Camping With Kids: Why It’s Worth It

For the past decade a group of family and close friends have trekked up North each summer into giant redwood territory near Eureka to camp for a few days along the Eel River. When it all started, it was a bunch of young adults, for the most part untethered and able to keep it simple. As the years have passed, many of us have gotten hitched and had kids, which has expanded the group size as well as the packing list!

This year, it took both Backtire and I spending two full days and evenings packing, shopping, and prepping, and it was only that fast because we’ve done this trip before and were working off a pretty well developed packing list. Then there was one day of loading the truck, driving seven hours, and unloading it to make camp and another day reversing that on the way out but with additional time driving because it was horrible-Sunday-everyone-else-is-returning-from-having-fun-too traffic. Plus, at least a full day’s worth of unloading the truck at home, unpacking, doing laundry, cleaning pots and pans, and putting everything away. Although that full “day” was actually spread out across the better part of a week because we were back to work and couldn’t devote much time to it each each day.

So, let’s see… that adds up to five or more days of pre- and post- doings so that we could spend three nights and essentially two full days camping as a family.

And I’m not even counting the mental thinking and planning and listing that went on in the weeks before we started physically packing or the flurry of last-minute email coordination between us and our fellow campers.

And let’s not forget that once we started our brief camping trip we spent a good chunk of each day setting up and tearing down and packing and unpacking something or other for each meal or hike or trip to the river we did. All of which involved more back/shoulder/wrist-straining schlepping than normal because we brought an immobile 3 month old baby and her necessary accoutrements with us.

All told you’ve gotta admit there was a pretty high work to play ratio here! And you know what? It was all worth it! Here’s why:

•Lying on the ground with your 5-year old and looking up to see the tops of giant redwood trees swaying in the wind.

•Waking up to the sound of kids squealing because they found banana slugs crawling all over the coolers.

•Catching tadpoles with our bare hands.

•Hours and hours and hours without a single “I’m bored” as kids busy themselves playing endless imaginary games with sticks, rocks, and leaves.

•Adults and kids together playing “night soccer” with headlamps.

•Learning how to build a fire and then staying up way past your bedtime listening to the guitar and singing together around the campfire.

•Crunching through pine needles on your bike.

•Feeling the current of the river tugging on your legs as you cross it holding Daddy’s hand.

•The whole family snuggled up in the tent together, keeping each other warm.

•Water gun fights with your grandparents in the heat of the afternoon.

•20 people whooping in the woods as they play a crazy game of catch with baggies full of milk, sugar, fruit, ice, and rock salt and then laughing with delight as they enjoy eating the ice cream they just made.

•Making new friends and re-connecting with old ones.

•Sharing responsibilities and taking care of each other, lending and borrowing, helping out, taking turns, sharing a treat.

•Standing with your family in the forest as you leave the empty campground for one last moment before heading home. Hearing only the rustling of leaves as the breeze blows through them. Hugs and kisses and sighs of contentment.

Teaching Evolution to Children

Last night, Turtle was talking to his dad about the dinosaurs in the puzzle he was piecing together and mentioned that the T-Rex was a “bad guy”. Daddy corrected him pointing out that just because an animal is a meat-eater, that doesn’t make it a bad guy, that’s just how it needs to eat. Turtle clarified saying the reason it was a bad guy was that it ate people.

To which both of us quickly jumped in to remind him that dinosaurs and people never lived at the same time on earth.* I said something to the effect of “a long time after most of the dinosaurs were extinct, then humans came to earth” and the instant those words left my mouth, I regretted that last clause.

Predictably it led to Turtle asking “well, how did humans come to the earth, then?” Crap! I knew better than to use the phrase “came to”- what was I thinking! To make it worse, Backtire jumps in with a sarcastic “well, the aliens dropped off the humans” and I give him the evil eye because this is going to be a tough enough concept to explain to an almost 5-year old with out adding sarcasm about other people’s misconceptions and crazy notions into the mix.

So, I had to explain that Daddy was joking about the aliens thing and apologize for my mistake and backtrack into the explanation that there was an ancient group of animals who changed a little over time, then changed a little more, more, more, more until they became humans. He already knows that this is how birds came about from their dinosaur ancestors, so the analogy would have made sense to him.

