Harriet's 8th Birthday Letter

I really do wish I had written this on/before Harriet's birthday.  Insert 1000 reasons why I had no time to do it.  If I had been able to sit down and think about it, this is what I would have written to her the week she turned 8:

(Harriet eating her birthday donut at school.  She brought Rebel Donuts for her class.)

Dear Harriet,

You are 8 years old!  Turning 8 has been a goal of yours for a very long time.  You have wanted to be 8 for so long, definitely since your sister turned 8, and maybe before.  You have always been so jealous of Grace and all the growing up she does before you have a chance, but when she was baptized and started to go to activity days at church, you really couldn't stand being left out of it.

You have thrown a fit every (other) Thursday night since Grace started going to activity days.  This is something you WANT to do, can't WAIT to do.  You watched Grace get baptized and immediately started planning your baptism.  You have been planning it for 3 years!  I'm confident that you have put more thought and planning into your baptism than few others ever have, adults or children.

I know you are so excited for your birthday party.  I was kind of surprised.  I thought you would want a girlie theme, like Frozen, or Barbie, or American Girl Dolls.  I think it's pretty adorable you chose the Despicable Me minions to celebrate your 8th birthday.  They are so silly and funny and cute, just like you.  I hope your party goes just as you have hoped and that all your friends come and make you feel as special as you are.

This school year has been a rough one for you.  I am so proud of you for how well you have handled all of the challenges and frustrations it has brought.  Neither one of us were perfect in doing that, but for a little kid, you have really learned a lot and come a long way in dealing with unpleasant things.  I am so proud of you for trying your best and being willing to take chances, even when you knew you might be disappointed.  You want so badly to be in the gifted program (and you should be in it,) and you were willing to give up one of your favorite school events (the jog-a-thon) to go and take the test.  I know that was a really hard decision, but it is amazing that you understand what is the most important thing to do in these situations.

Dear Harriet, I love you so much.  I wish I could fix things for you so that you weren't so frustrated with the injustices and inconsistencies in the world.  You have an amazing ability to spot them and I know how mad it makes you when you find them.  You make me learn how to be a better mom every single day.

I hope that you have an awesome birthday party, filled with friends and all of the things that make you happy.  I hope that your baptism is a truly magical day that brings all you have hoped and planned for.

Congratulations on turning 8 years old.  I am so happy for you because I know how much you have wanted it.  I hope that 8 is your best year ever.

Love Always,
Mommy

Easter 2014

Easter Sunday is kind of a blur to me now.  This is why you have to keep up on things like blogging and journaling.  All I know is that we got back from Carlsbad on Friday night, seems like we did a million things Saturday, and then the Easter Bunny (and the Tooth Fairy) came that night.  Let's not talk about how old Grace is getting for these things, but she still wants and likes to believe, so I keep letting her.  (It was Grace who lost the tooth, very late, on Saturday night!  Can we give the magical creatures a break, peeps?!)

We had a nice Easter morning, filled with the usual egg hunt (girls requested that EB please hide the eggs in harder places so that the hunt would take longer.  He obliged.) New Easter Dresses, and since Harriet's birthday was in 6 days, we had a joint Easter/Hattie Family Birthday party after church with Grandma, Grandpa, and Christine.

 The grand tradition of our EB is that he puts cadbury mini eggs in plastic eggs on the stairs.  The kids polish up this area first and quick.

Kitty Cat was totally annoying after EB came.  She played floor hockey with the plastic eggs all night.  Just when I thought I didn't have to worry about animals and Easter eggs anymore... (Velvet used to try to eat all the candy before the girls got up.)  

Kudos to 1:00pm church so that we had tons of time to fill our morning with hunting and candy and playing and then enough time leftover for dressing up and hair.  

Hattie wanted us all to wear identical Easter Dresses.  I just couldn't make it happen, so she settled for "coordinating."  I think it turned out nice.  Just wish I had time to get my hair done before Easter.  Those roots are dark and grey!  yikes.  

Oh, I KNOW what was the big deal about Easter!  Grace played her guitar for the first time in sacrament meeting!  Back in January, the chorister had asked Grace if she would accompany the senior primary in playing this song.  I think I've mentioned it on the blog already.  We fussed with microphones and things so that you could hear her above the piano and the 50 kids singing.  She did AMAZING.  It was really really cool to see her play like that and be so confident and share her talent so willingly.

I had one of those amazon local coupons to Nothing Bundt Cakes, so Harriet got a pretty cool Easter/Birthday cake to put a candle in for dessert.

