April I

Playing on the newly-felled logs at Grandma and Grandpa's.

Helping dad wash the car.

Homemade fangs.

Faith and Culture Writer's Conference

I can't believe it's already been a month since I went to the Faith and Culture Writer's Conference at Western Seminary.

I've been wanting to get to a conference for a while now, but they are not cheap. This particular conference was a one day affair, and the rock-bottom price of $55 for the entire day (8-5) included breakfast, lunch, and unlimited snacks.

AND it was a Christian conference. I had no idea going into it if that was a good thing or a bad thing. It worried me that all of the agents and editors who would be there (not that I had any intention of meeting with an agent or an editor) worked in the Christian market. The Christian publishing world is indeed a world unto itself, and I will be honest here: I haven't read any Christian fiction since high school, when I was at camp at Mount Hermon and picked up a recommended Jeanette Oke book at their Christian (only) bookstore out of desperation.

However, when I saw that one of the keynote speakers was Gina Ochsner, Flannery O'Conner Award for Short Fiction and two-time Oregon Book Award winner, I took heart that the conference organizers were folks who were interested in both spiritual and literary integrity.

After the first keynote address (the other speaker was Paul Louis Metzger) I had to resist the urge to call Shaun at home and tell him how amazing the conference was. It's been so long since I went to a good talk that gave me so much to think about. I'd read Gina Ochsner's People I Wanted to Be: Stories in preparation for the conference, and really enjoyed it. By the end of her first keynote address, I totally understood the whole disciple thing: I was ready to follow her around and sit at her feet, hanging on every word.

The first workshop I went to was with Mike Thaler. (Please do check out the photo at the link. He was wearing the same happy shirt and bright tangerine-colored pants.) Mike writes for children, and has had a long and interesting career. Mike is in his 70's, grew up Jewish, and became a Christian ten years ago. Every time Mike discussed his faith and how it applied to his life and work, he was overcome with emotion and had to pause to collect himself. As a result, we didn't get through very much content, but his evident passion made it a more memorable session than it might have been otherwise. An added bonus: Gina Ochsner attended it as well.

I went to Gina's workshop on tips for generating story ideas when you're stuck, which couldn't have been a more apropos topic for me. Almost all of the examples she gave were from stories of hers that I'd read, which gave me a great peek behind the screen. It was amazing to see what she'd used and how she'd done it.

I also took the opportunity to go to a seminar from Matt Mikalatos, who is a friend of a friend, lives in the area, and has a blog that I enjoy. Matt wrote the book Imaginary Jesus (do not let the cover photo of the skeevy 80's youth pastor-looking imaginary Jesus put you off), which I also read ahead in advance of the conference. I am a total junkie when it comes to stories of "normal" people and their paths to publication, and his talk did not disappoint. It's not every day that a writer passes around a stack of rejection letters ranging from a form rejection addressed to the wrong person to a bitingly personal handwritten note. But Matt really did his own thing when it came to writing his book, and it was published! I find that inspiring.

One seminar I couldn't make it to was Brad Harper's "Why (Evangelical) Christians Do Bad Art." I heard it was good though, so I bought the recording of the session. Much of what he said I'd already concluded independently, but the talk was still worth a listen. Also he quoted his friend Dan Siedell, whose name I recognized from my friend Amanda. Here's a link to an abridged version of Dan Siedell's recent chapel talk at Biola, which was a good companion to what I'd heard at the conference.

By the end of the day I was wishing for more. Of course I didn't agree 100% with everything I heard (how dull that would be!) but the tone and level of the discussion left me invigorated rather than drained and discouraged. I'll be looking forward to next year's conference with cautious optimism; it's hard to imagine how they could top this year's. (Well, OK, axing the worship music would be my only suggestion.)

I came home that evening to a delicious home-cooked dinner, cooked by Ariana and provided by the Mullins family, who stayed the weekend with us while they were between homes. (And countries--read about it on Ariana's blog!)

It was a great day, and one that I hope stays with me for a good time to come.

Proving Mom Wrong: It Hurts So Good

Willem had his five-year immunizations today. I didn't tell him what we were up to until an hour ahead of time, which I figured was optimal both for minimizing dread and for getting the "no, I'm not going to have shots" fit over with before we got there. Upon receiving the bad news, Willem did indeed shut himself in his room and proclaim that he would not be getting shots. Fortunately, I had a bargaining chip in the form of a threat to withhold a rare play date with his best friend the following day.

Resigned to the inevitable, Willem came out of his room and sought to arm himself with information.

Will it hurt?

How long will it take?

Where will they do it?

Will I scream?

"No, you won't scream. You might say ouch! ouch!" I said, smiling and keeping my ouches lively, as though I were being bothered by some minor nuisance. Willem must not have remembered the day Nels had those shots: his thigh muscles were so tense, it was like trying to stick a needle into a marble statue, and he screamed bloody murder.

When the big moment arrived, the nurse had Willem sit on my lap with his legs hung over to the side. I wrapped my arms around his chest and held his arms close. I think we both found this comforting, even though the nurse's sole aim was to prevent him grabbing for the needle. (Can you imagine? Apparently kids do that all the time.)

