Super soakage

It is 9 p.m., brilliantly sunny outside, and the kids are involved in an intense super-soaker battle outside with 3 additional neighborhood kids. I am smiling at their happiness, while also noting the occasional traumatized screams as one of them gets wetter than planned. They are mostly doing a great job at trying to share all the water guns and various projection devices. They are also incredibly loud! Better outside than inside, I say.

We have had a lot of fun with Noah, and I think he is having fun too, although admittedly it must be a tough transition fitting into life with 4 siblings again all of the sudden. He is a great sport, and I have moved past my micro-managing to a more peaceful and laid back place. He is used to being the only child in the family and not having to take turns. We also have some different rules and structures. It's a process for him, and all of us. Either way I'm so thankful to have him here!

In the meantime, as he put it today after a bike collision with Wolfie, "I'm right where I always am! Underneath a pile with Wolfie!" (See picture. He's totally right.)

Bethany says "Dada"

Here's some video of Bethany. Yesterday, she said "Hi Dada" and looked at her hand while opening it and closing it. I would say that was her first expression of utter genius. (Feel free to raise an eyebrow at me. I admit that I am completely and hopelessly biased.)

Dirty Joke Reinterpretation

First things first--Noah is here! He flew in late Friday night and will be here until mid-September. It is thrilling to see what a tall, articulate, handsome young man he is. He also makes a great lab assistant. We just spent the last hour working on my virtual lab for Anatomy/Physiology II, calculating hematocrit and hemoglobin volumes and discussing anemias. He has opted out of the lab visit on Monday, however. As he puts it, "Blood is gross. It creeps me out, Mom."

That doesn't change the fact that he still takes pleasure in gross jokes. Adding a fifth child into the mix makes for some hilarious exchanges. Take yesterday, for example:

Noah, age 10: “Hey Wolfie, wanna hear a dirty joke?”

Mom, age 30, raising eyebrow and answering for Wolfie: “Sure, Noah. As long as it’s not too dirty.”

Noah: “Well, it’s not dirty. It’s just gross.”

Mom: “That works. Shoot.” (all 8 ears listening intently--Bethany indifferent)

Noah: “Why did Tigger look in the toilet?”

Mom: “Why?”

Noah: “He was looking for Pooh.”

Hysterical laughter ensuing. I admit, I was howling. It was hilarious! All of the kids were equally amused, but Zoya downright cracked up and began her practice of immediately retelling the joke which was just shared with the rest of us so we could laugh some more.

Zoya, age 4: “Hey mom! Why did Tigger look in the toilet?! He was trying to find poop to eat!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!"

Noah sighing: “I don’t think Zoya gets it, Mom.”

:)

Glacier-cruisin'

Our good friend invited us to Portage to participate in a discounted 2-hour glacier cruise. We jumped at the chance. One should spend as much time as possible around glaciers. Firstly, they smell amazing. They are like the best rain you could ever smell. They also sound deliciously profound. They crack and splash when calving.

We didn't see any calving this time around. But we did hear cracking and saw lots of massive chunks of ice floating in the glacier water, thick with silt. The water is an opaque icy-blue because of how the glacier water absorbs the sun. Here are some pictures.

This is a view from the most dangerous and most beautiful highway in America. Lots of bald eagles, and the occasional dall sheep and beluga whale can be seen. In winter, this highway is deadly. However, it is also the only route to Alyeska where snowboarding fixes can be had. In the winter, you will find people ice-climbing along the mountainous side-walls right along the highway. This time of year, waterfalls line the road and the view is truly spectacular.


Our boat, the Ptarmigan:


Pictures of us and Portage Glacier:




Yes, cheesy I know. Even though it's been almost 3 years, I think we may still qualify as tourists, as evidenced by this picture:


Look at that adorable baby!!




A retired flag, whipped relentlessly by the wind in Portage:




Our silly hams--this was taken at the Boggs-Begich Visitor Center in Portage, a very educational, entertaining, and inexpensive (like, free!) museum of sorts with lots of audio-visual and hands-on learning activities. We always enjoy going.

Our kids they are a-changin'.

Bethany has a big girl place at the table now. She also surprised me the other day when she was leaning against me while sitting and then used her little baby abdominal muscles to sit herself up and hold herself upright for several minutes without teetering. Now, she is working on maintaining her balance so that when she starts to tip like a tea kettle, she can get herself back into position.



