Spelunking and Speleology

So this post is only a couple of months late but at least it's getting done. Back in August Mark and I took Mira for a trip to Mt. Timpanogos cave. Mt. Timp is the second highest peak in Utah, and several years ago Mark and I climbed to the top of the mountain. It was an amazing experience, although we could barely walk for the next week. But there's a cave inside the mountain, which I'd never gone through, so we decided to give it a go. The cave tour was great, but taking Mira with us probably wasn't our smartest decision ever. To get to the cave entrance is about a 1.5 mile hike up the mountain. Mira walked about a quarter of the way and decided she was done. So we had to haul her protesting and uncooperative butt up the rest of the way, then through the caves, then back down. Mark threw his back out and it still hasn't completely recovered. But on the other hand, we learned that there is a special Introduction to Caving tour where they take a limited number of people off to a different part of the caves and you get to crawl on your hands and knees and climb up and down boulders and stuff to an underground lake. Mark and I both thought this sounded like a blast so we signed up for our spot, dropped Mira off with Mark's parents on the designated day, and went caving!

The pictures didn't come out super great, but it was really cool.

It used to be kosher to break off parts of rock formations, cart them out of the caves and sell them as souvenirs. Luckily that's not allowed anymore but you can see where rocks were hacked off.

 You can see the lake in the background with a measuring stick to tell the depth.

This next picture is neat. Our guide lit a cigarette lighter to show how much light the early explorers would have had to work with.

Something else that used to be kosher for tourists was writing your name on the rock formations. Again, luckily that behavior doesn't fly these days but it's neat to see the remnants. The cool thing is the people who wrote their names in indelible ink just turned into splotches, but the people who wrote their names in pencil, you can still make out a lot of the words.

And some pictures from the hike up/down the mountain. I just love hiking, and every time I go I remember how much I love it and vow I'm going to go more often, and then does it happen? Nope. But man, I need to get out hiking more often.

The city of Provo, a.k.a. Happy Valley.

Anyway, there you go, just a short little post with some cool cave pictures. The next post will have all our Halloween pictures and such. I just wanted to get these pictures up before I completely spaced and it never happened.

Speleology, by the way, is the official term for caving.

When In Doubt, Just Make It Work

Someone told me recently that 3 and 4 years old is the best age for everyone except the mom, and after some thought I have to say that that is one of the truest statements I've ever heard in my entire life.

I've heard from many people that they love the 3-4 year old stage because of all the funny things kids say at this age. It took awhile for Mira to get to that point because her speech has been a bit behind but now I can totally see what people are talking about.

For example, I came home from work one morning, gave her a big hug as I always do and asked her, "How's my baby??"

Her reply, very seriously: "Mom, me's not a baby, me's a grown-up."

She is starting to learn some basic time-recognition skills, which basically boil down to something like this statement: "Mom, the sun is up. It's awake time." Or, "It's dark outside! It's sleep time!" (Luckily, for the most part she doesn't fight bedtime too much, but only because it's actually dark when it's her bedtime. I figure we're good for the next several months until late spring or so, then it's going to get rough.)

When she wants to see someone: "Mom, me want to see Mom-Mom and Dad-Dad this night." "Me want to see you's own dad this night." "Me see Mom's own mom this night?" "Mom, me miss Grandpa this night [sad face]."

We're starting to teach her the alphabet, and I guess I just took it for granted that any offspring of mine would be able to sing the ABCs before kindergarten because Mark is decidedly more impressed with Mira's memorization skills than I am. Not that I'm not impressed, he's just more surprised as well as impressed. This is about how she sings the alphabet:

"A B E F G I J K N O P Q R S T U V W X Y and Z, now mine ABCs, next time sing with me!" [applauds self] Or alternatively, "A B E F G I J K N O P Q R S T U V W X T U V W X T U V W X..." I didn't hear this next version, but apparently Mira was starting to sing the alphabet, only got through A because at B she belched, and gave Mark a sheepish look with her hands over her mouth while he cracked up.

