And she's gone!

Eldest daughter left for sleep-away camp yesterday. I couldn't bring myself to take her to the bus stop; she asked me to then reconsidered when I told her I'd cry in front of her friends. The words had barely come out of my mouth when she raced downstairs to find her father, to confirm his availability.

This child has been away from us before. In fact, at nine weeks she spent seven days at Grandma and Papa's house. (Dave won a quota club trip and we went to Puerto Rico. It wasn't our best trip, my hormones were way out of control, but I went. It's important to support your spouse in their accomplishments if you want to stay married and I was really proud of him.) Since then she's overnighted there many other times, at friends' houses, and at my sister-in-law's house. Yes, this child sleeps around. Happily.

And this is not her first year at this particular camp. Last year she went for a week and begged to go back for longer this summer. So after a tremendous amount of coordination between the families of the friends she made last year, three of the five of us settled on a session that worked. This was no small feat.

This picture, taken a year ago, has a good and complicated backstory. Take notes as you never know when I'll take down this post and there will be a pop quiz. My daughter is the second from the left. To her right is Wendy's daughter. Wendy and I have been friends since we went to a different sleep away camp, in third grade. To my daughter's left is a girl who became friends with Wendy's daughter the summer before. My daughter goes to Religious School with the girl on the far right. Her mother and I met the year we were 16, on a trip to Israel. She, Wendy and the girl on the far left's father all met at this sleep away camp in junior high. Did you follow? Jewish Geography at its best.

I miss her. Sort of. I miss her in anticipation that she'll be gone for nearly two weeks. Does that make sense? The house seems empty already.

The phone call I never expected

"Hello? I'm looking for Thing 2's Mom."

"This is she."

"My dog, Chloe, and I met Thing 2 last week at the park. She was with your parents."

"Oh, yes?"

"Chloe is having her 7th birthday party on August 17. I'm calling to invite Thing 2."

"To Chloe's 7th birthday party?"

"Yes, to Chloe's birthday party."

"And Chloe is a dog?"

"Yes, a Yellow Lab."

Let's make sure we understand this. My daughter, Thing 2, has been invited to a dog's birthday party.

I've read a fair number of parenting books. I can debate Ferber, attachment parenting and 123 Magic with the best of them. Nothing I've read prepared me for this parenting moment.

Home again

We're back from Tahoe. Although we can make the drive home in 2 hours, 45 minutes, today we took our time and even stopped at Fenton's Creamery at the Nut Tree for dinner. Eldest daughter's favorite clothing store is there, too, Justice. I sincerely hope she enjoyed her shopping there today as we will never go there again. I heartily disagreed with one of their business practices and hey, if you don't exercise your right to choose where you lay down your hard-earned greenbacks, what good is living in America?

Aside from the sundae I had with dinner (in truth, it was dinner), the best part of our day was rafting down the Truckee River with two other families. We do this five-mile float annually, this time going with the Truckee River Rafting Co. Basically, you heavily douse with sunscreen and take a cooler full of drinks and snacks into a river raft. Then you float down the river, padding from time to time to avoid the banks. You hydrate, eat and either instigate or defend yourself from water fights with other rafters. You hop in and out of the water to cool down and you get absolutely filthy. The rapids are barely Class 1 so even little kids can go. Three hours later you pull out at River Ranch and eat lunch on the patio and then you take the shuttle bus back to your car. It was a gorgeous day, the kind my friend Thom Singer calls Chamber-of-Commerce-Weather, with temps in the low 80s when we pulled out, and the sky was blue, something that's not a given this summer since the whole state seems to be on fire.

So we're home. It was well over 100 degrees here while we were away and fortunately the heat wave has passed. Eldest daughter leaves for sleep away camp in three days. I see a Target run in my future.

Are Wii Fit yet?!

