Category: Out & About

The Princess Festival, Egads

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Princess Festival 2009 Pumpkin Coach

It’s tough being the only girl in the family, right?

It’s also tough being the middle child, right?

So it’s a good idea when Mom decides to lavish some one-on-one time with said only girl/middle child, riiiiiight?

That’s basically the logic behind my decision to take Eleanor to the Princess Festival that was held down in Lindon yesterday.  It’s hosted by this very wealthy family as a fundraiser for impoverished Kenyans.  They even flew some Kenyan children in to participate.  Here’s Eleanor jumping on the trampoline with them (they were very sweet to involve her in their play):

 Princess Festival 2009 tramp

The site of the Princess Festival is “Hatfieldadelphia” (sworn enemy of McCoyadelphia) — a privately owned reception center/pleasure garden/castle owned by the aforementioned very wealthy family.  It features a witch’s cottage with a twisty slide running out its back, a massive fountain, a pavilion topped with a giant Russian-style dome, a big giant playground, a covered picnic area, a tiny Statue of Liberty holding aloft a street lamp, etc.  It gave the impression of being a very small amusement park with no rides.  The reception center was surrounded with giant iron statues of African animals.  Here’s Eleanor on an elephant:

 Princess Festival 2009 Elephant

ANYWAY — the Festival.  Girls came bedecked in their sparkliest duds, and a woman dressed as the Blue Fairy guided them through a role-playing adventure.  The kids helped Snow White decline the witch’s apple (Ella was a tad afraid of the witch, and had to find Mom for a moment).  They helped Rapunzel’s Prince reach the just-out-of-reach braid of hair hanging from the castle tower.  They gave the Beast a hug and he turned into a prince.  They helped Cinderella go to the ball.  They taught the Blue Fairy how to dance and twirl (said Rapunzel’s Prince: “You guys dance awesome.”)  The photo below is of Eleanor with Beauty and her Beast-turned-Prince.  Love them braces:

Princess Festival 2009 beauty & beast

At the end of the adventure, the girls went into the fairytale-decorated ballroom and watched the various princes and princesses they had just helped while they did a spiffy ballroom dance routine (the teenagers involved in this program deserve MEDALS, let me tell you).

At the end, Eleanor shyly introduced herself to the various fairytale characters, with emphasis on the shyly.  She was a wee bit overwhelmed by the sheer bigness of it all, but it was nothing another ’round of bouncing on the trampoline couldn’t fix.  Ella says her favorite part was meeting Cinderella.  You gotta admit, she does look just like the Disney cartoon.

Princess Festival 2009 Cinderella

Grandma Shirts and Great-Grandma Hanson accompanied us on the trip through fairyland, for which they deserve medals, as well.  Much cuteness was enjoyed by all.  Ella is a lucky girl.

Great Basin National Park

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We took a trip to said park over Memorial Day weekend.  The park is one of the least visited in the country, so most people don’t know where it is: it’s just on the Nevada side of the Utah/Nevada border, a.k.a. No Man’s Land.  The only town nearby is so small that is doesn’t even have a stop sign, much less a stoplight.  Most of the surrounding area is dry dry desert, but the Snake Range of mountains — which comprises the park — is unusually high, catching banks of rainclouds and allowing for snowpack reservoirs of water.  So it’s unusually lush, what the rangers call a “mountain island.”

 Great Basin 2009 Pole Creek

It’s still pretty deserty.  You can see in the above photo the contrast between desert (on the left) and mountain forest (on the right).  There’s a tiny creek that flows through the right hand side, allowing for the little scrap of forest.

Great Basin National Park is famous for Lehman Caves, a group of limestone rooms similar to Timpanogos Caves.  Apparently the caves served as a jazz club/speakeasy in the ’20s. Eleanor looks rather surprised to hear of it.  We took our cave tour with a biker gang from Salt Lake.  They were rather funny and polite, and had wicked cool leather jackets.

Great Basin 2009 Lehman Caves

Wheeler Peak is the highest peak in the park.  I supposed I would have been more impressed with it if I didn’t see peaks like this every day in Salt Lake.

Great Basin 2009 Mt. Wheeler

BUT — Wheeler Peak also hosts several groves of ancient bristlecone pines.  Really ancient.  Recent research calculated the age of one tree to be around 4,950 years old.  It’s the oldest known living tree in the world.

That’s right, 4,950 years old.  Think about that for a second.  That means that tree was a sapling when, like, Moses brought the Ten Commandments down to the Israelites.  Or when the Brother of Jared was contemplating how to light up his boat.  Old with a capital O.

