the other planners…it was wonderful…thanks so much.  And also a huge thank you to Katie and Dave for driving us to Avalon and meeting us for dinner at Mr. Ning’s!  Wish there was more time Oh and please someone tell MJ thanks for taking the divers out on the Disco!  What a treat!!

Avalon -  We spent two days in town and I felt weird being a tourist and not an islander.  We found a great little hotel off the beaten path, the El Terrado Terrace, if anyone ever wants to stay there, great rooms, great service, close to the main drag, but not a great view from the balcony (someone’s dirty yard filled with cat food cans??).  It was comparatively cheap since we got a buy one night, get one half-off deal.  Our main goal for town was diving the dive park at the Casino which we got to do twice!  I found a babysitter through the community church and she took care of Evan while we spent the afternoon exploring the park.  I even saw some stuff I’d never seen before.  The highlights:  the Jacques Cousteau plaque, lots of eels, shrimp hiding in a cave, sheep head sparring, feeding an abalone that yanked a piece of kelp right out of my hand, a giant kelp fish harassing the senorita fish to be cleaned, and of course tons of Garibaldi.

It was a great trip, but by the end of the week we were definitely ready to be home.  A month of rocking Evan to sleep with bad ears put us at a disadvantage with him sleeping well for the trip and half-way through he was in bed with us demanding his pacifier every five minutes.  Needless to say he was driving us nuts, so when we got home he was in for a shock.  It was to the crib (aka baby jail) for him.  Poor guy, he was all into having us cater to his every little whimper all night long for a week   Not so much anymore champ!  Now we just have to survive our short trip to New York to visit Mike while he’s there for the UN.  Very excited for that, since I have never seen that part of the country!  Will post on that next week!

I’ve been trying to capture these images for a while.  Finally got the chance!  I’ve already bombarded facebook with Evan recently, so I thought I’d make these special to our blog.  Wanted to go to a festival today, but it’s stormy…so just playin’ around.