Sequoia National Park - Day 2

Well, that was a rousing and creative title, wasn't it? It's funny to look back on our little camping trip and realize how much we really did. As usual, I reflect on it and marvel at how I managed to push my children to the brink of their abilities...their mental abilities if not their physical ones. It's no great wonder they get so frustrated with me. My parents never made me do stuff like this at eight or ten. I'm pretty sure.

But the kids seemed a little jealous of my evening trip to Moro Rock. I told them it was no big deal. There's a parking lot right at the bottom of the stairs. It probably took me no more than 20 minutes to get up there. They wanted to go. So, as soon as the morning pancakes were cleaned up, we headed right back to where I'd been the night before.

It looked a lot different in the morning light, actually. You could even see the glaciers on the mountains of the Great Western Divide.

Even with the kids, it was a pretty quick trip. I thought we'd do that, then go back to the campsite for lunch, but it was far from lunchtime by the time we got back to the bottom. We opted instead for a nice little flat hike around another meadow.

It was a lovely meadow, but I don't even remember what motivated me to stop at this particular spot. It was such a great stop though! There were more butterflies.

There were more big, beautiful trees.

There were some cool black and gold-colored moths.

There were more beautiful flowers.

There was a giant sequoia devouring a large boulder.

And just when it seemed like we'd had a nice walk, but it was all the same ol' same ol' impossibly beautiful stuff, we ran across this guy:

who we dubbed "itchy bear" because he sat there scratching his belly for probably 10 minutes without a whole lot of concern about the people gawking at him. It was easily the best bear sighting of the trip.

We did finally make it back to the campsite for lunch. And after lunch, we set out on the trail out of the campground to the nearby waterfall, Tokopah Falls. It was hot, but it was a really nice hike through the rocky forest with beautiful views of the Sentinal rock above us.

It got rockier as we got towards the falls...and hotter hiking around on the granite.

Tokopah Falls often looks like this:

At least that's what I glean from the internet. It looked nothing like that on our visit. The sign warning us of certain deadly peril if we passed it was laughable.

But the view from the falls down the valley was nice.

And despite being more than a little green in many spots, the water was still cool and I thought a shower was probably in order (fully clothed as I might've been).

The kids refused to get under the falls, giant torrent as it was and despite the fact that Mam had hiked the whole way in her swimsuit, but at least they cooled their heels for a bit.

By the time we headed back, it was easily time for dinner already. We stopped along the trail for a little snack in the shade and we were treated to a close up visit from a curious buck.

At the same time, Smunch spotted another little critter on a downed tree on the other side of the trail. "Is that a marmot, Mom?"

He'd never seen a marmot. I'd told him only that they look like great big guinea pigs. So, you can imagine that my inner naturalist was beaming with pride.

Another long and lovely day. At least our noisy campground neighbors were gone. We all slept well that night!

Butterflies

While we were in San Diego, I noticed that the passion flower vine covering Aunt Karen's fence was home to a considerable crop of caterpillars. We even found a couple of chrysalises (chrysali?) among the leaves. Being the biological sort, I decided to do a little online research to try and figure out what these critters were.

It turns out that there is one butterfly, the Gulf Fritillary butterfly, that lays its eggs only on passion flower vines. And its caterpillars looked suspiciously similar to those we found. I also learned that their range extends to the San Francisco Bay Area and you know what that means.

I asked politely if I could relieve Karen of her fattest caterpillar and a chrysalis. We left with a baggie of passion flower leaves and a jar containing one fat caterpillar and a healthy-looking chrysalis.I never did take a picture of the caterpillar. By the time we'd completed our drive home, our caterpillar was already hanging in a little "J", ready to turn into a chrysalis itself.

Happily, the first butterfly emerged from its chrysalis during Aunt Karen's visit. We spotted it while it was still coming out and watched as its wings dried, enjoyed it taking its first fluttery flight around the "butterfly house" and finally let it go. It sped away so fast that I didn't even get a picture with its wings open.Fortunately, it's pretty on the underside too.

The second butterly emerged a little over a week later and this time I was sure to get a picture before it flew away in the exact same direction as the first...doubtlessly looking for some passion flowers to land on...

Flutterby

I was out inspecting my vegetable garden last weekend and was surprised to find this lovely little specimen just hanging out next to the house. I was thrilled that it stuck around for a little photo shoot.

Winter Beach

We really weren't sure what to do with ourselves yesterday, but the kids made it abundantly clear that we had to get out of the house and do something. Daddy and I had come up with a couple of ideas the night before, but neither of them really appealed. It took too long to get there or might be boring for one or more of us. So, I came up with something else on the spur of the moment and we headed over the hill to the beach.

This idea took care of a number of needs. It got the kids out of the house to a place they're always game to go (the beach) and it meant I'd have some use for my new camera lens. The latest is a killer telephoto and this state beach features over-wintering monarch butterflies at this time of year, so it seemed like a good choice.

Of course, there were so few butterflies that I didn't get any photos of them. I guess we should've gone during ski week instead. And despite a weather forecast that wasn't promising, it turned out to be a beautiful morning and early afternoon at the coast. So, in the end, all our objectives were met.The new lens is great. I took this photo of wading birds from really far away. That's probably why it's a little too dark too, but whatever.

I decided to do a little study on different textures at the beach and that was fun. This is one of my favorites:Yeah, I know. You don't need a telephoto for that. It was one of the last telephoto pictures I took, opting instead for my relatively new macro lens to take close-ups for the rest of our little walk.Oh, whoops. No children. Mommy must've been off in her own little photo world. Where are the photos of the children? Well, they're not quite as cooperative or photogenic as rocks, you know. So, here they are.Does Daddy look like he's messing around with his iPhone? I think he does, but we're out on this beautiful beach. He would never, ever...oh...well. Nevermind.