Unfortunately, the trail leading to the grove was still covered in snow.  We gave up when the drifts got up to our knees.

Great Basin 2009 Snow

Wildflowers were in abundance in the park — Brian gave me a local wildflower guide for Mother’s Day, and we had fun looking up all the little blossoms we found.  We were able to identify nearly 20 different flowers.  The hillsides were carpeted with this variety of sunflower — the picture here just doesn’t do it justice; imagine the yellow flowers going on for miles, up and over slopes, and you’ll get the idea.  Gorgeous.

Great Basin 2009 Wildflowers

Jeffrey and Eleanor were good little troopers on the trip (William stayed with Grandma back at home.  Bless that grandma!).  Even though the campgrounds were at full capacity, the trails still seemed almost deserted.  We didn’t see any other children in the park at all.  When the kids finished the requirements for the Junior Ranger program, the park rangers were really excited; I don’t think they get to see very many kids.

Great Basin 2009 South Route trail

The kids made for slow hiking, (we estimated that our hiking speed was 3/4 of a mile per hour) but they were very good natured about it, even when slogging uphill.  Our only complaint is that we didn’t expect the cold temperatures.  Our campground was at 7,000 feet, so the nights were rather brrrrrr.  On the plus side, there were no gnats or mosquitoes.  So there you go.

The sad part of the trip is that we hoped to do some stargazing — the park is a protected Dark Sky Area, and has ranger-led astronomy programs — but the skies were overcast every night we were there (and there was a new moon, what a waste!).  I suppose this means we’ll just have to go back in late summer another year!

What I’ve Been Up To, Pt. 1

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The main problem is that my standard time for blogging is Saturday afternoons.  So what is to become of Ye Blog when every one of my Saturdays involve something time consuming yet wonderful?

Case in point: the Midwest Pilgrimage.  Here are all of my best friends from Pittsburgh.  We met together at a women’s retreat in Rockford, Illinois.  Aren’t we a corking good bunch?

 Midwest Pilgrims 2009

(Images almost identical to this one have already appeared on many of my friends’ blogs.)  It was three glorious days of spill-your-guts style conversation, eating M&Ms, and sleep deprivation — like a great big old slumber party, only without Footloose blaring, unwatched, in the background (such were the slumber parties of my youth).  What a lovely bunch of smart, curious ladies . . . I’m already counting down the days until next year.

Until then, I’m going to be heading off to the Utah Pilgrimage with my mother in law this weekend (have I mentioned how wonderful she is?).

Spring Break at Red Butte Gardens

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Spring Break is OVER! 

(Hurrah!  I survived!)

While I understand the need for teachers to have a much-needed break, does it have to be at the time of year when the weather is the most unpredictable and the incidence for ear infections and flu is the highest? 

Spring Break came just after I had finished up a four-days-in-bed Eleanor flu, ear infections for both her and Wimmy, and then four-days-in-bed Jeffrey flu.  Having him home with the flu for four straight days was a trial; he is the most high-maintenance (whiny) of all my kids.  We finally figured out how to keep him entertained on Day Four: putting the “Making of Lord of the Rings documentary in my laptop and letting him watch it all he wanted without driving the rest of us crazy.  I don’t know why my six year old has such a high tolerance for the endless natterings of Peter Jackson, but he does.

 So, needless to say, after two weeks of feeling isolated and lonely due to sickness, it was difficult to take on three bored kids snowed in with cabin fever.  Arrrgh.

At least on Monday the weather was good.  We got to go to Red Butte Gardens and see the pretty flowers.  I made an attempt at taking portraits of the kids, like we used to do at the Phipps Conservatory every spring in Pittsburgh.  Here are the results:

Eleanor is learning how to “look cute” for the camera (i.e. mugging):

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I actually got Jeffrey to look at the camera AND smile.  Kinda:

 red-butte-09-jeff

William found a seat just his size under a willow tree in the children’s garden:

 red-butte-09-wimmy

This picture is just darn springy:

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Monday was the only day of the week that we had sunshine.  By Wednesday, the ground was once again blanketed in snow and I threw myself onto a pile of mittens and boots and did some screaming and kicking for a while. 

But now school is back in session, and the sun has returned.  Happy days.

Retro Acres vs. Ye Olde Pioneers

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little-house-in-the-big-woods1For the past two weeks, our evening storytime has taken a departure from the usual picture books and headed deep into the Big Woods — Little House in the Big Woods, to be exact.  The first in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s famous “Little House” series.

