Dandelion queen

 

We came back from camping to find that our back yard had grown a foot in the four days that we were gone. I use the term yard here very, very loosely. We don't so much have a back yard as a field full of dandelions. It is still slightly better than the dirt pit that we call the front yard. I am so tired of dirt as a replacement for grass. By this weekend DH will have planted grass seed and with the help of 20 hours of Alaskan sunshine per day, we should finally have grass in a few weeks. 

 

Hallelujah.

So while I'm not excited about dandelions (even though it is better than dirt), there is one girl who is very excited about dandelions. She usually picks me a few bouquets of them a day.

Often, when we are driving in the car she will suddenly yell MOM! LOOK IT, LOOK IT, LOOK IT! She says it will such urgency that I think that I am about to get hit by a semi carrying a highly flammable load or maybe even a train, but she is simply trying to show me a field or yard full of dandelions.

She often forgets what they are and calls them sunflowers. I should be so lucky to have a backyard full of sunflowers.

 But I have to say, I'm awfully proud to display my dandelion bouquets.

Survival

We made it. I survived camping and I actually had a really wonderful time. 

And we did not get eaten by any bears. In fact, we did not see any bears. I may be the only person on the planet who goes all the way to Denali and hopes that they don't see any, but so be it. My fear for survival far outweighs the want for the thrill of a bear induced adrenaline rush.

We did see a lot of moose, and lots of other park visitors were very excited about that, but considering our backyard is the favorite local bistro of the area moose, we just didn't get that excited about it. Until we were all packed up and ready to leave and the kids came screaming into the camper. MOM, THERE ARE MOOSE OUTSIDE!

A cow and her very new calf had walked right by Sonny Boy and Princess Blondie and then hung out near our picnic table until it was time for us to leave. 

Now let's just talk for a second about the size of these creatures. Holy cow, these things are tall. Every other picture I have showed you in the past was taken from the safety of my porch or window so I was always a few feet off the ground. Well, now I was finally on ground level with them and this lady was TALL. See how her knees are higher than the picnic table? That should give you a little perspective.

 

It was the first time that I had seen a new calf and boy are they cute. But in that really ugly kind of cute, you know, the kind with a face that only a mother could love? It reminded me a cross between a baby giraffe and a calf (of the bovine variety).

He kind of reminded me of Bambi a little too. And the mother sort of reminded me of a model. Very tall, very skinny, with knobby knees and I could see some of her ribs. Not the prettiest face, but that's not always important in modeling. That is what makeup, lighting, and air brushing are for.

Strike a pose, Mama.

Family camping

It just hit me that we are going camping in three days and I am very much unprepared. My focus as of late has been to get my kids finished with school and figure out how to survive summer break with my two spawn. Well, perhaps survive is the wrong word. I know I'll survive, I'm just trying to find a way to make our time together enjoyable and not boring. After Sonny Boy started asking to go back to school on the first day of spring break I started feeling a little queasy every time I thought of summer break. I thought he might actually die of boredom. I guess I'm just not that fun.  At least not by seven-year-old boy standards. And neither is his sister, which is unfortunate because Princess Blondie thinks that he is the coolest thing since sliced bread. 

Fortunately, I think now that we will have plenty to do this summer and Sonny Boy will survive and not, in fact, die of boredom. First off, Sonny Boy started baseball this year and that is keeping us plenty busy. Two games and one practice a week should keep us all hopping. Then there is Scout camp sometime in June. Plus there are the visits from grandparents.

And finally there is the camping. For which I am unprepared. And if I may admit, slightly unenthusiastic. There are a few reasons I am skeptical of camping being fun. First, it sort of seems like playing house on a smaller, dirtier scale. At least there is a smaller space to clean than my house. Not that I clean my house, just ask my husband. I'm a terrible housekeeper. For instance, instead of cleaning I am blogging. Anyhow, second, I'm afraid my kids will be bored to tears. Third, I'm afraid I will be bored to tears. Fourth, I'm afraid of wild life here. Bears especially. They just completely freak me out. If it were just me and my DH it wouldn't worry me so much but I've found I'm sort of paranoid about some things now that I have kids. Bears being one of them.