Prick. Prick. Prick.

Willem sat utterly still and silent until the nurse set everything down, and it was clear that she was done. Only then did the sound leak out, a low hiss that turned into a quiet moan, and he began to shake. He took a few moments to collect himself, then looked at me with triumph in his teary eyes.

"See, Mom? I didn't even say ouch! ouch! like you said I would."

Fun With Friends

And now for the rest of the Hamilton's visit!

I am glad have we so many friends with charming little girls. It's nice to have a girl fix when I am feeling overwhelmed by all the rough-and-tumble that boys entail.

For instance, who could resist this little munchkin?

This girl can eat Honey Nut Cheerios like nobody's business (the most likely explanation being that she's usually fed something more healthy at home.) She had two bowls herself and then found and finished Willem's own abandoned bowl at some point in the morning. I have really been falling down on hostess duty, allowing guests to eat cold cereal for breakfast.

The boys and an iPhone: like moths to a flame.

While Hamilton visits often entail fine dining, we're not always fancy. Here we are enjoying an Ikea meatball lunch.

Willem can put away the fifteen meatballs on the plate all by himself.

After we put the kids to bed on Friday night, Shaun made potato chips.

I just can't leave well enough alone.

On Saturday we tried out the Pearl District's buzzy new Little Big Burger.

It's cool, but I'm not a fan of places where you have to lurk about waiting to pounce on an available seat.

On Saturday night, there was no pouncing. We lined up our babysitter extraordinaire and set off for Laurelhurst Market, a restaurant I have been reading about in my food magazines since it opened.

They don't take reservations for small parties, so we got there early. At 5:30 there was an hour and a half wait. They took our phone number and we went and had a beer at the cozy Horse Brass Pub, a worthy destination in its own right.

Then it was back to the restaurant and its adjoining butcher shop.

My quick review: I didn't really care for the steaks, but everything else we ordered was delicious (including the cocktails.) The salt cured foie gras torchon with blood orange, grapefruit, and brioche bread salad with saba and cress (I know, how pretentious does that sound!) was the dish of the evening. Shaun pointed out that it had obviously been made with pure evil, which was what made it taste so good.

After dinner it was still fairly early, so we headed downtown...

had a nightcap at Clyde Common...

and still made it home before 10:30!

It may seem like all we did was eat, but it was a short visit, so that is what we did most of. We also spent some time at Powell's and then tracked down a new iPad for Amanda, which everyone (including the babysitter) had fun playing with.

Fun. With friends.

Yippee Ki Yay

"Mom, I can hula hoop with my arms crossed."

Nels had been telling me this for weeks. The Helen Baller spring program was coming up. The theme was "cowboy," and Nels's class had learned to hula hoop for the occasion.

Once the big day finally arrived, we had to leave the visiting Hamiltons at our house for a few hours while we went to the high school to watch the program. Every class in the entire school participates, so it's not the sort of thing one wants to subject out-of-town visitors to.

We didn't get there early enough to get ready parking, so Shaun dropped me and Nels off. Nels grasped my hand firmly as we joined the stream of fellow almost-late families heading for the doors of the school.

"Look at that boy's hat," said a mom walking behind us. She was referring to Nels, who was wearing a cowboy hat that was a gift from my mom. I think she bought it in Sisters, Oregon. Wherever it came from, it was the jen-yoo-wine article.

"He has the best hat in the whole school." Nels didn't look at me, but he stood up straighter and his step grew bouncier.

"He sure is lucky." Her children, a boy and a girl, voiced their assent. When I dropped Nels off with his classmates, his eyes were shining.

Here are the spectators occupying one side of the Camas High School gym. The entire student body (and teachers) took up the other side.

Here's Nels and some of his classmates waiting for the show to begin. The red-kerchiefed kiddos are Kindergartners.

Ready, set...

spin!

Here's where he really hit his stride and I cried just a little. It was fabulous.

When his group finished, all the kids took a hurried bow and ran off. Nels, on the other hand, bowed low and slow, with a flourish and a wave to each section of the bleachers.

A job well done.

After the show, we came home to find that Amanda and Andrew had cleaned up the dinner mess I'd left behind, and they'd washed the dishes. And Amanda had scrubbed my kitchen sink cleaner than it's been since we first moved in. Yippee ki yay.

Springy Spring Spring

We've done lots of great things lately, but a round-up of springtime photos is in order before I launch into that.

After the boys got those amazing shields and books about knights, Willem was hankering for some armor. Shaun crafted these out of cardboard. Once Willem added the hat, they looked more like robot cowboy chaps.

It always takes me about five times longer to get dinner on the table than I expect it to. These boys are ready to dig into the St. Patrick's Day soda bread.

I made a sort of theme-y dinner because we had to eat anyways, and it seemed like a good excuse to drink a Guinness, which I hadn't had in a while. I waited until three hours before dinner to decide on what I was fixing, and when I ran to the neighborhood Safeway, they were sold out of cabbage. I improvised with a bag of coleslaw mix.