Then he says “oh yeah, so gorillas changed into humans”. Aack! No! I started over, explaining that there was an ancient primate that was similar to monkeys and apes, but not the same, and some of them changed and changed and eventually became gorillas, while others changed and changed and eventually became chimps, and others monkeys, and others humans.

After that, we had to head out to dinner, but I kept thinking about this conversation, as a parent and an educator. Evolution is notoriously tough for laypeople to understand and there are some very real cognitive barriers (not to mention the emotional and cultural ones) that prevent people from truly grasping it easily. One is that it deals with deep time, which in and of itself is nearly impossible for most people to conceptualize. Another is that it is a highly complex phenomenon, each new piece you learn leads to more questions and details and variables to consider, so although you can attempt so simplify evolution and explain it to people of all ages and educational backgrounds, a true understanding of it doesn’t come until after much study.

Although I understand evolution well and have been careful to avoid explaining nature in magical or so-grossly-oversimplified-that-they-become-incorrect ways, he still leapt to conclusions that represent some of the most common misconceptions held by laypeople about evolution all on his own. Namely, that humans and dinosaurs lived together and that monkeys and apes turned into humans.

This happened in my living room and I am a parent who has invested a lot of energy into educating myself about evolution, educating my students about evolution, and working with other scientists and educators to attempt to address the difficulties encountered by the public and students when trying to understand evolution.

What’s a less evolution-involved parent to do? Seek out appropriate resources for helping you talk about the realities of how nature works with your young children. Visit Charlie’s Playhouse and recommend it as a resource to your child’s teachers. They’ve got learning resources and a list of approved and recommended books for all ages. This is important because there is a lot of quackery and incorrect stuff out there, so you can’t just Google “evolution books for kids”- the list you get back won’t have been vetted for accuracy.

Educate yourself. When’s the last time you took a biology class? Who knows what the quality of your learning was in the first place, how much you've retained, and how outdated that information is at this point? Get the facts. How?

Go to Berkeley’s Understanding Evolution site, which can serve as a sort of refresher Evo 101 course for you and has a whole section dedicated to resources for teachers you can recommend to teachers you know.

Visit the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History’s Human Evolution site with your kids. There are beautiful photos, fossils, timelines, videos, maps, and more to help you understand and explain our origins. Even better, plan a visit to the exhibit with your family!

Want to go deeper into current evolution research? Try NESCent.

Want updates on efforts to ensure quality evolution education in public schools? Head to NCSE.

Good luck with you & your child's evolving understanding of evolution!

(*Dinosaurs lived between 250 & 65 million years ago, when most of the species went extinct. It’s important not to imply and simply not true that all dinosaurs went extinct. Some species remained, evolving over time to become modern birds. This is one of the first misconceptions children hear from us about ancient life and evolution.)

I Vote for Extinction

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Front Yard Sorbet

For the past two years, I've enjoyed the deep red foliage and gorgeous white-pink blossoms of the plum tree in our front yard while merely stepping over the sticky stain blobs of the tiny plums it drops on the sidewalk. Never having an edible fruit tree before, I think we subconsciously assumed the plums were sour, toxic, or bad in some way. But this summer, since we've been in the rhythm of checking our garden for harvest-ready peas and tomatoes each day, I finally looked at the plum tree and really SAW the plums before they made it to the sidewalk and it dawned on me that we had no reason to believe the fruits were bad and had never even tested them.

I plucked just one off a branch, ate it, and waited around for a few hours ready to dial 911 if I started feeling poisoned or something. It was really juicy and sweet and I didn't die, so I commenced with Googling and unofficially identified that we are the owners of a "cherry plum" tree. Several websites dismissed these trees warning that cherry plums are not worth harvesting as they aren't much bigger than a cherry and their fruit clings to the pits. But I couldn't pass up the chance to pick and eat fruit with Turtle in our very own yard!

We got out the 6 foot ladder and took turns climbing up to reach the plums that we could. Unfortunately, many of them were still beyond my reach, so I would need some serious equipment if I ever really wanted to harvest them all. And many of them were already half eaten or fermented, bursting apart as we touched them. But eventually we had 20 or so good ones that we kept.

