Late Afternoon at Ocean Beach

When we're on the coast, any coast, we HAVE to go to the beach. I don't care if it's foggy, I don't care if it's windy, I don't care if it's almost dark, I don't care if the section of beach just north of us has been closed off because of a massive sewage spill--we HAVE to go there.

I know it doesn't make total sense; I grew up in Arkansas, so I should be finding my greatest pleasure on the river, or in the mountains, or driving out to the countryside, and I do enjoy those places, but not as much as I love the beach.

So on our last day in California, after a long afternoon at the Children's Creativity Museum and the perfect playground on the rooftop of Yerba Buena, Matt's parents drove us across the city and straight into the fog so that we could visit Ocean Beach:

The kids had their usual fabulous time, running around like maniacs, soaking themselves in freezing water, grubbing like the wild little critters that they are, as seemingly happy playing to the tune fog horns in this low visibility as they were two months ago in the bright sunlight and the pleasant water of Florida:

And the next day, we flew home!

Let Your Girl Shoot a Gun

On the day after Thanksgiving, there is a selection of activities from which the 45 or so Thanksgiving guests of Matt's Aunt Mabel can choose:

1. Sydney chose to go shopping with her Grandma Janie and a bunch of people.
2. A bunch of other people went golfing.
3. Matt, Willow and I chose the obviously best activity, however--a trip to the firing range with a third bunch of people.

I did plenty of shooting as a high school kid back in Arkansas, and I'd forgotten how much I love it. In JROTC, however, we only shot air rifles. But Cousin Jim and Uncle Lynn, whose hobby is shooting, own a wide variety of weapons, and they were very generous and let us try out all of them. The other guys who were there seemed to prefer the big guns, the kinds with laser sights and kicks that whomp your shoulder when you shoot. I liked those a lot, too, of course, but for me, nothing beats the familiarity of a .22--it's light, has no kick, sports a simple sight, and is plenty effective for the types of shooting that I like to do. I had a fabulous time getting acquainted with this particular lovely rifle:

Matt tried out all of the weapons, too, and I tried to sway him in favor of my favorite, but in the end, he fell hard for the pistol:

The biggest surprise by far, however, was Willow. Poor Will, it turns out, although she HAS shot rifles before, has never, of course, been to such an overwhelming place as a firing range before. It turned out that she didn't really so much want to go to a firing range this time, either, but just chose it as preferable to shopping or golf.

I don't know what she was imagining the firing range would be like, but as we waited our turn, and as her cousin Jim gave all the kids a lecture on safety, and as we tried the heavy ear protection on her, she steadily began working herself up into such a fit of nerves that, by the time it was actually our turn on the firing range, she was in tears. 

Since Matt had never had a chance to be in a firing range before, and I have, I took Willow back out to the car to sit and wait for the rest of the guys, but I was VERY upset, and I'm afraid that I let her know it. It's a selfish personal peeve of mine that I take the kids to all kinds of places that I find incredibly boring, but whenever I want them to come with me to something that I really, really want to do, they often find a way to throw a fit and ruin my fun.

So selfish of me, I know, I know. And on our walk back to the car, I gave Will a selfish lecture about it, about how the firing range was perfectly safe, and a huge amount of fun, and I'd been looking forward to it so much, but now instead we were going to go sit in the car and read quietly to ourselves for two hours while everybody else had fun. 

To be fair to myself, I did ask Will several times, in several ways, if she could vocalize what was upsetting her, but who knows if she even understood, herself, what was upsetting her about the firing range, much less knew how to put it into words for me. Poor kid.

Also to my small credit, it took me about ten seconds in the car to realize what a huge asshole I'd just acted like, to my own kid, even. So I apologized, lied and said it was fine to hang out in the car, and comforted myself with the thought that Matt would certainly come and switch off with me at some point. 

I'd barely managed to finish apologizing and lying and not sounding like an asshole this time, when Willow piped back up and said that she wanted to go back in. So now I REALLY felt like an asshole, and pumped up my enthusiasm for just how totally okay it is! To sit in the car instead of going to the firing range! But Will, perhaps having renewed her courage in the quiet space, hopefully not having been cowed by what a jerk I am, but probably having realized that she didn't have two hours of reading material there in the backseat of the car with her, insisted.

So back in we went.

And to my brave girl's HUGE credit, she had an awesome time:

There's no better children's shooting instructor in the world than Willow's Uncle Lynn, and he talked quietly to her, patiently instructed her, and, completely giving up any shooting himself, gave her and the other two girls who'd come all the time in the world:

With Uncle Lynn assisting Willow, I got my selfish shooting time that I'd privileged over my kid's happiness, and Matt got his shooting time, and Willow got her shooting time, too:
And guess what?

