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| Harry Potter Acting Camp. Lucy hurled insults at Malfoy in a perfect British accent as she played Ginny Weasley; Lindsay anchored the show, delivering opening and closing lines as Dumbledore (The Arts are often short on boys. Luckily she thought it was hilarious) |
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| Grammy and Grandpa brought cousin Cate to the San Juan Capistrano play house to see the performance. We love living by family! |
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| Theater week continued with a performance of Fiddler on the Roof. We have listened to the music in the car many times and I have (through tears) told the kids the story in great detail, so everyone was very engaged through the nearly-three-hour production. |
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| More family time! Cousins came over for sundaes and swimming |
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I just looked up bubble baths (I love Wikipedia!) to find out when kids first started forming faux beards with foam. It was the 1930's, when soap flakes were invented, and then bubble bath was marketed to kids a lot in the 1960's. May this tradition last forever.
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Not pictured: my 2 months of sadness. Erik and I were starting to train for the EATMOR: the Erik Allebest Trail Mountain Ocean Run. He had done this run a few months ago and said it was the most beautiful place he has ever been, so he invited our dearest NorCal running buddies. But a few miles into a 16-miler, I injured my Achilles tendon and ended up having to quit running completely for about 6 depressing weeks. Erik finished training without me, and we all drove up to Palo Alto as planned. The kids played with friends but I shut myself into my friend Betsy's house and cried about my tendon and about not living by my friends anymore. It stunk. Then Erik got home from the run with a busted knee (he had to quit at mile 19 - the only ones to finish all 32 miles were Christie (the woman who masters everything she touches), Esther (the Australian athlete who will. not. quit.) and Zach (the 0.2% body fat machine). I'm so proud of them! Maybe next year is my year to smash through the marathon barrier and feel my spirit communing with my favorite non-human organisms: redwood trees.
Havasupai:
Uncle Brigham planned an epic camping adventure to the Grand Canyon, and in the early Spring he invited us and Erik's parents to come along. Many family trips to R.E.I. for gear, practice hikes in our hills, taste testing dehydrated dinner packets and learning about Arizona climate and Native American history later, the day finally arrived to embark on our first family backpacking adventure.
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| The drive to Brigham's house through the high desert, complete with a colorful train |
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| Joshua trees, "Mormon rocks" named after 19th-Century pioneers, cowboy country |
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| View from Brigham's house |
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| Stone loves their dogs (and cats and chickens and horses and goats and 4-wheeler and zip line) |
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| These rules on the fridge made me laugh. And admire their parenting. |
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| Brigham painted this incredible self portrait of him and Nancy, which hangs in the house they built themselves. Not designed themselves, not worked as the contractors, they actually pounded in the nails with hammers using their own hands. I can't think of anyone I'd rather hike in the desert with. |
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We arrived at the hotel at night to find out that a huge flash flood had inundated the canyon and village, so we wouldn't be able to get into the canyon the next morning as we'd planned. Everyone's jaw dropped - Brigham, Nancy and their kids + Erik and our two oldest girls decided to chance it and camp at the rim of the canyon, just in case it was clear enough for them to hike in. I stayed at the hotel with Sophie and Stone and Erik's parents. Sophie was really worried - it was great practice for being flexible.
And the rest of the story is to be continued.... my phone died right after I took this picture of Sophie at breakfast, but you can guess by her smile that the canyon was cleared for hiking, and in our case, helicoptering!!! I will get the rest of the photos from Erik's dad's phone and tell the rest of the twists and turns in the adventure. |
Aunt Lulu and Aunt Rachel come to visit
Two days after arriving home from Havasupai/Las Vegas, we filled our house with family again - this time McPhies!! Erik went to LA for a few days, leaving us like an early-Mormon household: Three women and 10 kids. There has never been happier chaos.