I am hoping to be pleasantly surprised and really enjoy our camping trip. I think that I will. For starters, we have a fifth wheel now instead of tent. I have decided that I loathe tent camping. Especially in NC when it is unbearably hot. It's just not fun. At all. We didn't really plan to buy a fifth wheel already, but we sort of needed one to live in when we first moved up here. We stayed in my sister's yard until we finally closed on a house. We figured if we didn't like it we could sell it. We decided that we liked it. And now we are on to our first summer of camping, because my sister's backyard does not count. 

My survival tactic for the weekend is to bring books. For the kids but mostly for me. And we will bring games and stuff for the kids. And our bikes, I think. I would love to sit around all weekend and do nothing but read but I think that I should probably interact with and cook for my family. They would probably appreciate that. And since we will be in Denali we will obviously check out the park. Please don't think that I really will go camping and just sit in my camper reading all weekend. I'm not that lame. 

So off we go. Well, not quite yet, but soon. Let me know if you've got any camping survival/fun tips. I may need them.

Sisters

This is my mom. Here she is holding my sleeping girl. 

This is her version of heaven. Her favorite thing to do in the whole world is to cuddle her sleeping grandkids. The only thing that she might like more is to read to her grandkids while cuddling. I used to crawl in bed with her every morning before school to cuddle. Let's just say that neither of us are morning people. Cuddling in bed is much more fun than getting up and getting ready for school/work.

Now, my mom has a sister, Eva. My mom and Aunt Eva used to come down to NC every spring to visit us. It started when my cousin also lived in NC. Mom and Aunt Eva would take road trip and mom would be dropped off at my house and Aunt Eva would go visit her daughter 2 hours away. We would get together for a day at the beach and have a great time together.

Then my cousin had the audacity to move back to Michigan. I'm glad that my mom and aunt decided that these road trips were fun anyway and decided that they would keep coming. So now our new tradition was for them to come visit just me. And we would make margaritas and play dominoes or cards. Mom and aunt Eva are  feisty card players. This is helped by the fact that mom can't hold her liquor. Mom just nurses one drink all night and gets giggly and mischievous. She tries to cheat A LOT. She's not very good at cheating.

I love watching my mom with her sister. They really are great friends. They have so much fun and laugh so much when they are together. 

There was recently a photo contest that was entitled Happiness. I immediately thought of a particular photo of my mom and Aunt Eva. It is the perfect picture of happiness. Then I realized that my sister sent me copies of her pictures and I hadn't actually taken the photo. So much for the photo contest, but I thought I would share them with you, anyway. 

I hope my sisters and I have as much fun as my mom and her sister do when we are old. Hehehe.... I love to call them old. It gets them all riled up. And then we laugh a lot.

Oh won't you please, please help me....

Sorry, I've got Beatles songs stuck in my head today. But really, I do need your help. Especially if you have special knowledge about building in Alaska. 

And here, for your viewing pleasure. I would like to present to you no less than 5 pipes sticking out of our backyard.

 

 

 

 And there is one more in our front yard for our well. The five in the backyard are for the septic and whatnot. Now will someone please help me understand why they are all there. I was told that they were sticking out of the ground that far in case someone needed to access them in the winter. Now my question is why, for the love of Pete, do they need five different pipes to access my septic? And two of them are approximately four feet apart. Shouldn't one be sufficient? 

Having grown up in Michigan I just don't understand this. We had snow in Michigan. The ground froze just the same as in Alaska. If we ever needed to have the septic pumped in the middle of winter I guess that we just had to remember where it was and dig, because our pipe did not stick three feet above the ground. It stuck about an inch or two above the ground. And there was only one of them. I guess it was just good motivation to get all your septic needs taken care of before winter.

I should also point out that our house is not the only house with pipes sticking out all over the yard. All of them have it. It makes playing a backyard game of soccer or baseball a bit tricky. And building a deck. Or patio. Or figuring out where to put a playset. Or a fire pit. There is an industry up here for small fake wishing wells that people place over the pipe that everyone has in their front yard for the well. I'm just not a fake wishing well kind of girl. 

Now can someone please tell me why, oh why, this is all necessary? It had better have something to do with permafrost, because it is the only thing that I can think of that would set us apart from all the other states that I have lived in. Stupid permafrost.

No help at all

This is a moose. I saw her wandering around our yard the other evening.

After a while I kind of forgot she was there. They just sort of blend in to the the scenery up here. 

