Ashland

After a somewhat clausterphobic but uneventful 8 hour drive from Olympia to Ashland we arrived at our campground.  My first thought was "this place is really run down"...luckily, I have kids to see for me, and they went bonkers over the very wobbly merryground in the camp's "park".  E promptly fell off and scraped the entire right side of his face up. After a quick pasta dinner, we went into town for ice cream. The weather was a little cold but very sunny, and Ashland, OR is really wonderful medium sized town. It is best known for it's Shakespeare festival, but Southern Oregon University is here as well and Ashland is just the sort of crunchy, granola BoBo paradise that I love. There are a lot of coffee shops, trees, and tastefully restored older homes. After ice cream, we found a great park with a fantastic rope climbing tower that I will post pictures of soon. 

 Since there is WiFi at this campground, Ariel and I got to watch the Daily Show while everyone else was asleep. This morning when we woke up, there was still frost on the ground, and we were very slow to get out of bed. The kids celebrated by having a watergun fight in their shorts and sandals and then, shockingly, complaining that they were cold. 

 Today we have another 7-8 hour drive to Mackericher State Park near Mendocino. We will switch over from I-5 to 101 and go through the Redwoods. I finished Better by Atul Gawande and am going to start in on my Pediatric Text Book and Lolita until car sickness and curves force me to stop. Better was a wonderful book - it was a series of essays he had written on medicine focused around the ideas of how it (and humanity in general) can be better. The concepts include diligence and integrity. I had read some of the essays before in the New Yorker, but I still enjoyed reading them again. One of my favorite chapters was on the clash of medicine with birthing traditions. I hear a lot about the damage that obstetrics has done to women in the medicalization of birth through my midwife friends, but he did a wonderful job of making me understand that medical reasoning and the conflict of seeing labor and delivery as a craft vs. a science. 

The bags are packed

This is about all I am thinking about now...the Big Bigg Road Trip '08 is about 12 hours from being underway....the amount of prepatory work is rather overwhelming, but I think it will be worth it. I hope I can get the chance to post while we are on the road. Right now the only thing that really worries me is fratercide and car accidents!

Happy 7th Birthday Isaac!!!

Here is Isaac at his seventh birthday party with two siblings and a cousin. His Dad made him a Ben Ten Cake and a Hand Puppet Theatre. I really love our low key family parties.

James and the Giant Peach

This afternoon I got to do something with the kids I had been hoping to do for a long time. We went to see James and the Giant Peach performed by the new Olympia Family Theatre. I have really wanted to try taking the kids before, but had been prohibited by the cost of the Seattle Children's Theatre (30$ a ticket as opposed to the OFT's 8$). They did a wonderful job and the kids were transfixed for about 80% of the show. I can't wait until their season next year. 

 Elias has been doing the funniest thing the last few days. When he is trying to get away with something naughty, he irately "Mom, Stop Looking at Me"..as if that would be enough for me to not notice he was climbing the refrigerator to get to Easter Candy. Tomorrow we are going to Blintzapalooza in the morning. I have never been, but it sounds very promising - a fundraiser Blintz and used booksale at the Jewish Temple in Olympia.

 A true Olympia moment; while browsing Craigslist, I saw an add for wanted housing that read, "Clean, quiet anarchist $350.oo" 

Aaahhhh...