Since they were all pretty ripe and wouldn't last long and we didn't want to eat 20 plums that day, I decided we should make something out of them. Sorbet seemed summery and easy enough, so we looked at a few online recipes, rinsed the plums, and started to de-pit them.

Perhaps there exists some awesome technique or tool used for pitting cherry plums neatly. If so, please let me know. I just kind of ended up hacking them open with knives and then they'd nearly explode into a pulpy mess all over the cutting board. There was a lot of skin and juice all over the place and not much "meat" and it was really hard to get the meat off the pit. After trying a few different things, the easiest was to just hold a plum over a bowl and use my fingernails to kind of pull the pit out and just drop whatever was left behind into the bowl as juice dribbled down my arms. Very messy business and I was starting to understand the websites that said cherry plums aren't worth putting your energy into!

Here you can see what pitting 20 cherry plums gave us- less than a cup of juice and skins. I can't imagine how much work and mess it would have been to try to make a true quantity of sorbet.
Then we remembered that we had some leftover watermelon in the fridge, so we chopped that up and added it to bulk up our mixture. That went into a blender and then was strained to get the skins and seeds out. After straining, you can see that we only ended up with a little over a cup of stuff.

Meanwhile, I prepared a 1:1 sugar to water syrup on the stove. 1 cup sugar dissolved into 1 cup water allowed to boil for 30 seconds together. We added that directly to the fruit mixture. So, it ended up being 1 cup syrup to 1 cup fruit. Then a squirt of lemon juice, stirred it up, and put it in a container in the freezer. I have never made sorbet before. I have no idea if we needed the lemon juice, but most sorbet recipes had it. I have no idea if my ratio of syrup to fruit was right, because all of the recipes dealt with much larger quantities of fruit, used different ratios than each other, or said add syrup to taste. I had no idea if mixing watermelon and plum was a good idea and if our sorbet would taste any good at all, but we had fun making it, so I was happy with the experience.

The next day, we took out our nearly frozen solid chunk of sorbet and broke it up with a fork to make it fluffy, then put it back in the freezer for a couple hours. It looked gorgeous when we took it out after dinner:

Now, I'm no gourmet. It probably had too many ice crystals and maybe the sugar ratio wasn't quite right and so on and so forth. But it was really really yummy. Seriously yummy! Everyone loved it!

It was a lot of work and mess for a tiny bit of dessert, but it was even sweeter because we had used the fruits from our own tree and made it ourselves!

How My Garden Made Me Sick

Yesterday, I learned what bolting is.

Bolting: What my stomach contents wanted to do all afternoon and last night after eating a big salad for lunch made from the romaine I've been growing the backyard this summer.

We planted 4 each of romaine and red leaf lettuce from seedlings this spring for the first time and they both did beautifully, continuously producing scrumptuously crisp and tasty leaves for us to eat for the past month or so. Having no real experience with lettuce, I wasn't sure if I should cut a whole head and bring it in to the kitchen- would that kill the plant, would it resprout? So, I would just keep tearing only the leaves I needed for the day off the bottom of the head in the hopes that the center would continue producing. That plan seemed to work and I had fresh lettuce for sandwiches and salad every day for a long time. I signed up for the green salad at all the potlucks and we couldn't even begin to consume all of the lettuce we were producing with our little family of 3, one of whom won't eat lettuce.



Then a couple weeks ago I noticed that the romaine was suddenly growing tall instead of just bushy. It shot up a long stem between each set of leaves and kept stretching out its height. I had no idea what that meant but figured it signaled that the lettuce was moving on to some new phase of life and maybe wouldn't produce much longer. But I kept eating it and it tasted fine. Then the red leaf shot up flowers and when I mentioned it to friends they said "yeah, you can't let the lettuce go to seed". But no one could actually tell me why when I asked. So, I chopped off the flower stalk in the hopes that I could force the lettuce to keep producing leaves and kept eating it.

