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Yesterday was the Great American Backyard Campout.
We decided to pack up the twins and our tent, and a carload of other things that one would need for one night’s worth of camping, (Yes, Mike, we really DO need that mountain of stuff!) and headed off to a local botanical garden that was hosting the event.
Thankfully we got there in time to snag one of the coveted parking spots that were in short supply and headed for level ground to pitch our tent.
While the girls had fun with a giant-sized set of pick-up-sticks (our tent poles), Mike tried to set up the tent without instructions (later we found them attatched to the INSIDE of the tent!) and I tried to keep the girls from poking any eyes out with the tent poles, pulled them away from trying to demolish neighboring tents, and plucking various bits of flora and fauna (or the by-products thereof, a.k.a. ‘droppings’) from their dainty little fingers, while spritzing them and myself with herbal bugspray.
Finally the tent was up and the girls were eager to get inside it and explore. This would be their first grown-up tent. Halle immediately flung herself at the ‘windows’ and lounged face-first into them, squooshing her face into the mesh to make funny faces at the outside world. Zanna fussed over the proper placement of the sacred purple ‘piddows’, while Mike collapsed in an exhausted heap.
He had schlepped enough equipment that would normally take three sherpas to get it up Everest.
We then piled outside, after prying Dada from the tent floor where he had collapsed, and headed for a bench for a picnic dinner.
Copious servings were offered to the garbage fairy, by way of gravity.
After collecting the fairy’s offering and dropping them in her ‘in-box’, we explored a little, pulling the girls away from trampling prize rosebushes, snatching other childrens’ crayons, or falling into the koi pond.
Then it was time for the reptile show.
This is what originally made me think this would be a good outing, the tipping point, as it were.
A lady was hired by the park staff to show off various reptiles: an alligator, a turtle, snakes and other scaly critters.
After cautioning us to be very quiet so the critters wouldn’t be spooked, she took them out of their cages and walked around with them. So far, so good.
And then the girls learned they would not be able to pet the alligator or other critters.
A four-alarm fire then broke out, minus the fire, but plus all the sirens and whistles. At least that’s what two very disappointed toddlers sounded like as we carried them away, howling at full-throttle and weeping pitiful baby tears.
It was definitely time to break out the marshmallows!
When they mentioned s’mores in the event description, I had thought there would be a bonfire and so I bought some extra-extra long sticks with which to roast our marshmallows and not get singed kids.
Nope, no bonfire, so we ate the marshmallows raw. Later, park staff came around with trays holding pre-made s’mores, which the girls loved.
They loved smearing them on their faces, on their shirts, on their hands, and showing off the half-chewed remains still in their mouths. Gack!
After wiping up the sticky mess we decided it was high-time for bedtime!
Imagine trying to get two cranky toddlers to sleep while other older kids are running all around, shining flashlights into our tent and generally making loud noises.
Finally, peace decended upon the valley once more.
And then the temperature dropped.
Alot.
Luckily I had brought their summer longsleeve pj’s, but it got REALLY cold that night, and the girls still haven’t caught on to using blankets, so Mike and I each snuggled with a girl to share body heat and somehow we all made it to morning.
5:30 am, crack of dawn, and our Halle alarm went off. Loudly.
Ten minutes later, our Zanna snooze alarm went off, too, so we put them in the car while Mike dismantled the tent and re-schlepped everything to the car as we waited for the park staff to finish making coffee and bring back the spoils of a donut run.
Then we went home where I got to take a nap before taking the girls blueberry picking at a playdate.
I don’t like camping, I usually end up cold, wet, miserable and with a sore back, but the girls loved it! So I guess we’ll be doing it again!
I think ‘masochist’ must be part of the Mama job description.
Yep, we’re still having difficulties with the people down below us.
While they expect us to tiptoe around like timid mice, they bang and slam and crash with impunity. I often hear their dog howling at the noise they make, like the hound of the Baskervilles.
Our apartment literally vibrates everytime they slam out of their apartment and slam back into it. We can even feel the vibration in bed!
And it’s at all hours of the night! Even past midnite I can hear them. Sounds like they’re either moving furniture around or maybe dead bodies, who knows?
They’ve got 3-4 smokers living there at any given time and the two dogs (and cat) so they are constantly in and out, and each entre or egress is accompanied by the slamming of the apartment and outer doors.
At least the man seems to have grown up a little and started bringing his keys with him when he goes walkabout, instead of ringing our bell repeatedly and accusing us of ‘locking him out’ when the wind blows the SECURITY door shut that he deliberately left open. He even rang our bell when his own wife was at home.
At times, they even play their tv SO loud, we have a hard time hearing our own!
And here’s the heartbreaker: Zanna HAS taken to tiptoeing around sometimes, saying “Look, Mama! I walking SOFT!”
