High Holidays

The High Holidays have come and almost gone, the last of the cycle being Simchat Torah this Thursday.  We've had a great new year.  On Rosh Hashanah morning the boys attended an incredible two hours of adult services, with wonderful manners.  I think they wanted to see me read - I was on the bimah for the second half.  A peaceful place, the bimah.  Dale had his hands full back there in the stands but you couldn't tell from where I was.

(The reason I was enjoying such a big honor is that a few months ago the rabbi invited me to "help out with new members."  I agreed to pitch in; new members are a good zone for me, especially since they are often families with young kids.  Later I found out that he had been inviting me to chair the membership committee.  Still later I found out that there is no membership committee, that I will have to create one.  Um. This process is moving slowly.  The honor of a High Holidays reading is thus more about reinforcing my sense of obligation than about acknowledging anything I've actually done.)

This year we have had the novel experience of celebrating with other families!  In the past we have been mostly been en famille, and the closest famille in Maryland involved a long and harrowing rush-hour drive from Takoma Park to the north burbs of Baltimore.  But put your kids in a Jewish preschool and what do you know, you make Jewish friends.  Rosh Hashanah evening we had two families over (how is that twelve people already?) and had a delicious vegetarian meal involving fresh-baked challah and a wild mushroom galette.  We adults relaxed and enjoyed themselves to the exact extent that we were able to ignore the constant wild shrieking from the six loudly happy children.

On Yom Kippur, I mused on how detail-oriented the confession of sins is.  The traditional recitation has 44 sins, including, for example "sins we have committed with eye movements":  Did you look places you should not have looked?  Did you roll your eyes at anyone?  Did you narrow your eyes at someone?  The general mood seems to be that there are a hundred thousand opportunities every day to do well or badly, and we are responsible for all of them.  This seems particularly poignant for parents.  My favorite one is "sins we have committed through confusion of the heart."  The rabbis taught that all mistakes stem from a confusion of the heart; this is why we tap our chests as we recite the mistakes.  This seems like a very compassionate outlook.

I fasted this year, and Dale ate less than usual.  The general agreement among our friends seems to be that at most one parent can realistically fast - it's just too much to deal with preschoolers on no food.  I did well until we got stuck in Husky traffic on the way to break-the-fast at a friend's house, with fresh warm challah on my lap.  Torture.  When we finally arrived and ate the challah, though, I was hugely cheered up by my friend (also fasting) who said, awestruck:  "This is heaven.  And not just because I'm starving!"  I do make a delicious challah if I do say so myself.  Nana would be proud.

Irresistible pictures

These pictures aren't associated with any major trip or event but I just can't not post them.  How can we go another day, for example, without this astonishing image of Jordan, wearing a tiger balloon hat?

The tiger hat was made by the balloon man at a three-year-old's birthday party, and was one of a dozen similar creations.  He made a cow hat, a Thomas the Train hat, a snail, Spider-Man, you name it.  He told the kids he could make anything they wanted and they were thunderstruck at the very concept of that.

And here we have our children, outdoors in their pajamas (why?), on a sunny day months ago, discovering the delight of poofing water out an absurdly long tube.  The tubes have a seam that lets water from the swimming pool seep in between breaths, and something about the angle makes the water just super funny when it pops out.  They did this for a long time.  They look like didgeridoo players, or like something out of Dr. Seuss.  The tubes were originally part of a garden cloche thing.

Next we have the children posing together at a playground, so that I could take a picture and email it to Daddy who was out of town.

And finally we have a selection of Lego creations.  Jordan is a master:  his best works are extremely elaborate, and all are exactly symmetric, with specific intentional deviations for antennas and the like.  (Aaron contributed to this collection also... he is equally enthusiastic and his fine motor skills are coming right along.)  Jordan is so amazing at this that we thought he would love Engineering with Legos, but he was not into it.  "You only get to build what they say," he complained.  At home, everything is ships with guns.  Can't help that.  

Aunt Kari Camp

This is out of order, because Aunt Kari Camp was last month, but whatever.  Aunt Kari Camp was a whole week in which Dale's sister took the older boys (her kids and Jordan, but not Aaron) on various adventures all day every day.  They did a three-day camping trip at Mount Rainier that included a six-mile mountain hike.  They went to Northwest Trek, the Evergreen State Fair, and the Space Needle.  They got treats and souvenirs and generally had a blast.  I hope they do it every year.  Here are just a couple pictures:

Olympic Peninsula: Mountains

We went up to Hurricane Ridge for a day to see the mountains.  No hurricanes; in fact, if you can believe it, the weather was absolutely fantastic for our entire trip.  It didn't rain on us one bit the whole time, right up until the day we left.  How do you visit the rainforest and not get rained on?  It was disorienting.  We had brought raincoats, umbrellas, extra shoes, the works, and they were just piled around in the minivan being dry.

But I digress.  The mountains were gorgeous.  This whole post is really just an excuse to show this picture:  click on it to make it bigger for full drama:

I have almost nothing to say after that.  We had snacks.

We took a hike.  We didn't hike long because it was hot and steep and - sorry to say this - actually a little monotonous, once you were done gawking at the view.  A bear-went-over-the-mountain kind of hike if you  know what I mean.   

The boys love to pose together.

