Mama Scouts

Sierra and I have decided to start a new club, and we’re calling ourselves Mama Scouts of America.

We just got back from an impromptu camping trip in the nearby Casper’s Wilderness Park and we had  A BLAST! We also impressed the heck out of ourselves: getting the tent set up in record time, grilling steak and portobello mushroom caps for dinner – Sierra even got up before me and got a fire going and brought me hot coffee in the morning.

We stayed at Live Oak Campground, Site #3 at the recommendation of the ranger. It overlooked the dry creek bed of Bell River and since sites #2 and #1 were closed, and #4 was down the hill, we were virtually by ourselves. We saw deer in the wash in the evening, and the nearly full moon setting in the morning when we woke.

Check out the grill we had going in the evening and morning. No men around – just us two mamas and four kidlets between us! (We shared her massive tent, which is as large as my bedroom…)

Another mom and two kids joined us in the morning and we all went to hike the nature trail loop. And we found the perfect place for our Martinmas celebration that we’re going to have at the beginning of November: Sites #5 and #38!

We had so much fun that we planned two more camping trips while we were out there: Joshua Tree, October 18-19; and Casper’s again, in early November. Let me know if you want to join us, and I’ll send you more info.

My favorite part  of the trip? Staying up late after the kids fell asleep, poring over and reading the introduction to Sierra’s new Waldorf Oak Meadow curriculum for her homeschooling kindergartener.

 

A Ridiculously Great Loot Bag

The World Breastfeeding Week Picnic is now right around the corner (August 1 at Alta Laguna Park from 11 am- 2 pm) and next Tuesday we will be assembling our 100 gift bags.

These bags are the best FREE gift bags I have ever seen.

To begin with, each bag is a full-size reusable grocery bag donated from Whole Foods. Then we  have bottles of multi-vitamins from Mother’s Market (our local health food store chain); a 15-ounce glass bottle of oxygenated, ph-alkalized, revitalized, remineralized and energized water from The Water Brewery; two bags of Dr Sears’s Popumz (snacks); samples of Traditional Medicine’s Mother’s Milk tea, nursing and menstrual pads from Natracare; a copy of Mothering Magazine’s most recent edition, and most exciting for me, a full size bottle of Benev’s skin lightening cream!

There are also great coupons from Glamourmom, Gypsy Mama Wraps, Happy Baby, JuJuBe, overnightprints ($12 off a photobook or any product on their site!), and Storksak. Nova Naturals is providing a full color catalog for each gift bag with a fundraiser code – meaning that La Leche League gets 10% of all sales made using our code until the end of September 2009.

Of course we will also be dropping in business cards and flyers for many of the other businesses who are participating in our event.

This is a great bag of goodies. The skin cream alone is worth about $100 and it is safe for pregnant and nursing mamas. (For those who don’t know, Koreans and asian women in general are obsessed with clear, light skin. If you go into a department store, or even a drugstore in Thailand, Seoul, or Tokyo you will see rows and rows of skin-lightening creams… That said, if you don’t want your bottle of skin-lightening lotion, I’ll take it!)

While La Leche League does not officially endorse these businesses, all of these businesses have contributed a generous donation to our cause. Many are locally-owned, family-friendly businesses – many are owned by friends and families of ours!

When inviting a business to contribute to our annual World Breastfeeding Week Picnic, we try and target companies that are green and health-oriented, besides being supportive of nursing families.

If you decide to support one of these businesses, please let them know that you heard about them through their support of  La Leche League.

P.S. There are pretty amazing auctions items: $150 will package with an attorney, a couple of family portrait photography sessions over $200 value each, two tickets to the brunch at the Laguna Beach Ritz, overnight stays at the Hilton Hotel, yoga packages, and more! Ditto on the raffle prizes: Nova Naturals donated a wooden doll house!

P.P. S Here are the booths that will be there:

1.    registration/family gift bags
2.    hotdogs
3.    bake sale
4.    silent auction
5.    raffle
6.    bean bag craft
7    potty toss- and free water from The Water Brewery
8.     Steph Fowler Photography
9.    Handprint lady
10.    Discovery Toys
11.    Baby UR Precious- bamboo velour blankets, etc
12.    Earthroots Field School seed planting activity
13.    Envirobabystore.com
14.    Allbabyandmom.com
15.    Oasis Child
16.    Belly Sprout
17.    Arbonne

 

Free Fun

All photos by Tracy, the children's librarian.

The last couple Tuesdays I’ve been heading over to my local branch library (Laguna Niguel) to check out their family fun nights. All the programs are funded by the Friends of the Library and are absolutely FREE to the public. That’s a wonderful thing.

This week Christian and I saw Michael Rayner, aka the Wacky Juggler. The dude IS wacky – and pretty entertaining. He juggled flaming torches! Balanced a real wheelbarrow on his chin! Christian was enthralled (well, at least for twenty minutes).

And told jokes, apparently, that only I got. My friend Darlene does always say I’m a good audience… What up with all the stony faces?!?

