Free Range Mama

around the house this morning

Trying to get back on the blogging bandwagon. I figured I’d start by sharing a few vignettes from around our house this morning. We’re kind of in holiday-hangover mode still, I’m afraid. You know how it is.

Z loves to write notes and letters, so we always have a bunch of them laying around. Today’s assortment includes a “Happy New Year” card for me featuring  a very menacing owl carrying off a mouse in it’s talons.

Fortunately the message inside is less scary.

A note to Alex’s friend Ryan from “Secret” – who is clearly Miss Z. I should probably be worried here, but I’m pretty sure it just says “Merry Christmas” inside.

A note found on the coffee table, which I’m fairly certain she intended for Alex.

Here she is, showing off her ukulele which never seems to be far from her hands, even though she hasn’t quite figured out how to play it yet.

In the kitchen we find Alex, who has been “down the rabbit hole” playing Skyrim for the last few days (in addition to having a yucky cold) and is taking a much needed refueling break. A little groggy looking, but quite contented.

Tiki is also a little tired looking. Though she did manage to rouse herself enough to bark half-heartedly at a deer.

We still have tons of candy left over form the Christmas stockings. This is the most interesting looking, though nobody seems to have been tempted to open it.

Downstairs we have the usual assortment of projects. Z is very insistent that I get this ornament she made fixed up in time to get it on the tree. Running out of time on that one.

The rest of the downstairs is dye-central. I got accepted as a vendor at Madrona Fiber Arts at the last minute (after being on the waitlist for *ahem* quite a while) so now I am working double time to build up enough inventory to fill my booth.

Also this weekend we had to do our final year-end inventory for the accountant, which was a bit daunting, plus I had to get my January fiber club installment dyed up, so I haven’t spent much time out of the studio.

gingerbread

A friend of ours threw a gingerbread house making party which was a lot of fun.

A lot of the kids’ friends were there, and it was really cool to see all the different families and kids went about building their houses.

We used kits, which were okay except that the houses turned out to be really flimsy.  Z got hers mostly done before it collapsed, and which point she was pretty much content just to start nibbling on it.

Alex took his house *really* seriously and made sure it had all kinds of detail, right down to a little mailbox. It was fun to see him get engrossed in something that was essentially an artistic endeavor, as art isn’t usually his thing.

His house was a bit more sturdy, and made it as far as the hairpin turn on the drive home, at which point it pretty much exploded in his lap. think next time I will just use wood glue or something instead of relying on wussy frosting as an adhesive, as it would have been nice to keep it around for a couple of days, even if it would no longer be edible. Fortunately he took it in stride - we talked about a video we had seen a few days earlier of some Tibetan monks making a beautiful mandala (only to sweep it all up when they were done) some things just are just meant to be temporary, and gingerbread definitely falls into that category.

holiday fun in seattle

Today we took a break from our regular activities to head into Seattle for Pacific Northwest Ballet’s Nutcracker (with some friends).

The kids enjoyed it – more than I expected actually. I was sure someone would moan about how long it was or something, but they watched the whole thing with interest, and seemed quite impressed. Afterwards we headed over to the Seattle Center Centerhouse, where we got some lunch and checked out the massive train village they have up for Winterfest.

We were making a day of it, so from there, we took the Monorail to Pacific Place to check out some other holiday stuff. Of course I had to stop and get my picture taken with “Gold Guy” – who the kids found rather fascinating. Z’s friend found him terrifying, but the boys were both really excited to find out that people will literally hand you cash if you paint yourself gold and wave a gun around. I could see them filing that little tidbit away for future consideration.

Next stop: carousel.

Were the boys too mature and dignified to ride colorful ponies? Not a chance!

From there it was Gingerbread Lane at the Marriot. A big collection of massively awesome gingerbread houses, this year decorated in a train station theme. This was my favorite – I love the chewing-gum roof tiles.

Just a photo-op over here. I don’t get that boy to wear a tie very often.

Back on the monorail.

new baby!

Big excitement this past week as Z’s best friend’s horse had her long awaited foal. The horse, Rose, was a rescue horse purchased at auction 11 months ago, so the pregnancy was a surprise and a bit of a mystery.

Her foal turned out to be a boy, and a beautiful brown and white paint horse. Here he is just a few hours after he was born (November 4):

Sorry, the blanket covers up his gorgeous markings. Rose is a very good mama – very protective and attentive to her baby.

