11 - Tiggers are Wonderful Things

This:

is my 11-year-old. Even though at-home, old-fashioned birthday parties are appparently passé, he still wants me to make his birthday cake. Cute. Of course, I've set ridiculous expectations in this regard. Silly me. It started with the Curious George cake, then the Elmo cake, the 3D train cake, the fire engine cake, the Spiderman cake, the soccer field cake, the Superbowl cakes, the chess cake (ooh, that one kinda rocked!), the SF Giants cake, the laser tag cake, which gets a lot of hits on Google...I'm sure I missed a few in there.

This year, Smunch wanted to go to a trampoline place for his birthday. It made for an easy cake idea at least. The idea was easy. The execution is never quite so easy...especially with increased hours at work and such. It just meant I had to start early. I made lots of colors of fondant.

Smunch wanted a yellow cake with strawberry and whipped cream filling. Done.

And if he was going to have a trampoline party...well, then..it had to look like a trampoline, didn't it?

And if it was going to be a kids' party, there had to be kids...or else it was just going to look like some funny, stripey cake decoration thingy.

Very P.C., huh?

If there were going to be kids, they were going to have to be jumping, somehow. Fortunately, I made some basketball dunking penguins once upon a time. I almost felt experienced with this sort of thing.

I got this done around 11pm, the night before the party...and then added a border to the bottom the next morning because I just can't leave well enough alone.

It's pretty impossible to take pictures of little boys jumping on trampolines in a dimly lit warehouse. I tried, but the cake was probably a pretty good approximation of what it looked like anyway. I gave up trying to get a real photo and took a picture of one of the TVs they had monitoring the trampoline dodgeball arena.

Geez. That looks just like...a birthday cake!

So, Smunch successfully turned 11 and had a bouncy, bouncy, bouncy, bouncy party with his friends (who are a pretty awesome group of boys, I might add) on his birthday.

And even though I got more pictures of cake and little fondant people than I did of the sweaty little 10 and 11-year-olds, I think it was all a raging success for everyone.

Return to Uvas Canyon

If you managed to read through my giant, long post from May, the one called "Quick Fix", you may remember that we went camping at Uvas Canyon County Park right after Easter this year. It was fun, but ultimately kinda ill-fated as camping goes. That's generally how we roll with Spring Break camping. I'm anxious to get out. The weather isn't anxious to cooperate.

So, when my "coffee buddies" and I decided it'd be fun to take all of our kids...all 11 of them...on a weekend camping trip this July, Uvas Canyon seemed like a great choice. It's just an hour's drive, it's got a shady campground, waterfalls, creeks, some wildlife.

You almost wouldn't know from this picture that the four of us had been wrangling 12 children (one of them invited a guest) for a couple of days straight.

The best part about going places with these ladies is that we've all known each other since our 10-year-olds were tiny babies. We were all around for the births of our second set of kids...and in a couple cases, the third set. It's great to be around people who know about your kids, are comfortable playing with them and reprimanding them if necessary.

I love that.

And our kids aren't all that familiar with each other anymore. None of them go to school together. But they're familiar enough that they know each other's names and they can get back into the swing of things pretty quickly. In the case of certain monkeys, pretty darned fast, actually.

My kids were in camp in downtown San Jose on Friday...Mam training goats at Happy Hollow and Smunch playing baseball at the San Jose Giants' stadium. No point in going home, so I picked them up and we drove straight to the campground, where we arrived at least an hour before everyone else, took our pick of camping spots and were all set up and having some snacks before the rest of the crew showed up.

Dinner was late in coming with everyone arriving after work and getting themselves set up. So s'mores were postponed 'til Saturday. There were still marshmallows to roast though.

Saturday,we herded all the kids together for a hike around the waterfalls. They all got to see a tiny little rattlesnake who seemed patently unimpressed with the attention.

Plenty of banana slugs for entertainment too.

There was a little whining and complaining as we walked uphill, but once they discovered things like making facepaint by rubbing creek rocks together, things improved markedly.

After lunch at the campsite, we took the kids on a fun creekwalk. When you have 12 kids with you, they get pretty spread out, but somehow they all seemed to have at least one of us looking out for them.

This particular walk ended in a surprise waterfall, which was a great addition to the trip.

There were hot dogs and hamburgers for dinner and s'mores for dessert. It's hard to imagine a bunch of happier kids.

Before leaving on Sunday, we all headed back down the creek from a different direction and went back to the waterfall to let the kids play. Somehow, it didn't surprise me that my two were some of the only kids to get right under the waterfall. There is almost nothing epitomizes them more than this.