Happy Easter to all!  On a side note, having Easter be the last day of Spring Break is not cool.  Not cool!  I used to think that would be nice - to have spring break line up with Easter.  This is the first year the school district planned it that way.  Usually, spring break and Easter are separate.  When we were kids, we just got a long 4 day weekend for Easter and no spring break and it seemed nice that way.  But the truth is - I don't like to travel on Easter (or Christmas.)  So, if we use our big, long, spring break for traveling, then we have to be back by the weekend and then getting ready for a big holiday like that after the kids have been home all week and you've been busy doing things and going places - well, it's a bit much.  I guess I either need to decide to be ok with going somewhere for Easter, or being more organized so it's all done before spring break hits.  It was all incredibly fun and worthwhile, but I was exhausted and really done with it by the time Easter dinner rolled around.  Next year, I will figure it out and do it better.

Spring Break Adventures 2014 - part III - Living Desert Zoo and Garden

The morning after the caves, I convinced everyone that we really should stop by this "Living Desert Zoo and Garden" on our way out of Carlsbad.  I found a random flyer for it in the hotel lobby.  I was not prepared for how amazing this place would be!  If you ever go down to Carlsbad for the caves, be sure to stop at this place too.  It is so well worth it, and we got in for half off because we had a zoo membership too.

Basically, it's a tour of all of the plants and wild life of the Chihuahuan Desert near the Mexican Border.  The plants are just incredible.  One thing I have really come to love about living in the desert is the plants.  I had no idea how beautiful desert plants could be.  The prickly pear cacti are blooming right now and they are just amazing.  People say that it's "so brown here", and "don't you miss the trees and the green of the East coast?"  No, no I do not.  It is a few shades more brown here, but the desert is beautiful and I miss the trees about 1 hour per year.  Wait.  I don't even miss them that much.  I love my SINGLE tree in my front yard!

I digress.  Back to the beauty of the desert.  Check out this botany!

This is one of my favorite plants.  The Ocotillo.  There is one growing at the entrance to our neighborhood, but it doesn't get this big and nice.  I think the ABQ is probably not quite the right climate for it.  Probably grows best in southern NM.  It's this crazy ugly stick thing and you have no idea why anyone would plant something like that.  Then, in the spring, the stalks get all these little leaves on them and big bright orange flowers at the end.  There is beauty in everything.   Mother Nature is so rad!

 I also love the prickly pear.  You can see the flower buds on these.  We were too early for them to bloom last month, but I bet they are gorgeous right now.  

The yucca palm.  These have grown on me. I used to hate them, but now I think they are pretty cool.  They get these super tall flower blossoms on them in the spring.  Their flowers can sometimes be as tall as the whole plant and stick way up out of the top.  They are way weird, but way awesome.

There were miles and miles of open desert, just full of prickly pear and ocotillo.  

Those last few pics were of plants they kept in a greenhouse from deserts all over the world.  I love that fuzzy cactus thing.  

The local animals in the park were equally fun.  Harriet fell in love with this little burrowing owl.  We didn't get a picture of him, but he was way cute.  We saw tons of birds, reptiles, etc.  They supposedly had bears and big cats too, but they were all tucked away in their dens.  Then, we all found out what it's like to have a rattlesnake raise it's rattles at you.  Luckily, he was behind glass, but if we even approached his house, he got super mad at us.  Yikes.  I really really don't like snakes.  

The kids are always excited and satisfied to see a wolf.  

We really did pack in a lot into a less-than-48 hour trip.  On our way home from Carlsbad, we made a 2  hour stop in Roswell.  After seeing Roswell, trust me.  It's not worth more than a 2 hour stop.  I would NEVER  head down there JUST for Roswell.  I can't believe people book hotel rooms there and use it as a destination.  There is truly, nothing there - a main street with a few fast food places and some goofy gift shops, a museum about the "true" history of Roswell (much much better than the alternative,) and the hokiest, lamest excuse for a "museum and research center" based on the crazy alien crash story.  I loved reading all the accounts of people having their lives threatened by the federal government if they revealed any information.  Yep, they were, I'm sure, because the stuff they found was probably top secret government experimentation - not little green guys in a flying saucer.  Roswell has sure capitalized on the alien thing though.  Every single store and restaurant has an alien statue in front or an alien painted on it.  Aliens might as well land there, because the locals are pretty convinced that they did and there's a full welcoming committee!

Like I said, the legit Roswell museum was worth seeing.  Harriet found an incredible Georgia O'Keeffe painting that she loved because she just did a report on her.  And, we all loved the history of the rocket science that was developed in Roswell.

Could this BE any cheesier?   And it was kind of expensive to get in this place too!  (David was dying.  He wanted to bypass the whole thing, but after driving through Roswell on the way down, the girls fully expected an alien experience on their way home and made him do it.  He really thought he was going to get away with driving home after the real museum.   Rookie mistake.)  Truthfully, I fully believe that there are many life forms and plenty of other races of humans out there in the universe.  I fully believe in "aliens."  But, I don't for one second, believe that they are these little green guys and that they landed in NM a few decades ago.  do de do do, do de do do

Anyone feel like watching an episode of X-files?  

Ahh... good times in NM.  

