He’d been slowing down over the last year or two, down from his lightning speed to just race-car speed.  One of his long-time favorite games at the beach was to get other dogs riled up so they’d chase him.  They’d be galloping at top speed, losing distance, while Whistler zipped along out ahead, glancing behind him as if to say, “Is that as fast as you can go?”   There was not much Whistler loved more than to run long on the beach, the dunes, the desert, a good grassy field, the mountains.

Whistler was a good hiker.  He hiked Oregon from the Pacific coast to the Eagle Cap Wilderness alongside Bob and myself.  The above picture was atop Chief Joseph Mountain, probably one of Whistler’s proudest moments.  We could see the peak from our campsite at Wallowa Lake State Park, and walked right on up, sort of.  It was a good sturdy climb through the woods for a ways, then navigated a long patch of storm-downed trees that we clambered over, under, and around, up a relentless series of switchbacks in the meadow above the treeline, and finally to the grassy slope at the top.  We learned later the trail had been closed due to the downed trees.  No wonder it had been such a slog!  Whistler delighted in the outing and bounded ahead the whole time.

Whistler took to being a family dog in a wink.  He loved having one, and then two, crumb-droppers.  Loved it.  Extra people to snuggle with?  Loved it.  Frequent baby puke on the floor?  Loved it.

Two little people his size?  Loved it.  Two little people who played with him, petted him, read him stories, danced with him, took naps with him?  Loved it.

Whistler may have enjoyed being a family dog, but he wasn’t always the easiest family dog.  His anxious personality required a lot of emotional energy, and for the last few years I have had little to spare.  I cannot begin to count the number of times he knocked Lucy and Molly down in his excitement to get to the door.  His tremendous speed and their relative snail-pace often made walks a complicated and frustrating affair for everyone involved.

However, you’d be hard pressed to find a more loving and sweet-natured dog anywhere.  He loved to dance, loved to hike, loved to snuggle behind the knees of anyone laying down, loved to be outside, loved to be inside.  He was such a goofy looking dog, and so regal, as well.

We’re really not sure what lead to his death, his kidneys were probably the main cause, mostly he was just done living his life.  He stopped eating about a week and a half before his last day, and during that week grew quieter and slower.  You could just see his dial turning down and down until he was ready to turn it off.  And that was perfect.  He’d had a great life and then was ready to be done.  Like everything for Whistler, he was fast.

We’ll look forward to inviting him back in November for Dia de los Muertos, and we have lots of great memories and photos.  Lucy summed up the general mood of the household the morning after he died, when she began to scramble for a piece of toast dropped under the table.  Her expression dropped as she said, “We don’t have to worry about Whistler anymore, but no more friend time.”

You’re a good dog, Whistler.

It is not unusual to see Lucy sitting on the couch with a stack of books on either side of her; one stack unread, the other already perused.  Once she’s gone through all the books, she’ll pick out the most intriguing and study those more carefully.  Very carefully.  She has told me entire stories with many small details, just by looking at the pictures, without having heard the words yet.  That’s also the mark of a good illustrator, but I digress…

Now that she’s four and a half, her attention span has expanded enough to happily read (listen to, actually) chapter books.  We began reading chapter books with a book I only just learned of, called “Tumtum and Nutmeg,” about the escapades of two little mice.  The stories are darling, and dramatic enough to be exciting without being scary.  I delighted in reading them to her, Bob was tickled anytime he got the chance to read them, and we all loved this new stage of reading.

Oh, what worlds open up when chapter books become interesting!  I have loved reading picture books with Lucy and Molly, and will continue to do so for many years, but it’s so much fun to explore a long story over many days.  Bob is currently reading “Charlotte’s Web” to Lucy, much to their great enjoyment.

Now this all sounds pretty normal still.  Lucy is not the first four year old to be obsessed with stories and books.  My parents say this reminds them of some other little girl thirty-some years ago.  But we’ve recently taken a major step into some seriously classic literature that many adults don’t even attempt: Shakespeare.  Lucy is listening to Shakespeare, and she likes it!  And she gets it!