We took a quick trip by the visitor's center before heading back to town to grab some lunch. We found ourselves a fun little spot called Emily's Bakery where we got some yummy sandwiches and couldn't leave without picking up some awesome-looking pastries for New Year's. Can't wait to try them!

It was such a fun day. I wish we felt free to just go take off and find something like that to do more often! Clearly Daddy and I need to do some research and cabin/campsite booking!

Flutter By

So much to catch up on, but, of course, I won't be catching up on most of it...ever. There are still a ridiculous number of Christmas cards to be sent and a few presents left to pick up. Thankfully, I'm mostly done with my shopping, thanks to Amazon and a couple of great post-Thanksgiving sales. The chocolates for the teachers are made, but there are still lots of cookies to go, at least in theory. Even the invitations for the baby shower I'm helping to plan went out in the mail yesterday...to my great relief!

Long before Thanksgiving, however, a friend of mine asked me if I'd like to raise some caterpillars. She was on her second or third batch at that point and I thought the kids might have fun watching them grow. She mercifully gave me only five little 'pillars and I lamely forgot to take any pictures of them as they grew. But grow they did and sooner or later, they started hanging from the roof of their little Gladware home.It's hard to tell from the pictures, but the chrysalises were a beautiful greenish, metallic gold color until the butterflies were about ready to emerge, when you could see their black and orange colors through the "skin".Of our five caterpillars, only three made it to full butterflies, the other two turning to chrysalis mush in the container. Still, we had some lovely little butterflies.But after a week of seeing no sign of mating activity (suggesting maybe we only had one gender in there)...and realizing that it was going to become awfully hard to find hollyhock leaves for new caterpillars with winter coming on strong, we chose a sunny afternoon to let our three butterflies flutter away. And that was possibly the most fun part of all!

Happy Daze

On the day just before the great panic attack, which has now subsided into a dull depression, we had a really fantastic time with friends from school out at Happy Hollow. I need to remember just how much difference it makes to take a day off and do something relaxing that the kids really love.

Our trip to the park was the result of a cancelled playdate the prior week, so we met the moms and kids of two other families there. Smunch is big buddies with one of the other little boys and hopefully, he's now feeling friendlier with the other one too. Mam is on friendly terms with one of the younger brothers, who is her age. The other little boy has a big sister and she was all over that. It was a lot like herding cats. It was hard to keep track of all six kids at any one time. But it was so much fun! In so many ways, the rigamarole of school, speech therapy and occupational therapy every week, with the addition of PONY baseball and a little gymnastics has been really draining. This one little trip was more rejuvenating than I could have imagined.It was a day when no one cared if Gavin stuttered. There was no homework to do, no shopping trips to be cajoled into, no rooms to clean up or things more important than having fun.

Unfortunately, the ride I like to refer to as "the snail-go-round" was closed, supposedly for repairs. But I know they'll be auctioning it off in July when they close the park for renovations. I'm bummed that after multiple measurements and a lot of wishful thinking, a carousel just won't fit in our backyard and the snail-go-round probably isn't set up in such a way that we could power it with solar panels, huh? I took one of my first favorite photos of Smunch on this ride. I included it in my last Happy Hollow post. Hard to believe that was almost a year ago already.

The kids were also thrilled to get to see this guy up close. Here begins their interest in entomology. They love telling everyone how they saw a Tiger Swallower. Uh. yeah.

We rounded out our super fun day with some fun for Mommy. Because wouldn't you know it? There's a letterbox within easy walking distance of the park entrance. Ha! Even the kids seemed to think that was pretty cool!

Butterflies on the Beach

I'd been looking for an opportunity to go to Santa Cruz and see the monarch butterflies this year. The migrate to a particular eucalyptus grove there every winter and I'd never taken the kids. So, the Sunday before Christmas, Daddy and I packed the kids in the car and headed South.

It was a beautiful, sunny day, but it was cold and it hadn't really warmed up enough for the butterflies to get going when we got there...and apparently they leave around the end of December these days, when they used to stay until February. So, there weren't all that many. No long bunches of butterflies looking like dead leaves dripping off the trees. Just a bunch of orange and black butterflies fluttering around...but only a couple hours after we arrived.The kids were thrilled just to look at the chilly little butterflies that couldn't get off the ground.

Fortunately, the place is also right on the beach, so we went down to the beach for a while, where the kids were happy to play in the sun and the sand, collecting shells, making sand castles and generally running amok. I, on the other hand, wandered up and down the beach looking for interesting photos to take. I ended up with a couple of pretty cool ones. Too many to bore you with here, but here's a small sample:





After a while on the beach, we set off over the rocks to the tide pools. The tide was still going out, but there were some interesting pools already, mostly with lots of sea anemones. The kids were pretty excited to have a sea anemone "suck" on their fingers. There were a few missteps and sodden socks and shoes, but nothing quite compared to my looking over the rock ledge at the field of mussels clinging to the rocks, only to hear Daddy yell "Wave!" I had enough time to turn my back and make a feeble attempt to protect the camera. The camera survived. My clothes were a different story.

You can't tell just how drenched I was - from heels to hair - in this photo, a rare one of me with the kids. I usually spend all the time taking the photos, but I'd handed the camera over to Daddy after my little mishap.

Thankfully, I keep the ol' mommymobile in a terrible mess, which means there are almost always some spare clothes in there somewhere. I had to live with my wet jeans, but I found a new sweater and we headed back to see the butterflies, which were now flying around, before making our trek home. Unfortunately, you can't really take decent photos of butterflies flying around in the sky! All in all, a very blog-worthy day, if just for the photos!