She also begs to go outside a lot ("Mom, you go me outside right now?"), which is great except for when she takes it into her head to just run outside without anyone accompanying her. She knows she has to stay on the sidewalks but I still have to be a helicopter parent for this one. But at least she loves being outside because it's something active for her and I don't know what on earth we're going to do once we're snowed in for the winter in a few months. She's asked to go skiing a few times and I have to explain to her that we can't go ski because there's no snow in the mountains yet but there will be soon. Her response: "Yeah, in ten minutes!"

One thing I love about this age is in some ways, Mira is so easy to please. A couple days ago I told Mira we were going to the park. She was so happy she hugged and kissed me multiple times and announced, "Thanks you, Mom! You's the best mom!" Awww!

She's good at getting herself into interesting predicaments too. We went to my sister Sara's house last month for her birthday and Mira managed to slide down and get herself wedged between the fence and a canoe - and yes, I was that mom that instead of helping her out right away I took some pictures.

There was also a little baby there, and Mira was absolutely obsessed with the little guy. She wanted to feed him some potato salad and I had to tell her that even though she was being very nice and thoughtful, babies can't eat big girl food. I don't think she understood.

Sometimes I feel bad when I see Mira around babies. She LOVES babies. If she sees a baby in public she goes right up to it to examine it and pat it on the head and exclaim over it. Luckily the moms have been very tolerant of this rogue toddler curiously investigating their babies. When I see how sweet she is with babies there is a very small part of me that thinks I should have given her a little sibling. But then I remember that I would have to raise another child and that kills that idea. I feel stressed enough with just Mira - I have the very real feeling that even though the idea of another baby sounds nice (besides the fact that we have taken measures to make that near impossible), the reality would be bad for my mental health.

Mira is definitely enough of a handful on her own, no doubt about it.

A couple weeks ago Mira came down with some mystery ailment - for 4 days she had a fever but absolutely no other physical symptoms. And we're talking a legit fever, 104 degrees. And boy, she looked like she felt crappy when her temp got up that high, poor thing. Luckily Tylenol and ibuprofen were able to bring her temp down so she wasn't blazing hot, but she definitely didn't feel good. For those days that she was sick she napped about 3 hours a day every day. This from a kid who won't even stay in her room for "quiet time" for more than a couple of minutes. But the strange thing is nothing else seemed to be wrong - she was still eating and drinking, no GI symptoms, no respiratory symptoms, just a really high fever. Bizarre.

As kids tend to do, she bounced back pretty easily and we were back to normal before too long. One afternoon she liked the idea of taking a nap outside on the front lawn. That lasted about as long as it took to take these pictures and then she lost patience and wanted nothing to do with any of this great idea. Figures.

I would like to introduce a segment here about how difficult it is to get anything accomplished with a toddler around. For example, when I'm getting dressed in the morning, it would normally only take 5 minutes at the most. With Mira around, it takes much longer because she's jumping on the bed, pulling shoes off the racks to put on, trying to put on my deodorant, dumping my face cleanser down the drain, scattering my bobby pins around the bathroom, trying to get into contact lens cases, yanking clothes off hangers and throwing them on the ground, and so on. So getting dressed takes more like the whole morning.

Trying to get out of the house - oh man, the process of trying to leave the house. If it's just you, give yourself maybe 3 minutes to locate all the items you need to bring with you to whatever location you are traveling to, then you walk out of the house, climb into your vehicle, and off you go. With a toddler, I think the sentence "Hurry up, we need to leave!" translates into "Take as long as possible to leave the house." One of the best ways to accomplish this is to need to poop the second your parent says "Hurry up, we need to leave!" And going to the potty is about 10 or 15 minutes by itself. (Seriously, I don't understand why I have to hassle Mira 27 times to wash her hands after using the potty. It's been the same routine hundreds of times already!) After the 10-15 minutes of using the potty, then I have to wait for her to find her shoes, change her mind about which pair she wants to wear about 4 times, then wait for her to actually put them on. That's another 5 minutes. Then for some reason it takes 5 minutes to herd her out the front door, even though when she wants to sneak out unattended she can get out the door and to the next block in less than 4 seconds. Then I have to convince her she has to wait to investigate every little thing outside and get in the car instead. And of course she has to get in the car, climb into her carseat, and buckle herself in. If I try to help her she screams, "No! MINE OWN!" Forty-five minutes later we're finally driving away to wherever we need to go. No wonder I like to wait until after she goes to bed to get errands done.