She LOVED it!!!

Look at my kid with her very first bullseye!

 I knew she would, which is, honestly, partially why I'd been so frustrated with her. Shooting is precise, encourages focused concentration, involves some pretty awesome equipment, and can be clearly, easily, and immediately evaluated. It's individual, with your main concern being your own improved performance. It's basically everything that Willow would like, including the cool shell casings that you can collect and sit on the floor playing with when it's not your turn to shoot:

Will pocketed a ton of these, by the way, even finding the bucket where they're thrown at the end of a session and pulling out some other casings that made Jim, later, look at them and say, "Whoah! What was THIS from?!?". Flying home with them was monumentally stressful for me.

Willow spent most of her time on the rifle, including a super bolt-action one that reminded me so much of my JROTC days as a kid, but after watching me and Matt take turns shooting Uncle Lynn's pistol, she requested a turn for herself, and Uncle Lynn gamely complied:

It ended up, thank goodness, being a terrific morning, and Will ended up, thank goodness, having a wonderful time. She's such a great kid in that, even when she's protested something and thrown a fit about it and everything, when she finally submits to doing it and discovers that it is, in fact, just as great as I'd been telling her it would be, she doesn't have an attitude about it, or pretend to still hate it just because she doesn't want to be wrong. She still hates it when I attempt to gently remind her that this is why it's good to try new things even if you don't want to, but she still admits to genuinely liking what she's come to like.

And when I suggested that when we finally get our dream house with five or so acres surrounding it, we should totally buy a rifle of our own and set up a target range with a bunch of hay bales, she agreed that that was a very fine idea, indeed.

At the Tech Museum

What do you do on the busiest cooking day of the year?

Yeah, we left my mother-in-law chained to the oven and escaped to the Tech Museum.

Free with our ASTC Passport reciprocal membership to the Wonderlab, the Tech Museum was a huge hit for three of us and a dismal bust for the fourth of us. Poor Syd didn't WANT to explore math and hard science using interactive technology; Syd wanted to go a hands-on children's museum like we usually do!

And is Sydney a good sport when she doesn't get what she wants, but instead has to play along with what everyone else wants to do?

No, she's not!

Mind you, I could also go on and on about cross-country jet lag, that bugaboo that causes children to wake at 3:00 am Pacific Time; to need to eat when they wake, when everyone else is eating breakfast, an hour after breakfast when it's lunch time on the east coast, when everyone else is eating lunch, and then again at 3 pm; to be utterly exhausted by 5:00 pm Pacific Time but to want to stay up until midnight on east coast time; and then to wake at 3:00 am Pacific Time the next day. Cross-country jet lag does not improve the behavior, stamina, or attitude of children.

To make a long story short, I perp-walked Sydney out of the Tech Museum perhaps an hour after we'd arrived, followed by Matt and poor blameless Willow, who actually was a pretty good sport about being required to leave a museum she'd just gotten to, was enjoying quite a lot, and was behaving herself at.

We went back to Matt's parents' house, where the day passed by with several more off-hours meals, a visit to the park, and some quiet family time. Then, later that afternoon, Matt and I did something that happens to all of us so, SO rarely:

We left Sydney behind with her grandparents, and we took Willow, sans sister, back to the Tech Museum:

designing and testing a submersible

The Tech Museum has some of the same types of exhibits as other hands-on science museums that we've visited, as well as a lot of really special stuff, of course, but the unique thing about the Tech Museum, the thing that blows it WAY out of the water compared to every other hands-on science museum of my experience, is this thingy that they call the "tech tag." It's your ticket stub with a bar code on it, and when an exhibit in the museum has a bar code scanner, you can scan your code and later, at home, log into a free account and see digital passport stamps, or high-speed film containing the time frame that you visited the exhibit, or photos of you actually at the exhibit. You may have been in an earthquake simulator before, for instance, but now I have a photo of our family taken while we were in the simulator! I have a family portrait taken with a 360-degree panoramic camera, and I have a thermal family portrait:

How cool is that?!? Welcome to my new online avatar:

Of course, there were tons of fabulous and unique exhibits here. Many of them were so special that you have to see video of them to believe it. This is Google Earth, seen through a 180-degree surround screen:


This is a simulator of an astronaut's MMU, used during EVAs:

 There's a video camera that records your face for several seconds, then uses its facial recognition technology to merge your features with those of other visitors:


