Florence and Newport

In retrospect, we should probably have stayed one night in Newport and one night in Florence. The two cities are an hour apart with a lot of features in between. However we chose to spend two nights in Florence and backtrack to Newport the following day.

Florence isn't nearly as pretty as its Italian namesake (which probably comes as no surprise), but the old part of town, near the Siuslaw river and bridge is lovely. We ate there our first night at an Italian called 1285 Restobar. There was no kid's menu, but my daughter and I shared a pizza (which would have comfortably served three of us... We boxed half of it) and my son had a half portion of spaghetti and garlic bread.

Norfolk has mermaid sculptures; Florence has sea lions.

As we were unlikely to see wild sea otters on this trip, I had decided to go to Newport's Oregon Coast Aquarium which had a sea otter exhibit. This made for a great morning. It wasn't too big, and it was easy to get from any one exhibit to the other in just a few minutes, which made attending feedings and shows very easy. We entered at 10am, caught the sea otter feeding at 10:30, the sea lion feeding at 11am and the pelican presentation at 11:30, by which time we had seen all of the aquarium in between scheduled events. (We could have taken more time over it, but we were on a time constraint.)

Sea Otter

The glass in the shark tunnel was being cleaned.

We had gone for the sea otters, but my daughter was delighted by the aviary where we could finally see tufted puffins and horned puffins up close. Even better was the seal who was pressing up against the glass window of her exhibit. Her keeper told us her name was Boots, and she was moulting which made her itchy. She was going to the glass to encourage people to scratch her, getting some kind of psychosomatic relief from the motion. Needless to say, the kids adored the interaction.

Tufted Puffin

Boots

Personally, I preferred the abalone in the touch tank. I had seen polished abalone shells before, but never a live one. I was squeamish up until the keeper told us that if you let them suck on your finger, it feels like a cat's tongue, at which point I had to try it. It does, and they get quite a grip with those 'kisses'. In a weird way, it was kind of adorable. Abalone are now my favourite shellfish.

Hot abalone action.

After this, we went to Nana's Irish Pub in the Nye Beach area of Newport (very pretty area... would have loved to spend more time exploring.) The pub did a great all day breakfast with proper sausages and bacon, but be warned, the beans are Bush so they're sweeter than the traditional Heinz. The kids' menu was good value and they had a box of books for kids to read while waiting.

On our way to the pub we passed Coast Park (next to Nye Beach Montessori School!) and were immediately taken by the playground. While my husband paid for lunch, the kids and I walked back up the hill to the playground so that we could take fifteen of our precious minutes for this slide:

All four of us went down at least once. Totally worth it.

Diversion done, we rushed back to the car and headed to Cape Perpetua to see Thor's Well. This is one of two places on this Buzzfeed list that we planned our trip around, and as it was best seen at high tide, we wanted to get there for high tide.

One problem, I had checked the tides for Florence, which had high tide at about 2:10pm. At the Cape Perpetua visitor centre, where the short trail to Thor's Well starts (follow the signs for Spouting Horn), high tide was 1:42pm. We ended up missing it by almost two hours.

So we screwed up, but it was a windy day and the well was still fascinating. We didn't get to see the effect of the ocean apparently draining into it, but we were able to get right up to the well and watch the water surge and ebb in relative safety.

Draining between waves

And full! We could see why this place was dangerous at high tide.

Starfish inside the well.

My camera ran out of battery, but that whole section of rocks is a lot of fun, there was a shelf of sand to play on and an entire fallen tree turned driftwood, which we climbed via its root system. On our way back, we took another exit off the trail onto a different rock shelf known for its tidepools and found thousands of tadpoles in one large pool and dozens of purple sea urchins in another. Great fun to scramble around--very reminiscent of my childhood Cornish beach visits but with Oregon's dramatic touch--but wear shoes with durable soles. The rocks are sharp and rough!

Anemones in a rock pool next to Thor's Well.

