We arrived to this:

And it only got nicer. Warm, sunny, and three nights in a row of the most spectacular sunsets I’ve ever seen in my life. Oh, it was such a wonderful trip.

(I’m sorry about the low quality and potential annoying-ness of the Instagram photos, but my Nikon is a hot mess right now and this is all I’ve got.)

Okay, so I tried running on the beach and at first I was like YES THIS IS TOTALLY AWESOME I HEAR CHARIOTS OF FIRE! and then I was like oh hey the sand is kind of unstable and boy there sure are a lot of rocks and gosh my ankles/knees/calves/everything kind of hurts and finally I was like THIS TOTALLY SUCKS.

This was much better:

For Dylan’s cake I made this recipe from Pioneer Woman, and OH. MY. GOD.

Seriously, it was like a brownie made sweet, sweet love to a cake and they had a sinful chocolate baby made of butter and sugar. SO GOOD.

The cake was a hit, the birthday presents were a hit, and everyone absolutely loved the condo. If you’re in the market for a truly amazing place to stay on the Oregon coast, boy do I ever recommend this place—particularly unit #36. The view is to die for, you’ve got all the comforts of home (plus a lot of amenities that are above and beyond, like for instance the VIBRATING MASSAGE CHAIR), it’s on a private beach, and you’re close to nearby fun spots like the Newport Aquarium and Rogue Brewery.

What an amazing gift my family gave us, and I’m so glad we got to use it on such a gorgeous birthday weekend.

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(There is context for why I’m thinking about this topic, of course, but I’d rather hear your thoughts on the subject in general instead of describing the specific issue or asking for advice.)

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What’s easy to see, however, is that Riley is a very different kid these days. I actually noticed a pretty big change when he started going to school, although maybe that just coincided with his age. The sensitivities are virtually gone, and his anxiety about New Experiences has dialed way, way back.

Tonight I watched him do something I literally could not even begin to imagine last summer: he spent an entire swimming lesson with his face in the water. Swimming (assisted by a board) entire laps at a time, diving underwater to retrieve a tossed ring, practicing a dive position into the water from the side of the pool.

At one point I realized I was watching him in a mild state of boredom: ho hum, there goes Riley, there’s Dylan with the pool noodle, is it 6 yet? Like, no big deal, my kid’s just out there swimming. Not crying, or protesting, or clinging. It didn’t even seem noteworthy, because this is just how things are these days.

It’s easy to mourn the loss of the younger years, especially when I look at old pictures or videos and wonder just where my babies went. But oh, it’s so amazing to see your kids grow and change and master new things. I used to be so worried about figuring out how to help him, and it turns out all he really needed was time to get there in his own way.

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I ended up getting him a balance bike and some sort of nightmare Hot Wheel configuration that in theory the boys can play with together but will probably just result in a lot of fighting and even more little cars all over the house, like I don’t get up their ass enough already for the constant Lego-spew. Why does boy stuff have to have so many pieces? My ideal toy would just be a big solid, silent chunk of something that doesn’t require batteries and can’t be thrown or moved around the house. Like, say, a slab of granite. Here! Happy birthday! Some India Juparana, just for you!

Anyway, FOUR, I can hardly believe it. I feel like 2011 just flew by in a whoosh of flapping calendar pages.

I put together a video of my goofball kids and I’ve been watching it over and over—not because it’s such a great piece of moviemaking, mind you, but because there’s something so captivating about seeing them through the camera lens. My brain flickers back and forth on how they look to me: so big! So little! Wasn’t Riley just a furrow-browed baby being toted around in a backpack? When did Dylan replace his round toddler belly with all those lanky limbs? (And will he ever figure out how to put on a coat?)

The other day I joked to Riley he needed to stop growing so that I could keep him this size forever, and he laughed and patted my knee. Like, for real: he patted my knee, and said, “Oh, Mom. I have to get bigger, that’s what kids do.” And then he ran off to do just exactly that.

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Speaking of Jack! JB went to the grocery store last night and on his way home he called me to ask if I could put the cat in the utility room. I allowed as I could probably go ahead and do that but was there any particular reason, or was this some sort of weird sex metaphor where “cat” meant “penis” because if so I’d really need to know what “utility room” meant.

“Well, I sort of picked up one of those Jack Russell dogs. He’s in my truck right now,” JB said.

NOT what I expected him to say, by the way.

It turned out that the dog came inside the grocery store while JB was in there, the staff shooed him back out, and JB watched him wander around the parking lot for a while before he opened the truck door and the dog cheerily jumped right in. He didn’t have a collar, and some people walking by told JB they’d seen the dog off and on all day, just running around lost in the snow.

