Backwoods Birthday

Dear Laney,

For your 8th birthday, you decided you wanted an overnight group camping trip with all of your friends and their families. I reserved five campsites next to each other at the closest lake campground to Missoula so we'd have enough room for everyone to come. At $20/piece for the night, this was actually cheaper than most kid party ideas in town and had a more epic feel to it than a pizza at the bowling alley. And if there's one thing we've learned about your birthday gatherings, it's that you (okay, WE) like them to be big-time productions.  

We wanted to have a big celebration because not only were you turning 8, but your dad was home and everyone wanted to see him. 

One problem we hadn't anticipated is that most of Montana was on fire last summer. We had the biggest wildfires in the nation, and checked the news every morning for air quality alerts. Many days, it was "hazardous," and we were advised not to leave our houses.  This is why the eclipse wasn't all that impressive at our house; we'd spent most of the summer with smoke blotting out the sun, anyway. One of the biggest fires in the region was just northwest of where we'd reserved campsites and we didn't know until the very last minute if we'd be able to go, or if our friends would be game to join us. 

On Friday, the air at the campsite was only "unhealthy" (which is what it was in Missoula, anyway) so we decided to chance it. We arrived a day before everyone else, and decorated our campsites. 

Our luck held out, and all of our friends decided to join us.

Because severe fire restrictions were in place, we weren't allowed to have a campfire or even a grill with an open flame. This became a fun cooking challenge: how do you feed 19 people in the woods with no fire? Only by luck/chance, one of the sites I'd reserved had an electric outlet. I prepped all the ingredients for a taco bar in bags in the cooler, including pre-grilling and shredding a bunch of chicken, so when dinnertime rolled around, all I had to do was heat the chicken in a pot on a plug-in hotplate. It came together like a miracle with salsa on top.

For dessert, we couldn't have an frosted cake (it wouldn't travel well in 95-degree heat), we couldn't have ice cream (couldn't keep it frozen) and we couldn't do s'mores (no open fire). So I made a tray of brownies and let everyone make their own s'more sundae.

Instead of doing goodie bags, I bought a tie-dying kit and some dollar store bowls, and every kid got to make their own t-shirt as a memento of the weekend.

We did a ton of paddling on the lake:

Yeah, that's me. Your dad did it, so I had to.

Having your dad there was such an amazing gift. 

He rigged a rope up into a tree and let each kid have a turn to "blast off."

...And then, to make the weekend even more special, there was a guest appearance by Uncle Nate and Aunt Brynn:

Laney, it was truly like the entire universe pulled its act together to give us 24 hours of perfection in honor of your dad and your birthday. 

After the year we'd had, you deserved a weekend as awesome as you are. 

Love,

Mom

Thor Comes Home - Take One

Hey, y'all -

 Thor's leave got approved, and he was given the go-ahead to come home for two weeks. Mazar-I-Sharif to Bagram Airfield to Kuwait to Minneapolis to Missoula is probably not a very popular ticket, and it took him over a week just to get here (though the travel time didn't count against his two week leave). On the night he was supposed to arrive, I was a nervous wreck. Would he be different? Would I be different? Would we get along like we used to or would we spend the whole time getting to know each other again?  Typically, my emotions are in good shape and my hair is a mess. For Thor's arrival, I told my girlfriends, my brain was a tossed salad of anxiety but my hair decided to pull it together. Like it took pity on me and said "Eh, let's give her this." (That's me in the bathroom, trying to take deep, cleansing breaths).

I was all over the map in terms of how I felt about Thor's arrival. On one hand, I told him he might have to catch a cab, because I wasn't sure how I'd react to seeing him for the first time and I might start wailing in the middle of the airport. "Low key is the way to go!" I thought.  Then I'd wake up the next morning and think, "This is a BIG DEAL. I should call the local news and have them cover it. "Multi-camera coverage is the way to go!" I thought. 

His plane was scheduled to land at 10pm, so you kids spent the night with Grandma Sue and I went to get your dad at the airport. As he was landing, I texted him that he would need to meet me over in the little maintenance hallway away from the regular arrivals because I was barely holding it together. In the end, there was some happy crying and things went back to normal surprisingly fast and instead of wondering how I should document it, I decided instead to just live it. It was a little awkward and a lot joyous and I'll remember it forever.

