Zombie Crawl

The news is out. This year's Zombie Crawl in Denver broke the record yet again with 45,000+ attendees. They collected hundreds of pounds of food for the local food bank. I'm proud to say that my family was there.

We were all dressed up as gross, grey zombies. I found this awesome tutorial on instructables for applying some fancy zombie makeup with normal household stuff. I will admit that I had to buy some colors of eye shadow that I don't normally own. Then, I found this helpful list of ways to make fake blood. We used the first recipe. Cub thought it was delicious.

We tore up our clothes and glued stuff to our faces and put eye shadow in places I'd normally never allow. That is, except for Cub. He did not want makeup on him at all. The whole process was unusual and loads of fun.

We got the clothes from the thrift store and the pile of stuff were were already going to throw out. So the kids got to go crazy, stomping things into the mud and cutting/ripping holes in things. The twins got to do some of their own makeup. We looked amazing, especially as a family.

The night before the crawl, I asked Cub what he wanted to wear. He specifically asked for a dress. So, Papa and I picked up a fluffy dress for him at the thrift store... something that would tear nicely. But, when we got it home, he fell in love with it and didn't want to ruin it. He wanted to wear it to bed. So, we picked a dress that had been retired to the play clothes box for him to soil instead.

When Papa took the twins to gymnastics the next day, some other parents were talking about the Zombie Crawl, saying they wish they could have gone. Papa said we went... and we took our kids. The other parents, a bit surprised, said they would definitely not take their kids. It would be too scary.

Our kids didn't enjoy that event, but not because it was scary. The costumes were fun and interesting. The problem was the lack of entertainment for them. 45,000+ people were there. We felt like we were being trampled more than half of the time. One end of the even was flooded with loud music and people, with nothing else of interest to be seen. We never made it to the other end of the event because of the crowd-induced chaos.

I emailed the even coordinators before we even floated the idea of attending. I asked if they thought that this would be the sort of event that kids would enjoy. Their website said there would be games, but wasn't clear about what that actually meant. I was assured that kids would love the Zombie Crawl, but probably not the "Organ Trail" scavenger hunt scheduled for earlier in the day.

We loved getting dressed up, getting dirty, getting messy, and putting crazy makeup on. The event itself was a huge flop for us. The kids only really enjoyed when we found a place to sit quietly and eat, away from the crowd. Cub probably had the least trouble with the crowd, because he was in a stroller and has no social fear. M, who tends to be much more shy, was overwhelmed but well-behaved. The twins just didn't have any fun because they couldn't go anywhere, do anything, or even see anything.

So, regardless of whether or not monster fear is an issue for your kids, I really wouldn't recommend the Zombie Crawl for children. Keep in mind that mind are 8 (S), 8 (C), 6 (M), and 2 (Cub). I saw several other kids there. Most of the kids I saw having any fun at all were probably at least 12.

A Difficult Six

We celebrated M's birthday the weekend before she actually turned six. Her birthday was on a Wednesday, and Papa and I are both gone all day on Wednesdays. We both leave the house at 7am. I drive to school and he goes to work. Then, we don't get home until after 5pm. Normally, birthdays that fall on weekdays get moved to the weekend after, that way we don't miss any cards or gifts that our far away relatives might have mailed. This year, though we had plans for the weekend after M's birthday: zombie crawl. Besides, we were having family visit for the weekend before her birthday. We like to share birthdays with family.

We don't make a big social event out of birthday parties. We don't send out invites or plan to have tons of guests. We have four kids - three birthdays - all in the fall/winter. We don't have that kind of budget. On a couple of occasions, though, birthdays have fallen near times when people were planning to visit for other reasons. So, we throw the party in while our guests are here.

Sometimes I ask what theme they want for the party. For M, I already knew. She checked out a book about sharks from the library and renewed it the maximum number of times, keeping it for 9 weeks. We read it multiple times. She learned (and actually retained) a lot of weird facts about sharks. Did you know that the outer layer of shark skin is made of tiny, tooth-like things called dermal denticles? Skin teeth. Seems like sharks are basically made of teeth. She was sad to see the book go.