So we totally had a dog last night, which was great entertainment for the kids.

We called him Jack and briefly considered what it might be like to keep him if we couldn’t find the owners, but as well-behaved and friendly as he was, he clearly wasn’t meant to be in a house with a cat. They did have a brief truce for a while:

But 99% of the time Jack was staring intently at the cat with his entire body on alert. Tail wagging madly, but you could actually see the little pangs of frustration emanating from him. I’m not sure if he was visualizing a delicious cat risotto or if he just wanted to play or what, but I don’t think I would have left them alone together to find out, you know?

Other than being a total Cat Creeplord, Jack was the perfect overnight guest. This morning JB took him to the vet, where they treated him for an eye/ear infection and scanned him for a microchip. Thankfully, he had one, and better yet, it had been registered. JB got the owner’s address, then drove right over and delivered Jack back to his happy owner:

Man, I love happy endings, don’t you?

PS: Turns out the dog’s real name is “Blast.” Heh.

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Sledding January 2012 from J_5harps on Vimeo.

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I’m filing both under A for awesome.

And now for a question that has nothing to do with adorably hugging brothers or the lovely sense of stillness a layer of snow brings to the world: what do you think about Botox?

I’ve been thinking about it lately. Sort of. Like, not in the sense that I’m about to actually make any sort of decision, but just … rolling it around in my head a little.

I have this deepish vertical line in my forehead—it’s between my eyebrows, slightly off center—and I really, really hate it. I don’t hate it because it’s a wrinkle, nor am I interested in waging a massive expensive crazymaking pointless battle against my age, now or ten years from now. I hate it because it makes me look angry or unhappy, pretty much all of the time. It’s a frown line that never goes away, and I’m bothered more and more by it when I see pictures of myself.

I generally like the lines that grow on people’s faces, the ones that show a lifetime of, you know, having a life. JB has a deepening collection of creases near the outside of his eyes (crow’s feet, according to women’s magazines) that I think are wildly handsome.

This line between my eyebrows, however, just bums me out. I suspect it’s grown worse over the last year from peering, eyebrows knit, into a laptop screen for several hours a day, but whatever the cause, it’s like my face is settling into this permanently grumpy expression. I’ve even had Riley randomly ask me if I was angry about something: “Well, I don’t know, you look kind of mad.”

So: Botox, or whatever the latest minimally invasive cosmetic whatsit might be, it’s been sounding kind of attractive. JB is thoroughly opposed to the idea, says it’s unnatural and ridiculous and also more than a little gross/potentially dangerous (BOTULINUM TOXINS! IN YOUR FACEPARTS!) and I get all that. But man, if there was a fairly easy and not unaffordable way to dial this Frowny Forehead Line back a few notches … I don’t know, it doesn’t seem ridiculously vain to want to look less pissed off, you know?

Or maybe it does. Maybe one little procedure is a slippery slope and pretty soon you’re obsessing over every other facial line and brown spot and general nearing-40 droopage, and then you start thinking about how a tiny bit of suction might reduce that immovable C-section flab, and so on and so forth.

What’s your take on Botox/fillers/similar treatments? Never in a million years … or never say never?

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Still, at least I can snap the fuckers shut now without resorting to a cast iron C-clamp and eventually passing out from asphyxiation, so … you know. Progress.

My preferred workout routine is to hit the gym for either a circuit training* or kickboxing class, but on the days when I can’t get there, I’ve been cycling through a few DVDs for a vastly inferior (I find it nearly impossible to push myself as hard as I would in a class) but convenient (I can wear ratty shorts and stop to blow my nose!) living room sweatfest.

*Have you ever tried this type of class? For some reason I totally thought it was going to be a circuit of stationary machines, with each person in the class spending X amount of time on each machine, but that’s not it at all. At my gym, anyway, it’s a room with an open space for doing various evil bodyweight/dumbbell/resistance band exercises, and a selection of cardio machines along the perimeter. A typical hourlong class involves 15 minutes of interval cardio (on a treadmill, say), then a bunch of high-repetition toning stuff on the floor, then back to the cardio machines for another 15 minutes or so, and back to the floor for a final round. It’s fairly evil but the hour seems to fly by, which is awesome.

For those who might be interested, I’m currently “enjoying” the following:

George St-Pierre Rushfit, $12.

GSP is a bigtime MMA star from Canada (I guess he’s the current welterweight champion of the UFC?). I don’t know much about him personally, but I bought this DVD after reading some decent reviews online.