 

LN to MdR

For those of you who thought I was the crazy one in the marriage, think again. For all Chad’s mild-mannered appearance, he can be intense, and intensely determined.

The picture above is of Chad’s route from Laguna Niguel to Marina del Rey on Sunday. About 67 miles, and that’s already the second time he’s biked to Los Angeles in 2009. (The first time was to Union Station.) And while he finds the most pleasant route he can, he is often just on the street and not always in the best of neighborhoods. Now THAT is a crazy adventure. I used to lead bike tours, but only on idyllic country roads in New England and France. And never more than 30 miles a day!

Segue: We have been pretty busy and, DOING, as it turns out, is not that compatible with WRITING. I have lots to post about, and no time to do it. Which, in thinking about it, is the way I prefer it. I’d rather do much and write less than to do less.

Last week…

Tuesday: Drove to the Waldorf School of Orange County for a meetup I’d organized. Walked briskly with the other mothers and kids for an hour or two, and then browsed leisurely in the toy shop there. Everything you could want Waldorf is there.

Wednesday: Drive to Hungtington Gardens with friend, Sierra. We have a blast. The children’s garden there is the most ingenious bits of landscape planning I have ever experienced. Didn’t get home until 8pm, at which point I realized I had completely spaced on picking up our bi-weekly CSA basket. In a slight panic (I don’t want to forfeit my $40 basket of organic veggies), I toss the baby into Chad’s arms and rush back out. I am relieved to find that my basket is one of four that still hasn’t been picked up and that nobody appears to have noticed. It is only the next day that I realize that I had completely missed my bunco game. I RSVP’d “Yes” and then I never showed or even called. How rude am I?

(The Huntington Gardens are in Pasadena. You can just make out Pasadena to the left of the traffic tab in the picture.)

Thursday: Recupped in the morning and then packed for Joshua Tree. At six, drive Bella to her Safe-Rides Officer Meeting. At 7:30, pick her up, ready to go and drive directly to Joshua Tree.

(Joshua Tree is off the map to the top right. Another 50 miles east on the 60 or 10.

Friday: Spend an hour with a friend (Darlene), then meet another friend for lunch (Caryn and her daughter), and then the afternoon with Granma and Grampy. In the evening drive back to Laguna Niguel.

Saturday: Wake up and enjoy Chad’s delicious breakfast (homemade hash browns and eggs with tapenade). While baby sleeps for unprecedentedly long nap, we watch Lost, Sarah Connor Chronicles, and the rest of The Reader.

Sunday: Chad leaves for bike ride to LA. Bella, Christian and I depart by car. Reconvene in Marina del Rey at friend’s house to eat homemade chicken pot pie and salad. Walk around the Third Street Promenade. Attend Murdy family shindig in celebration of February girls’ birthdays at delicious Tompkin’s Square. Eat, drink, and be merry. Drive home.

Monday: Wake up late and walk around in a daze all day. Do laundry. Make beef strogonoff to celebrate last night of eating dairy.

Tuesday: Today. Blow off my “rain or shine” wilderness hike because it is raining and post while the baby is napping.

 

Free Snow in OC

In some places, like Calgary, kids know what snow is. In other places, like Orange County, kids hear about snow, they see snow on TV, and if they’re lucky they travel to places with snow, but they don’t get snow at home.

So it creates some excitement when a park (The Great Park) decides to truck in several tons of snow to show the local kids a good time FOR FREE. Yep, on Valentine’s Day, The Great Park will provide snow for sledding and throwing and eating from 1pm-4pm. Then from 4-10pm, an ice skating rink will open up in the old airplane hangar (The Great Park is being built on top of an old air force base) and skating AND skate rentals will also be free.

The Great Park is also where you can go on a free hot air balloon ride, which I posted about last year here.

We tried to go again the weekend before last, but the timed tickets were all gone for the day. We took pictures though – look at what Bella and Dawkins are wearing and you can see what kind of winter we’ve been having down here. (Although to be honest, it’s been colder and rainier since then…)

 

Oh Joy!

Today the woman I met through Freecycle and I carpooled to a market she knew about in Irvine: a KOREAN MARKET!

And although I was tired and grumpy (I woke up last night at 2am to discover that Bella and her three friends were MIA – after much stressing and pacing, they showed up at 3 am – in bikinis and towels; they had taken upon themselves to go swimming in the middle of the night. Needless to say there is much house cleaning and sobbing about how unfair life is going on around here…and will be too, for the next week or so.)

Zion Market is not only a Korean market (versus a general Asian market, thus having one entire aisle dedicated to kimchi, another to hot pastes, another to seaweed, etc) but it is clean and huge. I see lots and lots of Korean food in my future. Now I just need to get there at the beginning of budgeted grocery money not at the end like I did today (I did get the essential: kimchi).

