Trailer camping in the Jemez mountains

Our kids love to go camping! I don't personally LOVE love to camp, but since we got a tent trailer a couple of years ago, it's more fun and less messy. We spent last weekend in the Jemez, enjoying the stream, grass, wildflowers, meadows, and trees. (Sometimes I feel like such a terrible mom when my kids ask "Is this a forest, Mom?" That is what happens when you raise kids in the high desert.)

One really fun thing Matt does with the kids is that each time we go trailer-camping, he lets them paint a square on the trailer. It's so fun to see their ideas each time, and how they change. I think Zoe was painting the river and a beach, and Mattie was painting the mountain view.




Eventually, anyway. Pierce painted too but I have no pictures of that.


Matt was super excited when I got my camera out!


Pierce and Mattie demonstrated their fire-building talents. The fire was hardly out all weekend.


Pierce can't just take a nice picture, it's not possible right now.


I can't imagine where he gets it!




Matt and Mattie spent a little time experimenting with oil on canvas. The only problem - it was nowhere near dry by the time we had to leave! I think packing them up wet was definitely detrimental to their style.


After I took some nice pictures of Zoe (coming up), I got out my medium-sized camera body and taught her some things about photography. She pretty much only wanted to take pictures of ME. Since I almost never appear in photographs I thought I would post this charmer.


This was her favorite picture, the one of Pierce's foot, while he read a book in the tiny one-man tent that he set up himself. He never actually slept in this tent, he said this was "because of bears". He gave it a good 10 minute try one night, but no go.


Here I am, pretending to reach for that rock in the river.


The funniest thing that happened on the trip was when we were woken up at 6:30am by some very loud MOOOOO's. MOOOOOO! MOOOOOOOOOO! MOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! At first I thought it was a funny alarm on Mattie's ipod, because such things do sometimes happen. But we were camping on BLM land, and it was real true cows doing the MOOOOOOOOs. The came by again later so we could get a good daytime look at them.


Zoe took another few cow pictures. One of them evidently had very funny eyebrows, but it was a different black cow, not this one.




I have had these pictures in my head for a long time, and the beautiful little stream we were camping by in the Jemez was perfect. Zoe loves to wear dresses, and in fact had brought nothing but dresses to wear while camping. Her long blue dress was perfect for what I was thinking. She had so much fun getting really wet in the stream with me! It was a little cold but I convinced her that it was worth it.


(I did have to promise her a big print for her room.) Her favorite is the image above, where she is pretending to sleep. My favorite is the image below.








I love this because she couldn't resist the huge grin. It was just too fun to pretend to be interested in the stream or a flower or something.






We have been giggling ever since about how funny it was to get into a stream fully dressed!


She also helped me out with some dandelion blowing pictures. We loved all the wildflowers! I wish we had a place in town that looks just like this... but I guess this is why people get away to the mountains.






Nobody else was interested in getting their pictures taken, so I'm happy that Zoe wanted to be my model. And it was so nice to get to spend some time in nature with our family.

First day of school

I am always sooooooooo sad when summer gets over (or, when summer does NOT get over, but we start school anyway, grrrrrr, in kind of the beginning of August). BUT the kids' school is so awesome that I was much less sad this year than usual. Mattie (8th grade) and Pierce (5th grade) are in Miss Gael's class (together) again, along with most of their class from last year. It's a grade 4-8 class, which seems absolutely crazy, but their methods and curriculum are amazing and it really works. Zoe (2nd grade) is in Miss Jennifer's class again - last year it was a grade 1-2 class and this year it's a grade 2-3 class, with most of the same kids again also. They were all either happy or relatively happy to go.


This year Pierce's friend Dallin joined the class. This has not been without its problems - Dallin is very bright but doesn't love to do homework, and there is a LOT of homework. His mom is seeing improvements (I hope) but it's not easy. (writing this a couple of months later)


They always start the year with something really cool. They are studying rivers this year and Gael created the river "Sporadica" (it only flows when it rains or when the hose is turned on). The kids have since used Sporadica to study erosion, water eddies, and some other interesting things.


Frankly, Sporadica doesn't look like much, but I didn't stay to see the water actually flow.


No breaks at this school - homework on the first day. The kids were okay with that too (I'm sure they expected it).






"Mommy, now take a picture of me with these cool rocks!" I think these are Pierce's rocks from a Webelos meeting with our cubmaster, who has a really amazing rock collection and shared rocks with the boys.




We're ready for another great year!

Trip to Taos to celebrate our 19th anniversary

It's so crazy to me that we've been married 19 years! It has gone so fast. I don't know what we'll do when it's 20, but this year we did a great job of celebrating 19. We have some nice friends whose anniversary is at about the same time, and we switched off kids for the weekend. (The kids' verdict in the end was that we should spread it out a little and not do sequential weekends, but other than that I think they really liked it too!)