Also, trying to get additional tasks done is darn near impossible. Washing the car is a good example. Normally I can wash the SUV in about 30 minutes. But of course Mira wants to "help." So between Mira spraying the hose everywhere (including on herself), dunking her arms into the bucket of dirty soapy water, running off with the towels, and "washing" the opposite side of the car from the one that I was working on about 5 times, washing the car took more like 17 hours, and it still looked pretty sketchy when I finally decided I was done. On the plus side, I could see through the windows, even if the rest of the car was streaky, and Mira got so wet I figured I'd call it her bath and call it good for the day.

Yes, sometimes a lot of the time this girl is a challenge. She is so opposite in temperament from my own that very frequently I'm left scratching my head pulling my hair out, wondering how I'm supposed to handle such a vivacious, lively, energetic, outgoing, independent, and smart-as-hell little girl. All of these are great traits to have but trying to properly handle her when she's also pushing every single boundary is rough some days. Sometimes it's all about my attitude towards the process. Even though it's tempting to do everything for her because it's faster, I always force myself to stand back and let her do it by herself. The goal, after all, is for her to be able to do all of this by herself, all the time, so even if it's difficult for me I really should encourage her to be independent. It'll pay off in the long run.

And I should definitely encourage her to run around dancing in the rain.

In other brag-worthy news, Mira one day just suddenly figured out how to pedal her tricycle and now one of her favorite activities is to ride around the block, sometimes a few times a day. She's quite the little daredevil - when we get to a downhill portion she likes to lean back and go as fast as she can. I should probably stick her head in a helmet sometime soon.

And yes, our big black kitty Neo went around the block with us.

Sometimes I feel ambitious enough to play around with Mira's hair. She likes to put up a fight about getting her hair brushed but really, if she has Mickey Mouse Clubhouse to watch while I experiment, she doesn't really care. And she does get excited about fancy hairstyles. I'll admit it, this is one reason I was so excited to have a little girl.

And now for some obligatory cute cat pictures.

Wally sleeps like this a lot, with his face smashed into the cushion. I'm not sure how he breathes but apparently it's not as difficult as he makes it look. I've also seen him fall asleep in Mira's toy box, on a pile of toys, with his face smashed into the side of the box.

Neo and Wally actually get along really well, for two cats living in the same house. If I'd known how much better male cats were than females, I would have been adopting them a lot sooner.

Our mutant tomato plants are finally giving us ripe tomatoes, plus our hotter-than-Hades jalapeno peppers are ripening, and we're up to our ears in monstrous zucchini.

We're starting to get to the point that we're adding zucchini to just about every meal, just to try and use them up (and our one zucchini plant is still spitting more out almost on a daily basis). A couple days ago we had well over a dozen ripe tomatoes with more on the way. So Mark tried making tomato bisque from scratch. It took hours so this won't be a regular occurrence but let me just say - wow! Too bad there isn't much money to be had working as a chef because Mark would rock that career. I've never been much of a cook and frankly there's not much need for me to work on that because Mark is so good at it. I follow recipes exactly and it never comes out quite right, whereas Mark will just throw a bunch of ingredients together haphazardly and it ends up being a 5-course gourmet meal. Sometimes life isn't fair - but I'm not complaining about this particular part.

Mark started school a few weeks ago and it's been another learning process for us to figure out our schedules again. Luckily his classes are at night and our babysitting is already set up for evenings so at least that part is easy. So far he's enjoying school - he's in his element and really enjoying himself. He tries to explain everything to me and even though I really do appreciate how he wants me to get involved with everything, a lot of the stuff he talks about makes my head hurt. Not that I'm not interested, my brain just doesn't comprehend engineering as easily as, for example, idiopathic thrombocytopenia purpura. Everyone's brain is different, I'm just glad Mark has found something that complements his brain type.