Here we are on a Sunday at Willem's favorite restaurant, the Lakeside Chalet. I'm not sure if he loves it because of the breakfast they serve all day or because of the extensive collection of dinosaurs with huge open mouths that they have available to play with. Probably a little of both.

He was inspired to draw a toothy dinosaur of his own.

One afternoon the boys watched a show that featured the world-record holder for building the tallest house of cards. As soon as the program ended, the boys shut off the TV and raced upstairs to get out our cards. Nels in particular worked for hours over several days trying to build a two-level house. I love it when they do that. It makes me feel much less guilty about the TV-watching.

We watched a documentary on origami, and Willem abandoned it midway to go work with paper at the craft table. Nels watched to the end and then spent the next week littering the house with accordion-pleated papers of various colors and sizes.

While I was at a writing conference last Saturday (more on that weekend later), Shaun was the parent designated to take the boys to a birthday party. I love how methodical and tidy Nels was in wrapping up his brother like a mummy. And Willem's expression of resignation is priceless.

Here is Willem after a typical Sunday morning of racing around the church hallways. He has doused his head in the drinking fountain. We are so happy to go to a church where our kids have other kids to run around with and grow up with. Good people there.

This week has been spring break, and the very grand Martins took the boys for three nights. We're going to pick them up tonight. While they were gone, we had this hail storm:

Also while they were gone, I had this. Because sometimes a girl just needs a giant day-glo margarita. (Oh, in this picture you can see the ring that I mentioned in a previous post.)

Three nights is the longest we've ever been home without the boys. I am greatly relieved to find that I miss them!

Wrapping it Up

After the rally at the library (the measure passed, by the way), we took the long way back to Kim and Cory's house. We got off the freeway at Beverly Boulevard and showed the boys our old stomping grounds in uptown Whittier. They were exactly as impressed as I expected them to be. Which was not at all.

For me, though, it was surreal to drive by our little white cottage on Greenleaf. There was a "For Rent" sign stuck in the lawn, and our old neighbors Mark and Sandy were out front, as they always had been on a sunny day. Mark had the same bird dogs that he'd spent most of his time yelling at and whistling for, and his perpetual girlfriend Sandy (they maintained separate residences but were always together) appeared to be wearing the exact same black velour warm-up suit that was her uniform eight years ago.

We wondered if we should stop; we decided to. But they were talking to the driver of a delivery truck who had stopped in the street, blocking the parking at the curb. When the truck moved on, so did they. Chasing them down would have been too weird, so we drove on. It made me a little sad, which was of a piece with how I felt about the whole afternoon.

We continued down Greenleaf, which looked more vital than it had on our last visit. I wish we had stopped and walked and taken a chance on a place to eat, but the boys were beyond exhausted by that point, and I was feeling a little shell-shocked myself. It was strange to pass through a place that had been such an important part of our lives.

Shaun leaned across me and took a picture out the window of what had been such an important part of his life:

We pointed out the landmarks to our impassive sightseers. Look, mommy used to live there. -There's daddy's old apartment. Well, you can't really see it from here, but it's back there. -That's where mommy used to be in plays. -Do you remember Eric? Dietrich's daddy? He used to work there.

Even the El Pollo Loco on Whittier Boulevard, where we finally stopped for lunch, was not spared: I used to stop here a lot on my way home from work and pick us up some dinner, Shaun told the kids. But memories, schmemories. Two weeks later, it's the churros that the boys are still talking about.

After lunch we drove the surface streets from Whittier to Placentia. Everything was familiar. But because I lived in six different places during my time in LA/Orange County, and because it's been eight years now since I lived there, I wasn't able to put everything into context. I remember this drive. But where would I have been going? Of course I remembered the big destinations, but the mundane details of day-to-day life were lost to time. It was very unsettling. As a person with a natural tendency to see things as black and white (as unrealistic and misguided as that may be), I feel very uncomfortable when confronted with the erosion of my memory.

I felt a sense of loss, but with it a sense of gratitude. I realized that I've lived in a lot of places, all completely different from each other, and I've enjoyed every one. All in all, it was a bittersweet afternoon.

The evening, however, was nothing but sweet. Auntie Nancy and Great Grandma Martin joined us for dinner at the Macks', and we finally enjoyed the In 'N Out burgers I'd been looking forward to since we bought our plane tickets.

Nancy brought late Christmas presents: leather-covered shields with a version of the Clan Ross crest and Sir Nels and Sir Willem embossed on the front. Brass nameplates mark the shields as belonging to Nels the Valiant and Willem the Lionhearted, which I think are very apt monikers indeed. Accompanying the shields were some excellent coloring books on swords and jousts and tournaments. They came in handy on the trip home.

Can you tell that all the kids were a little fried by the end of our visit?

Here's cousin Henry in normal mode. His drawings of any manner of conveyance (train, monster truck) are all particularly good. Sweet cousin Heidi is in the background.

Early to bed and not so early to rise, and before we knew it it was Monday afternoon and we were headed home.

It's a proven fact that drinks taste better when sipped through dual cocktail straws. Ask any kid.

Goodbye, California. Let's not be strangers.