It’s the first real “chapter book” I’ve read out loud to the kids, and they are for the most part following along very well.  I felt that we were going out on a limb with it; the Little House books have been unfortunately marginalized as “girl books,” and I’ll admit that the first chapter, with its long descriptions of smoking meat and making butter, made both Jeffrey and Eleanor a bit restless.

BUT — then comes the moment when Pa picks up his gun.  And goes hunting for BEARS.  And THEN he comes home and cleans the gun and makes BULLETS in the FIREPLACE.  Can’t get more boy-appeal-oriented than that.

There’s also the great moments when Ma slaps a bear, Pa hacks apart a tree full of bees, various characters are chased by panthers, and many, many meals in which everybody has either maple candy or honey and not much else.

Ah, the 19th century!  Motto: “Teetha Rottenum Est.”

The secret motive, of course, is that I wanted to get Jeffrey ready for the Intermountain Living History Conference that we attended last week at This is the Place Heritage Park (aka “the Pioneer Village”)– a conference for people interested in historical reenactment.  They had inexpensive children’s classes taught concurrently with the adults’ workshops, so while I was off learning about tinsmithing or millenery, Jeffrey got to learn how to wash with a washboard, write with a quill, and how to take a bow like a gentleman.  He enjoyed the classes and bowed all the way home, carefully holding his feather quill in one hand.  (His “pioneer schoolteacher” later told me that, when she was encouraging all the kids to write in cursive with their quills, Jeffrey huffed, rolled his eyes, and said “Geez, I’m only in kindergarten!”)

Did reading the book help?  Well, his first class was held in the Gardiner cabin, a little log house decorated with all the accoutrements of 19th century frontier life.  As Jeffrey waited on a bench with the other kids for the class to begin, he looked all around him, wide-eyed.

“Mom!” he cried.  “This is just like the Little House in the Big Woods!”

I smiled at the cuteness, but his period-dress-clad teacher was simply touched.

“Why, yes,” she cried, choking up a bit.  “You’re absolutely right!”

Rest Assured, There Were No Explosions on the Floor

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We celebrated Valentine’s Day this weekend.  I’d like to say that a rather romantic event was prepared and executed, but instead we were burdened with loads of spare time on our hands.

You see, owing to our quirky local school district, the kids had a 4-day weekend off, and we had originally planned to go down to Southern Utah, visit family, and see Zion National Park (quite the excellent place at any time of year, but bursting with sweet solitude in the winter).  Originally planned, however — last-minute cancellations, schedule snafus, and bad weather caused us to ditch the whole affair.  Sad!  So we hung around the house, instead.

Therefore, in honor of Valentine’s Day, I’m simply going to talk about one of the more romantic-y destinations Brian and I visited this month.  Namely: public dancing at the Murray Arts Center.  Yep, dancin’ at the MAC!

This is a privately-owned, schmaltzy ramshackle of a building down on State Street in Murray, and on every Friday and Saturday evening, you can plunk down $7 and twirl around a shiny dance floor to the tune of a five-piece band.  The ballroom is rather piecemeal, but glitzy — think of a patchwork quilt made of disco balls — decorated with mismatched chandeliers, thrift-store art, and architectural pieces scavenged from theatrical sets and demolished buildings.

The crowd is stately, lively, and comprised mostly of people over the age of 65.  It is, in other words, just like this:

Yes, I admit, there are quite a few hot-to-trot young couples at the MAC.  But the real stars are the elderly swingers who can MOVE LIKE ANYTHING.  Ladies who adorn themselves in draping fabric and loads of costume jewelry, sashaying elegantly in the arms of their spindly partners. 

Brian and I used to go ballroom dancing quite a bit when we lived in Utah the first time, seven years ago.  Dancing at the MAC was one of the things we missed a lot when we moved to Pittsburgh, and was one of the things I looked forward to revisiting when we found that we were coming back to Salt Lake.

Two weeks ago, it was finally possible to go back — we had babysitting, we rustled up some dancing clothes, Brian donned his soft dancing shoes, and we headed south to get glitterfied.  We were so pleased to find that the ballroom looked just the same as it did years ago!  We strolled out onto the floor, arm in arm —

–and realized that we had COMPLETELY forgotten everything we once knew about dancing. Yeah, we managed to cobble together a collective memory of the cha-cha, the waltz, and the two-step (which may or may not have been exactly like a waltz) but beyond that . . . erugh.  We spent a lot of time sitting on the sidelines, watching the curving machinations of the swingin’ set, turning to each other to squawk, “Hey, look at that move!  We used to know that one, right?”