Wolfgang got rid of his training wheels and picked up two-wheeling in no time. Alex spent a couple afternoons chasing him alongside while holding onto the back of his shirt. Then, he and I started talking and ZOOM. Wolf was off, riding on his own. He's quite proud of himself. Psalm also has a bike now. We found his new setup at the thrift store for under $15. It's got bumblebees on it.





Funny side note: Zoya is taking after her mother and is now the bike helmet police. When she sees a motorcyclist without a helmet on (no helmet laws around here) she says, "Look--there's a biker trying to kill himself." Reminder to self: Kids listen. And repeat!

Finally, a couple of pics of me and the babe.




And a new lake we discovered by the airport. Picnic on the calendar.



I seriously feel spoiled rotten. No complaints here.

Five Grocery Shopping Money Savers

Our income doesn't change frequently and there aren't a lot of ways we can impact our spending, other than to cut back on the variable expenses. Seasonally, we are using less heat and electricity in our home (the humidifiers are off, for instance) but the cost of gas is certainly offsetting that. Thus, we are deliberately driving less to keep from eating into our disposable income. Groceries are one area where I can try like heck to minimize costs and free up money for savings and other expenditures. Here are five ways I have found to do so--in no particular order.

1) Make soup. There is nothing I love more in my home (other than the various living creatures) than a big pot of hot soup. Probably the next best thing is a big pot of cold soup in the fridge for leftovers and lunches. Not only can I quickly heat it up and feed it to the kids, but Alex packs a bowl of it nightly for a meal at work that fills him up and doesn't cost him money.

Making soup has become one of my favorite activities, and the children love to help. The most recent pot involved 2 cans of enchilada sauce, 2 canisters of V8 juice, 2 pounds of dried black beans, 1 onion, a bag of baby carrots, 3 cans of stewed tomatoes, at least 10 baby red potatoes halved, 6 tablespoons or so of crushed garlic, and a whole lot of salt, pepper, and cayenne. On its own, it's a bit spicy, but with a small handful of colby jack cheese melted on top, everyone is happy. Alex has his without the cheese.

The cost of each bowl of this soup is minimal. The enchilada sauce, V8, beans, and carrots were free. The remaining ingredients cost mere dollars. Even if I were to pay for the free ingredients, the costs would still be blessedly low. Each pot of soup is unique and is improvised based on what is in the house. V8 as a base is a great way to make the soup healthier and boost our family's veggie intake.

2) Position yourself to buy in bulk. Don't trust the prices at warehouse stores either. I know that ground beef at Costco is $2.39/pound. I know that ground turkey is $1.79/pound. I know that 2 fryer chickens there are $10, give or take a few cents. Thus, when I go to the grocery store and see meat on clearance that is 70% less than that and has a "sell by" date 3 days out, it is a bargain and I will buy all I can, limited only by the size of my freezer. As soon as we save up for one, we will buy a chest freezer. During the winter, we just put a cooler outside and let Mother Nature help us to buy in bulk and prepare freezer food in advance. I have also learned not to trust my good intentions to cook the meat right away when I get home. It goes into the freezer because invariably I will put off cooking it for a week or two, and letting it go bad is a big waste of a great deal.

3) Use dried beans. These used to intimidate me. They require soaking and a long cooking time. I bought a 25 pound bag of pinto beans at Costco and just stared at them, hiding them behind something (hard to do!) and forgetting about them for weeks. Finally, I spent a half hour with a 1-cup scoop, dividing the 25 pounds into 12 or so bags with 2 pounds of beans each. I stashed these bags in a box and felt decidedly less intimidated. Now, I could simply grab a bag and do something with it--either use it in soup or prepare beans for meal inclusion. Once you get the hang of cooking with these, you will appreciate their texture and flavor more than canned beans. And they're very inexpensive and nutritious. I often will cook up a batch and my kids will request them with rice, which I make in advance as well. These foods take awhile to cook but they're easy to reheat and very versatile and tasty. Keep tortillas on hand and you can always throw together a quick meal of burritos or tacos. Cheap, cheap, and more cheap.

4) Use oatmeal for breakfast. The average cereal in a box costs a ridiculous amount of money for what is really a not very filling or nutritious handful of fluffy grains, often stripped of its nutrition and accentuated with unnecessary sugar. And don't buy the little expensive packets of oatmeal. Get whole oats and have fun with them. Add brown sugar and cinnamon; add jelly; add banana or apple pieces. The best way I've found to add fruit is to cook it with the oatmeal, so it gets soggy and yummy; then pour in some cinnamon. If you belong to a warehouse store, get it there. A half cup of oats to one cup of water is more than enough for most children. We save the leftovers in individual coffee mugs in the fridge and the kids enjoy cold oatmeal as a snack at a later time.