So, M had a shark party.

I spend days making cakes and other baked goods for birthdays. I think I'm hoping that my kids will remember that when they're older. My mom says they'll remember that and think, "no way. I'm not baking cakes." That's okay. I just want them to remember how much I cared about their birthdays. Plus, I love baking.

Decorating is rewarding but stressful. Fondant is... torture that sometimes produces desirable results. But baking is relaxing. With three birthdays every year for the last 8.5 years, I've found some great cake and frosting recipes. I get better at decorating every time I try it, but... it's a slow process.

This year, I made cookies with royal icing t
o go with M's cake. I had never made or used royal icing before. The recipe I used didn't turn out quite as smooth as I would have liked. The cookies took an entire day to make and decorate from start to finish. They tasted okay. They were honestly kind of unremarkable, but they were worth making because now I can try again and do things a little differently until I get it right. You have to start somewhere.

We went to the fall festival before coming home for cake and cookies. She played in a giant hamster ball and a bounce house and ate festival food. I didn't take a lot of pictures of that. She had a great time and everyone was a bit sad when we had to go home. There were so many other things they wanted to do at the festival, but we didn't have time.

This year, Daddy got to be at her party. For a few years, he lived more than a thousand miles away, in Florida. Now, he lives five minutes away, in an apartment complex with a pool. They see him several times a week, now. They get to have dinner with him twice every week. He gets to be at their birthday parties.

M's six years old, now. She's really into sounding out new words and slowly adding new sight words to her vocabulary. She loves library books. She loves sharks and wants to learn to rock climb and go indoor skydiving. She likes to sit on the roof of the playhouse and talk to the kid on the other side of the back fence.

She's going through a bit of a regressive phase recently. Daddy has told me that "regressive phase" is a nice way of saying it. For the last couple of months, she refuses to do what we ask her to do. She pouts, whines and throws fits in "baby talk". She briefly decided that if we asked her to go somewhere, she would, instead, grab on to the nearest large object and refuse to move. She looks frustratingly pleased with herself (or maybe with our reactions) as she does these things.

So, predictably, she gets timeouts. We have always had timeouts for fit-throwing and disobeying. We make an effort to distinguish between requests and commands, and commands are mandatory. If she refuses to respond to a command, we warn her of the possibility of a timeout. If she continues to refuse, she gets a timeout. Her timeouts are now 6 minutes long.

Consistency seems to be helping. It sure helps me retain my sanity, just knowing what comes next. I'm sure she just wants more attention. There's a lot going on around here. She has the twins as older sisters, and they have each other. She has the Cub as a baby brother, and he gets a lot of adult attention because he's potty training and always in things he shouldn't be. I'm at school twice a week, Papa is at work five days a week, Daddy is at school and busy most of the time. I imagine she feels pretty alone.

I'm going to try to work on that.

Hanging Lake

Hanging Lake - joshuahicks

It's a place I've wanted to go for years. But, you know, there are places you can drive to on your day off, and there are places you can fly to on vacation. Then there are places you never go because they're somewhere in between. They're too far away to want to drive there for a day trip, but too close to justify a vacation. Hanging Lake is one of those places.

I didn't realize, when I moved to Colorado, that a lot of the beautiful places I loved when I was a kid would be on that list, actually. It was easier to go on long road trips on summer vacation to see the Rockies than it is to find the time to visit them now that I live here.

Having lived in Hawaii, I should have seen it coming. People who have been on vacation in Hawaii often ask how awesome it was to live there. Not. It was not awesome. It was expensive and the only houses I could afford to buy didn't have central AC, so it was hot. Just living there left me so broke I could barely do anything. You vacationers went to Hawaii to do things. I could not afford to do things.

Living in Colorado presents basically the same problem, but with a different currency: time.

Papa and I were finally motivated to go on this hike, 3 hours from my house. One of the ladies I went backpacking with wanted to go. She's from Texas. She moved to Colorado for school, which is pretty weird because my college is mostly populated with sensible people who live nearby. She's graduating in December, and wanted to see Hanging Lake before she goes back to Texas. Funny how it takes something like that to motivate me to do something I've been wanting to do for myself for years.