We learned an extremely useful fact on this trip: We hike at one mile per hour on easy to moderate trails.  (Challenging trails we do not attempt at all.)  Young preschoolers are often either dawdlers or dashers, and Aaron is very much the former.  He is also too big to be carried for more than a few minutes.  Thus we know our pace and accept it.  Zippy young adults hike easy trails at three or four miles an hour, so we had to be careful when other people referred us to "short hikes" in the area.

We also take frequent breaks for food, water, and trying on antlers.

Olympic Peninsula: Beach, river, dam

When I was in college Rialto Beach was one of the most powerfully significant natural places in the world to me.  It's awesome:  explosive crashing waves, gargantuan rock formations out past the tide pools, huge beach logs piled violently on top of each other.  Calling it a "beach" almost feels misleading -- there is little sand, it's not warm, and overall there is no invitation to relax.  On the contrary, it's downright dangerous.  But it's beautiful, and the ruggedness just increased my respect for and immersion in the place.  I remember sitting on the beach for an hour once just letting the noise of the waves pound my ears.

On this trip I sadly had to admit that the ruggedness was perhaps just plain harsh.  Back in the day, I hardly noticed the howling wind and freezing cold - at least I don't remember minding it; and clambering over the beach logs and stumbling through the irregular rocks, I think I just took that for granted.  Visiting the beach as part of a family whose members' ages span 67 years, now, that brought the wind and the cold and the potential for breaking your neck quite vividly to the front of the experience.  We didn't stay long.

Jordan loved it, and would have jumped all over the logs like a goat for half the day if he had had the option.

Aaron was much more troubled by the wind.  

I wish he had been troubled by the log-jumping too, but no, he wanted to go all over everything just like his big brother.  Aaron is all reckless delight, fearless, no interest in his physical limitations.  (Totally different from Jordan at the same age, who was cautious and respectful of possible danger.)  This was another reason we had to leave quickly.

We found ourselves some access to a flat, rocky riverbed, and spent a while there wading, rockhopping, and looking for little fish.  Actually the kids did that with Sue and Dale while Dad and I relaxed under a tree.

Later (was it even the same day?  I'm not sure, and I don't think it matters) we stopped by the Elwha Dam for a last look.  This is the "last dam summer" for the Elwha River; in an absolutely gigantic project, its two dams are being removed to free the river for salmon runs and general ecosystem rehabilitation.  It was fascinating to see the dam in person and imagine it not being there.  It's really big.  (UPDATE 9/13/10:  NPR had an excellent 4-minute story on this today.)  

The boys were mainly interested in the construction equipment.

Olympic Peninsula: Woods

We had another fantastic family vacation in a national park - this one much closer to home, the Olympic Peninsula.  One of the great things about the Peninsula is that there is temperate rainforest, rugged coastline, and high mountain peaks all within an hour or two of each other, so we had multiple ecologies in a single week!  We stayed at Sol Duc Hot Springs, which had duplex kitchen cabins and pools of various temperatures.  Jordan and I enjoyed discussing the two stories of why the hot springs are hot:  the myth, which is that the hot springs are the tears of a dragon, and the science story, which is that the water in the hot springs went next to an underground volcano before coming out of the ground.  Jordan said "A myth is an awesome story which is not true, and science is amazing because you can discover things that nobody knew before."  We agreed that both stories were excellent.

Sol Duc Lodge:

Cabin.  I was delighted to have a kitchen and brought a ton of food; I cooked for the whole family (the four of us plus Dad and Sue) the whole week and we took picnics for lunch.  We only ate out twice in six days.

Boys bouncing on the beds in the cabin.  

Picnic.  It was really good we had the picnic action going, as there was amazingly little for tourists to eat otherwise.

On to the woods.  We loved the giant trees, the hanging mosses, the clear streams, and the general lushness of it all.

Best of all were the slugs, for which the boys were on constant watch.

Jordan loves posing in dramatic locations and frequently asked to be photographed.

He is trying to teach Aaron to look at the camera; he does this by putting his hand on Aaron's head and physically swiveling it toward the photographer.

Dale was a whiz with the timer function, so there are even several pictures of all of us!

UPDATE:  Found a couple more photos on my phone.  Here we are eating lunch the way we did pretty much every day:  

Who cares what they think?

Jordan still sucks his thumb a fair amount. We remind him constantly not to (citing teeth, hygiene, etc) but it's still quite a habit. The other day, he was doing it while watching some third-grade boys play soccer, and I kept whispering to him not to but he kept forgetting, or not caring, or whatever. On the way home in the car, we had this exchange:

Rachel: Hey Jordan, I think you should really work harder on not sucking your thumb. Not only is it bad for your teeth and it gets germs in your mouth, but other kids might think it's babyish.
Jordan: Nobody said they think it is babyish.
Rachel: Well, they might be thinking it but not saying it.
Jordan: If they don't say it to me, I don't care.

I was pretty much stopped in my tracks by that statement. Shouldn't we all care a lot less about what negative things people might think of us, as long as they keep it to themselves?

* * *

UPDATE:  After thinking about it some more, I'm not feeling that Jordan's response is really based in an idealistic self-determination; I think it's more a case of not wanting to admit he's doing anything wrong or undesirable, and not wanting to be told what to do.  these are things we're seeing a lot of in other contexts.