It was a blast!

We've lived in White Salmon for 6 1/2 years now. During that whole time, some college friends of ours--Sterling & Julie--have lived four hours away in Seattle.  Until May, we've never gotten together. We kept talking about it, but just never made it happen until we found out Sterling was accepting a job transfer and they were moving back to Massachusetts!

Julie, Sterling, and their 2 sons

So in mid-May we met Sterling and Julie and their two boys at a hotel in Kelso, Washington on a Friday night. We had adjoining rooms and the kids played while the adults caught up. Everyone went to bed pretty late, but we made it up in time for breakfast and a dip in the hotel pool before heading up the highway to Mt. St. Helens.

We had been wanting to visit Mt. St. Helens and Julie had never been either. (Sterling grew up in Washington, so I think he'd been there before.)  Squeezing in a volcano visit with the McMillans before their departure seemed a great way for Sterling & Julie to combine two must-do activities before they left the Northwest.
We regularly drive I-84, the east-west freeway that connects Portland and the Columbia Gorge. I-84 is south of Mt. St. Helens, and from it, on a clear day you can make out the mountain's sloping sides and flat top in the distance.  I had never, however, seen the Mt. St. Helens from the north, and was amazed at what I saw as we drove up the mountainside towards Johnston Ridge Visitors Center, where I was keen to go and learn all about the May 18, 1980 eruption.

Look at that! It's as though the whole side of the mountain was just scooped out! I was in awe.

This photograph gives a little bit better perspective of where Johnston Ridge is and of the path of the debris rushing down from the mountain. 

As one of the rangers at the Visitors Center said of the mountain, "She didn't so much blow her top as lose her head." The whole side of the mountain had been bulging outwards, increasing by about 5 feet per day, in the weeks preceding the blast.  Then the pressure was just so great that the mountain basically just gave way and slid down, burying the forest for miles and miles and sending ash more than a hundred miles away. 

This view is to the northeast of Mt. St. Helens.

When you see the tall trees and green forest of the surrounding mountainsides, or even lower down on  Mt. St. Helens outside of the blast zone, it really helps you understand the magnitude of the dirt and rock that came rushing down/out of the volcano.  It has been more than twenty years and it is still pretty much a barren wasteland. 

Trees were sheared off, completely uprooted, and thrown downhill.  We could still see stumps and logs lying beside the paths.  The devastation wrought by the volcano was still so evident, and that was so amazing to me since it erupted two decades ago.  It was powerful.

 

The kids and adults alike really enjoyed the exhibits and activities at the Johnston Ridge Visitors Center and hiking up for more views of the surrounding valleys.  It's a bit of a drive to get there, since you have to go for about an hour east of the freeway (and for us, that's after coming west--it's the only way to get there), but it's definitely worth it.

 

The kids all got along with each other and the adults sure enjoyed catching up.  Damon and Sterling were freshmen at MIT together and have known each other since Damon joined the Church. I met Sterling after his mission, a year before I met Damon. The four of us were all in a ward together as undergrads and continued to socialize after we were married (about 6 months apart). Sterling and Julie even surprised us by showing up at our wedding reception in Salt Lake City! Even though they were living in Massachusetts at the time, they happened to be in Utah to see family a few days before our reception and arranged their plans to stay and see us.  The last time we'd seen them was at a going-away party ten years ago when they left Massachusetts for Washington.  Still, we'd always kept in touch and it was so great to see them and wish them well again before their next move.  With any luck, it won't take us another decade to see them again.

Project Early Bird

After returning from my  trip to Arizona and giving myself a few days to adjust to the normal routine, I launched an experiment which I have now dubbed "Project Early Bird."

I started getting up at 5:30 in the morning.

Are you sure about this?

That is a big deal for me. Really big. I like to sleep in. For most of our marriage, Damon has risen earlier than me, getting up and having breakfast with the kids and sometimes only waking me up when it was absolutely necessary for me to take over while he got in the shower.

Still, I had this big idea to start getting up early enough that I could exercise and shower before the kids needed me. I had several motivators for embarking on such an ambitious new schedule. I'm more productive once I'm showered and dressed. Holly is at an age where she can get into mischief and danger if left unsupervised for too long, so I can really only shower when she's napping or someone older (other than Gunnar) is here to keep an eye on her.  Over the last several months she has dropped a nap, and now her only nap of the day is a little later in the morning. If I wait for her to go to sleep, I'm not able to shower until after 11:00, and so I just tend to waste the whole morning kind of puttering around waiting for her to nap. I figured that if I could be showered and dressed before the girls leave for school, that would help me start my day better.