If money were no object, we would have liked to have done the Sea Lion Caves, but we had been able to watch sea lions in Astoria and as we had done the aquarium that day, the Sea Lion Caves seemed redundant considering the price of entry. They do come highly recommended though.

Instead we returned to Florence which marks a shift in the coastal geography from rocks to sand dunes. Towering sand dunes. We rented a sandboard and took ourselves to Honeyman State Park--this was our Father's Day activity.

Sandboarding proved a little easier than I expected, as in we were all able to get ourselves up and actually pick up some speed for maybe ten seconds before falling over. This was interspersed with descents where we start sliding and immediately fall on our backsides, but we were still getting a lot of fun out of it--not bad when boards can be rented for $10-$16! We rented a small board, and the kids did better than the adults--our five year old loved it!

This may be the closest I ever come to looking like an action hero.

We spent much longer than we intended sandboarding, but dinner for the kids was McDonalds and a Play Place while I did laundry at the hotel. My husband and I then shared the leftover Pizza while watching Game of Thrones (and praying the kids--sleeping in the same room--wouldn't wake up mid-gore.)

The North Oregon Coastline

We left Astoria to drive south down the coastline. Our first stop was Seaside, which proved to be a resort town closer to what we were familiar with, with a boardwalk and tatty shops. We were partly there on our Lewis and Clark trail though, as this was where their Corps of Discovery had made salt for their winter, and there's a statue of them there.

Detail of Clark's dog, Seaman.

 As it happened, we passed through on a Saturday morning when some Soccer in the Sand event was going on, so the beach was heaving. We played on the swings for a little before heading back into town for a go on the carousel at Seaside Carousel Mall.

Next door to the carousel was a salt water taffy outlet, with 170 flavours, so we each picked out a bag of that before heading on to Cannon Beach. Depending on your interests, this was the beach where Lewis and Clark (and Sacagawea) came to see a dead whale... or this is the beach from The Goonies.

Looking south

Haystack Rock

Looking north to Tillamook Head

The other attraction of Cannon Beach for us was that Haystack Rock was a nesting place for crested puffins--my daughter is a big fan of the animated series, Puffin Rock. Unfortunately, the tide was too high for us to explore the rocks and pools surrounding Haystack Rock, but I found somebody who could tell me how to identify the puffins as they flew around it. Unlike seagulls who wheel and glide, the puffins are smaller birds who flap their wings very fast. (The same applies to Murres, but they have white bellies while the puffins are mostly black.) My efforts at puffin photography sadly left much to be desired.

The orange spots are the feet!

From Cannon Beach, we drove down to Tillamook, passing the Oregon Coast Railway as we did so--we saw the steam train and enough of the track to wish we had had the time to try it out. But we didn't, so we carried onto the Tillamook Cheese Factory where we had lunch. Afterwards, we toured the factory (this is free, but there is no way anybody gets out of there without cheese and/or ice cream), which the kids found hypnotising. Massive blocks of cheese, conveyor belts and strange machines... They could have watched it for much longer.

We had a hotel booked in Florence, so we had a long drive to get through after lunch--all on the 101, the Pacific Coast Scenic Byway, which really is stunning. We broke it up taking the Otter Crest Loop, just south of Depoe. We stopped at Cape Foulweather (really!), with its Lookout Gift Shop. I had half hoped that perhaps there might be sea otters at Otter Crest, but Oregon still doesn't have any resident colonies. However, a group of excited people pointed out to us some irregularly breaking waves and puffs of spray that were actually a grey whale and her calf.

I had considered whale-spotting too ambitious to make it one of my goals for this trip, so this was a real delight. Aside from captive orcas, these are the first whales I've ever seen.

Further down Otter Crest Loop, we pulled off to view the Devil's Punch Bowl. We have seen the Devil's Frying Pan, down in Cadgwith, UK, so it felt appropriate to view more of Satan's kitchenware. (Though we would pass up the Devil's Churn between Newport and Florence.)

The Devil's Punch Bowl

From there, we headed on to Newport and Florence, but that's going to wait for a separate entry.