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| Lindsay was just sitting there talking with me, and I thought she looked so pretty I made her let me take a picture |
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| Stone's dream come true: a room full of boy cousins! |
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| Beach day |
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| We love the Hickoks |
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| We love the McPhies |
Lull between visitors
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| Stone hiding in the sheet cupboard |
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| Lindsay and her friends kidnapping Maren on her 12th birthday. I took them to IHOP and let them sit at a table by themselves - a first for Lindsay. I stayed in the waiting area studying for the GRE (which I am going to take after all), thinking how weird it was that my girl is old enough to just sit with her friends at a restaurant and pay the bill all by themselves. |
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| Sophie came home from Horseback-riding camp every day full of stories about the horses she loved, telling us the commands, how to make their food, clean their hooves, brush their coats, etc. |
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| Sophie's horse, Rushmore |
Ariana comes to town
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| Lindsay's dear friend from Mountain View flew down by herself to visit!! |
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| Digging a well at Salt Creek State Beach |
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| Sophie the mermaid is sad because she misses the sea |
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| Lucy the mermaid is happy she gets to hang out on land |
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The Three Amigos - we're just missing Ailey!!
Tomorrow our darling Carolina from Spain is coming to visit from Spain!!! We are so excited. And so grateful to have so many visitors brightening our lives!! |
I can straighten you out a bit on the details regarding bubble baths' history. I contributed a lot to that Wikipedia entry, and you can judge my expertise from here -- http;//users.bestweb.net/~robgood/lather.html .
ReplyDeleteSoap flakes go back to the 1890s, not the 1930s. Although it is probable in a world this big that some people had taken baths with enough soap in them to make the water sudsy before that, flakes made it convenient to dissolve that much soap quickly. Although some people continued that practice (which probably was never done by more than a small minority of bathers anyway), the character of bubble baths changed in the 1930s with the introduction for consumer use of alkyl sulfates (originally Dreft), which made bubble baths feasible using smaller amounts of material (so the water wasn't so soapy, irritating, and defatting to skin), and practicable for the first time in "harder" (i.e. more calcific/magnesic) waters which would've required enormous amounts of soap to make a bathtubful foamy, besides making fluffier, lacier, less lathery foams.
It was ca. 1960 that bath foams started to be mass marketed and heavily advertised as a low-priced supermarket-shelf "family" product mostly for children. Until then, bath foam preparations tended to be heavily fragranced and somewhat expensive items, and although children's liking of them and their ability to prevent bathtub rings from soap in "hard" water was noted, they still tended to be the sort of thing that'd come via the Avon lady and that kids might get only as a Xmas gift, the majority being positioned as part of particular fragrance lines for women. Charlie Eaton (who also developed the Styrofoam cup), noting his wife's being irked by his frequent use of her expensive bubble bath on or by her son (although benefiting from the lack of bathtub ring) started in 1958 (with his Bub brand) the mass market trend of low-fragrance or unfragranced (for more boy appeal) bubble baths modeled on the high-sudsing laundry detergents of the time.
The advertising of such products, especially on children's TV shows, made the claim that they would actually clean kids (or adults) without additional soap or even without rubbing. Even with the relatively harsh products of that time (typically like no-frills laundry powders but more finely powdered and without silicates to protect washing machine parts), I doubt that was true at the concentrations used in bath water. Unlike soap, these materials make foam at concentrations much lower than would be useful for detergency of soft surfaces like skin or fabrics. The advertising (which used boys more than girls as models) also served to remove any "girly" stigma bubble baths still had for the young. By the mid-1970s the powdered formulas had been eclipsed by liquids and the advertising practically stopped, largely because it had succeeded in establishing bubble baths as something kids would routinely use rather than an occasional-if-ever treat more for girls than boys. This was also long before there was much popularity outside continental Europe for bath & shower gels or what we now call body wash, so bubble bath as an additive to bath water was the chief alternative many families had for preventing their soap from leaving a ring on their children's bathtub; soaps like Zest & Dove, with their own lime soap dispersants, were relatively expensive and didn't really save much cleaning, because what they prevented in bathtub ring or soap scum they made up for in goo on or around the soap dish, the used bars becoming mushier than those of conventional soap cakes.