huckleberried bits about family, bowling, music, and helicopters

huckin' with the cousins

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Rachel, Cam, and Dave made a quick trip over from Portland for a couple days of togetherness. I enjoyed our lively discussion about what we'd do with a huge windfall of money. Or even, say, $35. One whole day was spent daydreaming about a nice big commune whereby we could make money doing the things we love and have low enough overhead to be free for family and travel. It's going to be so cool when we ever get that particular dream ironed out. We also bowled, just we kids, while the parents and David went to a wedding. Bowling is something we don't ever do as a family, and it was a pretty good time, not because of the total titillation inherent in bowling, but just because we were together. OH. And we watched Zoralee do stuff. I didn't get many pics, unfortunately, other than of bowling.

About bowling. I know a few people who bowl, and they are nice folks. Really. If you are one such individual and you are reading this blog, I just want to say that I am so hopeful for you. I know that soon your ship will come in, and you'll discover the next step up: crossword puzzles. Hang in there.

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If my kid ever comes home and says, "Ma, I want to bowl. I mean, really bowl, where you go to a sports store and purchase a bowling glove, your own ball, and a bag for it. And shoes that are half one color, half another, to where we constantly do double-takes at each other's feet, thinking everybody's wearing unmatching shoes," then I will have a very icky feeling inside for a good many days. I cannot see getting into bowling. Does it make you jealous and embarrassed when the list of this week's top bowlers up on the wall doesn't include your name? When you're not bowling, do you work on your game somehow? What else could you do but imagine yourself throwing an insanely heavy ball down a straight, long lane until it hits a bunch of tall, peculiar nuggets of painted wood? Do you live in fear of those dark, menacing grooves at the edges? (As if there's not enough evil in the world, they've got to throw it into the game of bowling.) I don't ask these things only to be a jackass. I sincerely don't understand. Enlighten me.

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There was a family in the lane next to us, each member outfitted with their own glove. It was sick, you guys. Of course, they thought we were sick too, with maneuvers like Luke's two-handed toss and me wearing a baby the whole time.

looking forlornly toward a full set of standing pins and a ball that is no more

OH WAIT! HERE IT COMES IN THIS MAGIC BALL-SPITTY-OUTTIE THING.

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We have gotten to spend some great time with my best friend from high school, Kristi, and her hubby, Brent. He writes books, which he can more or less do from any flat surface that holds a laptop, so they're in the area for a long visit. Yay! Who has played the game Carcassonne? I have now. We'll get to play it and see our friends more too, and that thought makes me glad. It always surprises me when I'm amongst people I knew from years before and they're still so them, so familiar. I can't think of an example of that not happening, where you're like, "Whoa! You're not YOU!", but it's surprising still. People are always themselves, even after time and distance and life has happened. Although, this does remind me of a great encounter I had at the grocery store not long ago that sort of disproves my point...

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I saw a girl I hadn't seen since high school, and her first words were, "LORI?!? Oh my God! Your hair looks so....orGAANic! And is that a tattoo?! [grabbed my arm and twisted it for a better look] You were such a nerd in high school. What happened to you?!" Ironically, my hair is virtually unchanged, other than I wore it in a ponytail more back then. And my tattoo is pretty small. We saw each other in another aisle later on, and she apologized profusely for being so forward. I told her I wasn't offended and that hey, people change over 15 years. Hello. But you know, if she'd spent even 10 minutes with me, she would've realized there was like 93% of the same me-ness to me as there was back then. Right? I'm guessing.

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- singing with my brother and grandpa at a memorial service -

This was good to be a part of. Though the three of us didn't know the deceased man, we played with a couple of people who did, including his great-grandson, down from Alaska, where he plays in a heavy metal band. We did a couple of upbeat country church numbers, and Vince Gill's "Go Rest High On That Mountain." One of music's beauties is that, with a basic understanding of how it works and a little proficiency at an instrument, you can create something meaningful with perfect strangers for the benefit of those gathered. It's an odd duty to weave music through a funeral or wedding where you don't know the person/people whose memory/honor it is in. A tad creepy, perhaps. It doesn't happen all that often for me - maybe once every year or two - but I get a real cool feeling of camaraderie with the flute-tooters in Ireland and the drummers in African villages and any other musicians who play at a community's life events.

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Oh! We also had a 10th anniversary in there. We'd considered going on a Caribbean cruise to celebrate but, yeah, we changed our minds and went to a movie.

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Jason has been hard at work, including a couple of fun, special assignments. Today he got to head up the ground crew for a helicopter operation at a remote lake. They dropped a boat and some gear in by long line for a research crew coming this fall, and Jason's crew did the legwork for determining how low the chopper could fly because of the trees, radio communications, and hooking and unhooking stuff from the longline. Here are a couple of pics of that.

the Pumpkin Buns' latest antics and rantics

Zoralee the Academic

Zoralee the Yoga Instructor

Zoralee the Contemplative Musician

um...Zoralee the Normal Baby

Zoralee has changed so much in the last couple of weeks that she's virtually a new person. There was the tooth, yes. But also....