 

Anticipation

My sister, Sue, and her family are coming in about three weeks and I’m getting excited! The logistics are a bit screwy, as we are officially MOVING to a new place on the 31st as well, but unofficially our new landlords have said that we can most likely move in all our stuff on Sunday, July 27. That gives me, let’s see, three whole days of unpacking the contents of our collective lives one-handed (other hand holds the baby). I think it can be done.

At least it’s less hectic than last summer when we were entertaining friends and family from out of town and getting married the week before moving away from a town I’d lived in for fifteen years. This time we’re packing in stages far in advance and we’re just moving to the neighborhood across the street. And Chad, my hard-working husband, is here to kick my butt into gear. (It’s just that I only have one arm to work with; it’s taking me three days just to pack a small bookcase in my bedroom!)

But while I’m pacing around the house with a baby slung over my shoulder, I’m thinking about all the things we might want to do while Sue, Joss, and Nabi Grace are here (in pairs or in rotation with the babies). They’ll be here until August 9, at which time Bella, Christian and I will join them at my parents’ house in Virginia:

• cuddle and exclaim over our respectively cute babies
• take lots of pictures of the cousins (Bella, Christian and Nabi Grace) meeting for the first time
• go to the beach (probably Tablerock in Laguna Beach)
• go biking (click here for a video on a trail Chad rides regularly)
• get our hair done at Bruno and Soonie’s (in Beverly Hills)
• go to the Getty (big video art retrospective going on)
• go to the Huntington Gardens, perhaps have an English Tea (free entrance the first Thursday of each month)
• join the LLL moms at a toddlers’ playgroup (first Wednesday of the month at Cabot Park)
• hang out in LA, maybe go to the farmer’s market or go to the Museum of Jurassic Technology
• eat lots (kielbasa with rice and eggs in the morning – kielbasa comes in three packs at Costco, Mexican food, tonkatsu pork chops, Boar’s Head liverwurst, Sprinkles cupcakes, maybe a roast or a lasagna or a chicken enchiladas)

 

Friend Hunting

Have you heard of Meetup?

I read an article about them in the LA Times weekend magazine a few months ago – but it was in context of singles meeting other singles, so I clipped the article and sent it to a friend, and didn’t think more of it. Meetup.com is a website that creates a forum where people of like interests can connect and then meet in REAL LIFE.

Well, a week or so ago, I posted a freecycle ad for Assorted Gift Bags and Tissue Paper and met a very nice woman named Kris. Turned out that she was Chinese but raised in Korea and it happened that her parents had owned a restaurant while she was growing up. Why am I telling you all this? Because there is a special dish of black bean paste and noodles called Ja Jang Myun, which can only be found at the intersection of Chinese and Korean culture – and it happens to be one of my favorite dishes. (It can be found at Chinese restaurants owned by Koreans or vice versa – bur strangely nowhere else…)

Needless to say, I invited her right on in and started grilling her for restaurant and Asian market information in south Orange County. She was happy to oblige. We talked about carpooling to Garden Grove to shop for Korean ingredients.

Then this week she emailed me to ask if I wanted some homemade Ja Jang sauce since her mother had just made some! I consider that a good trade: assorted gift bags for dinner. The sauce was good – unfortunately her kids are too young/old to hang with my kids and she also works – so we’ll see if we ever end up spending more time together in the future.

She is also the mother of two half-Asian kids and so she passed along information about two different mothering groups that she’s enjoyed over the years.

1. One’s a free mothering Q & A that meets in Mission Viejo called Mommy Matters run by the Family Resource Center @ 27700 Medical Center Rd, Mission Viejo, CA 92691 Phone: (949) 364-1770. I haven’t checked it out yet.

2. The other is group called Melting Pot Moms that sounded interesting. Just a minimal $10/year fee to join a multicultural group of moms who plan activities year-round. When I followed the link she sent me, it turned out to be a Meetup group – and there are a stroller walk planned for the Aliso Woods Canyons Wilderness Trail yesterday, which happens to be just around the corner from the house. I noted too, that there were no less than 79 different parenting Meetup groups in Orange County, one of which was called the Attachment Parenting group. (That’s the group I’m going to check out next. Topics include: homeschooling, co-sleeping, cloth diapering…)

I went to the stroller walk yesterday, but I was late and i didn’t run into any moms with strollers. I did see a small group of women pushing strollers across the street in the park – but they all looked so fit and well-heeled – that I didn’t even feel like waving them down. On the other hand, I spent a beautiful two hours walking with Christian in the “woods” by myself. Orange County has enough green space to not feel too citified, but it was lovely to stroll along wild meadows and see the bunnies lying in the shade and lizards scampering across the path. There was a nice breeze blowing, with the tiniest edge of coolness to it, so we were accompanied by the sound of rustling leaves and many kinds of birds whistling and chirping. There was also the low rhythmic summertime drone of cicadas and the mesmerizing waves rippling through the fields of dry wild mustard plants.

We got to a fork in the path and sat and nursed a bit at the picnic table there. Christian gazed up at the dappled patterns of tree leaves against the sky and I thought, This is so much cooler than looking at a crib mobile.