I don't think this trip could have gone any better. Sure there were plenty of sibling squabbles, kids being reprimanded for various things, a little blood, a few tears and a lot of wet clothes. We're already talking about planning another trip next summer.

Can't wait! We're off on a single-family camping trip to Sequoia National Park this weekend. Somehow, I'm not sure the kids will have nearly as much fun!

My New Gig

Uh, no, there will be no more babies. At least not mine!

The title is sort of ambiguous here because it seems like I have multiple gigs at any given time. Mid-mid-life crisis, I'm trying to cut down on them and really figure out what I want to be when I grow up. I don't know that I'm making much progress on that.

In the meantime, a fantastic part-time job fell out of the sky and into my lap. It uses my genetics degree and all that writing training. And it pays well. And I can work at home most of the time. Or I can go into the office and interact with human beings, rather than sharing some passing words with the guinea pigs and having a very large cat sit on my keyboard. I'm excited...and completely daunted. I haven't worked in an office with any regularity in almost 10 years. And when I took this job, I'd conveniently forgotten that my kids have full weeks off school...including one at Thanksgiving and two weeks around Christmas. Those times are coming right up. Well, best to set the bar low early on, right?

But that wasn't really what I wanted to write about, because although it's a great job and it'll be a nice change for me, I know it's not going to be something that scratches whatever itch I've got going on. It won't be wildly fulfilling. It won't fill that unnamed void in my life. It's a fun new challenge, but it won't be challenging forever. And let's face it, tech writing will never be exciting.

What's far more exciting is that a while back, my friend, K, asked me who takes my Christmas photographs for my holiday cards. Well, that was flattering. If you've been around my blog a while, you know I take them all myself most years. And I have fun doing it too. A few weeks later, K e-mailed and asked if she could pay me to take some photos of her daughters. Pay me? To take photos? You've got to be kidding! But I was thrilled to have the opportunity.

So, last weekend, I showed up at her house bright and early. Her younger daughter, R, was just getting up when I arrived. Fortunately, she's a happy morning baby, so she was fun to photograph.R's big sister, M, was asleep during most of this photo shoot and wasn't altogether thrilled about getting dressed up all pretty just to have her picture taken. She wasn't about to sit still for it either, but that's just as well, I suppose. And in a way, it made for some more interesting photos.It was a little challenging and I can't claim to have much knowledge of what I was doing, but I liked the results and I think K did too (unless she was just being nice!). I'm pretty sure M was more than a little relieved when I left!Now, I've got a whole host of fun little activities to turn into little side businesses! Tech writer by day, photographer in the early morning and cake decorator at night. And don't forget pumpkin carver in October. No clue who's going to pay me for that yet!

And for the record, I didn't actually charge K for my time. Since I neglected to successfully get her a gift to celebrate the birth of R, this is it. I think this'll last a whole lot longer and be more appreciated than those flowers Teleflora failed to deliver anyway!

Girls Getaway

I can't say that I'd ever spent a weekend away with just my girlfriends...not since high school anyway. But a couple of my high school buddies decided that since we're all turning 40 this year, we should celebrate by getting away from our families for a while and hanging out together somewhere...anywhere, really.

After much deliberation, we decided to take the cheaper option of staying at my friend K's father's house in Sausalito...and just for one night. When there are seven of you and there are nine young children under the age of 10 among you, it's hard to schedule anything where you can all make it for more than a single night. But you take what you can get.

I took off right after Mam's soccer game. It's easy to get to Sausalito from here, but it turned out the house was a little harder to locate. And no big surprise with a view like this:We hung out for the rest of the afternoon, then went out for a fun dinner on the water.And although we're no great partiers, we were still up 'til 2 a.m. yakking about one thing or another. When you've known each other as long as we have, it doesn't seem to matter much that we don't get to see each other all that often or that we've all taken different paths in life. There's always something to talk about.

We had a mellow morning around the house...before taking a nice walk down many, many stairs into town for brunch.

We'd prepared for a foggy, chilly time, but the weather couldn't have been more beautiful and the walk back up the hill was actually kinda hot!The whole trip was far too short. Fortunately, there were more birthdays and birthday parties to come. It's been a great year for getting together! We're hoping maybe we can make this an annual thing...Who wouldn't hope?

Adventure

You know it's been far too long since you've updated your blog when you need to go through iPhoto on your computer to remember what's happened since your last post. As far as I can tell, nothing photo-worthy happened in the week and a half after Halloween. It's quite possibly true, but it's hard to know.