The next morning, he got immediately back in the dad swing of things, making pancakes with Laney and taking us to the farmer's market. That's one of the things I hadn't done with him gone, because there were two of you and just one of me and holy hipster hell, that place is crowded. It's impossible to shop for produce while also keeping an eye on Hagen, who's likely to see an ear of corn and take a sharp right while he does a monologue on the history of maize in native cultures. 

Your dad came back super skinny, because Camp Marmal isn't known for its gourmet spread. But Grandma Sue hustled over with some homemade ice cream sandwiches and fixed him right up.

The solar eclipse was just a few days after he got home, so we all climbed on our roof for a family viewing.

One of the reasons Thor picked that two week window to come home was it coincided with Laney's 8th birthday. As part of our present to her, we gave her a little bedroom makeover.

On her actual birthday, she wanted to celebrate by taking two of her best friends to dinner at a Chinese restaurant, and then having a sleepover. Living next to launching drones and assorted ordnance for a year had probably prepared your dad just right for the average voice pitch of a gaggle of 3rd grade girls. Then they wanted to walk around the mall and pretend they were high schoolers and it was like a horrifying visit from the Ghost of Teenager Future. 

The girls got in their sleeping bags for their sleepover, but would NOT go to sleep. I did Warning #1 and then Warning #2 and told the girls I didn't want to have to come back. Then I remembered that one of great things about Thor being home - besides that I got to have a great romantic reunion with the love of my life - was that there was now another ADULT in the house, who could shoulder some of this responsibility. A glorious co-parent. So I told Thor, who was peacefully snoring through all the giggling next door, "The next time they make a racket, it's your turn to be bad cop." "Sure," he mumbled. At one o'clock in the damn morning, the girls decided to dance on the bed (I'm guessing) and kicked the wall separating our rooms. "OH, HELL NO!" I yelled. And though I had made Thor promise to take the next turn at parenting, I vaulted over him in the bed like one of those jesus lizards that runs across water, threw open Laney's door and announced. "I AM DONE. If I hear another peep out of this room, I'm throwing your butts in my car and YOU can explain to your mamas why you're standing on your porch in the middle of the night. LOOK ME IN THE FACE AND TELL ME YOU UNDERSTAND ME."

I woke up the next morning wondering if I'd been too scary, but by the next weekend Laney said they wanted to come back for another sleepover, so apparently it's harder to traumatize third graders than it used to be. 

Then it was time to get down to the business of planning Laney's real 8th Birthday Party weekend, and you know I don't do anything halfway. 

Tune in tomorrow to see how this turned out (No, really. I already wrote the post, so I mean it this time.)

Love,

Mom

How We Got By

Hey, y'all - 

I don't mean to suggest that our summer was just wall-to-wall fun. Your dad being gone cast a definite shadow on our lives. Most of the time, I was able to keep my head down and forge ahead and make the best of it and try not to think about it. That was a lot of meaningless cliches in one sentence, I know. What I'm trying to say is I did a pretty good job of pretending to be okay. People would ask me all the time how you two were holding up without Dad, and honestly I think it didn't affect you all that much, BUT that's only because I constantly tried to do the job of two people and I pretty much exhausted myself in the process.

Towards the end of summer, some friends invited us to join them on an overnight camping trip at the lake. By this point, I had gotten pretty good at loading paddle boards on the truck and rounding up outdoor supplies, but I hadn't attempted a camping trip. Somehow, in the middle of loading up tents and poles and sleeping bags, the reality that your dad was gone sorta hit me in the gut and I sat down on the kitchen floor and started sobbing. What Oprah refers to as "going into your ugly cry." I think there was something so depressing about loading up camping gear, because outdoor stuff is where your dad shines, and instead of sitting by the lake on a nice August day with his family, he was behind concertina wire on the other side of the world. He had missed almost an entire year of making memories with his family, and the unfairness of that washed over me as I sat on the floor. Also, I was feeling sorry for myself because loading up all that stuff was hard and I had no one to help me. The price of appearing competent all the time is that no one thinks you need help when really you're dying for it. 

But in other ways, life chugged along. 

Hagen's preschool made a paper chain to count down the days until Thor came home.

One evening, the two of you disappeared into the bathroom for about half an hour. I knew that silence probably equaled trouble, but when you're a single mom, you find yourself asking questions like, "If whatever they're doing requires me to repaint the entire bathroom when they're done, will it be worth it for half an hour of alone time right now? Answer: yes."