 

Here he is a few days later out in the pasture..

He’s a very rambunctious little guy – already giving his mom all kinds of worry. He takes off like a shot across the pasture on those wobbly legs and Rose is right on his heels trying to keep up with him. 

z is 9

In honor of her birthday, the kids had their friends over for a sleepover on Saturday night, had pancakes with presents in the morning (starting at 6am!), and then they all went to see the 3D Puss n’ Boots movie.

Instead of a cake, Z opted for homemade “dirt” cupcakes, a house specialty.

For dinner we went to her favorite Mexican restaurant so that she could have the birthday song in Spanish with the sombrero.

a week in whitefish, mt

I was too lazy to blog while I was on vacation this past week, so I am going to try to compress the entire thing into one post. That’s efficient, right?

This isn’t our first trip to Montana this year. We went a few months ago for a fiber show, but we were invited to come back this fall by my husband’s parents, who thought it might be nice to have a vacation with the grandkids. They rented a little condo in Whitefish, a town in the Northwest part of the state, near Glacier National Park. They took the train, but we made the long drive from Western Washington, which proved to be much easier than last time – probably because we weren’t pulling a trailer full of wool.

I had originally planned a little excursion into Canada to go along with this trip, but the night before our departure I pulled out my passport and realized it had just expired. Doh! So we stayed entirely on the US side for this one.

Whitefish is a popular area for resorts/ tourism, but we were firmly in the offseason here. Too late for a lot of the summer fun, and too early for ski season. We did, however, enjoy some gorgeous weather and spectacular fall color.

We also got to take advantage of some very interesting and uncrowded restaurants. This one was particularly memorable…

One place I was very excited to visit was the Great Northern Brewing Company, as they had been clients of mine back in the dark ages when I still had a tech career. I had helped them run a webcam in their tasting room, and make a virtual brewery tour, but had never set foot in there myself. I have now!

Note the construction out front. The whole town was pretty much torn up with road construction, which made parking and getting around a bit of a challenge. I would love to go back to Whitefish, but I am seriously going to wait until this project is finished.

We took a few local hikes like this one. I thought we were very brave to go up something called “Lion Mountain” in an area known for cougars. Here’s Alex admiring the view with his Grandpa.

Of course we also visited Glacier National Park, but most of the “Going to the Sun’ road was closed for the winter, so we didn’t explore it too deeply.

 

We were pretty happy with what we saw, though.

Of course we couldn’t forget the tacky souvenir stops on the way home.

The drive home from whitefish was full of surprises – I started out in the wrong direction and ended up heading North instead of West out of Whitefish. I was almost at the Canadian border (with no passport, remember?) when I realized my mistake. I stopped and asked one of the locals for advice, and she pointed me in the direction of a lesser-known route to Idaho, and got me back on track. Turns out my little side trip didn’t cost us too much in time, but it definitely upped the adventure factor. The northern route was reeeeally remote. Not a car, not a house, not a single sign of human life for an hour as we wound our way through the Kootenai National Forest along Lake Kookanusa. It was almost surreal at the end to stumble across this enormous dam.

After the dam, we hooked back up with our intended route, and we were back on track until we got to Cle Elum Washington and saw that traffic on I-90 was at a dead stop. I didn’t have the patience to just sit and wait there with no idea what was going on, so I decided to cut North and come in on Route 2. This was probably a stupid idea because 1) It took forever. 2) I ended up driving through the mountains and over the pass in the fog and in the rain and in the dark. I should count myself lucky that there was no snow up there, but really all I needed when I was that tired was to be careening around mountain roads with horrible visibility at 60 miles an hour. Ugh. But we made it home in one piece and I can totally laugh about it now, so there’s that.

offf 2011

We all drove down to Canby, Oregon on Friday for the Oregon Flock and Fiber Festival. It was a bit of a miracle that we got out the door at all considering how totally unprepared we were, but somehow we got the trailer and all our stuff packed in the morning and were on the road not too far behind schedule. It’s a long drive, with traffic, and we were all pretty tired when we got to the fairgrounds, but we wanted to get as much of the booth set up as possible so that we wouldn’t have to rush in the morning. The kids were not very excited about this, however, so we only got as far as having the tent up and the tablecloths on before we called it a night.