Occasionally, we’d trot back out to give those newly half-remembered moves another go.  However, the people-watching was what it was really all about.  And the atmosphere, baby.  A shiny, shiny atmosphere.

Ich habe ein Blog

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This winter I decided to follow up on something I’ve always wanted to do and enrolled in a beginning German course.  My grandfather was German, and we were stationed in Bavaria for 3 years when I was a girl, but in high school I decided to study French.  I’ve always kinda regretted never taking Deutch instead.  So, when I saw a listing for the class in the Salt Lake Community Education brochure I found in the mail, I thought, why not?

My class is held in a nearby high school, and is taught by a petite Swiss woman who also teaches all of the Italian courses.  She’s beautiful, fond of hoop earrings, and very friendly.  The nice thing about taking German is that the class size is always small — there are only about ten adults in my class.

As for actually learning the language . . . well, let’s just say I would be doing better if I could remember to study every evening.  But it’s fun, and nice to get out of the house once a week and tackle some umlauts.  Oh, and the German word for cell phone: das Handi.  That’s mighty cute slang, if I do say so myself.

So far the most difficult part of the class is pronouncing the German name for the United States: Envereinigten Staaten.  (Hmm.  I may have spelled that wrong.)

If nothing else, someday I’ll hopefully be able to understand what’s going on in this video clip.  It may just be the worst dancing ever captured on film.  Is it owing to my German heritage that I dance just like this:

It just may be the most awesomely hilarious fashion show in the history of the world.

Blades of Steel

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Okay, I’ll admit it: I’m attempting to redeem my childhood failures through my kids, okay?  Okay?  That is, we’ve started them in skating lessons.

See? Not so bad.  Learning to ice skate is something I longed and yearned to do as a child, but my family never lived in a town with a rink.  So, who am I to pass up getting my kids to learn this sport when we now live 5 minutes away from a rink?

The Salt Lake City Sports Complex has two big ice sheets that were built for Olympic hockey games back in ’01.  They have children’s group skating lessons there taught by Official US Figure Skating People, namely, amazingly fit 18 year old girls who could probably skate on the head of a pin.  All at once.

Eleanor is in the “Snowplow Sam” course, designed for preschoolers.  Their main task is to learn how to stand up by themselves after falling down.  Sometimes they “march” from foot to foot, but mainly it’s all about the falling.

Jeffrey is in the “Basic One” course.  The kids in this class actually scoot around the ice a bit.  Jeffrey even engages in the occasional game of “Red Light, Green Light,” when he isn’t chewing on his gloves.

Both children really enjoy the skating.  Jeffrey has NO FEAR — it doesn’t phase him one bit when he falls, he just gets right back up and keeps scooting.  He idolizes the hockey players who practice on the sheet next door, which makes Mommy nervous. 

Eleanor gets a bit more shaky on the ice, but she loves doing it anyway.  Rather, she especially loves putting on the layers of stretchy pants and knitted gloves which we set aside for skating sessions.  It’s all about the clothes, people.

For years, I’ve had a fantasy of having whole-family outings on the ice.  Brian can handle himself pretty well on the ice, so that leaves just William and myself to figure it out.  I’m going to predict that William will learn to skate before I do (and keep in mind that they don’t let kids on the ice until they are 3). 

skating-jan-09

I made a feeble attempt at skating during a public skate event last Saturday, and Chaos Ensued.  Let’s just say that I fell down and couldn’t figure out how to get up.  With skates on, my bent knee came up to my ears, and my wimpy legs couldn’t push hard enough to get me into a standing position.  Or rather, my wimpy brain was afraid my wimpy legs would cause me to fall foward onto my face.  (Hey, falling on my behind is one thing, falling on my face quite another.)  After kneeling feebly on the ice for a few minutes, one of those 9-year-old wunderkind skaters — a little Asian girl with an Official Figure Skating Jacket — came over and told me how to do it.  And thus ended my skating session for the day.

So: squats first, then skating.  You hear that, legs?

Fun in the . . . Brrr

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One of the things I promised myself when we planned to move back to Salt Lake is that I would get the family to participate more in winter sports.  I love sledding, sure, and backyard snowplay is positively excellent behind our house, but I felt that we needed something more — specifically something that engages the grown-ups.  Brian and I  — especially I — tend to turn in to big, galumphing atrophied bears during the wintertime.  This behavior was a tad more excusable in Pittsburgh — Brian was a time-crunched med student, I was nursing newborns, and while we did get bits of snow in western Pennsylvania, it never stuck around for more than a couple of days.  The city didn’t have much by was of winter sports facilities, and the high humidity and ice storms made spending more than twenty minutes at a time outdoors akin to taking a mudbath in a refrigerator. 