Also, I tend to stay up too late, and wondered if getting up earlier would leave me tired out and inclined to go to bed earlier.  One of the reasons I believe that I stay up late is because I need some time to wind down and do my own thing after the kids are in bed. I thought that, maybe, by getting up earlier, I could "fill my cup" before the kids were awake rather than recharging at the end of the day. I was skeptical about this potential benefit of my early rising, but willing to try it out.

So, is it worth it?
Turns out, I'm not getting to bed any earlier most nights. Instead, I'm just getting less sleep. I don't actually notice it too much, except at about 5:30 and 1 second when I've realized that the alarm is going off and I wonder if I'm crazy and can really drag myself out of bed.  Honestly, some days I do bail and get back in bed. And, some nights I know that I just can't get up at 5:30 the next morning. (I also manage to sneak in a few afternoon catnaps throughout the week, which helps.)

However, I have learned that I really like being showered and dressed before the girls leave for school. Often I still tend to lounge about and waste some time on the Internet after they leave, but once I come to myself and decide I ought to get on with the housework or some other project. . . I'm already dressed! So, on the mornings when I decide I need to sleep in a little and don't get up at 5:30, I get up at 6:30 instead (still early for me) and hop right in the shower.

I'm also getting more exercise. Although I have to have the TV turned way down low and all the lights off (so that when Holly wakes up at about 6:00 she'll go in our bedroom and fall asleep with Damon instead of coming out to the family room with me), it's so much easier to exercise without kids climbing on me, asking for a drink of water, or needing a diaper change in the middle of the workout. I've even spent some of my early-morning hours going for solo walks or working on a landscaping project in the part of our yard that's right by the street--both things that I can't really do when I'm home alone with the kids.

So, I'd consider my Project a success.  Dare I go so far as to call it a new lifestyle? Maybe.  Ask me in a few more months.

P.S. I do plan to continue it during the summer, but I might allow myself a 30-minute delay since there won't be the pressure of having kids dressed and fed and lunches made by the time Damon leaves for work.

Photos by the Yard

For our Family Home Evening activity two weeks ago I asked everyone to take a photograph of one thing in the yard. I thought it would be a fun way to see how our yard looked at a specific time, and also what was important or eye-catching to different family members.

(The kids were all in their jammies already and Holly was in bed.)

Here's my photo, with Gunnar included for scale: This is our rhubarb plant. We've had it for 4 years now (I think--maybe it's only 3), and this is the first time it has flowered.  Damon finally pulled them out since people told us the plant would stop producing, but first we wanted to see what they'd look like. They were just tiny white flowers, but they grew in clusters. And, they were TALL! I think they were about 6 feet tall when Damon pulled them. Amazing.

 

Damon's photo of the new grass: He decided to re-seed the front lawn this spring. After thatching the old lawn, bringing in new top soil, spreading seed and fertilizer, and waiting . . . we had this thin, but strong-looking grass coming in.  It's really filling in now. Hopefully Damon will let us step on it soon. : )

 

Maggie's photo of blueberry blossoms: These will turn into berries in about two more months!

 

Adah's photo of one of our birdhouses: The evening light didn't cooperate well and I don't think the camera flashed, so the photo was blurry.  This is a little corner of the yard where we have a holly tree (bush?) and the kids like to create little "bird cities" there with different houses and other paraphernalia.

 

Gunnar's hole: I'm not sure when, but sometime in the spring Gunnar was playing in the backyard and just decided to dig a hole. His sisters helped, but only a little. It was mostly Gunnar. Part of me wanted to stop him--a big hole in the middle of the play area isn't exactly safe--but Damon and I both kind of wanted to see how big it would get.  When Gunnar gets in it, he's in up to his waist!  It's pretty deep.

 

Here's Gunnar, posing with the shovel that did almost all of the digging: (Pajamas and flip-flops were not his usual excavation attire.)

 

And, Adah requested this final photo of her swinging (or preparing to swing--the swing picture was fuzzy) on a rope under the play structure:

 

We have a great yard, and I'm grateful it's a fun place for the kids to play, as well as a place that helps feed us in the summer.

Mosier Tunnel Bike Ride

A few Saturdays ago I took Adah and Maggie on their first real bike ride.  We live in a neighborhood with no sidewalks and our house is at a T intersection one house away from a semi-busy street, meaning there are lots of turning cars coming and going on our street. Combine that with having two younger siblings and you get two good bike riders who don't have much opportunity for safe bicycling near our house.  We usually have to load up the bikes in the back of the truck and drive to our church parking lot in order to give the kids some good, safe bike-riding time.