Saturday was fantastic. We arrived early (minus the kids who stayed with their grandparents), and got everything completely set up with about 3 minutes to spare. Here’s what the booth looked like when we opened…

The weather was perfect, there was a great crowd of customers and old friends coming through, and we had a really fabulous time. The only dark spot was hearing about some shoplifting occurrences in some of the booths. It just sickens me that anyone could shoplift at an event like this. It’s not even like they are taking food to feed their starving children, they are stealing luxury / artisan yarns from hardworking independent (and undercompensated) business owners, and there just isn’t any excuse for it. Ugh.

In the evening, the kids were at Autumnal Equinox party with the grandparents, so Chris and I went to the Cornelius Pass Road House on the way home and had a lovely dinner.

Sunday I got out of the booth a bit more, made it to the fleece sale, the barns, visited the other vendors and watched a few demos. The kids were with us, so they explored quite a bit – especially the visiting the animals, which are their favorite. Our booth is nicely located under a shady tree, and right in front of the big lawn, and the musicians tent, so we got a little entertainment right in our ‘front yard’.

We knew some rain was coming, however, and we had done a bit of prep for it, but we had no idea. Basically around mid-day the skies opened up and we had a torrential downpour, with thunder and the whole bit.  It drenched me completely just in the time it took to get around the tent and put the tarps up. We got rained on last year at this event too, and it was such a drag. The rain drips through the tent, splashes mud up from the ground, and of course drives the customers away so nothing gets sold, either. 

So there I am, soaked, looking like a drowned rat, just shuffling from corner to corner in the booth (which is now a total mess) trying to protect things from getting ruined, and sending the kids off on errands so that we don’t have 5 people huddled in the same tiny space. Here’s Chris amid the chaos…

Shoppers fleeing for the shelter of the indoor marketplaces…

Yes, it was funny at times, but not exactly what we came for. Fortunately wet wool will dry (though we had to reprint some labels) and we didn’t damage any paper products. It was also fortunate that the rain stopped by the end of the show, so we didn’t have to get soaked packing the trailer. After the packing and the drive, we got home around midnight. Wiped out!

high ropes course

There is a high ropes course at a local park that has always intrigued us, so when Alex got an invite to try it out, we jumped at the chance.

By “we” I mean Alex, because I wasn’t eligible, and Z was not interested in the slightest. She was happy enough to go to the park, ride her bike, play with our friends’ Chihuahua… but no interest at all in the ropes course.

Back at the ropes course, Alex had completed the ‘team building exercises’ part and ascended the first tower.

Apparently being up there was way more terrifying than it had looked from the ground, and he had a few false starts before going across in the company of one of the instructors.

He made it across the first span, but then pretty much decided he’d had enough for one day and didn’t want to go across the second one. The higher course was out of the question, though he was a bit sad about it when he saw the cool flying-fox thing they used to get down. He says he’d like to try again in the future, though.

The bike part went a bit better. We don’t ride much, so this was really Z’s first chance to really try out her bike without training wheels. She picked it up really quickly and and was pedaling away from me in no time.

big four ice caves hike

We took a trip with some homeschool friends out to the Big Four Ice Caves in the Alpine Lakes wilderness. It is a pretty quick and easy hike, but a fun treat to see a big pile of snow on a hot summer day.

 

Z took a nasty fall and scraped up her leg pretty badly on the way down, but fortunately she brought her Girl Scout first aid kit, and we managed to get her bandaged up enough to limp out of there.

wrapping up summer

It has been a crazy whirlwind of activity around here, trying to squeeze the most out of the last few weeks of summer (and some rare sunny weather). Highlights have included The Evergreen State Fair, Blueberry picking, and a day at Bumbershoot the famous Seattle Music and Arts Festival.

We saw a few good bands,

but the kids weren’t as into just hanging out and enjoying the music quite as much as I would have been. They did like the food, the vendors, and the street performers, though - and of course the first rate peoplewatching.

The fountain was a big hit, especially as it was actually hot enough to run through it without worrying about being freezing afterwards.

I even took the dare to run up to touch the dome.

A few days later, we attended our homeschool group’s “Not Back to School Picnic” though on the same day we actually started fall classes. Even though my kids don’t technically go to school, they have enough classes, sports, and activities going on during the academic year to *almost* feel like they do, and give the start of the school year a bit of significance, anyway. Our schedule changes quite a bit in September, though fortunately it doesn’t all start at the same time, so we have a chance to ramp up, rather than just jump in.