Here’s what happened.  Lucy is also very interested, nay, obsessed with ballet, and last weekend we went to a dress rehearsal of “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” performed by the Portland Ballet Company at their studio.  It was wonderful to see the dancers up so close, and I had never seen this ballet at all.  I had thought it was to be a rehearsal of “The Nutcracker,” so I struggled through the performance dredging up  also the one time I had ever seen the play, trying to recall names and the general plot.  There was no narration at the rehearsal, so the story wasn’t entirely clear.

We came home, checked out a DVD of the ballet from the library (hooray for the library), and promptly watched it.  As the dancers swirled to Mendelssohn’s music, I pulled out my fifteen-pound tome of Shakespeare’s complete works to consult the players list and scan the dialogue to get a better sense of the story.  I knew it was a comedy, but I’d forgotten just how funny it really is.

As I read the roles and deciphered the intricacies of the story in my head, I couldn’t help but exclaim and “ah HA!” every page or two.  Lucy asked me to read it to her.  I had already told her the names, such tongue twisters as Demetrius, Hippolyta, Hermia, Theseus, Oberon, Titania, and of course, Puck.    It was easier to identify the “red lady” and the “blue lady” of the ballet, but it’s good to give them names, too.  Already the un-narrated rehearsal we’d watched made so much more sense with the players list.

I read selections of the play to her while she munched graham crackers and peanut butter.  Lucy listened to lyrical speeches on the magical forest, to exchanges between Titania the fairy queen and her beloved donkey, to Oberon and Puck planning the proper unions of the lovers.  Now, just so you don’t think this four-year-old picked up an antiquated Elizabethan play without a hitch, I did read it with great animation, just in short sections.  I often re-read the passage aloud, for my own clarification as much as for Lucy.

But hey, Lucy listens to Shakespeare!  She can barely heft the book, but she’s already got some Bard under her little belt.  I think that’s pretty darn awesome.  ”King Richard the Third,” anyone?

Lucy's interpretation of "A Midsummer Night's Dream"

Lovely, simply lovely.

Champoeg State Heritage Area is also minutes away and during the summer they have a variety of living history events that focus on farming life in mid-19th century Oregon.  Farmstead Day is the big Labor Day weekend event and it’s always a lot of fun.  Molly missed out, but had a stupendous nap with Grandpa, so Lucy and I had a great afternoon together.

Lucy, being closely related to her Grammy, stayed close to the butter churning station for quite a while and sampled some of the very butter she helped make.  She opted to eat it straight, rather than spread it on buttermilk biscuits baked in Dutch ovens over the nearby fire.

Ranger Bob liked it too.

My mom volunteers at the kitchen garden, which produces all kinds of beautiful and interesting foods that would have been grown in the 1860′s.  One lady asked her if she was hot in the long-sleeve dress.  Hmmm, let’s think about that one.  Mom replied that most ladies would have had the good sense not to stand in the hot sun at the end of the summer!

The cross-cut saw was a popular activity for kids, as was the cedar shingle splitting.  The blacksmiths  helped kids make their own iron nail, which also had a long line of kids waiting in the shade of this massive oak.

Lucy’s favorite place was in front of the storyteller, who was full of tales from early Oregon days.  He told stories of ghost towns, gold rush characters, flooding rivers and log booms, and Oregon Trail mishaps and adventures.  We could have listened to him all day!

When Farmstead Day closed up, Lucy and I headed down the road to Mustard Seed Farm, where I’ve been volunteering as a community garden member.  In exchange for a small bit of money and a dozen hours of work over the season, I can take home all the fresh, organic vegetables I want.  What a deal!  We went to pick berries.

Gold raspberries, to be precise.  I have never tasted one before and it is absolutely delectable.  They grow at the very top of each branch, up above my head.  Lucy managed to find quite a few at her level, but she spent most of her time between the two tree swings in the yard.