Astoria

We arrived in Astoria late afternoon--or evening time, as far as our body clocks were concerned.

From our hotel, we had two conflicting goals: I could hear the sound of sea lions from the nearby docks and wanted to go and see them; the kids had spotted a playground up the hill. In the end, my husband took the kids to the playground while I went to take pictures of sea lions. 

We ate dinner at the Ship Inn because it had a British selection of dishes on the menu. This was fine, if lacking in presentation. My bangers and mash came with the onion gravy piled on the sausages, while the mash was kept separated in a little bowl. To get to the Ship Inn from our hotel, the Comfort Suites, we walked two miles along the river walk. This is lovely, and it runs alongside the old fashioned trolley tracks, which gives the kids a bit of extra interest, while my husband and I were fascinated by the very British-feeling flora of brambles and foxgloves. Unfortunately, our kids were too jet lagged and out of sorts to appreciate it, and we had to more or less drag them the last mile. On the way back, we promised them a stop at an ice cream place if they were happy, and that worked a treat. 

The following morning, we all woke up East Coast time and were kept awake by the barking sea lions. At 5:30, I officially gave up and took the kids down to the hotel pool. Afterwards, we had breakfast and my husband went for a run while the kids decided that now they wanted to see the sea lions, so I took them down the pier to watch them jostle for space and yell at each other--the sea lions, not the kids. Well, mostly not the kids.

 A woman from the Sea Lion Defense Brigade (there is a contentious relationship between the sea lions and fishermen in Astoria) told us that these were all young males who had not yet gone south to mate.  On our way back, we stopped in the breakfast room for hot chocolate, and it was here my daughter managed to lose both her jacket and cardigan--the only long-sleeved articles of clothing she had. 

That made for a rather chilly visit to Fort Clatsop, where Lewis and Clark had spent the winter before returning back across the United States to report their findings to Thomas Jefferson. We had seen the Lewis and Clark trail sites when we were in Great Falls, Montana, so we are making a point of seeing where they reached the goal of their journey: the Pacific Ocean. However, it was too cold and wet to linger at Fort Clatsop, which seemed like it would benefit from more exploration. Thankfully, when we returned, the cardigan and jacket had been handed in at the hotel's front desk.

Many films have been shot at Astoria, most famously The Goonies, and the Goonies' house was just up the hill from our hotel. It's one of a group of houses up a private drive and tourists aren't permitted to go up and take pictures these days, but it's visible from below.

Back in the hotel room, we watched the opening sequence of the Goonies on the iPad, then went to get lunch from the Astoria Coffeehouse (and Goonies Shop) which we ate in the playground from the day before. As it turned out the playground was at the school used for Kindergarten Cop. (School was out for the summer, so the playground was open to the public.) 

On the way back, we found a baseball in the brambles next to the baseball diamond. We were lacking a bat, but that didn't stop the kids improvising a game anyway--which resulted in my daughter leaving her cardigan behind again. 

Duly inspired by our surroundings, we went to the Oregon Film Museum, which is housed in the old County Jail, the location of the Fratelli's jailbreak at the start of the Goonies. Their getaway car is on display, parked next to the entrance.

This is a very small museum, but very fun. Lots of Goonies' memorabilia, but the real highlight is the movie set area where you can shoot your own scenes in the getaway car, or at the hotel of the Shining. You get five 'takes' and these are then emailed to the address of your choosing.

Just across the road is the Flavel Museum, where Mikey's father works in The Goonies, though the kids were more impressed with the street itself (8th street) which takes you up a surprisingly steep hill.

As the Film Museum hadn't taken long, we headed up to Astoria Column, which stands on the hill above Astoria and offers incredible views of the entire area. It's a beautiful monument, in and of itself, but what really elevated (no pun intended) this experience was the giftshop's gimmick of selling flimsy balsa-wood gliders for $1 which you can then fly off the top of the column. (Allegedly, the wood breaks down into mulch in no time, so this isn't as environmentally hazardous as it sounds.) The spiral staircase up to the top was not for the fainthearted!