And after a particularly loud door slamming from down below, Halle came up to me saying “Why they bang so LOUD?” I asked her if she was ok and she said: “I scared, Mama.”
And always, before I have to take them outside, I peek outside first, because they always leave one of the dogs offleash, a pomeranian, but it’s so excitable, I don’t want it hurting my babies. And the pit bull, while leashed is also a menace: the wife downstairs one time let it have enough slack to lunge at Mike, so that he had to jump back to get out of its way. Then she reeled it in and walked past him without a word, not even a ’sorry’.
And now they’ve stepped up their campaign of intimidation and terror by working up some cockamamie story to tell management and so we’ve gotten called in for a meeting to respond to THEIR complaints!
I’m thinking of taking legal action here. This is SO not right!
It occurred to me yesterday that I could almost measure the girls’ developmental progress by the size of the apples they eat.
WAY way back in the early days, when they couldn’t even walk yet, they ate babyfood applesauce - ultra pureed.
Then we moved on to regular applesauce by the time they walked.
By the time their first molars had shown up, we had moved on to peeled and thinly sliced apple slices.
Then it was thicker peeled slices,
And after their second molars were well in, I started them on slices with the peel ON.
At first, they just nibbled the fruit and left the ‘rinds’ behind, often hidden in dark, quiet places where they could becom applepeel leather in case of famine, but after a few weeks, they started to eat the slices peel and all.
And now I just wash and hand them a whole apple. When they start getting into the core, they politely hand it back to me with a request to remove the ‘yucky stuff’.
I’m pretty happy that they’re getting all the fiber and nutrients that go along with the peel (usually the most nutrients in fruit and veggies is the layer just under the peel) and Halle has been having fantastic poos!
So I’ve been trying to give them an apple a day, or every other day.
Still not trying raw carrots in anything but small, thin matchsticks, though, as the choking hazard is still there in greater degree than the apples, I feel.
And I do supervise their apple eating, just in case 
…about 17 pounds worth.
That’s how much we picked last weekend when we went to Terhune Orchards up in Princeton.
They’ve got cute little trees so we don’t need ladders, and plenty of boughs were close to the ground so the girls could pick cherries, too.
We all picked and picked and picked…
We had so much fun that we didn’t realize just how much we had picked in less than an hour!
So after that we called it quits and made the usual rounds of feeding the geese and goats and petting the farm dogs.
And eating the dougnuts
End of June is Blueberry picking, which will be fun.
Hopefully we won’t go so crazy with the picking next time.
Apparently there is such a thing as being too helpful when it comes to toddlers.
Zanna was busily eating her “yummy yogurt” that I liberally spike with some green vegetable powder, when she got a bit too enthusiastic and accidentally splattered some on the table.
My husband, being the helpful sort, thoughtfully scooped up the splatter with a finger and licked it clean, whereupon Zanna set off a wail comparable to that of a triggered car alarm. After whooping and wailing at deafening levels for a minute I finally got a coherent sentance from her:
“Dada take my yogurt!!!” It was robbery most foul, in her view, and hangin’ was too good fer the varmint!
So I took the yogurt bowl into the kitchen, waited a few moments and brought it back to her with a bright smile “See! More yogurt!” She grumbled a little but started eating again.
Sometimes it’s like walking on eggshells with those two!
And now we come to the next part in the saga of Halle’s bag of balloon equipment. When we last left our heroine, she had appropriated a small gift bag with which to cart around her (my) balloon pump and a handful of (now wretched looking) uninflated balloons.
The only problem was that she insisted on taking it to bed with her. And every time she rolled over it, the crunchiness of the bag would wake her and she’d start shrieking and crying over the bag getting smooshed. So I tried taking the bag from her as soon as she was asleep.
Then she would wake up in the middle of the night shrieking and screaming for its return.
Then came the infamous “T-Day”. She woke up badly from a nap one afternoon and had a HUGE tantrum. Threw herself on the floor, kicking and screaming bloody murder.
By the end of it all she had ripped a couple of pieces off her beloved balloon bag and shredded them in her tiny, but potent, toddler fury.
When she had recovered from her tantrum and realized what she had done to her sweetie bag she was inconsolable. She kept asking me for a new bag, but it had come with a gift from Korea from our neighbor who had vacationed there recently. Heck of a commute to get a replacement.
So I told Halle we could try to fix it. She looked so hopeful at this and held the tape dispenser for me as we carefully patched up the patient. There were quite a few other holes and rips in the bag as well. Still, she seemed happy to stuff her goodies into it and prance around with it dangling from her arm like a purse.
And then nighttime came and the bag smooshing and all the shrieks and wails that that entailed.
I was not a happy mama. I was a very tired and cranky mama.