On the upside, there’s a timer at the bottom so you always have a countdown for each round and overall workout, which is really nice. The exercises vary a lot, so nothing feels too boring. It’s about 45 minutes long with 30 minutes being fairly intense—it does get exhausting about halfway through, but it mellows back out towards the end (in other words, you only truly want to die for a shortish period of time).

You need a set of dumbbells for this. They’re using 15lb bells in the video, but whatevski on that. I use my trusty old 5lb weights.

On the downside, the commentary between the trainer (who mainly leads the video) and St-Pierre is really awkward. George blurts random things (”Zees feels ‘orrible! But zere are no shortcuts to success!”) in his heavy French accent while his trainer grumpily interrupts, and they constantly try to tie back every exercise to fighting in a way that sort of screams I AM HAMHANDEDLY USING THIS MMA STAR TO MARKET THIS WORKOUT.

Overall, it’s a great workout, you just have to suffer through some annoying chatter while it’s going on.

Jillian Michaels: Banish Fat, Boost Metabolism, $7.50

If you’re sick of the 30DS, this is a great next step. It’s about 45 minutes of circuit training with an additional 10 minutes of warmup/cooldown (I pretty much never do the cooldowns. I know: bad. But man, when I’m done I’m done).

Jillian’s commentary also gets irritating after a while, but she knows how to set up a workout routine that has a lot of variety. This one has 7 six minute circuits (you go through each circuit twice), which has the nice effect of making you feel like you’re not stuck in any one awful exercise for too long. No weights or equipment necessary, and while it definitely makes you work, it seems like there are only a few routines that are really hateful. Best of all: NO LUNGES. God damn, I hate lunges.

The Pit Workout, DVD boxset $39.95

I saved the hardest for last. You can buy these DVDs separately from used sellers, but the whole package is a pretty good deal. On the Workout DVD, you get two discs, one with an upper body and lower body workout, the second with an overall workout.

I will not lie, these are hardcore. The upper body routine involves, like, FORTY THOUSAND PUSHUPS. While the lower body one involves a similar number of squats. I mean, I’ve never done anything like it—they just go on and on and on and on. The idea is to completely fatigue your limbs, then have you launch into punches or kicks (this basically simulates the exhausting effect of a ring fight).

The overall workout on Disc 2 has more variety, which I like. You start with jumping jacks (a LOT of them. No easy stretching warmup routine here), then move into kicks, shadow boxing, push ups with squat thrusts (these are ‘ORRIBLE), bicycle crunches, simulated rowing, simulated rowing, jump roping, and more.

No equipment needed. Just a lot of water, stamina, and a bottle or two of ibuprofen for the next day.

The downside to these is that they’re long, grueling, and very repetitive. It’s sort of a trifecta of suck that makes it very tempting to hit the off switch, but if you want an absolutely annihilating workout—even if you want to just focus on legs for, say, 20 minutes—they’re awesome.

The CrossPit DVD is also included in this set, which is slightly less intimidating. There are two workouts on this one, each about 30 minutes. The first uses the Tabata structure of 20 seconds of balls-out intensity followed by 10 seconds rest. It’s wicked, especially by round 5 or so, but the exercises seem to go by faster.

The second workout uses the CrossFit Chelsea pattern, where you have a specific amount of time (30 or 60 seconds) to finish a certain amount of work, so the pace is up to you.

I can’t remember which exercises happen in each of the CrossPit workouts, but almost all are body weight related: pushups, squats, squat thrusts, shadow boxing, and sit-ups. At some point he has you do exercise band pulls, but if you don’t have a band you could skip that section.

These are insanely effective no-frill no-chirpy-words-of-encouragement workouts. You won’t necessarily have fun during them, but you’ll feel like a sweat-soaked badass afterwards.

Old stuff gathering dust on my shelf: Turbo Jam Punch Kick & Jam (I sometimes do this for nostalgic reasons, but the whole thing feels pretty cheesy now), Tracy Anderson’s Mat Routine (god knows this will give you nice arm muscles if you’re diligent with it, but arrrgh it is so boring after a while. Plus, I’ve really come to hate her shtick about not BULKING, oh my god don’t BULK you BIG FAT BULKY HEIFER don’t you want to be like GWYNETH. Shut up, Tracy. PS: You totally look like a porn star.), Jillian Michaels’ 30 Day Shred (still a great little workout, but I’ve reached capacity on hearing her tell me not to phone it in).

OKAY I’M DONE NOW. I’m sure this was all very fascinating to exactly none of you, but if you have any exercise DVDs to recommend, I’d love to hear about them.

