Barbecue, origami, and a dog.

Griffin and I are enjoying some pre hike food while he folds paper. Interestingly, the origami figure is also a dog.

Cup-Stacking

So evidently there is such a thing among the youth of America - at least in this part of America - known as "cup-stacking." It seems as though it's positioned as a sport and to hear my kids talk about it, you'll probably want to start looking for it in Future Olympic Games.

Griffin has asked me a few times over the past god knows how many months for cup-stacking cups, a request that due to my own ignorance and dismissiveness of the entire concept, I let slide by, unheard. So thankfully, Griffin's friend Grant gave him a complete set of cups, complete with cup-stacking mat and timer.

Griffin was pretty excited about this (Rowan too, actually, when Griffin will let her use his gear) and has spent some amount of time trying to improve his time on this particular sequence. Right now, I think it's 21 seconds.

Today I went with Rowan on her Integrated Class field trip. Integrated is either social studies or science. The one she is currently in is social studies. It's called "Mysteries of History" and she is studying pre-Columbian Central and South American tribes - Aztecs, Incas, Mayans.

Normally, their ADI (All Day Integrated) field trip for this class would involve recreating a pre-Columbian village - a day in the life sort of thing - up in the foothills above Boulder, but because we've had some snow of late, they switched to the Build an Inuit Igloo field trip, for which we went up to Brainard Lake - also up in the foothills.

Unfortunately, the snow was light, powdery - great for skiing, not good for igloo building - so after a morning of shoveling snow into boxes, spraying it with water, and making igloo bricks that just wouldn't hold together, we had lunch and bailed on the igloo project. Instead we went walking  - SLIDING - on Brainard Lake.

It's probably hard to tell from the photo, but Rowan and I had a blast. And also, damn it's gorgeous here.

Buried Alive

The other night, Rowan was bent on going out and playing in the snow. She donned her coat, hat, gloves, and snow pants from the ski bag, and went out after dinner in the dark. And cold. 

Very cold. Griffin went out into the yard with her, but I was having no part of it. Even after Griffin came back in to do his math homework and told me that Rowan wanted me to come out and see something, I said no no no. Too cold. But this worried Griffin - he wouldn't tell me what Rowan wanted to show me, but he did check back outside on her. 

Of course, the story doesn't really have a punchline - you've already seen from the picture. Griffin had buried Rowan in the snow, which is what I discovered when I went out there, and she wasn't moving until I came out.

---

This morning, Rowan is upstairs coaching Griffin on a song to sing to try out for the Peanut Butter Players' Christmas play. Awesome.

At the Race for the Cure!

Komen Race for the Cure - This Weekend!

Hi guys. As you all know, Berit and I walked the Susan G. Komen 5K Race for the Cure last year and raised $500 to help cure breast cancer. This year, our whole family is doing the Race, and it happens on Sunday!

We'd love it if you could support us at any level at all ($5 or $10?). This year we're walking in honor of Kersten, Pam's best friend, who along with pam beat breast cancer, only to die tragically in a car accident.

Please go to my or Pam's race page to read more:

http://www.komendenver.org/goto/mark

http://www.komendenver.org/goto/pam

You can go straight to the kids' pages and make a donation to support them in the walk at these links:

http://www.komendenver.org/goto/griffin

http://www.komendenver.org/goto/rowan

http://www.komendenver.org/goto/berit

The Average Family

The other night, after an average day of head-butting with children, Berit brightly announced that she’d heard that the average family has 2000 arguments a year. I thought about this for a moment, trying to wrap my head around why this was necessarily revelatory or good news for us.

“Yeah? So? We probably have 2000 arguments a year.”

“Right,” Berit beamed. “So we’re average!”

Out of the loop.

As part of my morning commute I take Berit and her two friends to high school. This morning, as we’re passing the city bus, one of the friends blurts out, “oh my god.”

“What?” asks the other friend.

Pause.

“I’ll text it to you. I’ll text you too, Berit.”

Flowers.

Griffin engineered these.

Food is more delicious over a campfire.

Saturday after his flag football game ended at noon, Griffin and I headed up to camp out in the foothills, which is to say that we came back to the house and tried to gather everything together that I hadn't already gathered, drove into Boulder and did some grocery shopping followed by a stop at McGuckins Hardware for a whittling knife and a lantern for the tent, which stop was then followed by yet another at Pam's parents' house to beg some firewood once I realize I'd forgotten to buy firewood at the grocery story. We were out of town by 3:30.

Up lefthand canyon and through the thriving metropolis of Ward, CO to head North on the Peak to Peak Highway, we headed to Camp Dick / Peaceful Valley - where, though I knew everything reservable was reserved months in advance, I hoped we'd find a randomly open campsite. No such luck. Thank God for that, because in talking with the campground host, we learned of easily accessible Forest Service land to camp on just up the road. Perfect.

Griffin and I took a while setting up camp. He'd convinced me to bring the HUGE 8 person tent that we'd purchased recently, so that we'd have experience setting it up when we went with the whole family. In retrospect, I'm glad we did and that I now have the experience of setting it up, voluminous as it was for Griffin and I to sleep in with our two pads and sleeping bags.

Food. Not once did I break out the camp stove, as one of Griffin's stated goals in camping was to cook food in the fire. So we did. We cut up and wrapped potatoes and onions in tinfoil and let them cook in the coals, and we roasted corn on the cob in a similar fashion. Add bratwurst cooked on skewers, and it was a feast. We were stuffed, with just enough room for s'mores. We looked at the stars, walked up and down the road, and called it a night.