Saturday afternoon Damon stayed home with Gunnar and Holly and the girls and I put our bikes in the back of the truck and headed east through the Gorge to the tiny town of Mosier.  There's a fantastic paved trail that climbs up to go along parallel to the Columbia River, and then it goes through two tunnels. I think the whole thing used to be the highway before the interstate was built.  I had only been there once before on a date with Damon where we had walked the path, but I was pretty excited to ride it with Adah and Maggie.
My hopes for an excellent ride were looking a bit dim shortly after we began.  It was a little steep at first, and Adah was saying she was already getting tired.  Mags was having real trouble with her shoes. The straps kept coming undone about every 5 yards and she'd have to stop to fix them.  Eventually I tried to secure them with the only thing in my backpack that seemed promising: Band-Aids from the first aid kit.

 

The Band-Aids didn't solve the problem, as I'd hoped, but it did keep the straps a little more secure.

With all of the stop-and-start caused by the shoe trouble and both girls struggling with the hill, I readjusted my expectations for the ride. Once you crest the hill you can leave the main path to go to a look-out for an awesome view up and down the Columbia Gorge. I decided that that would be our goal, and not the tunnels.  However, as we turned off the main path for the lookout, I could see that the tunnels weren't much further and that at least going to look at them would be realistic. Whether or not we would ride through them would be another matter, since they go downhill and returning to the car would require an uphill climb that I wasn't sure the girls could handle.

First, though, to the look-out.  (Fortunately there were some other bicyclists there to take a picture of the three of us; they were riding a tandem bike.)

The views of the river and Gorge were awesome.  It was a beautiful day and I was, once again, so grateful to live in such a gorgeous place.  (Adah was happy to be munching on her Saltines; she loves those crackers.)

 

Looking east:

Looking west:

 

We did decide to ride through the tunnels. The girls were so excited once they saw them.  There are two, and the second one immediately follows the first, but is constructed differently.  The photo below is looking down the second tunnel. Way at the bottom is one of the girls on her bike. You can look out on the river (through trees) to the right.

 

We turned around after going through the second tunnel.  There was a short downhill stretch before the path started to climb back up.  I instructed the girls to get up as much speed as they could and to just keep going. They actually did really well.  Adah kept on chugging and made it through both tunnels in great time.  Maggie chose to stop at the break between the two tunnels, which meant I could get this fun shot of her: (Isn't the tunnel cool? It looks like you're inside a giant barrel.)

 

And there's her silhouette at the mouth of the east end of the tunnel:

 

I was so proud of the girls for making it back through the tunnels. Once we got through there it was a short way to the crest of the hill and then it was all downhill from there.  They LOVED that part of it. We got going pretty fast and it was such a great reward of ease and speed after all the pedaling. I realized later that it was really the first time they'd ridden their bikes down a real hill!  That sounds so sad, but, as I explained, we do most of our bike riding in our church parking lot.  We definitely need to do more bike rides like this. Gunnar will even be able to join us pretty soon. He learned to ride a two-wheeler at the beginning of April.  Hooray for bike rides!

Caught Off Guard?

Inspired by all of the trouble caused by the snow and ice storms we had in January, Damon set out to organize a community Emergency Preparedness Fair, hosted at our church building on April 14. He spent over two months putting together a 4-hour event with visits from emergency aid personnel and vehicles and classes taught by local experts on topics such as emergency heat and electricity, water and sanitation, emergency food prep and storage, kids' emergency preparation, and wildfire mitigation.  Although the fair was held at the church and organized under the supervision of our local ward leaders, this was truly a community event. Only two of the presenters were active Church members.  There were probably 150 people in attendance and nearly half were not members of our ward.

From the press release printed in our local paper:
"Fair organizer Damon McMillan stresses, 'This emergency preparedness fair is not geared toward hard-core survivalists or emergency services providers, but rather those average citizens who just need to take a few simple steps to be ready for the next emergency or disaster.'
"After the snow and ice storm this past February, McMillan, a White Salmon resident, was inspired to do something to help his family, friends, and neighbors be better prepared for future emergencies, weather-related or otherwise. He approached leaders at his local congregation of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who agreed that hosting such an event would be of benefit to the community.

"McMillan talked with people about their experiences and found common themes amongst their challenges, especially during power outages. He then spoke to local experts, asking questions about wood heat alternatives, cooking without power, and other issues. They agreed to share their knowledge of emergency preparation at a community event."

Everyone enjoyed touring the fire engine, which actually had to go out on a call during the fair! (No worries: someone was just burning brush on their property near the road and another person driving by called it in; that's legal where we live and a common occurrence in the springtime.)

 

They returned after making sure the fire was under control, and they brought an ambulance back with them!

 

Here's Adah in the fire truck with a few other kids we know:

 

Maggie even got to try on some of the fire fighter's clothes! (I didn't even know about this until I saw photos later.)