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You know what’s sort of funny about the whole topic, is that I brought it up in the first place because Riley had his best school friend over (with her parents) a couple weeks ago and after her mom emailed me about setting up another playdate the Gun Thing suddenly (belatedly) popped into my brain. I’d been hemming and hawing over whether I should go ahead and bring it up and worrying about how to address it and whether or not it was even necessary and all the stuff that got mentioned in the comments, really, and after reading through everything you guys had to say and doing a lot of thinking on it, I was like, all right, I’m going to work up the nerve to talk with the mom about it, let’s DO this thing. And then JB was like, uhh I totally pointed out our safe when I was demonstrating the safety locks on our power tools.

Huh. Okay then. (Ha ha ha, and you guys were worried about the guns. LET’S ALL PLAY BYE BYE FINGERS WITH THE CIRCULAR SAW!) (Oh my god, I’m just kidding, we don’t let visiting kids play in the shop.)

On a different subject, it randomly occurred to me recently that Dylan is officially older than Riley was when I brought Riley on a cross-country trip to Washington D.C. and while my time there with Riley was utterly wonderful and exceeded my expectations in nearly every way, I don’t think there’s any way in hell I’d do something similar with my second son.

This realization speaks volumes about the differences between the two in a way that’s brand new to me, because my memory is so faulty it’s been virtually impossible for me to compare Dylan to what Riley was like at the same age over the last few years (excepting certain things like how one kid slept through the night like a champ and the other woke me up for three solid years, not that, ahem, I’m holding a grudge or anything).

The main difference, I think, is that Dylan has a much shorter attention span than Riley did when he was 3.5-4 years old. For instance, Dylan won’t veg out in front of the TV, while Riley will sit saucer-eyed for hours in front of anything—like, even golf—if you let him. I don’t have any faith that I could keep Dylan entertained on a 7-hour flight, no matter how many distractions I packed on board, whereas I have blog documentation that Riley watched about 937 back-to-back Curious George episodes on the way there and back.

Dylan is also virtually impossible to get from point A to point B. I know I bought a travel stroller for Riley, but that was really less about containment and more about my concern that he’d get worn out walking for long distances. When we weren’t using it, he walked beside me through the airport like a normal, if pint-sized, human being. In comparison, I can barely herd Dylan through a grocery store aisle without wanting to commit seppuku—he wanders, he dashes in random directions, he walks right into people, he stops and touches things, he steps on my feet, he randomly bursts out singing, he loudly exclaims over every single thing he deems newsworthy (”HEY THAT MAN HAS A HAT LIKE A COWBOY DO YOU THINK HE HAS A HORSE MOM?”).

I do remember that out of all the travel logistics with Riley, the only thing that went haywire was the following incident:

We had arrived back in Seattle, rode the little train over towards baggage claim, and were just approaching the escalator when Riley dashed in front of me and hopped on. I think he must have thought it was going to be like the flat people-mover he had so enjoyed in the DC airport, and as he ascended and the steps pulled apart he completely lost his shit. He was clinging to the steps and howling and I pulled him to his feet, begged him to stay put, and in the meantime I managed to leave the stroller back at the bottom of the escalator, so I told him to stand still and I began sprinting back down the up steps, which I thought was going to be easy but ha ha ha HAAAA, NO, I was running like an idiot with my heavy-ass backpack pounding against me and my flip-flops making comical splatting noises against my feet but I was making no progress, like some sort of giant stupid hamster on a wheel, and Riley was screaming “MOMMMMMY!” and stretching a pathetic little arm out to me and people at the top of the escalator turned to see what horrible parent had abandoned their child who was probably going to get sucked under the sucker-inner part at the end and I was like “Just a sec! Just a sec!” and finally a security guard came and grabbed the stroller and got on the escalator and gave it to me, THE END.

I am absolutely 100% convinced that if I took Dylan on a similar trip, I’d have at least 83 different stories like that, only much, much worse. It’s funny, I would never have said Dylan is harder than Riley was, and in many ways I think he’s more lighthearted, affectionate and fun than Mr. Suspicious was during the preschool years, but there is no freaking way I’d get on a plane with him. Bless his adorable, mischievous, totally unique heart.

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Every gun we own is stored in a safe. One safe is of the large standup variety and it has a bank-vault type lock, the other safe involves typing a code into a keypad type thing. Kidproof.

So here’s what I’m wondering: now that Riley’s old enough to start having school friends over, is our gun ownership (and storage details) something I should be responsible for bringing up with their parents prior to any sort of playdate? In my mind I’ve thought of this subject sort of like a food allergy—in that if your visiting kid has one, I expect you to approach me ahead of time with your concerns and requirements—but I wonder if I’m off base with that.

What do you think?

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