The lady we went with is a few years older than me, and was homeschooled when she was a kid. It's no surprise that we bonded while backpacking. We're both studying biology and, besides, we shared a tent.

We didn't take the kids. Hanging Lake trail is almost 2 miles long in one direction, and gains 1050 feet in elevation. About halfway up, we saw a woman being evacuated on a stretcher (with a single bicycle wheel to aid in the descent. I had never seen one of those before). Day Hikes Near Denver says, "Close to the one-mile point, you'll climb a steep staircase of rock complete with handrails. While the handrails are helpful, it would be easy for a child to slip over one. So, we'd recommend that you keep your smaller children on the inside of the steps as you ascend and hold their hand. It's a sheer drop on the other side of the handrail." ... I can't even imagine.

The hike was beautiful and fun. I'm glad we went with a friend. If you go, don't overlook the little offshoot trail called "Spouting Rock". I think people go to Hanging Lake with an end point in mind and maybe don't realize what they're missing. At the lake, you can see a lake. There are falls on the other side and the water is remarkably clear. There are little fish swimming around in it and it's mesmerizing, but it's not terribly interactive. DO NOT WALK ON THE LOG!

But at Spouting Rock... you can walk under a tall waterfall and yell at your hiking companions because the sound of the rushing water hitting the rocks is just too loud for normal communication. It's maybe not as strikingly beautiful, but it is more fun.

I took lots of pictures of the lake, but none of my pictures do it justice. It really is beautiful. I guess I was a bit disappointed that it had a boardwalk built around the edge, like so many popular hikes do. I know, these things are necessary, to preserve the natural beauty and biodiversity and all. They just aren't attractive. I was also sad to see some garbage washed under the boardwalk... *sigh* humans.

All in all, I highly recommend this hike... but maybe not for your kids (though I did see kids on the trail who were... doing okay I guess).

We Did the Volcano Thing

One of our awesome, amazing, lovely family members got us a subscription to something really cool thing that I didn't even know existed. If you're homeschooling, you might love this, too. It's the Magic School Bus, Young Scientist Club.

We've been receiving their bubble-packed envelopes for most of a year, and I can now tell you that they are definitely worth it. If I were a little better at planning, I could organize our school schedule to focus on the topics in that month's Magic School Bus kit. They email in advance to let you know what the topic will be and what you will need in order to perform the experiments. Unfortunately, as I have detailed before, my life is a bit of a mess lately... sometimes it feels like an endless train wreck that I can do nothing to avoid, and just have to clean up after when the dust finally settles. So, there are envelopes we haven't opened and experiments we haven't done.

Some of the "experiments" aren't really... experimental. In one of our first envelopes, we got (among many other things) a card-stock print of a leg, cut in half at the knee, a couple of bits of string and a brass brad. We attached the two leg segments with the brad and taped the ends of the pieces of string so that one end attached to the lower half and one to the upper. I gather this was supposed to replicate the muscles moving the parts of the leg. As a biologist-in-training, I felt the need to explain that this was very simplified and... not really how this works. Still, it was a great conversation starter that resulted in education points that don't generally come up on their own.

My favorite so far was the most stereotypical science fair experiment ever: making and erupting a volcano. (obviously, there's a reason people love this one)

The instructions for the volcano experiment come in different phases. First, you build the structure with a small soda bottle and paper mache. The instructions are specific about what size of bottle, so you don't end up with a bottle too big for your solution to explode from. The kit doesn't include the bottle, but does come with tough construction paper to build your cone-shape and some powdered black paint. A lot of what you need comes from your kitchen: Flour, water and a bowl to make your paper mache, and vinegar, baking soda, red food coloring, soap and measuring cups/spoons for the "lava".

After you've built the volcano, your kids will slowly become more and more impatient before (maybe) just giving up all together, while you wait for it to dry completely before using it. It takes... days. You build it and you wait a long time... then you paint it and you wait another long time. Or at least that's how ours went. It's possible that my kids were overzealous with the mache and paint. They were incredibly excited about the project.