There's a robot arm that, after you type in a word or phrase, will spell it for you using alphabet blocks:

There's another robot that, after you pose for it--

--does a really funny, and REALLY abysmal, job of drawing a portrait of you that looks nothing like you:

This was Matt's favorite musical exhibit--

--and this was mine:

So much of my time parenting two children is spent mediating, moderating, managing, etc., that I feel like I often forget to enjoy them. Yes, I take them lots of places to do lots of things, but at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, for instance, I've just realized that while the girls were seeing the Wright Flyer for the very first time, instead of looking at them to enjoy their surprise and enjoyment, I was looking at the museum map trying to convince myself that surely there was some place besides McDonald's to eat, and wondering if the carousel takes credit cards, and trying to figure out if the girls could manage both the Natural History Museum and the Museum of American History without getting too footsore. 

There was none of that this time. While Syd was having a ball back at her grandparents' house making rice crispy treats with her Grandma Janie, I got to really take the time to enjoy my Willow's surprise and enjoyment, to notice the exhibits that she loved and run her to the bathroom to puke, bless her heart, when the exhibit on genetics tweaked her tender stomach (needles and syringes, doncha know?). Matt and I got to play with Willow all together without her having to share, or us having to leave out the other kid. Matt and I got to talk to each OTHER, my goodness!

And THAT was a good vacation.

Afternoon In San Francisco

One of the many nice things about visiting California is that Matt has a ton of family there; it's like Family Central for his clan, and so not only do you get to see all the regulars when you visit, but if you're visiting for a occasion, such as a wedding or, I don't know...Thanksgiving?!?!...you also get to see many of the outliers, those relatives who live in Mexico or Germany or Washington or the East Coast, but who are also making their pilgrimage to Family Central for the event.

And that's also how you don't just go to San Francisco for the afternoon with your husband and kids--you go to San Francisco for the afternoon with your husband, your kids, their grandparents, their great-grandma, and their great aunt and great uncle. They drive, and they navigate, and they treat you to a restaurant that you'd never otherwise budget for!

We ate lunch at Fog Harbor Fish House, which I highly recommend if you're interested in trying seafood, because their seafood is sustainably sourced using the recommendations of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium, and so you don't have to feel too creepy about eating it. I was especially excited because since our mollusks study, Willow had been eager to taste raw oysters. At Fog Harbor, we had a sustainably-sourced menu from which to order a half-dozen raw oysters for whoever wanted one, and Uncle Carlos to demonstrate the proper handling, saucing, and sucking down of said oysters.

Dreams really do come true in San Francisco:
Add in a big bread bowl full of clam chowder, and all the warm sourdough bread spread with melty butter that a kid can eat, and Willow came away from the table with her tummy nice and comfy, indeed. I have no idea what Sydney ate, probably macaroni and cheese or some such nonsense, certainly NOT a raw oyster, but she came away with a comfy tummy, too, so lunchtime goal achieved.

After lunch, the rest of the family wanted to visit Ghirardelli Square, which is totally not our speed, and then to drive back home, which is TOTALLY not our speed, so Matt, the girls, and I unashamedly ditched them. We spent the rest of the afternoon and evening sightseeing--

Chatting with a baker at Boudin as she makes crab-shaped sourdough bread

Posing in front of Alcatraz (We'll save that one for a future visit, ahem)

 --laughing at the sea lions--

 --and riding stuff:

Cable car!!! We also rode aimlessly in buses and trolleys, just so you know.

The pinnacle of our "riding stuff" adventure was catching the CalTrain back to San Jose that evening, arriving back home with two sleepy, sleepy girls who were happy to be fed a quick dinner and put to bed before the grown-up dinner.

Now, I love spending time with my babies, but I could get USED to that!

Leaving on a Jet Plane

36 hours.

That's approximately the length of time that the girls and I spent at home, before we were off and away again.

Enough to sleep two nights in our own beds.

Enough to do the laundry, then repack it.

Enough to...no, not actually enough to do anything else. We slept in our own beds for two nights, we did laundry, we repacked, then we were off and away again--this time with Matt, at least!

Matt's parents invited us to spend Thanksgiving with them, and a visit to them in California is extra-special, not just because the girls adore their Pop and Grandma Janie, but also because...