I am not a video game person. I never did Pong (Do you remember that? It was the 70s!) or Tetris or even Grand Theft Auto or Guitar Hero. Dave reluctantly bought a Playstation when Sony was his customer and after six months of use down here, it moved up to Tahoe where I literally do not know how to plug it in.

And then the Wii arrived in our home. For the first month Dave and the pinks played it. Tennis and boxing and bowling and Tiger Woods Golf and Mario Kart. I ignored it.

Then came the fateful morning that Dave went to Costco. He arrived at 10a, like he often does. But this time there was tidal wave of people moving from the door to somewhere in the warehouse. My guy is sharp. And he has long legs, too. So he followed the crowd and we found ourselves the proud owners of Wii Fit, on the very first day it hit the stores.

One of the first things you do on Wii Fit is take a fitness test. My girlfriend also managed to score one this day and confided to me that her Wii age was 49. I expressed the appropriate amount of horror at this piece of information then took the test myself. I then phoned her back and expressed an additional amount of angst at this since I, too, have a Wii Fit age of 49. I was born in 1967. You do the math.

Fast forward to today. I'm hooked.

Now my application isn't typical. I don't get up in the morning and turn the Wii on to get my workout in. I don't do it at night before I go to bed. A typical day for me begins at 5:30a with some work. I work until 7:30a or so when the kids get up and then I spend a little time with them, usually involving breakfast. When our nanny arrives at 8a I go back into the office and do a conference call or two. Sometimes three. If I'm lucky, a call will end early and then it's Wii Workout Time! Ten minutes of hula hooping or ski jumping is the perfect mental break from technobabble. I'm refreshed and ready to get back to business. Rinse and repeat.

One last note about this game: I absolutely suck at the soccer balance game. The thing is, I am a shoe magnet, even shoes for sports I have never played in real life, so every last one of those puppies nails me in the head.

Wii Fit suggests you retest your fitness each time you turn it on. I can't bring myself to. What if I've aged even more?!

Nice swing, nice hit

These are the only two acceptable things to say when teaching your children to golf, according to a book my husband read last year.

And so today Dave repeated these two phrases many times over. I have to give him credit; teaching the pinks to golf is a great idea. He adores the game and the more they enjoy it, the more opportunities he'll have to play.

Today the four of them went to the Tahoe City Golf Course and "played" three holes. Why just three? Always leave 'em begging for more. They pinks have their own sets of clubs, really and truly pink. They drove. They putted. And Dave chanted: nice swing. Nice hit. The verdict? It was fun to hang with Dad and even more fun to drive the golf cart.

While this was a good strategy, Dave really teed up this event with a primer several months back. Start taking notes now. When the three sets of new pink clubs arrived via UPS, Dave came up with what might have been the best children's golf-teaching-strategy of the year.

In our backyard he set up three plastic plates. And on each plate he put a selection of small candies, Halloween-type treats. The kids were each positioned a few yards from their respective plates, clubs in hand, balls on the ground in front of them. If they chipped onto the plate, they got all the candy. Balls that hit the plate were rewarded with a single piece of candy. How much do you think they like this game?!

A Boston Kinda Independence Day

I'm breathing smokey but not humid air this morning. Yes, I'm back in California!

Dave and I just returned from four days in the northeast, where we spent the 4th of July in Boston then headed to Newport, Rhode Island for his friend Peter's wedding.

Boston -- now that's a city that knows how to do the 4th of July!

We had a great meal Thursday night with my friend Kathy and her husband Mark at Via Matta, regional Italian food. Kathy drives a Prius and I was really jealous. I'm also jealous because on most days she and Mark ride their bikes to work. So she's in shape and green. It's a good thing we've been friends for 10 years.

We spent the day walking around town, trying not to say too many things along the lines of, "Thing 1 would really like this." When you have kids, your whole perspective changes. Frankly, I'd forgotten how much I love Boston. There are 70+ colleges in the area so one of the pinks will just have to head east so we can spend more time there. Not kidding.