In case you’re wondering, those are artichokes growing in the background of the top photo.  And in case you’re further wondering, they’re a booger to weed!

And, as an unrelated note, the construction on the front of our house is totally done and we’re ready to start painting!  Yahoo!

Early last week the foundation was poured, the base floor laid down, two walls up and secure.  The girls inaugurated it with a mudroom dance.

You can see the lighter paint that outlines the old roofline and the awful wings to either side of the porch.  Ahhhh, it’s so nice to have it gone!

Hooray!

I mean really, wouldn’t you rather look at a book about planning children’s birthday parties, chock-full of themed ideas, than take a bath with your dirty sister?!  Wouldn’t you rather leap from lily pad to lily pad down the hall while wearing Daddy’s safety glasses and a knitted winter bonnet than go potty?!  Who doesn’t prefer perfecting the latest Lego structure to brushing teeth?!  Yeah, exactly!

So I totally understand where they’re coming from and I certainly can’t blame the girls for not wanting to end another episode of the Lucy-Molly Show, engaging and delightful as it always is, but as an adult who wants to complete a thought or have a bit of a sit-down, I need them to be in bed.  Now.  It’s too late to be hungry.  We will not pick out a book from the living room, there are plenty in the bedroom already.  You want pajamas, you don’t want pajamas, whatever.  Just get in bed!  Goodnight!

Sleep, fortunately, usually comes immediately at our house.  Especially after a recent evening of Dionysian revelry with friends for a Greek-themed family dinner.

A few weeks ago we went to the Oregon Country Fair near Eugene.  I haven’t been in several years and it was great fun to be there again.  It’s always a wild and wacky experience, this year was no exception.

We came across a Poem Store, as one can only do at the Country Fair, and after a bit of discussion my cousin and I decided to commission a poem for a dear family friend in England.  No sooner had a brief description of our family’s friendship left our mouth than the Poem Store proprietor’s fingers began flying on her Hermes Rocket typewriter.  In mere moments, a poem on receipt paper had emerged.

“In this sense, in this fine way, we deliver best our feel of the fair.
Greetings had to show how alive the past is and how the world hasn’t given up on coming together, on what worked so well from the get go: typewriter to handcrank record player, the ways we knew as holy are still revealing themselves to all who choose to link in celebration of what the path introduces as just right, no need to change, all is just as it should be, how could it not be?”

A quirky little poem is quite a fitting way to describe the wonder, the magic, the weirdness, the delight, and the community of the fair.

It may have been coincidence, it may have been cosmic alignment, but as Bob and the girls rested in the shade and ate chocolate popsicles (organic coconut milk, sustainable, dairy-free, biodegradable wrapper, fair trade bamboo stick, cruelty-free, no high fructose corn syrup, made on equipment powered by bicycle), I noticed the sign on the fence behind them read “Strawberry Lane.”  Where else in the Country Fair could we have commissioned a receipt-paper typewritten poem for a wonderful Englishwoman who lives not too far from the original Strawberry Lane?

After too long, we made it back to the beach for a weekend camping trip near Astoria.  Earlier in the summer Molly was urgently telling me, “beach, beach.”  I didn’t quite understand what she was saying, so I asked her to show me.  She took me by the hand and marched purposefully out to the porch, then stopped to think.  After a minute of considering, she returned to the kitchen to show me a picture on the fridge of Lucy at the beach.

After growing up going to the packed Jersey shore each summer, where you need a beach ticket to squeeze a blanket onto a wee patch of vacant sand, Bob still has a hard time believing such vast expanses of Oregon’s beach are completely empty of people.  It could have something to do with the incessant blowing sand, the rain in July, the frigid water, the brisk wind, or the risk of sneaker waves and riptides.  The Oregon coast is just a different experience, more rugged, than the East Coast.