So I hied myself off to the Michael’s arts and crafts store and bought a few small white canvas tote bags for $1.29 each, a box of Crayola fabric pens for $3.49 and proceeded to decorate the bags with the pens and a few stencils I had.
Halle and Zanna each (I didn’t want any tugs of war) got one sunshine bag for daytime use, including traveling outside, and one moon and stars bag for nighttime use, including snuggling in bed. (That way I didn’t have to worry about some filth-infested thing being dragged into their beds after an exciting day mucking around a farm. (A separate adventure for a separate post.)
Halle was so taken with her new bag that she immediately dug her treasures out of the ratty paper gift bag and stuffed them into her new sunshine bag and proceeded to do a dance of celebration which involved much spinning around in circles and high-stepping pranciness.
Zanna also seemed content that the new bags were suitable habitats for rubber duckies and allowed me to place one of her traveling ducks into it for safekeeping.
Yes! Score one for the mama!
I have an alarm clock. Her name is Halle. Every morning at approx. 5:45am she wakes up.
And then she wakes me up.
Loudly.
I think a rooster would be quieter. She screeches to play with her toys, screeches to watch tv, and sometimes, she just screeches for the heck of it for no apparent reason.
I’ve tried coaxing her back to sleep, rubbing her tummy the way she likes, and just plain ignoring her, hoping she’ll take the hint and go back to sleep.
Sometimes if I’m really lucky, she’ll go back to sleep until 7 or 7:30am. Then it’s back to screeching. By then, her sister Zanna is awake and the two of them combine to create a cacophony that would raise the dead…and have them fleeing the planet!
By that time I give up all hope for a few more zzz’s and stagger into the kitchen to prepare breakfast for them. And even after that, I can’t go back and take a nap. If I’m out of the room while they have food and beverage available to them, they’ll use it to redecorate.
They’ll also spill it all over the table, climb up on top and dance around on it, while kicking it with merry abandon all over the place.
We find dried out chunks of kicked food in the strangest places weeks later.
Maybe it’s their way of preparing to survive a nuclear winter, making sure they have a supply of homemade food jerky tucked away.
It’s still embarassing though, when a guest is visiting and accidentally steps on a desiccated chunk of sausage from over a month ago.
Recently, we’ve gotten many queries wanting to know where we go to worship. As the answer is intrinsically related to our twins, I’ll answer here in the blog instead of the FAQ.
First we tried attending service at our own church, the Unification Church. However that is 40 minutes drive, one way, and once we get there, they have no Sunday School for toddlers. They do have Sunday School for older children, but the girls are not ready for that and would disrupt the class.
Trust me, they would TOTALLY disrupt the class 
So we tried attending in the main sanctuary with everyone else. Even armed with snacks, drinks and toys, the girls’ attention was soon claimed by all the interesting (and no doubt expensive) sound equipment on the stage.
It wasn’t too long before they managed to wriggle and kick and scream their way out of our grasp, and make a beeline for the equipment, where they started pulling at wires and microphones and other equipment, with merry abandon.
So, in short order we found ourselves in the cafeteria area watching them color with crayons and paper, or chasing after them as they found new things to destroy in that very un-babyproofed space.
Then it was 40 minutes back in the car to get home.
The second time we tried it, no sooner had we planted our butts in the pew then the girls were off and running, in a toddlerish attempt to bring down the temple, like Sampson.
To drive 80 minutes round trip to just watch them color in a basement wasn’t doing much for us in the way of spiritual nourishment, unless you count us praying desperately for God to give us strength.
Then we tried a local synagogue’s Tot Shabbat (Shabbat is Hebrew for Sabbath). Unfortunately they held that in the main sanctuary of the temple. Beeline for stage, toddler attack on (no doubt expensive) antique-y looking objects d’art, and we were carting kicking screaming toddlers out of there.
Sigh…
Then we miraculously found a local Christian church, that had just started holding services after converting from an online church.
AND THEY HAD A TODDLER SUNDAY SCHOOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The staff was warm and friendly, there were toys to play with, Bible-themed activities for the girls to engage in, crafts, and the girls really enjoyed it.
And it had a door with a window so I could peek in to see if they were ok, plus it was within earshot of the back of the sanctuary, so I could hear them if they cried for me, which meant…
I COULD FINALLY LISTEN TO A SERMON!!!!!!!!!
YAY! YIPPEE!!!! HOORAY!!!!!!!!! WAHOOOOO!!!!!!! HUZZAH!!!!!!!!!!!
Now and then we try a Tot Shabbat if it’s specifically geared for 2yr olds, but I think that once the girls have been in nursery school for a while, it’ll be easier to take them to pre-k religious programs, because they’ll be more used to behaving in a public kind of setting that involves attending to something.
I hope.
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