Airplane ride!!! It's been a couple of years since the girls were on an airplane, so the adventure was exciting all over again. The girls packed their dino backpacks with healthy snacks, their favorite stuffed lovey (Foxie for Willow, Wild Pony for Sydney), a couple of toys (the paper airplane, shown above, really wasn't the abysmal choice that I'd feared it would be, considering how empty this early-morning airport was), LOTS of books, and a CD case each of DVDs and audiobooks. Syd also has a portable CD player, but I provided my laptop for movies:

I tell you what, that Magic School Bus complete series may be the most useful thing that I have ever purchased. This is the third major trip that it has entertained the kids, and they never seem to get tired of it! AND it's educational!

And that's how we went coast-to-coast in four days.

In Washington, D.C.

I am really proud of myself for taking my babes to D.C. I'm a country girl, and although I've been to plenty of major cities, in plenty of countries around the world, I've never been there alone, and I've never been there on my own with two kids to take care of.

It doesn't help that many of my adventures in major cities have been kind of crazy. Hey, Mac, remember when we couldn't find a place to stay in London, so we slept on the lawn in front of the National Gallery, and that guy accidentally spat on me, but then he felt so terrible about it that he gave us something to smoke, but when we started smoking it we noticed that it tasted weird and you unwrapped it and it had what looked like filmstrip rolled up inside it?

Ooh, Matt, remember when WE were in London and our hostel was a total fire trap, and our bed had this creepy stained bedspread on it all embroidered with hearts, and the shower was directly over the toilet?

Hey, Mac, how about when we were in Amsterdam, and we got high and then decided to split up for a while, and I wandered around the same two blocks all day because I couldn't remember the name of our hostel, and you ended up out in the country?

Or Matt, remember on our honeymoon when we stayed in that hostel in Hawaii that turned out to just be some creepy guy's house, in that giant dormitory with all those other travelers' backpacks and bags on their beds and the hostel owner assured us that they were "around" but we never saw them, and then someone came in and stood in the women's bathroom while I was showering and then left several minutes later, but we never actually saw any other woman in the hostel, just that guy?

Ah, me in my twenties...now THAT was a good decade! And yet you see why I might have mistrusted my ability to construct a safe, kid-friendly big-city adventure.

I'm also nervous about city driving, the possibility of being mugged, and valet parking.

So, spoiler alerts: I did not get into a car accident, we were not mugged nor did we ever think we were about to be mugged, and while I did not actually "handle" the valet parking impeccably (how many times is the most ever times that someone has needed to get back into their car after handing it off to a valet? Add four, and you'll have reached my personal total), the valet and I totally hit it off (he's from Kenya, was perennially on duty and therefore happy to chat with us every time we were out and about, and could give me a first-hand comparison of the Grand Canyon to the Olduvai Gorge, where he used to run sight-seeing tours), AND I figured out how to do that handshake/pass him a big tip thing on our final morning. SCORE!!!

My partner got us a last-minute deal at a Sheraton within walking distance of the National Mall (when we travel, my partner is the Trixie to my Speed--he always books last-minute hotel deals online for us wherever we're staying, then gives me the hotel's address to plug into my GPS). It had an indoor rooftop pool, and a sandwich shop half a block away:

Evening ritual: walk down the street for sandwiches, bring them back to the hotel, swim for an hour, then eat!

In other words, it was perfect!

The afternoon that we arrived, it was far and away enough to go visit the valet three additional times, walk down the street for sandwiches--

I chose to blow my travel food budget because I just could NOT go back to the valet one more time to ask for my cooler and two blue crates of sandwich fixings, snack crackers, and fruit.

--swim for an hour, and hit the sack.

The next morning, however? Our mission was to see the sights!

There is so much to see in D.C. that scheduling is tricky, especially when we only had one full day. The big kid really wanted to go to the zoo, for instance, but that likely would have taken an entire day on its own. Instead, I decided that we would stick to the National Mall area, and just see what we could comfortably see. We headed out on foot from our hotel a full two hours before the Smithsonian museums opened, so that we could meander past at least a couple of historical sites and monuments.

At the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, we saw the major sights--

Spirit of St. Louis

--but also did some typical hand-on science museum-y things--

--AND learned how things fly:

Did you get that? I now know how things fly! All of high school physics, in which all the boys just zipped right along and I never knew what the hell was going on, and it took one hour in the Smithsonian to help me unlock the mystery of flight.

You want to know, right? Okay, it goes like this: An airplane's wing is curved at the top so that the same amount of air has to travel a farther distance just to go from the front of the wing to the back of the wing. Since that same amount of air is spread over a greater space, there's less air there, and thus less air pressure. Therefore, the air at the bottom of the wing, which is traveling a shorter distance from front to back, has a greater air pressure, and pushes the wing up.

BOOM, lifted!