This morning, we replicated dinner for the most part, added eggs and orange juice, and called it breakfast. We dawdled around our morning fire for quite some time before heading up the Sourdough Trail the mile or so that separated us from the Peaceful Valley / Camp Dick campgrounds (3 miles by car, but only 1 mile by hiking trail). Great hike with an excellent bridge across the creek just a little ways in. If we go back there, I'd like to hike in and camp by the creek.

Griffin and I talked about space on the hike, and he asked me if there'd be any harm in jettisoning our trash into space. We talked about global warming and the sun exploding in a billion years anyway. We talked about reincarnation, and if Einstein came back as a monkey, would he be a really smart one? Or Thomas Edison monkey - would he be able to invent the lightbulb? Griffin's least favorite notion of death is that there is nothing afterwards, and his favorite idea is that one would be a spirit that could exist in the world and interact with other things that had died, his example being that of a dead banana, which I believe he could actually eat.

It sprinkled on and off as we came back to the campsite, broke down the tent, and loaded everything into the car. One more small fire to roast a couple more brats to eat on English muffins with dill pickles. We left camp at 3:30 and made it down in time to bathe before heading down to Denver with the ladies to meet Tom and Gavin for dinner.

A friend and classmate of Berit's texted her tonight on the way home. She evidently didn't know she needed to read two chapters in her book (The Great Gatsby) and write up two log entries. There was some minor disagreement in the car since my reaction was, "well, looks like you're screwed," while Pam voted for stopping at the Barnes and Noble and picking up the paperback since Berit's library copy was at school. Compassion won out over tough love, and Berit is finishing up her work right now, as I type this.

"What??" Berit looks at me, because I'm smiling sideways as I write about her.
"Nothing."
"Why are you looking at me like that, then?"
"Me? I'm not..."
"What are you writing?"
"Oh... my..."
"Review?"
"Right."
"Cool."

Everything's going to be alright.

Outside tonight with Griffin and his skateboarder friend, Hayden, with whom I have a wee bit of clout for actually being an old man who can skate and has a "classical" board. Hayden and Griffin are teaching me how to ollie... slowly.

Griffin, Pam and I watched Source Code, great movie in the tradition of The Matrix and that other one recently starring Leonardo DiCaprio, with a quantum physics sort of bent. We liked it.

Had a lovely dinner with Pam, Berit, and Rowan. The girls told us all about their schooldays. It was all very nice and family-like. Not a bit of shouting. Just like in the films.

Stars

It was too late when I stepped outside with Rowan to look at the stars. She really likes to do that, and her interest is the only thing that compels me really because I never really have been very good at picking out the constellations and now with my old man eyes it’s even more difficult.

“Can you find the big dipper, Daddy?”
“I don’t know, Rowan…”
“Sure you can! It’s right over there – see it?” It’s easy to see once Rowan points it out to me. She’s also persistent about getting me to lie down in the road with her to look at the sky, and it turns out she’s right – it’s truly incredible the millions and millions of little stars you can make out despite the all the light pollution. Rowan comments that it must have been so much better 500 years ago AND even better back in the age of the dinosaurs.

And then we’re talking about dinosaurs, and she says isn’t it interesting how we really don’t know what color dinosaurs’ skin was, and that it could have been purple and pink or red and white striped or polka-dotted! And that’s really great because I never thought of that.

Rowan also taught Berit and I the initial moves of the dance she’s doing in mixed choir at school, which I didn’t want to do either but was all kinds of fun. Kids are great that way.

Berit had her three favorite classes today – Pre-engineering, Spanish, and Science (I think). Math is not one of her favorite classes and she commented exasperated about her block schedule and how she had to listen to her teacher talk for an hour and a half – “About MATH!”

After the struggle with getting Griffin to pick a book and read last night, we landed on Half Magic. I’ll let you know how that saga continues.

Griffin on my recently having reshaved my head after another brief foray into the world of hair

"You need to grow back your hair, Daddy. This way you look much, much too serious, like - Arrr I'm your Dad! I'll do your homework! I know everything!

The other way you just look like, Oh hello. I'm Griffin's Dad. Nice to meet you.

Back to School

Today marks the end of the first week of school, and I'm pretty proud of how all three of our young'uns have weathered the transition. Rowan is settling into middle school nicely and is very enthusiastic about her choir classes (two) and all of her teachers. She's attending the school that Berit just vacated and is receiving plenty of tutelage and enthusiasm from her older sister just for being there. She loves all of her teachers.

Berit, like Rowan, is in a new school - high school (God help us), and has daily provided us with a litany of her classes. What's great is that she has come home interested in much of what she's learning. Even the engineering class, which she dreaded, has been fun for her. Yes - she finds some things (Geometry) boring, but there's balance there, which - really - what more can I ask for.

I honestly haven't heard a lot about what Griffin's got going on, except that he spent his recess on multiple days this week volunteering to weed the Kindergarten playground area with a couple of other boys, which seems civic-minded enough. I'm just having fun on the home front with his blossoming interest in magic and juggling. YouTube videos to come.

We played basketball tonight - Griffin and I - and I played with all three kids last night after dinner together, which was nice. School has given us some structure, the likes of which was mostly deteriorating by the end of summer, and I'm appreciating that. On the other hand, I'm also appreciating that I don't have to get up at 6:20 tomorrow a.m. to take Berit and her two friends to high school. They start at 7:30, ugh. Barbaric.