We think the child’s poo issues are on the road to recovery. We still aren’t sure about his ability to ever have dairy again. Because of my own food related woes I don’t wish that on anyone. What I can say is that he’s been over a week accident free. This is a very very good thing.
Moving on…
Did I mention that I’m going to China for 15 days this summer? I may have mentioned it briefly, but haven’t gone into depth about it. On July 14th me and a friend are taking a group of 3 teenage girls to China. We are traveling with 2 other groups with an organization called ChinaConnect. Up until now this whole trip has been one of those in the distant future things. However, I leave in 30 days. That is one month and after today it will be LESS than a month. Did I mention it was 15 days? And the boys aren’t going? I waffle between simply giddy and freaking the hell out. I haven’t been out of the country in almost 4 years, I know about 5 words/phrases in Chinese (and one of them is NOT where is the bathroom) and I’m going with youth so I cannot drink the whole time. 15 days? I can manage.
In all honesty I’m very excited to go on the trip. The kids we are taking are 3 amazing girls and the friend I’m going with is a very good one. I’m quite glad I’m going with her. This is the first long term youth trip we’ve done just the two of us. Usually Derek is with us. It is going to be an adventure that is for sure. Her job is to find the “safe” toilets in the places we visit and my job is to be the first one to go into them. Hey, I’ve peed on the ground in Mexico, I’m not proud.
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In other life news… yeah, there is nothing.
Ok, maybe something.
The weed issue in our front yard had gotten so bad that Derek is now considering hiring a landscaper to come out and take care of it all. As in, she came to our house (at some point, we weren’t home) to look at it and she’ll give me a quote on Tuesday. Derek’s response was, “and I’ll turn around and write her a check.” And then I blacked out for a minute. My husband does not part easily with money for a project he can do himself. Back of our house fell off… we can fix that. We’ll see what the quote comes in at.
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Now here, have some photos.
The boy thought he’s stick butter cups in his hat. Then mom and I made him wear it like g-money.
I can’t believe how big my girl is getting.
We have a hard time remembering she’s just an 8 month old puppy.
My wonderful husband went to the store last weekend and upon his return he announced that we needed to start making our own cheese. This type of proclamation isn’t new around these parts. He firmly believes that all of our food should be made from scratch. I’m with him, but as the chief bread, pasta, tortilla and other stuff maker, time constraints have me subbing the store bought stuff more often than he’d like. More often than I’d like, but hey, work is work and I’d rather do the stuff I get paid for.
So he comes home and says that the local market is selling cheese from a creamery in Bow, WA. He was going to buy a ball of fresh mozzarella, but at the tune of $14 his cheap Swedeness kicked in and we had chicken as our protein instead. This is where we refer back to the earlier statement of him believing we should make our own cheese. I (as the stupid lady* I am) agreed.
Now I’ve done my locovore part and read Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. That’s what started this whole thing. I got to talking about it, then he read In Defense of Food and then Omnivore’s Dilemma and now we only buy cereal and flour from the grocery store. When I read the book Kingsolver talks about making your own cheese. I thought it couldn’t be that hard, but I’m fairly lazy and forgot about it until aforementioned proclamation. I knew where to get the stuff to make cheese so I hopped on “teh internets” and ordered me up a mozzarella making kit from New England Cheese Making Supply Company.
Yesterday my fancy new cheese making kit arrived and it just so happened that it was milk day. Just like the majority of our food, our milk doesn’t come from the grocery. We have milk delivery from a local company that gets it’s milk from local farms. It isn’t ultra-pasteurized and I do believe that it is organic. In a fit of Martha Stewart meets June Cleaver I put my family to the task of making cheese. The husband measured everything and the boy stirred. I read directions. Now this is supposed to be 30 minute mozzarella. We got to the part where the cheese is supposed to form curds. Um… riiiiight. ”Let sit 5 minutes,” or so the directions stated. 20 minutes later I had a sloppy mess of white stuff and whey.
Cheese making attempt #1 = colossal failure $6.00 down the tube (whole milk isn’t cheap)
I was determined to beat the cheese monster so I had the trusty husband bring home more milk. This time I did it all myself. I blame the boys because this time it worked! I made cheese. Real live cheese. Beautiful hand burny hot** cheese.