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CHATTER

Especially when we read to her, Zoralee is talking back, mostly in deep, extended, gutteral grunts. It would be alarming coming from a person of any age other than hers. Getting through a book is difficult; you hate to laugh too hard, because she's so very serious.

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SLEEP

She made it clear we needed a change in our sleep routine. Rather than falling asleep by nursing side by side, she multi-tasks, even when she's dog tired. She rolls onto her belly and raises her bum in the air as she tries to stand to her feet. She then unattaches from the breast and starts breathing excitedly about practicing her skills. Right now, the skill is Use Mama's Body to Stand Against, Let Go, and Wobble Around Grinning.

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I lay her back down and we go through the same drill a few times, and sometimes she'll fall asleep. But nowadays, Jason or I will rock her to sleep, holding her tight and talking gently or singing to her. At first, she cried for 1/2 hour, but now it takes her a couple of minutes of fussing (or wailing; let's be honest) in our arms before she settles in and resigns herself to sleep. She does continue to doze in and out for 10 minutes, just because she's such a light sleeper. But then we lay her in bed, and she's good to go. It is wonderful! I love holding her quiet, still little self for a few minutes.

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GLIMPSES OF CONTENTEDNESS
Yesterday while we were rocking, she got relaxed enough to gaze into my eyes while I sang - for a couple of minutes. It was perfectly sweet. Unfortunately, she made the funniest face as she dozed off, and I started giggling. That woke her right up, and she smiled. Pretty soon I was outright laughing. Dangit! So much for that nice, peaceful falling to sleep. Probably won't happen again for weeks.

ATTITUDE

Yep, Zoralee's got one. She turns it on and off like a faucet. A faucet of skin-burning acid.

MOBILITY

She goes up the stairs when anybody will let her. Loves to climb anything. LOVES to dive off the our mattress onto either her bed or pillows I've arranged on the floor. Today she climbed up onto Grandpa's pack box (goes on horses and holds gear), which is even higher than our mattress, and tried to dive to the floor. She's utterly loco.

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Uncle Cam spotting for her

first tooth

Zoralee had been restless and fussy for several nights and was a bit more needy than usual during the daytime. We'd seen the bumps forming on her gums. So, we knew the time was approaching, but of course didn't know exactly when that milestone moment would hit. Life with a baby is like that, man. You're going along with the day, your head in a sort of haze, and you'll look over to see the baby crawling up the stairs or making a totally new expression. It's jolting. To me, that's one of the most fun parts of this whole deal, but then, I like surprises.

We were having a relaxing evening at home with old friends of mine from high school, Kristi and Brent. I was feeling Z's gums and got an unusual poke on the finger. It was such a gleeful moment, and extra fun for having other people around. Just after I felt the tooth, Zoralee bit my arm and left a classic double dimple tooth mark, as if to drive the point home that, "hey people, something is UP."

Here is but a sampling of the dozens of photographs I have taken over the last week to capture this tooth. The big picture up top, Z in her purple dress, is the best, and I finally got that tonight.

happy 10, my love

summer 1996

summer 1999
summer 2009

You want to love with me,

Love with me then.

I only ask that you still be my friend...

So I will love you, and love you I do.

It’s not complete yet, but you know we’re not through

And the days go their ways in blessings,

Moments of truth,

We truly dare not waste our youth.

- from a Keith Green song we sang at our wedding

the critter news (and why I'm blogging about it)

There's a lot happening in the world. Obviously. Bombings there, shootings here, children being sold into slavery. There's a lot happening in our little world. Middle-aged friends dying of cancer. Young people dying in farming accidents. People being charged with crimes.

A blog is such a strange thing. Do you sit down and write whatever comes to mind, stream-of-consciousness style? Do you document the highlights or the lowlights of your own life? Do you make it a collection of stories and youtube videos you run across? Do you consider your audience, your family members who know you well but live far off and yet the next door neighbors who see you every day (and thus already know about you having the flu) but who might be surprised or alarmed at your thoughts on some controversial issue? How honest should you be? I know there aren't universal answers to these questions. I simply say all of that as an introduction to this post about animals.

Posts about animals might seem silly. But they're what's going on in a world that is as real to me as anything else and as enduring as the seemingly brainless and saddening activity of humans. I don't watch the news, because there isn't a darn thing I can do about 99.9% of it, and it just stresses me out. Which is the point, from what I gather at those times I do catch it incidentally. We watched the weather channel upstairs last night because of a huge storm system that's supposedly on its way here, and we couldn't believe the hype and nonsense. We decided they must practice at Weather School by setting a potato on the table and trying to talk about it in super hyper, dangerous-sounding language for ten minutes.

So there. That's my rambling justification for talking about animals while reporters in other countries are being imprisoned for trying to track down the truth about injustices.

Thank you.