With this done, and half the afternoon still stretching before us, we retrieved my daughter's cardigan for the second time and decided to drive across the Astoria-Megler Bridge to Washington and Cape Disappointment--where Lewis and Clark actually reached the Pacific before deciding they'd rather spend the winter in Oregon (though the Cape got its name from a trader some years earlier). Appropriately, the Lewis and Clark interpretive center was closed, due to open the next day, so we missed out on the history lesson, though we took a very pretty (and very steep) half mile walk to the lighthouse.

Afterwards, we had dinner at the Wet Dog Cafe, which we had passed on our walk the evening before. We went purely on the basis that we liked the name, but it turned out to be a brilliant place. Great food, better theming, and one of the best kids' menus I've seen (as well as the expected colour/activity sheet, there was a scavenger hunt to find random things in the decor. Oh, and a good selection of food.) Plus an obsession with beer--most of the desserts revolved around beer. Including a variety of beer ice cream flavours. We didn't try them.

Safely back in our hotel, complete with daughter's cardigan. Tomorrow, we head to Florence!

Mice are more Dangerous than Snakes

Yesterday evening, my son was playing around the neighbours' chicken coop, when he found a wild mouse and decided to pick it up. According to him, the mouse clawed rather than bit him, but the end result was the same: two puncture wounds on his hand. 

My son's reaction was to saunter off and ride his bike up the street, but the concerned neighbours reported the incident to me and warned me that they had put poison out for the mice. Poison would explain why the mouse was sluggish enough for my son to catch in the first place.

Unsurprisingly, when in conversation with the after hours paediatric clinic, the phrase "and the mouse may have been poisoned," elicited the response, "Yeah, you're going to need to take him to the emergency room." So off we went, armed with iPads so my son could play mine craft and I could type up this post. It was a much more peaceful visit than my first parental ER run. My son was in no immediate pain or danger and was pretty pumped about the whole experience. (He was also unfoundedly optimistic that it might result in a day off school. It didn't.)

The end result was that he had an X-ray to be sure there were no fragments of mouse tooth or claw in his hand. Since his tetanus shot was up to date, he was prescribed a course of antibiotics, and we were released to find a 24 hour pharmacy. Bedtime last night was 10:45pm. I was not overly impressed.

Nor was my husband whose first reaction was to ask my son how he could be so stupid as to pick up a mouse. After all, what did he think would happen? That was when I realised that this was all my fault.

In the past couple of weeks, the cats have brought a live snake and a live (but tail-less) lizard into the house. So far as I can tell, our cats never eat reptiles but they consider them excellent toys. The problem is that they aren't very good about taking them back outside when they are done playing with them.

As our cats are almost twelve years old, I am well used to dealing with unwanted wildlife in the house. These days, I view it as a good experience for the kids. I don't want them to grow up squeamish about snakes and such. 

The lizard was too lively to handle. We found it, lost it and when it turned up in the cloakroom cupboard the next day, I popped a glass food container over it and slid some cardboard underneath so we could carry it safely out. My son wanted to hold it, but it wriggled out and away at the first sign of an opening, so instead the children studied it as it froze between the stones in the flowerbed.

The snake, on the other hand, was a grass snake, which has a small, toothless mouth and eats insects. They're relatively easy to catch and perfectly safe to handle (if you wash your hands afterwards--I understand all reptiles can carry salmonella on their scales). 

 
I picked it up from where the cat had left it and asked the kids if they wanted to hold it. My daughter didn't but my son did. I took it back, and it coiled around my fingers (which was adorable but definitely a sign of undue stress) so we released it into the reeds beyond our fence. 

I was very proud of myself for raising budding David Attenboroughs up until yesterday's mouse incident, when I realised that in his seven year old experience, it made perfect sense. If he could hold a wild snake, why not a cute, fluffy, bottom-of-the-food-chain wild mouse? Yet the truth of our local fauna is that small mammals are actually more dangerous than most reptiles and bugs because they have teeth and claws and they will use them when they're frightened. 