Spring Break Adventures 2014 - part II - CARLSBAD CAVERNS

I've heard about Carlsbad the whole time we've lived here.  It's a popular weekend trip for New Mexicans.  I didn't really understand what it was.  I was thinking - you walk into a cave, see some formations, walk out.  Voila.  I had no idea what to expect given my severe aversion to being in enclosed spaces.  I don't venture into caves often.  The story of the Nutty Putty Cave in Utah still haunts me and it haunts me even more that David used to go there.   No freaking way am I EVER going into a cave where I have to crawl through the openings.

Thankfully, most of Carlsbad is HUGE - big wide openings, like the size of football stadiums.  I'm not kidding.  They are GINORMOUS.    There are parts of the cave where you have to crawl and shimmy through.  They have private tours for those.  No thank you.

Still, they are 830 feet underground!  What the heck was anyone doing going 830 feet underground to find those?  You've got to be kidding me.  It's a good thing that the exploration of the world does not depend on me.  We'd never know about anything.

So, you can walk into the caves from the "natural" entrance.  It's about a mile hike to get from the surface down to the caves.  We took the elevator.  In grand, national park form, they have glass windows in the elevator so that you can see the rock flying upward, past your face, that you are going through.  SO MUCH ROCK.  SO FAR DOWN.  

We paid for a tour of part of the cave that is closed off to general entrance; the King's Palace Tour.  It was so worth it to do that.  The caves we went in were amazing and really different from The Big Room, which is the part that is open to the general public.  While we were on the tour, our guide had everyone sit down and then he turned off all the lighting in the cave so that we could see how dark it really was.  That was pretty cool.  Your eyes don't adjust.  It's just black.  After he did that, I really could not imagine how the original explorers of the cave went through there with just lanterns, or less.  Crazy.  People have been going in them for thousands of years though.  They have found all kinds of artifacts that indicate people have been exploring/using the caves since like 10,000 years ago.

Taking pictures in the caves is nearly impossible.  The lighting is so dim, it's hard to get a focused picture, and if you use a flash, it just blinds out all the background.  Then, if you do get a good shot, the picture just doesn't explain a fraction of what you're really seeing.  You just can't imagine a place like this.  You have to see it for yourself.  

 All these formations are so big.  It is incredible to think how long it took to make them.  It's not a linear function, but it takes like 84 years to make a 1/8 of an inch.  Some of these things were 30 feet tall or more.  It's also creepy to think that the cave was carved out with sulphuric acid and since then has been slowly filling back in.  Some parts of the cave are more active than others though.

The flat floors are a natural feature of the cave.  Nature is so crazy!

These are all from King's Palace.  They name some of the formations after what they look like.  There is one that looks like a bunch of royalty sitting on thrones.

Batman shirt, definitely appropriate.  This would make quite the Batman hide-out.

I couldn't get over how many different kinds of formations were in there, all made of the same stuff through the same process.  Mother Nature, quite the artist.

It was in this room that they turned off the lights.  

Pool of water.  There were a few around different parts of the cave, and we definitely got dripped on.  It was super humid.  Since the cave is so far below the surface, the conditions inside never change.  Always 56 degrees with constant humidity.  See, NM isn't ALL dry and hot.

This is the ramp to get down into King's Palace.  It has many more switchbacks than I could fit in a photo.  

HUGE columns.  At least 30 feet high.

After the private tour, we went into The Big Room.  The big room is just so much bigger than you can imagine.  It took us about 90 minutes to walk around the edge of it.  2 miles or something?  The dimensions of just The Big Room cave alone are: 4000 feet long, 625 feet wide, and 255 feet high.  There are acres and acres of cave that are available to explore and they only have 1/3 of the caves open.  2/3 are closed off completely and protected as wilderness area.  I can't fathom how many caves there are under there.  There is one cave you can tour by driving 45 minutes from the visitors center and then hiking in, and it's all part of the same cave network.  45 minutes by car!  

Cave Family Selfie

lots of wide eyes!

This part was called "Fairyland" because it has all these tiny little intricate formations that look like miniature stone gardens.  

Most formations are not named.  You use your imagination and come up with your own ideas of what they look like.  3 guesses what David named this one.  Yep, that's right.  Boob Rock.  There was another nearby too.  Ha!  Mother Nature - always with the wicked sense of humor.

That is a 100 year old ladder. Some crazy dudes built it to explore further down a "bottomless pit."  Yeah... no thanks!

 Tried to give some perspective for the scale of the cave. 

 My cave explorers.  They have grand plans to come back when the youngest is 12 so they can do some more of the tours (most of the tours, you have to be 12.)  

I think this was called the Theater of Dolls because of all the tiny little doll-like formations in a mini amphitheater.

Crazy cool stuff.  Carlsbad Caverns did not disappoint.  We were all mesmerized.  It was totally worth driving 300 miles down in one day and 300 miles home the next.  Kudos to the National Parks for protecting these kinds of areas and making them usable for everyone.  We did do a few awesome things the next day too.  Stay tuned for post 3.