Turns out Laney had painted Hagen's entire body as a "poisonous wolf." She did not miss an inch of skin, and that's all I'm going to say about that. He looked just like that famous photo of artist Keith Haring. 

...but I got to eat an entire sandwich by myself and I didn't have to share and it was totally worth the effort it took to scrub off all that marker.

We filled our time with the business of everyday life as we counted down the days 'til we'd see your dad again. 

We still made time to hit the river with our friends to look for pirates and eels. No sightings to report, since neither is indigenous to Montana.

Laney discovered and fell in love with the show "Top Chef." On nights when it was on, Grandma Sue would join us for dinner and Laney had permission to go into the kitchen and whip up something for us to taste, just like the chefs on the show. Her creations always involved a flour tortilla and typically included a big dramatic smear of sauce. Sue and I ate a lot of microwaved chocolate sauce tortillas last summer while trying to think of a realistic-sounding critique: "It has a delightful chewiness. It's sweet, but not too sweet and the swoosh of sauce adds the perfect soupcon of artistry." Or some such nonsense. 

Ella the dog (who had promised me that she would live to see Thor's homecoming because I could not possibly deal with the passing of a family pet by myself) developed a benign fatty tumor on her front leg that had to be removed, which required several trips to the vet.

As a 12-year-old husky with arthritis and a leg tumor, and - it turns out! - Cushing's disease, Ella's days of being able to jump into the back of the Subaru are long over. I called your dad to report, "Well, the bad news is: your dog weighs 90 pounds. The good news is: your wife can squat 90 pounds." Ella and I had to give each other a little pep talk, then I'd bend down, wrap my arms around her front and back legs, and heave her fat butt into the car. 

She was supposed to wear the cone of shame for two weeks, but this is a dog who can figure out how to open bottled water, so no way was that going to happen. She found out that if she opened the sliding back door about a foot, she could jam her head in the opening and with a little brute force, that thing would pop right off. 

I fought her for a week, even trying to duct tape it, but on day 7, she got it off and then removed her own stitches. I sent a picture to the vet, who said, "Well, she did a great job. Looks perfect. Put some Neosporin on it and we'll call it a day."

Most nights, Hagen built himself a "nest" in the bottom of the closet next to the bed and would fall asleep there, while mumbling about the specifics of his "habitat." It was all about cheetahs for a while, and then there was a draco lizard phase, I think. Y'all, I don't know. I spent a lot of time saying "mmm hmmm...tell me more about that....Zzzzz..."

My friend Amy came to visit from California, and on the last day of her visit, because she had a late afternoon flight out, I suggested we go tubing on the river in the morning. We borrowed a two-person tube that was more or less an inflatable couch with a cooler hole in the middle. Laney joined us on her kid-sized paddle board. We were going to do a 3-mile float which normally takes a little over two hours. Lord have mercy, we got a third of the way and realized it had already been over an hour. The river wasn't moving nearly as fast as it had been just a few days before. And then it started to rain. Hard. There was one cloud in the sky and it was moving the same speed and direction as our stupid-as-hell couch tube, like our own personal storm front. I texted your dad in Afghanistan for tips on what to do, and he told me that statistically speaking, we probably wouldn't get hit by lightning, and we were probably safer staying in the middle of the river, away from the trees. Getting out wasn't really a possibility because there was a steep bank on both sides and nowhere for someone to come pick us up. Amy missing her flight was becoming a real possibility. So I tied Laney's board to the back of our tube, sat sideways so I'd be facing downriver, and paddled my butt off using Laney's kid paddle. I paddled us two miles. Couldn't move my arms the next day, but Amy made her flight and hopefully I showed Laney that panicking in the outdoors is never the way to go, and she has a mom who can solve problems while muttering some really, really bad words like a real sailor. Authenticity!

I probably wouldn't have made it through the summer (and the rest of the deployment) without the support of my girlfriends who rallied around whenever I needed them.

Around the middle of summer, we got word that Thor would be granted two weeks of leave. Glory hallelujah. He put in to take the two weeks surrounding Laney's birthday because we usually make quite a production out of that holiday, and because it would coincide with the first day of school. Right about the time I decided I couldn't take the separation any more, they issued him a plane ticket to come home.

Tomorrow on the blog, Thor comes home! (Cliffhanger.)

Love,
Mom