So I learned a lesson on giving disclaimers, the children received a lecture on not handling any wild animal without asking a grown up first, and my husband has presented the case that the most responsible course of action is simply to let nature be.

The Terrible Fives

Five years old is a really under-reported age in terms of difficulty. You hear all about the terrible twos, but I am OK with toddlers. Toddlers are fascinated by order and want to understand the world around them... Once you get the hang of breaking things down into what I call Toddler Logic, dealing with toddlers is practically therapeutic.

But five years old? That's different. That's temper. Frustration as they realize the limits of their independence, and suddenly their emotions are getting the better of them again.

My daughter has just hit this magical age.

We have been through this before. When our son turned five, he developed a violent side to his temper. I still have vivid memories of when I announced it was time to leave the space museum and he did his five year old best to beat me up. I ended up carrying him out in a fireman's lift, with him screaming the whole way.

At five, that's manageable, but I'd read things about parents of older children who could not discipline them because the child was physically stronger. (Trade secret: probably 50% of my parenting is driven by abject terror of their teenage years.) So our reaction was to place a complete ban on any physical violence in our house, either in sibling squabbles or parental discipline. It's not accepted, and there will be immediate consequences.

I also refused to take him out again without another adult for over a month afterwards. Eventually, we wrote out an agreement on what behaviour was expected when we were out and how we (parents included!) could be more considerate to each other, which we all signed. (This idea was stolen from a classroom agreement at school—I am all about plagiarising my kids' teachers.)

Mostly though, it was a case of teaching my son that however angry he got, it would not change the situation. Another vivid memory: my son shrieking at me while I stood next to the calendar. Every time he screamed, I crossed off another day for which there would be no television. I think it was nine days by the time he stopped... Sticking to that wasn't much fun for any of us, but it worked. Since then, I only have to ask him: "What will it take before you listen to me?" and I can see him struggling to master his temper, however resentfully.

The hard part moving on from that is to allow his other resolution techniques to work. As a parent, you really do have absolute power, and absolute power really does corrupt. It's hard for me to express how difficult it is to play 'fair' instead of rationalising to what is convenient for me. This past week, I have been failing miserably.

Fortunately, our daughter is not getting violent, but she is flying into intense rages at the drop of a hat, and this needs to be stopped. Of course, this just happens to coincide with an ongoing bout of insomnia for me. I'm exhausted, my patience is minimal, and my daughter is challenging everything I ask/tell her to do. Tackling the problem head on has never been less appealing.

To procrastinate, I've been trying to allow her a little more independence. One afternoon, I let her make the rules, with the end result that we watched a lot of television and did not go out to enjoy the spell of nice weather as I wanted; not a success. I've let her help out in the kitchen, despite how much stress that adds to the cooking; she sliced into her thumb while chopping a pepper—actually, I'll call that a win, considering it taught both of us that such an event was entirely manageable.

Ultimately, though, I need to just grit my teeth and enforce a code of conduct regarding temper tantrums, insomnia or no insomnia! At least I've got one success story in the form of my son, who is such good company these days. (To be fair to my daughter, she's delightful company too... but only for about five minutes at a time.)

But even with my daughter already, I've got one small success already. My husband was out one night last week and I got into a raging battle with my daughter over the issue of bedtime. Neither of us came out of that looking good, but at the end of it when she was recovering from her tears and I was giving her the Stricken Hug of Maternal Guilt, I said to her: "I love you. Even when I'm angry with you, I still love you."

It was partly rote. I meant it, but it was a case of reminding myself to say it, and I didn't really consider that it would mean anything to her. Yet the next day, she repeated those words back to me, after her daily protest against getting in the car for school. Since then, she's said that sentiment or something similar a few times... I can't say I ever take it too seriously when my daughter calls me "The worst Mummy ever!" but it is ridiculously reassuring to hear she doesn't mean it.