But before you explode your volcano, you've got some work (read: learning) to do. I bet you thought you were just going to follow some directions with specific quantities and get the perfect, explosive solution. Not so fast. The Magic School Bus directions don't make it that simple. Instead, they tell you what to put in, but not how much, and give you a few different blank spaces to write out what you used each time so you can come up with the ideal solution on your own. (we used a camelback bottle for our preliminaries so the kids could see what was happening inside)

I think that was the best part. We talked about how baking soda and vinegar react with one another and explained that you could use that knowledge to figure out if you needed more baking soda or more vinegar. Take the puddle of already reacted mess and add a little baking soda to one area. Does it react a lot? Now add vinegar to another area. Does that react more or less?

We came up with our perfect solution and put it in our volcano. It was amazing, and even the Cub loved it. And with all of those mixture tests we did on the front room floor, the hardwood is super sanitary now.

First Time Tenting

It's mid-term season. Time to panic and study a lot. Apparently, it's also a good time for everyone to get sick. I missed an important day of training at the zoo because I had some kind of 24 hour stomach bug. I also missed an important day of standing in the passport line at the post office because I chose, instead, to spend that day waiting at an urgent care clinic so I could get an antibiotic prescription.

I managed to make up the passport day, but I'm still not sure when I'll get to make up the zoo training. Oh well. It could have been worse. At least I was lucky enough to have Papa stay home so I could rest. He even called in for me. Sweet guy.

Now, I want to take a moment to revisit some of the good times.

About a month ago, before all of this mid-term/sick business started, we all went camping with some friends. We had been trying to figure out how to go since the Cub started sleeping through the night, but kept talking ourselves out of it. How do you take a little guy camping with you? Was he going to sleep in a pack-n-play? What if he wouldn't sleep? What would we feed him? How are we all going to fit in our tent with a pack-n-play anyway?

Now, he's been sleeping in a toddler bed for months and eating what we eat for well over a year, but we didn't like the odds: 2 adults vs 4 small children, so we continued our holding pattern. Then, we realized that we have some amazing friends who also love camping and being outdoors. Who'd have guessed that we'd be friends with people like us?

They picked the camp site, helped us out with some gear and brought camp food. In fact, they handled a lot of the logistics, and I don't think we could have done it without them. Their preparedness allowed us to spend our time watching the kids and enjoying the experience. It was the first time the kids had been camping at all, and the first time I had been camping since I was a kid.

There's a learning curve. Just like playing video games, using new lab equipment, tap dancing and baking, it's probably best to take your kids camping for the first time with people who have a lot of recent experience with kids and camping (if not combined, then separately). I'm thankful we had some help. Besides, these people are good company.

We had a lot of fun. The kids explored the wilderness with practically every moment they could. They also got a lot of entertainment out of a glow stick and some red flash lights once the sun went down. We built a fire, roasted marshmallows and made s'mores. We all had/got to pee in the woods.

That, by the way, is a unique adventure. I think every kid should get to do it. The Cub is potty trained, and will stand to pee in the grass, but he relied on his potty the whole time we were out. Papa and I had to find places to dump/bury the contents. The girls, however, all took care of business like the grown ups... with only one, unfortunate incident.

We slept like sardines in our "6 person" tent. The Cub only complained that he wanted his bed for several minutes before passing out and sleeping the whole night through in his mummy bag. The girls all claim that sharing a tent with him was the worst part of the weekend, but I can't really imagine how.

It was cold and frosty when we woke up. It was definitely nearing the end of the campable season for leisure campers like us. The mummy bags we borrowed from our friends were lifesavers in the cold night, but the morning view was beautiful. Probably my favorite part of camping is waking up with the sun and enjoying the scenic sunrise. I always feel more awake after camping than I do at home.

We played and explored for the day, headed back down the mountain a bit for lunch, and then went home. The kids were all a little disappointed to be going home. I'm sure they're excited to go camping again, but we won't be able to sleep in that tent again until the warm weather comes back.