Take that Miss Muffett with your curds and whey.
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*stupid because I keep indulging his make it fresh ideas and then we can never purchase the store bought stuff again. Because It’s. so. much. better. FRESH!
**the directions say to wear rubber gloves, but I used mine to stain the cabinets so I did it with 2 wooden spoons and my bare hands.
During the summer months our more popular tourist attractions see a glut of outsiders. Those that carry umbrellas and cross against the lights. During the winter months things are quiet and they let us enjoy our rain in peace. Then there are years like this year where Mother Nature dumps a bunch of snow on top of us and we have no clue what to do with it. Hell… the city of Seattle only owns 23 snow plows, and city workers in Olympia don’t know that the blade of the plow actually goes on the ground, not on top of the snow.
We said a little prayer that the snow would melt enough for us to make it up north so we could spend a few days sleeping on a futon that was too short for the trusty husband and me sneezing my brains out. Turns out we were lucky and every road was clear from our house to the bustling town of LaConner, WA. You’ll recall that we spent part of our spring break there as well. It’s just that we don’t have tons of money (*cough* new stove) to spend on a fancy bona fide vacation so we go stay with friends.
Despite the fact that Sam and Cari had to work while we were there we had a great time. We took the Wii and that provided hours of entertainment and got us away from the usual cards and drinking. My liver thanked me.
We had a lovely meal in Monday night and were left to our own devices most of Tuesday. We took the opportunity to visit a local art store that has the best prices on canvas and then drove further north for lunch. I would have to say we are some of the only people I know who would drive an additional 30 minutes north just for a bagel sandwich. It was worth it. It was even better to take the boy to his first Bagelry experience. He wasn’t overly impressed, but I had a grand ol’ nostalgic time. On the way back to La Conner we took the scenic route down Chuckanut drive. The most beautiful road in Washington State if you ask me.
The vacation was going quite well until Tuesday night while playing a rousing game of Wii tennis. BLAM. No power. Lemme just say that it is mighty dark out in the boonies. I don’t mind power outages that much, but this one was the result of a fairly major wind storm. When you are in an area with giant trees and strong winds it is a bit scary. The wind finally died down and the power came back on around 1:30 and I finally got some sleep, even if it was with both of my arms being numb from my back hurting.
Despite the power outage the vacation was lovely. We had a nice visit with friends. I couldn’t ask for more.
I want to wish all of you a Happy New Year. I am working on the direction of this blog and posting will continue to be light for a while. January is a tough month for me and I’m trying to keep my thin grip on sanity. That means more Lincoln Logs and less stat counters.
Since money is tight around Chez Elle we can’t get out to do fun and fantastic vacations like we would really like (which would include a trip to some tropical beach or a country where they don’t speak English). And since United Airlines stole all of my miles I can’t pack up and take a solo anywhere. I’m still bitter about that, but what can I do at this point? Not much. So we folded ourselves into our most fuel efficient vehicle (the bug) and drove to the booming town of La Center, WA. Consequently, this is where one of the trusty sister-in-laws lives.
La Center is one of those cities that earns it’s city revenue from speeding tickets and doesn’t have a grocery store, but does have 3 tribal casinos. Cute place, but I wouldn’t want to live there. However, La Center is about 20 miles north of Portland, OR. Handy.
We spent our Saturday at the Portland Zoo. I love this zoo. It’s big, lots of animals, and an all around fun time. We packed our lunch, but with the heat my bread free lettuce wrap was a little nasty. From the zoo we went down the hill to the International Rose Test Garden. Portland is known as the Rose City for a reason. The roses were simply beautiful. If it weren’t in the 90s I could have stayed there all day and used up all 1400 available shots on my camera.
From the test garded we drove to the Pearl district to find refreshments at Peet’s Coffee and then on to REI so I could get a new water bottle. I was hopin for a metal one, but since SIGG is suffering a shortage of stock I was out of luck. They had a few, but none I was in love with. If I’m going to pay $21.95 for a water bottle I sure as hell am going to buy one that I love. So I ended up with a new BPA free Nalgene in Lime. Now that I love.