It doesn't change the slog ahead of us, as we work through five year old temper, but both she and I feel a little more secure in the relationship we're fighting for.

The F Word

As we were driving to his swimming lesson this week, my six year old son suddenly piped up from the back of the car: "Is the F word 'fuck'?"

I like to imagine at this point a reasonable, sensitively presented, age appropriate discussion on swearing in our society. However, I was caught off guard (as I always am) and his four year old sister was also in the back--either off in her own little world or silently hooked on every word we were saying. So what I actually said was: "Yes, but don't use it."

"Why not?"

And so ensued a rather muddled discussion, in which I vaguely hit the key points I wanted to make. I deliberately said 'fuck' at least once, because I didn't want it to glamorise it at as The Word That Must Not Be Named. I know he has some concept of 'bad words,' but I don't know quite what that is as it's a phrase he's picked up from his peers.

I did not ask "Where did you hear that?" because I figured there was a big chance that the answer would be awkward. Likewise, I didn't want to say that only bad people said it. I told him: "Some people use it to express their feelings." Handily, I don't use the word 'fuck', so this wasn't prevaricating. I am very bad at self-censoring, so I never got into the habit of using the really strong swear words (the kids learned 'damn' 'oh my god' 'crap' and 'bugger' all from me.)

And in fits and starts we covered situations where you should not say it: "In job interviews," was my inspired first example. Then I pushed the age level down ten years, and we settled on 'at school' 'with other children' and 'in front of your grandparents'.

Obviously, we didn't talk about contexts where it was appropriate, but I didn't ban him from saying it either. Children swearing tends to be a provocative issue... people either find it shocking or funny. It doesn't bother me either way; I just don't want my child being the one teaching it to the others in the playground. But it seemed a little pointless to me to ban him from using a word based on his age.

I do regret not talking about the concept of offence, and why different words might offend different people. It didn't occur to me until afterwards, and then the moment had passed. I don't quite have the nerve to initiate another conversation on swearing. We'll just put that one off until his first job interview...

Talking about Guns; Listening about Beauty

I recently read this article about a three year old boy accidentally (and non-fatally) shooting his parents, and it occurred to me that I'd never talked to my children about gun safety. We don't have a gun, and so it hadn't been on my radar.

But my son is now at an age where he plays 'unsupervised' with friends. There's always an adult in the house, but they are not necessarily in the same room as him. He certainly has playdates where neither nor my husband nor myself are present, and I don't know who does or doesn't have a gun. I certainly shouldn't just assume that every gun owner we visit has their gun safely stored where the children can't get to it.

So I told my son about that shooting. I knew he'd like the detail about the father being shot in the bottom--and by that same token, he would remember it. I also told him that incidents like this happened where people died, including children. That nobody should handle a gun who hadn't been properly trained.

Then we talked about what he should do if a friend tried to show him a gun. That he should say no, that if somebody was holding a gun, he should walk out of the room. That he should never touch a gun.

I felt that that covered it for our purposes... At least for the time being. Gun-education is not something I have ever given much thought to, but considering how many American households have a gun, this is probably as vital as "Don't talk to strangers."


On a sweeter note, something that happened today... it started off being embarrassing. We were in the check out line at the supermarket when my son started pointing at the lady in front of us. I hastily pushed his hand down, but I crouched next to him and asked him what was wrong. He told me she was "so beautiful."

The lady in question was elderly, overweight, and casually dressed, but when I gave her this second look, I saw she had lovely skin for her age, bright blue eyes and thick white hair. Most likely my son saw something of Frozen's Elsa in her, and why the hell not?

I didn't want to embarrass my son, but when his back was turned, I tapped the woman on her shoulder and told her what he'd said. I figured it would make her day, and judging by her reaction, I wasn't far wrong. My son is too young to recognize age and he's not yet attuned to weight. There was something very refreshing about looking through his eyes and seeing beauty where I hadn't thought to look for it.