Just this weekend we went to Portland to visit OMSI again and I attended an excellent class at the second Sock Summit.  I got to ride my bike from OMSI up the Eastbank Esplanade along the Willamette River to the Convention Center, which was so delightful I couldn’t stop grinning!

That first picture shows the segment of the Esplanade that floats on the river (whee!) and the second is one of the wonderful views of downtown and the bridges across the Willamette.

On our way home in Portland we also came across the 24 Hour Church of Elvis, a favorite Portland institution.

Very weird indeed.

And because it’s summer, it’s fresh fruit time.  A couple times a week right now I go pick some kind of berry or cherry or something delicious and then come back and dry, freeze, or make jam with it.  The girls helped me pit a good bit of 15 pounds of cherries yesterday afternoon in the yard.

Mmmmm, yum!  Sticky!

Two years ago, we built “the New Room” at the back of the house, to give a bit more room for living and to accomodate a laundry room and second bathroom, both desperately needed.  Ah, what breathing room it gave the house!  The next summer we covered the functional but awful T-111 siding with functional and fine-looking (and a local timber product) cedar shiplap siding.

And painted it a stunning color, too.

By the fall of last year, the house was starting to look pretty sharp, except for the front…

Ugh.  Ugly, tacky, junky, blech.  We didn’t like anything about the porch from the first day we lived here, but we couldn’t decide how to change it.  For almost five years we pondered, and finally this last winter our ideas crystallized into a plan: a mudroom!

We’ll keep the same footprint as the porch, but it will be an enclosed room with windows and a front door.  Inside will be hooks galore, a good long bench with lots of cubby holes, shelves, all that good entryway stuff that we can’t do with an outdoor porch and a narrow entry hall.  Brilliant!  With the same new siding and some clever building elements, it’s going to be a splendid, functional, beautiful entry to the house.

Taking a crowbar and sledgehammer to this monstrosity was very satisfying for Bob.  He ripped it all down in an afternoon and two mornings.  We decided that renting a construction dumpster was worth the money rather than making 87,369,234 trips to the dump with our trailer.

Not full, but definitely worth getting a dumpster.

We’re ready to excavate tomorrow.

Good bye porch!  Good bye Caribbean blue T-111 siding with bizarre brown window trim.  Good bye cluttered storage all around the front entry way.  Hello sharp new look that this house deserves!

This year we headed to the mountains, to Cascadia State Park, and had another outstanding camping trip!  In this second installment of Mama Rama  our family joined with my good friend, Sara, and her two kids, Oliver, and Adele.

Lucy, Oliver, Adele, Molly

It seems to be a regular pattern of our early-June trips that the first day has crummy weather and we moms each secretly wonder whether our sanity has departed for good.  But we slog on through dinner, sending the kids into the tents to play together during the rainy spells, and are rewarded the next day with glorious Oregon summer weather.

Building a house in the tent

I realize this seems obvious, but the one year’s worth of growing and maturing time between our two trips made an astounding difference in the ease of camping.  All the kids can walk independently, only one still wears diapers, they can tell each other stories, come up with their own games, all that neat stuff that happens as kids become their own little selves.  I certainly felt less drained by the end of the weekend!  Rolling up sleeping bags, pads, and the tent is a heck of a lot easier when I’m not holding a baby!

We camped just a minute’s walk away from the Santiam River, which was flowing fast and cold due to the looooooooooong wet spring we’ve had.  At least twice a day we tromped down the steps to the river to throw eighty billion rocks.  It was great.

The kids would have been perfectly happy spending the whole weekend just throwing rocks, but there were waterfalls to explore.  One nice thing about camping in June in Oregon is the daylight that stretches across so many hours, so everyone was ready to hit the trail by about 8:30 the next morning.

We headed up the trail to Soda Creek Falls, about 1.75 miles round trip.  It was a deep woodsy path through mossy trees, past sword ferns, and adjoining the burbling creek.