This wasn't quite the same weekend, but since the Santa Fe Opera is something we sometimes do on our anniversary, I'm including this here. We have (another) friend who performed with the opera this summer, and she called one day and said that she had tickets for us if we wanted them. Yes! We sat up on the balcony for a double feature of both Mozart's "The Impresario" and Stravinsky's "Le Rossingnol". Both very different operas but they put them together in a really neat way and we really enjoyed them.


For our actual anniversary, we left the kids with our friends like I said, and we drove up to Taos. We stayed at the Adobe and Pines Inn, which was beautiful and had great breakfast (my priority) and a hot tub (Matt's priority). It was great! We didn't take pictures but we should have. Our first morning we went to the famous San Francisco de Asis church and took some pictures.

The photography in this whole post is a mixture of phone pictures and pictures from my 5d, but my medium-distance zoom lens was in the shop, so I shot using either a cheap fisheye or my 100mm telephoto, neither of which was generally the lens I would have chosen.








The courtyard around the church has some great walls and doors and gates.


Next we went to the plaza and walked around. Taos has a very nice plaza, less pretentious than Santa Fe, with art and shopping. We went in this art gallery and I literally could not resist taking a picture of this painting. I guess this artist is rather famous, and some of his art was better than this, but this is the picture he uses to advertise. We saw some other artists' galleries that we liked much better, but I respected their no photography rules I guess.


Then we went to the Harwood Museum of Art. We've been there before, but this time I was severely underwhelmed. They had a lot of (imo) pretentious modern art that was very not to my style, like the room with 5 large paintings of light blue horizontal strips. Right. Anyway Matt liked some of this guy's sculptures so we took pictures to remember them.








We also saw other galleries that we really liked, like the artist Inger Jirby. We actually talked to her for quite awhile - she was intense (like you might expect) and has a lot of good work. Then we walked around the plaza some more. Matt likes to take pictures of interesting ideas that he might like to remember for future projects, so we have some pictures like that here.












There is this really cool toy store on the plaza called Twirl - they have an amazing back yard play place that we took the kids to several years ago when we last went to Taos.


With a fountain for kid-splashing. Very pretty.


Then we drove out to the Rio Grande gorge. It's very deep and you walk out on this bridge to look over. Matt has a bit of a fear of heights, which I do not share, so I was amused when the big trucks would drive on the bridge and make it vibrate a bit. That wasn't his favorite part. And to give him credit, he is always willing to make himself uncomfortable with heights by going on high bridges and looking over, so it doesn't slow him down at all.






It's 660 feet down, pretty far.










On the other side of the river is the Earthship community that Matt really likes to visit. The Earthships are very creative and visually appealing.


Matt got his inspiration for the bottle wall that he built in our yard here. (Only his is cooler - I need to get a nice picture of it!)


We paid to go in their display model and take the self-guided tour.


The people are pretty kooky, but they have some great ideas about building. They like to include a greenhouse in their homes and these have a watering system that Matt wanted to remember.


These face the south so it's warm in the winter. And it's like a sunroom, you can pull down shades for the summer time.




Look at all those bottles. It looks like the inside of the city recycle bin!










The new model they're building is pretty amazing.


Then we drove back to town and had a really delicious dinner at the same plaza with the San Francisco de Asis church. Mmmmmm. The sunset was gorgeous.




The only picture we took of the bed & breakfast we stayed at - this was the door to our room. We liked it so well that Matt came home and painted our shed door to look like this. I love it!


The next morning we ate our delicious breakfast and went to church in town. Then we drove home on the high road, which we'd never taken before. It was as beautiful as people say! We stopped along the way at a potential hike, which we actually never took, but we sat by the river and enjoyed it for quite awhile.


















Farther down the high road was another LDS church that I guess we could have gone to if we'd seen it on the map. It's a trailer church!




I can't remember where this church was - I think it was Truchas but I'm not sure.










And we stopped in Chimayo to see the famous Santuario de Chimayo church (we've been here once before also, but it was Easter weekend when a million other people come too). This time we waited in line and went in the church. Matt took a sack of holy dirt. (It miraculously never runs out, and is reported to have healing powers.) More info here: http://www.elsantuariodechimayo.us/








There was a gallery across the street with this cool art (which we were not supposed to photograph) that used some kind of etching process.




And there was another church across the plaza that was also very interesting. I think Matt liked the iron work here.


It is a children's chapel.




We were not supposed to take pictures inside but Matt did (not me!) :)






As we continued south, we ran into this great rainstorm. I tried a bunch of times to get a picture of the lightning, but it's not easy to do out a car window.


Thanks so much to Matt for the really great trip! I loved it! It was so nice to get away and spend some time together, especially in such a nice place.