Visit to Lakeside

We spent the afternoon up on Whidby Island visiting the camp where I spent the majority of my childhood.  I haven't been up there since I was in college, so I was excited to see the place, as well as give Keith a visual of that place I've talked about so much.

They were expecting over 600 people, so we parked in Mukilteo and walked across.  Then we were picked up in Clinton by the oldest school bus I've seen in quite a while.  We weren't entirely sure it would make it up the hill to the camp, but we survived.

We got to wander around the camp for a few hours.  There are a few new buildings, but for the most part everything is just how I remember it from childhood (although everything seems just a little bit smaller than I remember).  I think Keith finally understands the draw of summer camp.  I'm really looking forward to when our little guy is big enough that we can take him to our first Family Camp.  I don't think I'm far enough into parenting to look forward to the day that I can drop him off for his first Jr Boy's camp and have a week to myself, but I'm sure those days will come too.

My first trip to camp was when I was 6-weeks old, our little guy was about 9-weeks younger than I.  But it will probably be a little while before he gets to visit outside of me.

We only stayed for about half of the 50-year celebration ceremony.  Knowing this group, it probably went pretty late, and Mom started to get antsy pretty much as soon as we finished eating.  I was sorry to miss the ceremony, but it was nice to get home while it was still a little light out.

My Mother Used to Bake

I was at Barnes & Nobel the other day buying a last-minute baby-shower gift and a book caught my eye. It was one of those books they have by the cash register. You know the kind, designed more for form than function, to sit on the shelf and be pretty, rather than actually read. The title was "Just like my Mother used to bake" and it had an assortment of baked goodies on the cover. But, the way they'd played around with the font, it looked more like "Just like MY MOTHER USED TO BAKE", which took me down an entirely different line of thought than I think they intended.

My Mother Used to Bake too. Amazing things. Hand-cut valentine cookies with each of my class-mates names piped in pink royal icing. Home-made gingerbread houses. A Chocolate Espresso Cake that took about 400 steps. And Sunday roasts that were nearly as good as Grandma Hamilton's. Now she can't remember how to turn the oven on (or off), and the closest she gets to cooking is asking my Dad if he'd prefer Azteca or Soprano's tonight.

She used to have huge dinner parties, making roast beef dinner (with Yorkshire Pudding!) for the entire church after the Christmas pageant. And she never would have considered sending an invitation with the words "we'll provide the main dish, please bring a side-dish to share". She was an "I'll do it all myself, thank-you-very-much" kind of lady. (Not that she was above giving her kiddo's 40 pounds of potatoes to peel, but family doesn't count, apparently). How things have changed. This year I stepped into her role & hosted Thanksgiving dinner, my parent's contribution was a Costco-tray of pre-cut veggies. That would have never passed muster in the household that I grew up in.

I have a friend who got married several months after Keith & I did. Her mom had died shortly after she finished college, and I remember wondering how on earth she was able to pull a wedding together without her Mom's assistance. Little did I realize that a few short years later I'd be staring down the nose of Motherhood with my Mother alive, but absent. How am I supposed to do this on my own? How do I know the things a Mother knows? Do I really need a wipe-warmer? What the heck is a boppy, anyway? Sometimes I wish I could surprise an answer out of my Mom. If I jump around a corner and throw a question at her, would the answer come flying out before her plaque-filled brain realized that it had been duped?

I know that I am fortunate to still have her around. I look forward to seeing her hold my baby boy. And whatever level of understanding she'll have, she will love him and everything he does. But I want so much more than a great photo-op. I want him to know her as a person, not just a memory. After spending the last 15 years fighting to be independent, I need my Mommy and it's too late. I want to put my little boy down on his blue & green bicycle-themed baby quilt and tell him how Grandma Hamilton loves to make quilts and she made this one just for him, but it's not going to happen. I want to take my Mom to Babies-R-Us and have her decipher the eight-hundred-million options for me, but I'd just end up trying to keep her corralled within the store. I want things to go back to how they used to be, back when she was just forgetful and a little crazy, but not enough to need a name for it.

So, my mother used to bake, but she doesn't any more, and that makes me sad.