I finished my last final on Tuesday and passed..so I can let a bit of a sigh of relief out. I was actually able to read a book. It wasn't a great book, and it only took me the better part of four hours to read, but it was a book and it made me happy. I was planning on taking my final today, but sped it up because the kids had their school conferences today and would be home. I am glad I did, because last night at work was rather hellish and I had two hours overtime. They are all doing quite well in school; Hamda is starting to catch up to her classmates in Kindergarten and both Isaac and Shkuri are at or better than grade level in their classes. It was fun talking to I and S's teacher; I tends to run through his work without following directions and gets very mad when he has to do it over again, while S is a major perfectionist and is furious if she get's anything wrong. They are such polar opposites, and it will be a major duty of my life to help them channel their strengths and weaknesses for good. After conferences today we went swimming - it actually snowed last night and they have to get out of the house for awhile every day.
This morning I had a chat with my friend Rene that was really applicable to a choice that is looming ahead in the near future. Rene and I are both rather pathologically compelled to always be changing something; for me that has meant going to grad school and having so many kids and always planning some trip. She has changed careers, made several exciting moves, and has just returned from a trip to launch her career in Europe. While I absolutely love this about us, it also has a major impact on those around us. For example, I have been ogling a house that I happened to see for sale for almost nine months ago. Most people would say, huh, I like that house. Not me. I call the real estate agent and get a tour. Then I don't do much of anything, because the property is way, way out of our price range, and we are always remodeling something. Right now we need a new roof and don't have any trim in our house, making it almost impossible to sell. Well, the real estate agent contacted me and said "if you still like the house, the owner wants all offers, since they have moved and the house is empty". So I wrote him back, telling him the ridiculously low bid that we could afford - and that there was no guarantee we could sell our house. He wrote back and said the owner wanted to meet with us and "see if we could work something out" and was interested in just trading our house to him so he could rent it out. We are going to meet with him on Sunday. I am more than a little freaked out about this - I thought there was no way we would ever hear from him again once I offered 250,000$ less than the asking price on the house.
We have a lot of things to work out if we do move (like do all the grandparents want to move with us??) but this house and property may be worth it. The house is older and a little beat up, but is twice as big as ours and it is on five acres with an orchard, two acres of woods, a large garden with a green house and a tiny sliver of muddy puget sound waterfront. It is also only ten minutes from downtown Olympia in a really beautiful area that Ariel and I have always loved. Luckily, Ariel is rather used to me, and even though he would never be nuts enough to go and make offers on a house when he wasn't really ready to move, he is happy to accompany me. We will see what happens.
Now that school is finished for the quarter, I am working on getting stuff ready for our California trip next week. At the moment, that involves me musing on what books I want to take. I am decided on Lolita and Better by Atul Gawande (he is a surgeon and an amazing medical writer for the New Yorker), and we have Tom Sawyer and Tortilla Flat by John Steinbeck on CD. By Sunday, I will probably start thinking about things like maps and first aid kits and clothes.

Easter Day

I am certainly glad it is Sunday night, because this weekend has been quite the whirlwind. On the sly Ariel bought tickets to see Henry Rollins at the capital theatre downtown. While I knew a little bit about him (he is the former lead singer of the punk band Black Flag and now tours the world talking/ performing spoken word) I wasn't that excited to go.  Aimee owed us some babysitting, so I went and I am very glad we did. He was really incredible - he spoke for three hours non stop and he is a very intense guy. Ariel and I and our friends Jacob and Catherine all really enjoyed his talk. He told stories of his travels (he was in Islamabad when Benazair Bhutto was assasinated and basically travels to the most dangerous places in the world and walks around to meet people), his thoughts on politics (pretty standard liberal), and Iraq (he has spent extended periods of time on USO tours both in the country and with veterans in hospitals). Anyway, it was a very enjoyable, exciting, and thought provoking way to spend an evening.

 

 The rest of our weekend was spent getting ready for Easter dinner - we host Ariel's family for Easter every year, and it basically takes us all weekend to get ready and clean up after all 26 people come and go.  Everyone really seemed to enjoy themselves and the Easter Egg hunt is always a pretty big hit. Luckily, the torrential rain let up enough for us to spend ten minutes running around. It was especially fun to help dress the girls up in the Easter dresses....there was something very special about the process that made me feel even more like the girl's Mother. Now all is said and done I am quite beat, and I am really looking forward to finishing my last final on Thursday. 

Caden Free

Here is a link to my BIL's website with pictures of baby Caden. http://www.jonbiggerstaff.com/photogallery/photogallery2.html We drove up last night to Kirkland only to find that the labor was probably going to last a lot longer than we thought, so we loaded back in the car to go home. After about ten minutes on the freeway, we got a call that the Dr. decided to do a C-section because of cord compressions, so we headed back to the hospital in time to meet Caden after all.
It was a little strange, because the circumstances of the delivery were very similiar to when I had Isaac and ended up having a c-section because of fetal distress. Although it was nice for Jon and Ranae that she already had an epidural and he was able to go into the OR with her. In my case, I was attempting to go natural and things started to go bad quickly - there was a great deal of rushing around, they wouldn't let Ar in the OR and the anesthesiologist was running late, so they had to do part of the operation before they put me out (I feel my great claim to toughness is having had part of a surgery without any anesthesia). In the end, everything turned out great in both cases and beautiful healthy boys joined the Biggerstaff clan.

After getting back this morning around 4 am, I slept for a few hours, got the kids to school and somehow managed to score a good grade on my Care of the Childbearing Woman Final (Thank God for Coffee!!). At some point tonight, I know I am going to collapse in a heap, but it was all worth it. Tomorrow we are driving the kids up to meet their new baby cousin, and they are very excited.