Random observations:

A Smart Car parked at the Brookline T station with the license plate "SMAHT"

Kathy has a black lab named Beaver.

At the Boudin Bakery at SFO, you can buy a sandwich as early as 4am but you cannot buy breakfast until 6am, which is a problem for passengers on 6am flights.

Long plane flights are easier when you are watching the full season of Sex and the City that you downloaded to your iPhone.

As mentioned previously, Boston does a bang up 4th of July Celebration. Dave and I had dinner at one of his favorite restaurants, The Palm, then headed over to the esplanade on the Charles River to hear the annual Boston Pops Concert. Shoulder-to-shoulder with 500,000 new friends, we watched a 25-minute fireworks show that bested any others I have seen and left us with huge patriotic smiles and ringing ears.

There were lots of well-coiffed children at Peter and Sarah's wedding, which was sweet to see. Peter's 6-year-old daughter, Anna, had a starting role and it was truly a family affair. The venue could not have been more spectacular -- overlooking the water at the OceanCliff Hotel in Newport, about 2 hours south of Boston. I didn't know anyone at the wedding except the happy couple and Anna, and Dave knew just a few of Peter's friends. I love going to events like this and not just for the "it's a happy occasion and we're thrilled for them" reason. I genuinely enjoy going to places where I'll meet people outside my world. You have the most unexpected conversations and come away knowing just a little more about things you'd never even thought about.

I'd never been to Newport before and it's worth a second look, perhaps not in the high season though. The maritime resort town was founded in 1639 and played a key role in the American Revolution. Newport has one of the highest concentrations of colonial homes in US and the architecture is quite charming. There are clapboard bungalows in town and then the huge mansions, for which Newport is known for, are overlooking the water.

For the record, it was very strange not to be with the pinks on 4 July. (I did, however, get a record amount of sleep this weekend.) They come home today -- two from my sister-in-law's in LA and one from camping with my folks. We missed them!

Under the Boardwalk

On Monday we took the pinks to Santa Cruz. It's been at least ten years since Dave and I have been and I'm happy to report that it was a lot cleaner and more family-friendly than either of us remembered.

We took the Roaring Camp Railroad Beach Train down from Felton and invited our train enthusiast friends Seth and Lori with us. (Seth is such a train junkie that Lori threw his 50th birthday party aboard the California Zephyr. They rented it and a panoramic dome car, hooked them to the back of an Amtrak train, and we feted Seth from Emeryville to Reno and back. That was a party!)

The Beach Train was the way to go. It's a gorgeous hour-long ride through the Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park and then you arrive at the Boardwalk. The train dropped us off at 11:30a and we reboarded at 4:30p, which was just enough time for the kids to do the roller coaster and bumper cars, play carnival games and eat a good lunch followed by caramel apples, salt water taffy and root beer floats. They were selling deep fried Twinkies there and as tempting as that sounded, I just couldn't bring myself to indulge. Maybe next time.

The Santa Cruz Beach Boardwalk celebrated its 100th anniversary this year and the Giant Dipper, its most popular attraction, is the 4th oldest roller coaster in the country. It's a classic wooden one and has been open since 1924. It also has a 1911 Looff caroussel with hand-carved horses. Both were named National Historic Landmarks by the U.S. National Parks Service in 1987.

Seth and Lori have retired from the Silly Valley rat race and were incredibly patient with the pinks and the endless questions and jokes that only elementary-school-aged children and their families can see the humor in.

As a bonus, the Boardwalk was surprisingly empty until mid-afternoon. It was cloudy when we arrived but by mid-day the sun had come out and it was a perfect 70F. Apparently Monday is the day to go!

We walked along the pier and were all fascinated by the sea lions, which look like seals but don't have ears. (Thanks, Seth!)
It was a great day. We anticipated that it'd be fun but it was an even better time than we'd imagined and we'll be back again soon, with our sand toys next time to take full advantage of the beach.