5) Drink water. Naturally, by "drink water" I mean "steer clear of overpriced and unhealthy flavored waters" called soda and all the other ways water has been disguised. We just drink water. At least, as a family. It's rare we drink juice. We drink lots of coffee, but I consider that a splurge. If you're going to drink coffee, make it yourself and take it with you in a travel mug instead of buying it at Starbucks. Even if you only spend $2 a weekday on coffee, that's still $40/month. We're rather snobby about our coffee. We spend $13.99 for 3 pounds of it, and it's organic. My favorite cheapo coffee is Chock Full O' Nuts but that would be a last resort for sure. Seriously though, at a restaurant, you'd be amazed at how much cheaper it is when you just get water. Ask for lemon. I'm laughing at how luxurious it feels to put a slice of lemon in our water. Yum!

Smokejumpers at Campbell Airstrip

Thanks to Michelle Mitchell's blog, we found out about an exciting opportunity last Saturday. The day was close to perfect--one of those days where, at the end of it all, I thought to myself that, if I was keeping track of the top 20 days ever, this would be one of them.

The children and I headed to the Campbell Airstrip to see the release of a rehabilitated eagle and to watch the smokejumpers parachute down to the runway. The Campbell Airstrip is the same place where Wolfgang got attacked by that bird that one time right after we moved here. The airstrip itself was created as a secret alternative runway near the military bases around here in the event that the bases themselves were inaccessible. It is a plain gravel strip in the middle of a big forest, as you can see in the pictures. I told Alex, "Gravel! It was just gravel!" And he looked at me with a look and said, "Yes, honey. Out in the bush, most of the runways are just dirt." Whoooooaaaahhh! Intellectually, I knew this, but it was cool to see one up close. :)



So we promptly missed the eagle release because of a lot of road construction happening right around the entrance to where we were going. As we were walking around the center itself, we saw its initial flight practically right toward us and heard the applause, and then made our way around the little building to where the people were. The eagle circled high overhead and we enjoyed that sight for awhile.

We walked through the forest through occasional patches of mosquito gathering spots. The day was gorgeous and warm. Even though Psalm is wearing his trademark hooded sweater in the pictures, I myself was enjoying a day in a t-shirt and loose pants with our sweet little Bethany strapped to my chest. (I opted for a front carrier instead of the backpack in order to maintain surveillance over all things mosquito-related.) At one point, Wolfgang smacked her head and left a dead bug behind. Bethany didn't even cry! I marveled at his perfect combination of gentle and forceful, harming only the bug but not the baby. For the record, though, the bugs let up once we were in the open clearing again. I've actually hardly noticed any mosquitoes at all this year, which is nice.



The plane took off from the runway and circled around to get higher and higher, occasionally tossing streamers out of it to check the wind and possible landing zones. The kids worked on their snacks, and everyone enjoyed the day. Then, out they came! Two firefighters jumped out of the plane and we watched them get closer and closer until they landed right where we were all standing, only 20-40 feet away from some of us. Once they landed, another two jumped out of the plane, and this happened again for a total of 8 jumpers, ultimately. One of them touched down gently into a standing position not 15 feet from where we were. Very fun for the kids (and the mom!) :)










So the kids got to chat with them for awhile, and Doug was the one in the pictures who let Wolf try on his big heavy firefighter jacket. Then the plane landed and came right up to where we were and we got to take a tour inside. Wolf wants to be a firefighter now---the kind who jumps out of planes. We ended the day with a trip to Baskin-Robbins, courtesy of Auntie Jen's gift certificates! Yummy. :)

I definitely came away from it appreciating these guys who fight forest fires all over the country. They are dropped into the danger zone, along with a few boxes of cargo. Doug said they can be on the ground for up to 21 days at a time, just surviving off what's in those boxes and sleeping in the tent which is built into their jackets. He said that 21 days was a new limit though---he himself had been on the ground up to 40 days once. They are able to rig hoses up to natural water sources and work until they get the fires out.

The Anti-cleaning Blog

Gotta love this.

How to Fake a Clean House

The Damned Fish

Only those who really know me know that I am not a pet person. I say that tentatively because some of the most important people in my life--whom I love the most!--love pets. One of my best friends is a self-proclaimed "crazy cat lady."