The only disappointment inherent in the Air and Space Museum was in its cafeteria options. I'd resigned myself to purchasing our lunch, but it was too chilly for the couple of outdoor options on the National Mall, I was unwilling to hike away from the Mall just to search for lunch, the kids were starving, and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum cafeteria served MCDONALD'S?!? 

Barf! So much for my strict policy of not purchasing fast food, sigh. And the worst part is that crap doesn't even fill you up! Seriously, the amount of money that I spent on burgers and fries was mind-boggling, and the kids acted just as hungry an hour later as they did right before lunch. 

The peanut butter, jelly, whole wheat bagels, and giant apples hanging out in the trunk of my car in the valet parking garage were sorely missed, I can tell you. As boring as it had gotten by that point in our trip, at least you know when you eat a nice peanut butter and jelly bagel sandwich, with a giant apple on the side, that you're going to be full for a while.

We cheered ourselves up with the long-promised carousel ride:

I thought the price of the ride ($3.50 per rider) was absurd, but I knew we'd be doing it, since the kids spied it long ago in one of the children's guides to Washington, D.C. that we'd checked out of the library, and yes, of course it was worth it. The big kid is getting old enough that I'm really starting to treasure things like carousel rides--I know all that stuff gets cool again later, but I'm pretty sure there's a window of childhood/adolescence in which carousel=social death, yes?

Our favorite museum by FAR was the Smithsonian Natural History Museum--I knew it would be. I wouldn't let the kids visit every single gallery on this trip, because I really wanted to see as much as possible just this first time, but we still managed to see a LOT:

All the high-tech exhibits in the museum, and the kids just adored these old-school, beaten-down dioramas.

This paleontologist is using a microscope with a mirror mount that allows him to see his sketch  without taking his eyes off of the lenses--I can't remember the name of this type of microscope, grr!

 

Again, I was thrilled to see how much we saw that connects to our previous or ongoing studies:

MOLLUSKS!!!

CRINOIDS!!! We've never found ones THIS big in our creek!

I'm stealing this brief, thorough explanation for our classification of living things studies.

We've watched several documentaries that mention these cat mummies, but never actually seen one before.

THIS is part of the meteorite that hit Meteor Crater in Arizona--how cool to know that we've been there!

 I LOVE meteorites:

 In the Natural History Museum gift shop, I used my Smithsonian magazine subscription discount card to do a great deal of damage, to the tune of two spiky dinosaur backpacks, one stuffed Smilodon (Shh! It's for Christmas!), one stuffed woolly mammoth (double shh!!!), and one double-scoop of ice cream:

It's VERY hard to secretly shop for the kids with the kids right there, so I'm still on the look-out locally for one triops kit and one ornithopter.

But the backpacks did NOT get saved for Christmas. They're awesome, and we love them:

The Smithsonian Museum of American History was toured at my insistence, and so it was toured pretty briefly. The ruby slippers are out on tour, and for some reason the documents hall was locked, but we were stunned and impressed by the Star-Spangled Banner, and seeing this guy didn't hurt, either:

The little kid is doing her homeschool Biography Fair project on George Washington, so I partly insisted on visiting the Museum of American History because I figured that since we were in D.C. already, we had to see SOMETHING of George Washington's! Fortunately, in this museum we saw a lot:

George Washington's saber--we also saw a complete outfit of his, his camping gear, and a bunch of other stuff.

 I had toyed with the idea of visiting some other outdoor monuments in the evening, but by closing time at this museum, we were all VERY footsore and quite ready to walk the straight shot that it was to get back to our hotel. I knew that there was a metro stop that might save us a few blocks, but honestly, what with the figuring it out and the buying the fare and the navigating our way from our stop, I really preferred just to walk the extra blocks. I felt bad about it, though, because the kids were clearly exhausted, and the big kid tearfully griped her way back to the hotel and then to the sandwich shop and back. Strangely enough, though, all griping ceased when I told them to get their swimsuits on, and all my guilt ceased as I watched them swim and splash and play and laugh for another hour in the pool after that long walk and before we ate our dinner.

And then after dinner, it was time for little kids and their wild ponies to go straight to bed:

We had a long drive ahead of us in the morning, back to home and the kitties!

We used the following resources for our Washington, D.C. study:
Virtual Tour of the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History
Virtual Tour of the White House
Google Art Tour of the White House

P.S. Want to follow along with my craft projects, books I'm reading, road trips to weird old cemeteries, looming mid-life crisis, and other various adventures on the daily? Find me on my Craft Knife Facebook page!