But in Salt Lake — ahh, nice winter!  Nice winter!  It gets into the 50s in the daytime, there’s plentiful snow (seriously, I haven’t seen grass since November), pretty mountains for exploring, and all kinds of state-of-the-art rinks and luges and what-have-yous left over from the 2002 Winter Olympics.

BUT — we’re still living on the cheap nowadays.  So instead of pitching in for lift tickets, we do this:

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Whee!  That’s Brian and Jeffrey about to sled down a dry creekbed on Little Mountain, my favorite scary/extreme sledding spot up Emigration Canyon.  (There are gentle slopes, too.)  We took this trip on New Year’s Day.  Jeffrey had NO FEAR — he marched straight up to the tallest hill and took off — while Eleanor was content to just go about a quarter of the way up with me and slowly drift down on her penguin tube.  She yelled “I’m having fuuuuuuun!” all the way down.

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My family and Brian’s came along with us on the trip, which was very fun.  Afterwards we went back to Retro Acres for hot chili, corn bread, and outrageously thick Spanish-style hot chocolate with homemade churros.  (Mmmm!  Deep fried blissss!)

Byeroid, Thyroid

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So, after long last, my thyroid is finally dying!  Hurrah!

For those of you who don’t know, I’ve been suffering from hyperthyroidism (Grave’s Disease) for the past two years.  It began during William’s pregnancy, and I’ve been waiting and waiting for him to be old enough for me to get the treatment: killing of the thyroid completely.  Why?  Here’s what hyperthyroidism gives you:

  • Rapid pulse (120 at rest is my personal all-time high)
  • Heart palpitations (I thought I was having a heart attack)
  • High body temperature (kicking the blankets off at night, even in winter)
  • High metabolism (always hungry)
  • Fatigue (zzzzz)

If you go too long without being treated, your eyes begin to bug out of your head, and it can lead to blindness.  Fortunately, I saw a doctor when I was just at the rapid pulse/palpitations stage.  The standard medication for hyperthyroidism has terrible long-term side effects (painful stiff joints, high chance of osteoporosis), so it’s better to kill the thyroid off and take the medicine for hypothyroidism, the medication for which has nary a side effect at all.

Here’s the treatment: you drink a dose of radioactive iodine.  Your thyroid is the only part of the body which absorbs iodine, so it’s the only tissue that is killed off by the radiation.  The excess radioactive stuff is excreted by the body, which means . . . you can’t be around small kids for a few days. 

See why I had to wait for William to reach toddlerhood?

I fianlly underwent this treatment last Tuesday.  I had to go off my regular medication for three weeks preceeding the treatment, which meant that all my symptoms came back.  I’ve been exhausted, hungry, and hot for a whole month, which is part of the reason why I haven’t blogged, or . . . well, done much of anything for the month of November.

The treatment was odd . . . did you know that many hospitals have a Department of Nuclear Medicine?  And they use a geiger counter to figure out how much radiation might be in your knee?  (At least, they did with me.  “Here, hold your leg still.”)  When it came time to down the iodine, I was lead to a lab hood where a big insulated steel can held a tiny glass vial with a straw inside.  I was given so little iodine that the lab tech had to mix it with tap water so I’d actually have something to slurp up.

The sainted grandmas took over childcare for a few days, and I holed myself up in my parents’ house for the duration.  My parents’ house is very nice, but it’s in West Point, where the most interesting thing to do depends on what books you brought to read with you.  My choices?  Karen Hesse’s Brookyln Bridge, Eva Ibbotson’s The Dragonfly Pool, and Nancy Werlin’s Impossible.  So . . . yeah, I read a book a day for three days.  (The best of the three?  The Dragonfly Pool, although Impossible had the smokin’ hot duct tape scene.)

It’s great to be back with the kidlets.  I missed William especially — I’m used to his constant physical presence, the cuddles, the loveys. 

It will take weeks before I notice any kind of effect from the treatment; my heart still jumps around from time to time.  But it will get better.  I hope.  The biggest question from family has been: with my exposure to radiation, what will my emerging superpower be?  My answer: if I had one, why would I tell you?  Isn’t it standard behavior to keep superpowers a secret?  Besides, I’m always wearing glasses.  You wouldn’t even recognize me in my superhero gear, from which glasses are excluded.

Ha.