There were a few muddy spots, only one actually required negotiating on mostly-submerged sticks and leaping quickly out of thorny brush.  The kids took it in stride and Lucy confidently announced after a few sloggy patches, “Just hitch up your pants and go.”  And go she did.

As with most hikes, it was worth the effort to see the waterfall come streaming over a cliff high above us.

After a snack we headed back down the trail.  As we neared the end, Lucy asked to go on another hike.  That moment!  What a kid, she’d just hiked nearly two miles on her little legs and she wanted more.  I’m sure her High-pointer Grandpa’s heart skipped a beat when she said that.  I know mine certainly did.  Lucy sure makes me proud sometimes.  As much as she likes to sit quietly and read, she has a real rough and ready side to her.  From the kid who usually can’t be bothered at home to walk the five blocks to the library, nary a complaint came about the hike, not a “my legs ache,” or “I want to go back.”  Way to go, Lucy Scout!

We did go for another hike later that day, but first we headed back to the river to throw more rocks.

Did I mention the kids liked throwing rocks?

In the afternoon, we drove to McDowell Creek to hike along and find more waterfalls.  Not far into this hike all the kids were slowing down, and Adele, our youngest walker, lost a shoe on a bridge over the creek.  ”Shoe, down,” she kept repeating as we crossed the bridge.  Bye bye shoe, there ain’t no getting that one back.  Lovely waterfalls, but we were headed toward a multi-child meltdown, so we hoofed it back on the road and drove back to camp.

Since a camping trip doesn’t count unless you roast marshmellows, we built a fire during dinner and the kids all tried their hand at roasting them.

Mmmm, messy.

Again, these long June days meant we still had too much daylight to settle down for sleep, so we walked to a lovely stone patio overlooking lower Soda Creek.  This looks like it was part of the original resort built here early in the twentieth century for people to enjoy the mineral springs.

Our last morning after breakfast,

we headed to the river again to throw our last few thousand rocks.

On the drive home, we had a fun surprise of driving right next to a parade through downtown Lebanon!  Their 102nd annual Strawberry Festival was that weekend and we just happened to hit the road at the right time that we cruised along the whole parade route.  After seeing most of the parade from rear to front, we parked, found a shady spot and sat down to watch it again.  The girls particularly liked the high school marching band and the float with live square dancing.

As far as the Mama Rama trip goes, I think we have firmly established a yearly tradition that is bound to grow more fun each time.  And just think, there will come a day when the Mamas can go throw rocks in the river while the kids stay in camp and do the dishes!  Woohoo!

Lucy somehow acquired a small sheet of tiny stickers recently.  I’m not sure where most of them are, but there are four prominently displayed on the edge of the table where she sits.  At most every meal, she’ll ask if I want to hear their names.  In the same order each time, she’ll introduce me to, “Cobra Snakey, Jump-Up Robot, Zoom-Up Rocket, Zoom-down Robot, and the biggest of all, bigger than this whole room, is the big, big, big, Big Occasion Robot!!!”

Finally, the girls were playing at a friend’s house the other day.  When I came to get them, I asked Lucy to help clean up the toys blanketing the bedroom floor.   Not being obstinate at all, merely honest, Lucy earnestly told me, “But Mom, it was messy when I got here.”  We helped tidy up anyway.

Lucy wasn’t interested in skiing, she spent her time just playing in the snow, eating it, tromping it, throwing it, sitting and scooting in it, everything a four-year-old can think of to do in this wonderful stuff.  Molly took a few runs with Bob and delighted in the whole thing, crying “wheeeee!” all the way down.

See what I mean about a lot of snow?!  Even with all this snow piled everywhere, all the ski places are either closed completely or just open on the weekends.  All we can figure is that people are just done with winter sports and are moving on to spring pursuits. 

I took these pictures fairly early in our snow outing, since we still have on jackets and warm clothes.  It didn’t take long to peel off the layers in the bright sun!