By far, my favorite pets so far since we've had children are the fuzzy seed pods that Wolfgang sincerely believed were caterpillars when he was younger. They were very low maintenance and rather cute, even for seed pods.

Now we have these fish. We started out with five. We're down to three. One of them died quickly, probably from the shock of being in a new environment. The other four seemed to be doing okay. Then I brought the bowl downstairs to clean it and left it on the kitchen counter for a day or two. Each time I got to the point of cleaning it, Bethany would need me and I would put off the task for a little bit longer.

This gave me time to observe the fish in a way that I hadn't before. I noticed that one of them was substantially smaller than the other ones (it's almost creepy how big they've gotten after just a couple weeks). He was having a very hard time swimming to the surface, and then Alex pointed out he was missing a fin on one side. Occasionally, the big fish we call Darth Fishee would occasionally come over and nip at him. I wanted to euthanize the poor little guy on the spot, because obviously he was in the process of dying a rather pitiful, painful death.

By the end of the day, that fish had died. These other guys are desperate for food all the time. I feel like I'm constantly feeding them. Can't they ever get enough, eating this strange concoction of artificial colors and processed fish guts?

(Actually, now that I'm reading the label of their food, it's pretty good! Salmon, cod, rockfish, shrimp, a little wheat, a few added minerals...)

So when I say "The Damned Fish," I'm not just using gratuitous profanity. I really do think that Darth Fishee is damned.

Sigh.

People Mover Part 3

Riding the bus carries with it a delicious sense of freedom. We set out on foot to get to the transit center. Unlike the park, which mostly involves the children running free while I occasionally help spin them on the spinny things, or help settle their occasional differences, this bus-riding experience guaranteed a full day of intimate time together. Conversation. Physical proximity. This could be a good or a bad thing, depending on how the day went. But I started out with a positive attitude and learned long ago that a "good day" often depends purely on attitude, regardless of whether everything else completely falls apart. I peered at the stroller when the driver told me to collapse it (okay--admittedly I peered at the driver as well. See aforementioned blog regarding the ridiculous amounts of stuff I brought with us). My friend thankfully helped us, holding the baby while I dealt with the stroller. We made our way to the rear of the bus where we formed our own little camp between the 8 of us: 2 adults and 6 children ages 6, 4, 4, 2, 9 months, and 5 months.

A woman near us chatted about how much easier it was getting to maneuver through the bus system now that she had been using it for three weeks. Another younger lady bemoaned her lost driver's license (with a cheerful attitude regardless) and asked us whether we knew if this bus would wind up downtown. In the end, we made it to the transit center with happy children. The bus was packed for that ride! I had never ridden on it when it was so crowded, especially at 10:30 in the morning. It took us the full scheduled hour on Route 77 to get 13 miles or so from where we started to where we ended (in contrast, the bus ride back--Route 102--is a quick 20 minutes--a straight shot back along the highway); we enjoyed our conversation between ourselves and the children. The kids, of course, felt like they were on the world's most exciting bus. :)

At the transit center, we plopped down on the ground to change diapers then made our way down the 6 blocks or so to Elderberry Park. We passed the Capt. Cook Hotel where Elton John was staying, formed a spectacle with our herd of children for all the cruise tourists who were unloading from their own bus in front of the hotel, and reached the park where the weather was absolutely gorgeous. The park overlooks the Cook Inlet which is largely mud this time of year, along with water and a gorgeous view of Mt. Susitna, a.k.a. Sleeping Lady (see picture). We ate lunch (bean and rice burritos) and played for about 2 hours. On our way back, after several street-crossing adventures involving a certain young toddler who had no interest in doing so, we made it back to the transit center for a rather longish wait after missing the bus we had intended to get on.

Sitting there at the transit center with so many people surrounding us, talking amongst themselves, playing with the kids, caused some realizations. One is that I miss people. Just being around people. In a way, I feel like we spend time around a lot of people. We go to the parks. We do things. We go to church. But these are kind of predetermined groups of people, not in the random and diverse way that happens when one is out in the world. Eagle River is not that big. It does not take long to run into people you know on a regular basis. I can almost count on seeing certain friends of mine simply by showing up to let my children play. And I love that! But it is much different from the lanky teens who are smoking at the bus stop, or the wrinkly and ancient-looking man playing a game of "Boo!" with my children. I feel rather sheltered in my little community. I love that on one hand, and on the other, I gobbled up this day and left it hungry for more.