Yesterday I was thinking about how the lettuce plants were probably ready to reproduce and would soon stop making new leaves and would die, so I should enjoy them while I can, so I made this big salad for lunch from the romaine, which looked closer to death than the red leaf. AFTER I enjoyed my salad, I decided to finally look this up and try to understand more about growing lettuce. It was only after some searching and many more unexplained "you shouldn't let the lettuce go to seed" statements, that I finally found out what was going on.

It turns out that my lettuce has been bolting- that's the name for when it shoots up and puts out flowers to make seed. It's like it's trying to "leave" your garden. And that lettuce will naturally bolt after some time and you can't stop or reverse it, maybe just slow it down a little by cutting off its flowers like I did. And, more importantly, that as it bolts, it will start producing bitter compounds in the leaves and becomes inedible. And that sometimes it will bolt early if it's under stress- if it becomes too hot, too dry, too crowded. And that if you let it go to seed, you'll end up with seeds that you wouldn't want to plant because they have a tendency to bolt early or you'll end up with seeds scattered in your soil that will become lettuce weeds in other areas of your garden plot. And you shouldn't put the seeds in your compost for the same reason. And that people spend a lot of energy cultivating and taking care of strains of lettuce that last as long as possible before bolting and those are the best seeds to buy.

Well, it was nice to learn about how to garden lettuce after I had already gardened it. And really good to know about the bitter compounds after I had that big salad because then when an hour or so later I started feeling nauseated and that went on all day and all night, at least I knew why! I'm pretty sure I toxified myself slightly yesterday with my homegrown bolted romaine lettuce. But that's what I call hands-on learning!

We unceremoniously pulled all the lettuce up last night and plopped it in the compost pile. Moving on to other garden adventures...

The Sheer Ridiculousness of our Response to Environmental Disaster

This is really funny and really sad and really clever and really tragic and I just don't even know how to feel about it! I love the video and hate the reality. I'm having a hard time even facing what's going on with the bp spill.

I wish I didn't know what I do about the importance of wetlands, about marine ecosystems, about the persistence of crude oil, about how the effects of Valdez still aren't over and that this is potentially thousands of times worse, about all of the ramifications of our dependence on oil and the plastics, pharmaceuticals, pesticides, and other petrochemicals made from it, about how volunteers washing birds with dishsoap makes for nice news but is pointless because their habitat is gone or toxic enough to impact generations of their population, about how toxins biomagnify and move up the food chain, about how we don't even hear of the hundreds of marine mammals who've been killed, about how we cannot even begin to predict what all of the fallout will be from this spill in terms of lives cost, biodiversity losses, marine fishery collapse, impacts on food supply, the economy, the aesthetics of the region, the health impacts of rescue workers exposing themselves to toxic oil and its vapors for weeks on end...

It's CRUSHINGLY depressing. I have to not pay attention or my outrage and feelings of hopelessness will consume me. I have to just keep thinking about what I can do to play my part in creating the world I want to live in and I want my son to live in, moving forward from here...

What's In Season?

(You can buy this vegetannual poster here.) 

The Vegetannual

I am currently relishing in reading Barbara Kingsolver's book, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. Today I sat in the park at toddler hour (10 am) without my toddler, drinking my chai, and reading about the mythical, metaphorical plant Kingsolver invented, the vegetannual. She invented this plant to help the horticulturally challenged have a handy dandy way of understanding which produce is in season throughout the year and why.

Somehow I have gained the knowledge that cherries and peaches are summer fruits and cranberries are in season in winter, I think? Winter is definitely squash, or is that fall? and a mango in January isn't normal. But I'm kind of shaky on the whole thing because for as long as I have been in charge of grocery shopping, I have gone to supermarkets that feature all produce almost all year round. I haven't gardened much, but I've tried a couple of times and remember that seed packets have maps and charts on the back telling you where things will grow and when to plant them. I know my old neighbors cucumbers were out last July. But, uh...okay that's about it for me.