Busy Weekend

We somehow have one of those magical and unusual weekends where we don't have anything scheduled, so of course, I had to find as many options to fill it as possible:

Friday night Rachel invited us over for dinner.  Well, actually, she invited us over for Thursday, but it's a long story...

Not being eager to spend any more time in her hot apartment than necessary, Rachel changed it up and we met at Carkeek Park.  (Although, now that I think about it, this could have just been her clever ploy to avoid cleaning her apartment, hmm...)  But I'll take any excuse to be outside in this new-fangled sunshine that seems to have come out of nowhere.  Rachel made a wonderful dinner, but the piece d'resistance was the drinks:

Each in it's individual watermelon cup, with umbrella straw, no less!

This morning I took on the job of pressure-washing the front porch.  It's something I've been meaning to do for a while, but haven't gotten around to.  Since we borrowed the pressure washer for the back deck, I figured I should do it now before we return the pressure washer to my Dad.

Before:

I learned a few things in the process:

1. Start at the top and work your way down (duh!) EXCEPT on the stairs.  Then you should do all the risers first, or you'll just spray crud all over the stair above that you just cleaned.

2. Have an exit strategy.  I knew I wanted to do the porch, and I knew that I didn't want to do the ENTIRE driveway, but finding a graceful stopping point is not as easy as it looks.  So we may have a few random splotchy spots across our driveway.

3. Our porch is actually darker than I thought.  Although there is a notable improvement in the appearance (without the moss garden growing on the stairs), it didn't get as light as I expected.  But it looks much better.  Which you can't really tell in the photo, as evidenced by the fact that I mixed them up the first time.  I think this really is the after-photo...

After:

I spent the rest of the morning at the gym swimming.  I've taken up swimming this week, not so much for the exercise (since I'm not exactly working hard), but just for the pure joy of spending a half-hour free from gravity.  That and I read that it can help with the swollen-ankles curse.

In the afternoon we headed down to Greenlake to see the Coughlin Porter Lundeen boat race in the Seafair Milk Carton Derby.

The weather was fantastic, and the group had staked out a great spot just by the end of the race.

The CPL boat was an engineering marvel and they won handily.

Of course, what else would you expect from a boat that is: 1. Designed & built by engineers and 2. Manned by four 20-something guys?

They left the competition in the dust.

This is the CPL boat:

This is everyone else:

I couldn't fit both in the same photo.

We came home & I pulled weeds in the garden until I had filled the compost and the spare-compost bin and I collapsed in a heap in the grass.

My finished product:

I know, it doesn't look like much, and I didn't take a before picture, so you'll have to believe me that it looked something like this before:

Keith, meanwhile, started staining the deck (these are the stairs, I can't figure out how to rotate the picture):

After recovering from my weed-pulling/jungle taming adventure, I made a Peach Pie.  Just in-case carrying his baby isn't enough to endear myself to Keith.

Yes, it's a touch over-done.  My oven & I are in negotiations at the moment.  I think it should interpret 425-degrees literally, but it seems to think it's okay to be 10-20 degrees under that.  I'm starting to get on to it's game, so I keep setting the temperature higher each time, guess I over did it this time.  Always learning...

After all this, I'm ready for bed, or a massage.  But I'll take just having Keith make dinner:

Never put off until tomorrow, what you can do today...

...but sometimes, if you put-off-until-tomorrow long enough, you can get out of it entirely.

Several months ago I looked out the office window to discover that we had a large tree branch hanging in our front tree.  It appeared to be held there only with friction and an ever-decreasing supply of teeny-tiny branches.  Being positioned completely vertical, I knew it was just a matter of time before I came crashing down onto whom- or what-ever was underneath it.  So, being a responsible adult, I knew it had to come down, and told Keith to take care of it.

Easier said than done, of course, since the lowest part of the branch was about two stories up (so no ladders) and way out at the edge of the tree branch (so no climbing the tree & shaking it out).  Keith's been thinking on it for several months, trying to find a way to get it down.  We've considered everything from a lasso to renting a cherry-picker truck.

But, yesterday we came home to find this in our front yard:

Apparently we'd taken too long thinking about it, so the tree chose to take things into it's own hands.  There were shattered bits of branch all over the front yard, but otherwise, not too much carnage.

Pretty much the perfect solution, actually.