After the Pearl we headed to the Cinetopia in Vancouver to see Wall-E. OMG this is just about the cutest movie of all time. We had a slight moment when the boy thought the seat was going to fold up on him so he spent the whole time on his dad’s lap, but other than that and 40 pounds of popcorn he was fine. Go see this movie.
Saturday was a bit much for the three year old. Tons of stuff, no real nap and a food schedule that was all kinds of screwed up. The air conditioner turned off in the condo and at 1:20 in the morning the child fell out of the bed. Didn’t help that the bed he was sleeping on was about 3 feet off the ground. It ended up being a good thing because it woke G up too and she turned on the AC.
Sunday we went to the even bigger (read one building makes up this town) of Yacolt. There we stopped for snacks at the Trading Post and hopped on the Chelatchie Prairie Railroad. This is a 10 mile ride along the Lewis River through the forest and through a 300′ rock tunnel. A fun ride, but the boy rode most of it with his ears covered. He was so afraid of the train whistle. I thought this child would be giddy to ride such a big train after the major meltdowns we had in Sacramento at the train museum. He said he liked it, but his favorite part was on the way back we stopped at a trail that went down to Moulten Falls. The rocks by the falls were such that you could go down to the water and wade in the river. Ice cold, but at 95 degrees outside… it felt good. This was the first time the boy has ever waded in a river. He loved it. I loved it and we have lots of video. (I’ll show you later) We will be making plans for a camping trip to a river shortly. In the end a good time was had by all.
We got home around 6:30 Sunday night and we were all so exhausted from all of the fun. I think we fell asleep the second our heads hit the pillow despite it being 81 inside of our house. Now we have to get back into the groove for 2 weeks before our really big super spectacular vacation at the end of July. Now that’s going to wear me out.
This week is full of fun and frivolity. Monday I had an acupuncture appointment, drove to Parkland to go pee*, worked and came home to prepare dinner for Tricia, Michael and Rita. Tuesday the boy and I accompanied the Kenny family to Mt. Rainier. I love that they wanted to do something besides the usual Seattle stuff. Not that Seattle isn’t fun and we won’t be doing that later in the week, but there is so much more to see in Washington besides Pike Place Market.
After a struggle trying to figure out how to hook a car seat into the rental car (thank you Michael for driving… I would have lost my shit along those roads before we even made it to the park) we were on our way. We thought we were smart and would stop early at the Copper Creek Inn for lunch. Sadly they weren’t open until 11:30 and it was only 11. We were hungry so we continued on. Eventually we made it to Longmire for lunch (also too early). Lunch was mostly mediocre. Certainly not worthy of the $14.75 I paid for my Cobb Salad (that had tomatoes on it so I might die of ebola or something by the end of the week).
The plan was to continue up the “hill” to Paradise to do some “hiking,” but when we arrived there was still 12′ of snow on the ground. We had a small boy in shorts, a lady in flip-flops and a little girl with a nasty cough so we did a National Lampoon’s moment and said, “oooo, look at the snow” and continued on down. My child was all too disappointed that he didn’t get to play in the snow. I was all for throwing him into a snow bank, but thought better of it. I don’t want to cost the trusty husband any more in therapy than I already have.
On the way up to Paradise we stopped out a viewpoint to admire the vista and snap a few photos.
(There is a photo of Tricia and I, but I’ll post it tomorrow.) Right after I took this shot
we tried to get the kids to stand together so we could take a photo. Rita thought it would be a good idea for the boy to sit on the little rock wall and proceeded to “assist” him onto the wall. I don’t think I’ve ever seen two women move so fast in their lives. That girl is strong and the boy weighs nothing. And on the other side of that wall… oh, a 300′ drop straight down. Honestly! Who puts a 2′ ledge between people and a sheer cliff? Poor Rita was so confused as to what all of the fuss was about. Needless to say we didn’t stay long at the Viewpoint.
We did stop at a waterfall on the way down. That was only slightly less scary.
We finished off our afternoon walking along a little trail at Longmire. Perfect length for two kids, easy to do in flip-flops and full of history and wildlife.
This has been a nice mini-vacation for me and the boy. I’m so inspired by yesterday’s adventures that I hope to keep up the activity level. So if you don’t hear from me for a few days, well, I’ve either died of ebola or we’re out having fun.
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*I’ll tell that story another day.
