Camping!

For Father's Day weekend we decided to pack up and head outta town, on what was probably our last pre-baby big adventure. As Mat says, it wouldn't be pregnancy if we didn't do something just a little bit stupid around 8 months. We have never been perfectly content car campers, so we found an easy backpacking trail about an hour from here (can I just say again how amazing it is to get the benefits of living in a big city while remaining less than an hour from true wilderness? Hundreds and hundreds of trails and parks to choose from- ocean, mountains, lakes, rainforest, whatever you want. We weren't the only people in the forest all weekend, but if we'd wanted to be, all we would have needed to do was drive another half hour or so.), picked up Mat after work, and had our tent staked in the woods by 8.

We are raising ACTUAL tree huggers. No prompting for these photographs at all, scout's honor.

We all had a great time, and though we are looking forward to the days of lighter packing for the trail, we're very glad we went. And honestly the pregnancy was more of a pain for packing than the kids- people who are 8 months pregnant are extremely precious sleepers, can't use plain old iodine tablets for purifying drinking water (something about the fetus growing an extra head, I don't know), and are not nearly as good at being pack mules as non pregnant people. They do, however, remember to bring s'mores supplies.

How many s'mores are you going to have tonight, Claire Helen?

Hey, don't we usually have, like, a dog or something on the end of this thing?

Children in the mist.

Simon is good at telling us when he wants a break.

Hey mom, I'm in a TENT! Not sleeping or anything, but hey, a TENT!

This is the way they really are, giggly, cuddly best friends who love to play together all day long. We know it's mostly luck, so we just appreciate our good fortune and adore watching them enjoying being together.

"You gonna eat that?" And Simon in Mat's baseball cap, keeping away from the evil sun. Did I tell you all that in addition to having every other non-serious skin malady in the book, he is allergic to sunscreen? Sweet Jesus on a stick, boy. I am really sorry about those maternal epidermal genes, but we have just got to be able to go outside every once in a while this summer. Maybe we could put him a giant UV protective plastic bubble.

Random photo dump from the last month or so

Simon has adopted his sister's mostly monochromatic style of dressing.

Simon doesn't really think he needs to own a lot of things- good little middle kid- but when his favored objects get taken away, it's a big problem.

Ah, order restored to the universe.

I took the kids hiking a couple weeks ago on a mountain about 45 minutes from here.

Mysteriously, I did not remember the first 3/4 mile being switchbacks, from the last time I hiked it, not pregnant and not with two small children. They were troupers, though Claire Helen absolutely did not trust that I could find my way back to the car and kept demanding to look at the map.

"Daddy, iffer a tow truck was broken, would another tow truck come and get it?"

Sunday morning

Happy Easter!

Simon has some sort of feverish plague, sucking the life out of all of us, so this will mostly be photos with captions.


The Easter Bunny brought (among other things) these little umbrellas filled with jelly beans. So the kids were using them like real umbrellas, and now use them as parasols for their dolls. Hee.

Mat tried so hard to get a picture of the two of them smiling while holding hands. This is about the best we got. That stuff on their faces, by the way, is face paint- a fairy for Claire Helen, a flower for Simon- from an egg hunt a local artsy fairy kid place hosted Easter morning. They had to go from room to room talking to forest fairies getting clues to find the eggs. Cute.

Just a random very Claire Helen picture from earlier this month. Drawing a parrot, I think. She's a very desk oriented person, and likes to hang out drawing there for a good portion of the day.

You're not going to take my soccer ball or anything, right?

Dying Easter eggs- I think we had about a 50% ratio of original eggs to final product. Simon was very serious about the whole project, as you can see.

We had our big ultrasound last week, and brought the kids along. Everything looks good! I think Claire Helen really enjoyed it. Her preschool class has been deep into human anatomy the last month or so, so seeing the ventricles of the heart up on the big screen (they have a big screen TV for parents to watch the ultrasound on. Fancy.) was a thrill for her. Simon was hours past due for a nap, so spent about half the time announcing (in a very quiet, gentlemanlike way, I should say) "I don't YIKE dat baby. Dat baby is not nice." Yeah, well, wait till dat baby kicks you out of your room, kiddo.