cali trip: day 5

monday was santa cruz day. the kids and I had never been there, so dave was our tour guide.

first stop was mt. cross, the camp where dave spent many a summer, either as a camper or as a counselor.

we had a picnic lunch to start.

then headed out on a little tour of the cabins and all that, followed by a hike.

we were on the lookout for banana slugs. we were not disappointed.

after that hike, we took another short one to “big tree”. when we found it, we knew that that was it. it was BIG. like, crazy big.

that’s us IN the tree.

after we left mt. cross, we went in to santa cruz and searched for a skate shop. shane was planning to buy himself a long board. we had planned to buy it for him as his birthday present. he picked it out and was quite pleased with his gift.

then we headed toward the beach.

not exactly good beach weather. it was cold and drizzly.

showing that I’ve come to terms with my life-long fear of kelp. this was instilled in me very early on during summers at the beach at auntie’s house in sequim.

layla looked for shells.

micah chased seagulls.

after the beach, we were all hungry, so we headed further into town to have dinner at pizza my heart.

we all got a slice and a t-shirt (except micah, who doesn’t like pizza). seriously, it was the best pizza I’ve ever eaten. SO good.

micah had sprite. @@

this guy caught us taking his picture as he was tossing the dough, so he gave us a chunk to try it out.

we were not very successful. but it was fun.

then we wandered down the street, poking into shops, and found a place to get ice cream and espresso in a fun little candy shop.

we were headed out of town along the beach and noticed some evening surfers, so we stopped to watch them catch a few waves.

I was ready to move there. what an awesome, funky town.

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books

so i have, what i’ve coined as, “book ADD”. basically, i love books. i love to read. i love the king county library system and their fabulous website. i love clicking the “place hold” button. i generally have upwards of 35 books checked out, a hold list a mile long, and a running ‘tab’ of fines for overdue books. but here’s the problem. i generally have so many books and i want to read them all, that i never wind up reading any of them. i’ll bring home a book, read a chapter or two, and then the next book on my list will come in. repeat. eventually, i will have read 2 chapters of a dozen or so books, they will be due to go back, and i’ll never get around to finishing them. ugh! well, i’m officially attempting to ‘kick that habit’. at my husband’s repeated suggestion, i’m learning to make use of the ‘freeze’ button on the library’s website. this enables you to keep your hold on the book, but not receive it until you want it. it just moves other people’s holds ahead of yours. this is

random diaper musings

do you ever feel at odds with yourself? i constantly feel like i'm a big wad of contradictions. and being the living-in-my-head, overthinking type i can spend years, i mean hours pondering things. it can really get me down. example: diapers. one would think that this was a relatively easy thing to handle. i've got 3 kids. i'm pretty familiar with diapers. it seems so simple; your baby needs a change so you take the old diaper off and put a new one on. done. right? no. i have this constant dilemma going on. cloth or disposable. i have 25 perfectly good fitted cloth diapers that i paid a lot of money for when i decided a couple years ago that i was done filling up landfills. so micah wears them a good share of the time. but it bugs me that they're so bulky, especially with the covers on and clothes fit funny and that totally drives me nuts. so at home, he just wears the diaper w/ no cover and when we leave the house, i put a disposable on him. not usually

but i wanted beans!

i have discovered something amazing. until recently, layla would never eat green beans. well, she used to, and then a little more than a year or so ago, she started pulling them apart and eating the seeds out of them, leaving the rest. yeah, i know she's weird. then she quit eating them all together. she would just leave them on her plate. well, a couple fridays ago, we were having our pizza and beans and something prompted shane to pull these 'trainer' chopsticks out of the drawer. i've had them for a couple of years - i think i found them at a thrift store and thought they were cute and the kids could use them when we had chinese food. but we'd all kind of forgotten about them since we rarely eat chinese food (which makes me sad). so everyone got really excited about these and layla used them to eat every last one of her beans that night. dave and i exchanged some raised eyebrows as lightbulbs were illuminating above our heads. last night i made chicken sandwiches

pink bubblegum goo, inaugurations and insomnia...

yesterday morning, layla mentioned again that her ears hurt. so that, coupled w/ the neon green snot and the vomit-inducing cough won her an all-expenses-paid trip to the doctor's office. dual acute otitis. aka, both ears were infected. AND, get this, the doc said she had blisters on both her eardrums. BLISTERS! doesn't that sound awful? funny thing is, this was not one of those situations where it is clear as day that your kid has an ear infection (usually revealed in the middle of the night) and you start debating whether or not you can pump them full of tylenol and pray they last until 7:30am when you can call the dr.'s office and get the earliest available appointment, or if you have to go to the ER at O-dark-thirty. (btw, i'm sure my 'critics' will have a hay day with that last one, but oh well.) she really only mentioned her ears a couple of times, but never really complained or moaned or whined or cried about them like i would expect. we've

micah's first word.

are you ready for it? "this" not very profound, i know. but he goes around pointing to stuff going, "this?" and then he'll point to something else and go,"this?" it's pretty cute. (and yes mary, reminiscent of lily. we're working on 'that'.) ... i'm taking shane to the doctor today. he's been having some random bouts of feeling like he's goint to throw up. he never does, but it's usually been at night and i'm getting tired. today's the first day he's felt bad during the day, but he was awake for a couple hours last night and today he said he wanted to go to the doctor and find out what's wrong with him. so we're going. ... i don't know if i ever mentioned that we finally got layla's doctor to refer us to an allergist. YAY! so now we've been in the holding pattern of trying to make an appointment and being unable to because they don't have all the info they need from her doctor

rachel's continued ramblings

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