The animals are taking over - the wild ones, the land, and the domestic ones, our time. You know about the grasshoppers, the bain of our existence. Mom just read an article in the paper today about this being a huge year for hoppers because of the spring weather. In a bizarre example of the John Muir sentiment that by tugging at any one thing you find it attached to the rest of the universe, baby birds are reportedly gorging themselves on the hoppers to the point of being unable to fly.

grasshoppers in the yard

A black and red snake has been hanging out in the rock pile beside the house all summer. Maybe she ate the toad, because I haven't seen him around anymore. For family groups, there's a set of three skunks that alert us to their presence by spraying nearby every couple days, several does with fawns, including a set of spotted twins, and several gaggles of wild turkeys with various sized babies. A mama black bear and three cubs (!) passed through and spent a couple of days visiting the pond. There are bears all around us in the hills, but it's unusual for down here in the valley. Here's a very far off photo of the bears. You can see the mama at the back, and three tiny black dots ahead of her.

My Pops has been deep-cleaning the barn and is finding tools, drill bits, and other shiny things stuffed into the darndest corners. The squirrels and rats do this. The other day he pulled a blanket from a top shelf, and down came a wad of apple-flavored horse treats, stuffed away for winter by rodents. He just had something like eight tons of hay delivered, getting set for winter.

It's been a round of bad luck with the horses and injuries over the last few weeks. Four have gotten leg gouges in a pasture we've been summering them in. There must be a pile of twisted metal or barbed wire somewhere on that property, but the guys haven't been able to find it. Harley, one of the horses Jason broke last summer, came down with an intestinal ailment a couple weeks ago, and it appeared for a couple days that he might not recover. He has though.

The chickens are well.

The dogs are well.

The tree by the garden is abuzz with bees.

checking Harley's heart rate and intestinal gurglings

wrapping Marley's leg injury, the worst one of all

frogs

my 8 month old Z girl

Eight months. Two thirds of a year. One less month than I was pregnant.

Zoralee is definitely living up to her nickname of Pickle. Like Jason says, sometimes she's a sweet pickle, and sometimes she's a sour one. She is busy. And curious. And sometimes sociable to the point of ridiculousness. She cops an attitude, which she can be distracted from with a little ingenuity, but every day you've got to change up your game. She grunts and hollers and slaps the table for food tidbits. She shakes absolutely everything she picks up to see what it does.

My absolute favorite thing these days is the Quick Chin Down move. When she's really happy about something, she quickly puts her head down EXACTLY like a Chinese nod. I say she has some Wong in her. Wong was a Chinese man who married my great-great-grandmother later in life, so he would be Zoralee's step-great-great-great-grandfather. Somehow that nod, it made it through the deep and wide pool of genes.

She knows which things are off limits, and so far, a strong "No" suffices, especially if she gets moved to another spot in the room. If she really wants to play with something questionable, she'll go toward it, then turn to see if we're looking at her. For the most part, we try to keep those things out of her reach. But you just can't do that with everything. If there are 3 billion and 37 okay things to touch in a room and one tiny poisonous speck frittered away in a corner, she'll find the speck.

Mostly though, Zoralee's eyes roam the earth, searching for something to climb. She learned the knee-up technique a couple of days ago. Jason and I had put our mattress on the floor to form more of a family bed with her mat. We got into her bed and played with toys so that she'd feel happy about the new arrangement. Evidently it worked, because she kept climbing in and out of her bed up onto ours, using the hereto unknown knee-up skill, squealing, and then dive-bombing off of our mattress toward the floor. She had all the confidence in the world but not all the sense. She also stood up with her hands at her side for a solid second or second and a half, twice. Both times, she freaked out with glee, probably because we were. Today she climbed up onto the bottom step of the staircase. YIKES. I am feverishly sewing the cloth part of a boundary thingy that Jason fashioned from PVC pipe. As it is, we are all the time laying chairs across doorways or open spaces, and that's getting old.

I hear the sentiment from fellow new moms that there is a definite pattern in babydom of routines and preferences lasting two or three weeks. Then they're suddenly onto something new. I totally concur. Right now, I've been getting a huge kick out of Zoralee's interest in tasks. If I open one of her dresser drawers, she'll stand there and take every last garment out. She may even crawl away for a bit but then return to finish the job.

It reminds me of some things I learned when I subbed at the Montessori school in Anchorage last year. I'd put all that on the brain's back burner, but when I saw Z at the dresser drawer, I got really excited to find a book or two on Montessori principles and incorporate them into her play. One thing I remember is that it was a big deal to not interrupt babies and children working on little tasks, especially with unrelated things like, "Hey, you want a Cheerio?" but also even to say "good job," or "Oooh! What are you drawing? It's so pretty!" because it disrupts their flow and trains them to look for external praises rather than working within their own motivation. If they show us voluntarily what they're up to, it's cool. Really interesting.

Well, that'll be enough for now. One tired mama is signing out. Maybe Z will start a new habit tomorrow of sleeping in until 9 or 10 a.m. Ohhhh gosh. I crack myself up.

we all been there, man