Kingsolver reminds us that most of the produce we enjoy are annual crops of flowering plants. All flowering plants share a life cycle abbreviated as: winter seeds lying in ground waiting, spring sprout, shoots, leaves, buds, flowers, pollinate, fruits, store extra energy as tuber, root, or bulb, seeds lie dormant until it starts over again next spring. All of the annual plants are growing roughly across the same growing season between frosts, but since we eat different parts of different plants, different produce items will be in season at different times. So, depending of course on latitude and climate and length of season for the particulars, the basic sequence of produce that is in season in any given place will follow that life cycle. Think about it this way: lettuces are leaves, peaches are fruit, beets are tubers. Meaning, lettuce will be in season first in the spring, peaches next in the summer, and beets toward the very end of the growing season in late fall. Isn't this brilliant?! Something I can understand and easily remember.

Kingsolver's explanation is much more award winning author than mine, so I invite you to read an article adapted from her book called "Stalking the Vegetannual".

Think Globally, Eat Locally

Now all this talk of in season, out of season is related, of course, to the travels of our food. You can't eat an out of season cherry unless it is in season somewhere else in the world at that moment, which means that someone is shipping it across great distances to you.

Some years ago, I became more aware of the distances that foods travel and the ecological impact that has and I began to read the signs and stickers at the grocery store that told me where my grapes and bananas were coming from. A handful of times I even decided not to buy something because it came from too far away and lately I've tried looking for locally produced labels when I have a choice. But most of the time, I just buy what we're in the mood for, the recipe calls for, or what strikes my fancy when I see it. And although I've been to the farmer's market on and off over the years, it has been more of a fun weekend outing than a serious way of providing food for my household. For sure we are snacking on out of season crude oil dependent tropical transports most of the time and giving it no regard.

Kingsolver's book asks the reader to give some regard to this. I will probably look further into the Slow Food Movement and groups like Locavores. I might revisit the idea of joining a local CSA. I've looked into it several times, but never taken the step. I might at the very least try to frequent the farmer's market more often. I might stop buying out of season foods and try to find recipes for the in season ones. But, herein lies the rub for me...

I believe in this issue and agree with it, but being non passionate about gardening, food shopping, meal planning, cooking, and all things related, I'm not finding an inner fire to get me actually making big changes on this one. And I fear that plus becoming used to being able to get all produce all the time is going to make it hard for a lot of us to do the right thing when it comes to sticking with local food.

Change takes time, though. So, at least understanding the vegetannual and thinking about it when I shop is a good first step!

Further Food For Thought

If our historical relationship to food and the ecological impact of agriculture interest you, I also recommend reading anything written by Michael Pollan or Vandana Shiva.

Underwater Astonishments

I have been meaning to share this for a while. This is just one of the amazing TED talks that I've been enjoying. Be prepared to be wowed by nature!

David Gallo shows jaw-dropping footage of amazing sea creatures, including a color-shifting cuttlefish, a perfectly camouflaged octopus, and a Times Square's worth of neon light displays from fish who live in the blackest depths of the ocean.

Taking Time to Stop and Find the Roses

Turtle & I were exploring our new front yard when he discovered a humble white garden rose on the underside of a nondescript shrub. "oooooooooh!" he intoned, with much dramatic enthusiasm, "Mommy, I found it! Look I found it. White flower!" He beamed up at me proudly from his crouch in front of the shrub. I held the rose stem between my thumb and forefinger and invited him to rub the soft petals between his. He asked permission to hold the bloom, as if it were a priceless fragile heirloom. He delicately reached behind it to pinch its stem. The look on his face blew me away- astonishment, pride, joy- all over finding this pedestrian flower.

I never noticed it was there. I've never been a fan of that particular type of flower. They do nothing for me with their crude asymmetry and layers of ruffly, often stained and tattered petals. Give me a passionflower, a tiger lily, an orchid. Something stunning, structured, bold.

And the naiveté of his pride of discovery. Like Columbus' "discovery" of the Americas. Silly!

But it's these moments that help me get it - how people talk about seeing the world renewed through your children's eyes. How and when did I become a flower snob? I always thought of myself as a nature lover, but when is the last time I crouched down and allowed myself to "discover" something that's been right in front of my busily-speeding-by-on-my-way-to-the-next-task eyes? And to take pleasure in the discovery instead of ignoring new blossoms as no more than the backdrop of my workaday life.