 

The Red Cross also sent a truck and presented a class on children's emergency preparedness and family emergency plans.

 

The real feather in Damon's cap for this event was the landing of a Life Flight medical helicopter in the church parking lot! He learned that they have a community outreach program and so he submitted a request for them to visit the fair.  We found out just a week before the fair, after all the publicity materials had been printed, so we got an additional press release in the paper and started spreading the word.

Everyone was pretty excited about seeing the helicopter land. They were a little later than expected and the first class had already begun. I was in the kids' class and the teacher let us all run out and see the chopper land. (I'm in the photo below, wearing a red jacket,behind a kid in a purple shirt.)

 

 

Adah snapped at least 20 photos of the helicopter. I spared you from looking at all the interior shots. You'd think she was a spy for some competing medical helicopter company trying to document exactly how this one was equipped. Still, they were kind of fun for me to look at it since Holly wouldn't let me get close enough to have a tour and I didn't want to leave her with Damon since he had enough to keep track of being the head honcho that day.

 

 

The kids' emergency prep class was well-attended and the kids got to participate by answering and asking lots of questions about different kinds of disasters they might experience and how they can help keep themselves and their families safe. They were all given the assignment to go home and ask their parents about their fire safety plan and to make sure they had working smoke detectors. It was a good reminder for us to review our fire escape plan, especially with Gunnar, who is now old enough to remember the family meeting place in case of fire.

 

The class I was most looking forward to and at which I learned some really great tips was the one on emergency heat. We have an electric heat pump and no fireplace of any kind in our home. When the power goes out, our means of generating heat is gone. That has always been my biggest concern in a winter emergency. I always have plenty of food and water on hand. (We're on city water anyway, unlike many of our friends who have their own wells and pumps, so we've always had water.)  We have a camp stove and a propane BBQ grill with a burner, so plenty of options for cooking meals. And, as much as we like watching TVs, we're good at entertaining ourselves without electricity.

However, it gets SO COLD in our house with no power. Even on sunny days, we don't have the southern window exposure to heat the house up much. At the heating class I learned about a few propane heaters on the market as well as a window-insert pellet stove. I think the best trick I learned was that you can use your grill to heat dry bricks and then wrap them in towels and bring them in the house to heat up your bed (or wherever). I thought that was brilliant and was disappointed that we had just sent about 10 bricks to the dump the week before! I plan to get a small stash to keep in the shed for future emergencies.  That's a simple low-cost option to help out through a chilly night.

Lucky for us, the longest we've been without power since living in this house is about 27 hours. During this last storm it was only out for about 20 hours. That is long enough for the inside temperature to drop into the 40s or 50s, so I don't think we could last for days and days as some of our friends had to do. Lucky for us, as well, those friends who had to tough it out without electricity are also very generous and were willing to share some floor space with us as our house cooled off. We've got friends who will always take care of us . . . if we can just get there through the snow.

But now, after this fair, I learned enough new, small steps that I can take to be more self-sufficient and prepared for the future that hopefully we'll be better off the next time the power goes out.

The Emergency Preparedness Fair that Damon planned was an excellent and successful event, lauded by all who participated and attended, including a fire chief, the mayor, and other civic leaders. I was and am so proud of all the work that he put into creating such a well-organized, useful, and timely event for our community.

After-School Community Building, or Building on the Hoods

The kids and I had fun building our own little town with Gunnar's train tracks, the Duplo blocks, and any other props we could find.

Gunnar and Maggie worked on a campground just outside of the town. The books are tents. To Maggie's left (our right) is the dinosaur museum.

Here's Winnie the Pooh in the forest.

Maggie built these trees, and in the photo above you can make out some other green bushes.

Here's a little pond at the campground:

Adah was Chief Railroad and Town Architect. I was her assistant.

Here's Mater's Tow Yard, the bakery (that's a Duplo loaf of bread atop that yellow "building"), and City Hall (?); the roof of the train station is in the foreground.

 

 

Woo-hoo! The trains didn't crash!

 

This was a fun afternoon. Everyone was working together, using their imaginations and building skills, and getting along. I need to do this more with my children. When I get down and play with them, it almost always goes better between them, (not that they don't come up with some very happy and imaginative play without me). This day we helped build up our own little neighborhood while I built up my memories of motherhood.

Camouflaging

Gunnar LOVES animals and has a great mind for remembering all kinds of details about them. His favorite TV show is Wild Kratts on PBS, which teaches him all about animals and all the special features they possess that help them survive. Lately, Gunnar has taken to dressing in all the same color and then "camouflaging" himself on or by like-colored things. It's hard to see him on this blue chair isn't it?

Love this boy.

Here's his other favorite camouflaging outfit and position.