Stinky Beagle wanted outside so we went out the front door and I hooked her up to her chain. (Stinky Beagle likes to explore the neighborhood a little too much, so until we find a better containment system, a chain it is.) 

I look up and see Miss Moose happily munching away at my yard. She sort of scared the crap out of me since I had forgotten she was there. I waited for my Stinky Beagle to start barking and going crazy and I hoped that she wouldn't get trampled on.

But alas, nothing happened. Stinky Bealge sniffed the air a bit. She knew something was amiss, but she couldn't quite place it. It's like Miss Moose is completely invisible. Stinky Beagle looked everywhere but at the moose. She then decided that all was right with the world, plopped herself down, and started gnawing on her bone.

She sat out there for a good half hour just chewing on her bone.

And Miss Moose just kept eating my grass.

So much for her scaring off any wild beasts. Stinky Beagle really is kind of worthless when it comes to being a gaurd dog. Unless you're a man. Then she'll bark her fool head off.

I hope that I never get trampled on by a moose because Stinky Beagle will probably just plop down, find herself a bone to chew on, and watch the show.

How do they get out of there?

My sister is pregnant. Check that. She was pregnant. She had a beautiful baby boy a day and a half ago.  This is the first time that my kids have been around a family member from the start to the end of pregnancy. This resulted in lots of questions, but mostly just "How does the baby get out of there?"

I was apparently just not that curious as a kid. Or I just never spent much time around pregnant people. I am the youngest so I have no brothers or sisters that I witnessed growing in my mothers belly. Or I was just too chicken to ask. Or maybe it's because I grew up on a farm and I saw calves being born on a regular basis. I guess I just never much cared how people gave birth to another tiny human.

So when my boy first asked me how babies are born, I freaked out. And then I turned to facebook. Because facebook has all the answers. Okay, facebook doesn't have all the answers, but it does have access to all the mothers that I know and I needed to ask them what they did when their kids asked this delicate question. So I asked them.

Some said they told their children that it came out of their belly button. I had to veto that one. I heard a story from a nurse friend once that said that there was a teenage girl in labor who actually thought the baby was going to come out of her belly button. I just can't set my kids up for that kind of failure as a human being. Some mothers told their kids that the doctors cut them, took the baby out, and sewed them back up. Okay, that is legitimate because they actually had c-sections, but I nor my sister has had a c-section. Then my cousin wrote me a note back and said you know what, you just need to tell them the cold, hard truth. Accept for the cold hard part. And make it not scary and age appropriate. So thank you Mary, I gathered up my courage, and the next time my kids asked, I told them. 

But this time they didn't ask how it was coming out of their aunt's belly, they asked how babies would come out of their dog's belly. I found it much easier to talk about it in terms of my dog instead of my sister. Sorry Lisa, you've been compared to animals a LOT lately.  

Then one night before bed my Sonny Boy asked again and he was very concerned that it hurt the mommy. I said yes, it does hurt a lot but then the mommies are happy when the baby is born. Truth was my new mantra. I was convicted.  He said okay, can I go to bed now? That's when I realized that he thought that I was STILL in pain from when he was born. Then I had to tell him that it only hurts when the baby is born and once the baby is out, it doesn't hurt any more. 

Then, Lord help me, he asked how it went back. I told him the baby doesn't go back in. He said no, not the baby, how does the hole go back? ( I didn't have the heart to tell him that it never quite fully recovers). With the help of God and a tubesock, I showed him that things that stretch can go back to their original state.  I'm pretty sure I scarred him for life. But by golly, he knows how babies get out. 

My Princess Blondie finally asked how babies got out when she was holding her new baby cousin in the hospital. Luckily, my girl likes animal documentaries and she had just seen one in which lots of baby animals were born. I told her it was a lot like that but people go to hospitals instead of having them outside in the dirt and grass. She seemed pretty satisfied with that answer. Thank God for PBS. Lisa, really, I'm very sorry that you've been compared to a beagle, a wildebeest, and zebras. I think you look like none of those. And readers, I'm sorry that I've now scarred you for life too.

So now I just pray every night that my kids never ask how a baby gets IN a mommy's belly. I'm just not prepared for that. I need a few years. And I need to move back to a farm. It makes all this birds and bees business a lot easier to explain.