Veteran's Day fell on a Thursday this year, so as a favor to...oh, I dunno...teachers, I guess (because it wasn't for stay-at-home parents) the kids had both Thursday and Friday off. Oh, what to do? They started fighting before I even rolled out of bed on Thursday morning. Fortunately, we were meeting up with some of my old mommy friends in our old stomping grounds where I was once in a mom's group. We met at the park. We had a picnic, then walked to frozen yogurt. It was great to catch up and it took most of the afternoon, so that little excursion was more than worthwhile. I didn't take my camera. I don't know why not.

A friend of mine who is far more organized and apparently far more motivated to keep her kids engaged in cool, outdoor, kid-friendly activites than I am, had made a reservation for a group of kids to play at Adventure Playground, a park at the Berkeley Marina. It's been featured in all sorts of magazines (including National Geographic) over the years as one of the best playgrounds around. It was an easy sell for me. Drive a bit to keep my kids occupied without TV or computers for the day? Sold.

I'd heard that they had materials so the kids could build things in the playground, but I couldn't quite grasp what they meant. Just as well. I'm not sure I would've trusted my kids had I known. And that would have been a shame. This was the view through the fence:Mam happily and very publicly declared that it looked like a junkyard. And so it did.

We arrived at the playground right on time and right at the same time as some of the other kids in our party. It was a suprisingly beautiful morning. The sun was shining and there was only a light breeze...not the stiff chilly wind I'd expected. Only one attendant was working in the playground that day and as soon as we'd all assembled, she went to work explaining the rules of the playground and for using their tools.Not surprisingly, once the kids had been told that they could ride the "trolley" (a modified zip-line-like ride) as often as they wanted, check out hammers and nails and saws and build whatever they wanted with any of the scrap wood available, they all ran through the gate...kindergartners through sixth graders.

The trolley was the first order of business:It was a short little ride, but it was a lot of fun until you hit the damp pile of sand at the end and had to shake it all out of your pants!
It took a while to get bored with that and finally get to picking up stray nails or shards of wood to earn the right to check out a real tool. Then they finally started to get a good look at the place. It's full of amazing old things, old playground bits like slides and swings, racks of scrap wood, old boats, old tires, cargo nets and the exposed innards of pianos.So many things to explore. And, of course, once Smunch and Mam had checked out some tools, neither kid knew what they wanted to do. I ended up helping Mam hammer a small plank onto the railing of a playstructure...for no really good reason. Smunch checked out some paint and started painting random pieces of the existing structures.While he appears to be taking this job very seriously, Mam had a much more artistic flair with her painting technique.Eventually, even I had to try out the trolley.But the sand in the pants made one ride enough.

Smunch and a friend tried their hand at reinforcing a catwalk.It didn't work out all that well, mostly serving to make the catwalk uneven. The attendant came and ripped off their additions, while suggesting they build a hand rail instead and helping them with that. Smunch's small contribution to the playground.

Meanwhile, Mam was sawing random things.Somehow, I doubt this is something they intend for the kids to do, but it's obvious it's been tried in thousands of places around the playground.

After two hours of just playing around...but having a whole lot of fun running amok in a "junkyard", our time was up and all the famlies had a picnic outside the playground and the kids went down to the "beach". I put that in quotations because this is a beach at the Berkeley Marina. There's nothing to suggest that it's particularly clean. I wasn't thrilled, but they were busy, happy and outdoors.

Fortunately, the webpage for Adventure Playground had mentioned the potential need for a change of clothes. The playground was no problem. But Ryder kids and water? Always a problem.This may look harmless enough, but if you click on that picture and look closely, you can tell that Mam's already been up to her butt in the water. She walked right in, shoes, socks and all. Smunch was jealous. He wanted to wade in the water too and started taking off his shoes. I stopped him, not knowing what kids of sharp rocks, shards of glass or needles might be under the surface (there was a rumor that hypodermic needles sometimes litter this beach). So, he too walked in with his shoes on.

I was prepared, but not the least bit thrilled. Stripping Mam to naked in the puddle/pot-hole filled dirt parking lot was a pain. I wasted the two towels I brought by having her stand on one (so she wouldn't get the new clothes muddy) and using the other to throw sopping wet clothes on. I hadn't prepared for needing to dry Mam off after that as well. So, I was grumpy and read Mam the riot act about how I really hate it when she does things like that after I ask her not to. But it was so predictable that I probably should have been better mentally prepared than that.

In retrospect, that was kind of a bad end to a fun morning. But the drive home was eventless and peaceful. I suspect they remember the fun a lot more than the trouble they got in for getting soaked! At least I hope so...