Shutterbug

 She wore these shorts a lot on the trip because they had belt loops for her camera case.

Hannah got a camera for her last birthday.  She loves it.  She has worn out batteries on it several times since last August.  She brought it to Yellowstone, of course, because there’s a lot to photograph there.  The batteries ran out there, too, but NEVER FEAR! she has learned to carry new ones with her, and then she nagged us reminded us to stop at the general store so that we could get backups for her just in case. 

We haven’t uploaded her photos yet, because Michael needs to get more memory for the computer before we do.  Haha!  Only kidding.  Sortof.  But not really.

I have plenty of pictures of Hannah doing things besides taking pictures, but I made sure to get some of her taking them, because I want to remember how cute she was, shutterbugging away. 

Enthusiastically.  She has far more pictures of poop – sorry – SCAT! than we have.

You can see she has the strap around her arm, too, so that if she happened to drop her camera, it wouldn’t fall and break. 

Maybe someday she won’t be such an enthusiastic photographer, maybe she’ll be jaded and cynical and…maybe that time isn’t so far off.  So I made sure to capture it now.

{pretty, happy, funny, real} – Yellowstone Road Trip Edition

Today I’m linking up with Auntie Leila for her {p,h,f,r}.

The good news is that there is a lot of {pretty} in Yellowstone!  If I forced you to look at all the pictures, you would not be amused.

 

We also had a lot of {happy} moments there. 

Nothing like a stinky mud pot to make a small boy happy.  He’s wearing his great-grandfather’s hat, too, which makes his mom happy.

Nature of almost any kind makes Hannah happy.

Posing for pictures makes Naomi happy.  She also doesn’t mind the stink of the geothermal areas, so they don’t affect her happiness.

Junior rangers!  Hannah had been planning to get her badge at Yellowstone since she heard we were going – was that in February?  Naomi didn’t plan for quite that long, but is still happy.

Plenty of {funny} moments, too.

Our first morning, we had to be escorted to our car (see that silver minivan on the right edge of the photo?) by security because there were elk within a few yards of it.  Here’s one before breakfast, happily sunning herself and causing angst among park rangers and security guards, because the tourists weren’t staying 25 yards away. 

Thank goodness I packed our rain gear, or this would be a {real} photo of us getting soaked…or not going on the Artist Paint Pot hike.  As it is, we bundled up, and by the end, all of the rain gear was superfluous.

 

This wasn’t actually in Yellowstone, where they don’t provide massive trampolines for the entertainment of the tourists.  It was on the way, but it was still funny.  This is one of a series, and the kids love to look at them. 

For some reason, this was the most fun part of the visitor’s center for Naomi and Sim.  They played in there for a long time while others enjoyed the exhibits.   

{real}

Our drive out of the park was slowed down somewhat by this guy, who was NOT going the posted 45 miles per hour.  We had 7 hours of driving ahead of us…

…so Michael decided to pass when the bison had drifted far enough (we thought) into the other lane.  This picture is of him shaking his head at us as we drove past.  We’re glad it was just a head shake!

On the way out to Yellowstone, I had noticed the sign for Wheat Montana, which is the brand of our favorite bread flour, Prairie Gold.  It’s whole wheat, non-GMO, chemical-free, and really, really, really DELICIOUS!  So on the way back, we stopped.

I convinced Michael to buy 150 pounds of it to bring home because it was 50 cents a pound!  Here’s me, after emptying our trunk to fit the flour in.  Not my best look, and it certainly is a real experience to see all one’s luggage in the parking lot. 

We put the flour on the bottom because we wouldn’t need to get it out again before we got home.  Michael said it made us look like flour smugglers.  50 cents a pound is less than half of what we pay here, though, so flour smuggling it is. 

YNP Scat Post

For those of you who aren’t in the know, “scat” means poop.  Usually it’s used by people who don’t really want to sound like they’re talking about poop, like biologists or zoologists.  Just think how embarrassing it would be to have to talk about your job, “I spend my time looking for signs of omniverous activity among the fauna of Yellowstone by analyzing their poop.”  Yeah, just replace “poop” with “scat” and you no longer sound like you’re poking through poop for a job, but doing something really scientific.  Parents, on the other hand, wouldn’t say things like, “Check that baby’s diaper to see if there’s scat in it.”  Or, “Honey, if you have to scat, be sure to do it now, because we’re going to be in the car for a long time.”Studying the scat beside the trail.

When I started research for this trip, I came across the book Who Pooped in the Park, by Gary D. Robson (It’s important, if you’re going to write a book with the word “pooped” in the title, to be sure your name sounds official.  That’s why he put the D. in there. Because otherwise, he’s just that guy Gary who wrote a book about poop.)   The kids, not surprisingly, LOVED this book.  Really, how can you go wrong?  A book about poop for kids.  But, in a surprise twist that nobody saw coming, Michael and I liked it, too, because it helped us learn to identify the scat – and tracks (but who would be charmed by a book called Who Walked in the Park?  BORING.) – of lots of animals that we’d see in Yellowstone.  All agreed:  this could only be the work of a bison.

This meant that, even on hikes on which we didn’t see any animals, we could tell that the animals had been there by the scat they left behind.  And we could wonder why they hadn’t fallen through the thin crust in the geyser basins, because they were always walking around pooping – wait! – scatting on parts that had signs that there was dangerous thin crust.Spring or summer elk scat.  Not everyone agreed on each pile.  Some had different theories.

Hannah had taken the scat study further.  She and I found some deer scat one morning, and she said, “Oh, this is female deer scat, because of the shape.  Male deer scat would have a pointy end on each one.”  Just to be clear, this wasn’t covered in the book mentioned above, but it was covered in the scat and tracks book she got last year at her wilderness awareness camp.  This was looking at tracks in the mud.  I’m pointing to a deer track with my foot. 

Despite the weirdness of studying poop, we did really enjoy having the knowledge to figure out which animal had left the piles we came upon on our adventures.  I highly recommend the book.  There are others for other national parks, too, so you can see who pooped other places.

On our way back, when we were visiting our friends, we related some of the stories of scat study.  Impressed by Hannah’s scat knowledge, I mentioned, “Hannah really knows her scat!” 

To which she replied, “Not my scat, Mama!”

Yellowstone National Park

       Well, friends, we went to Yellowstone.  We drove there, stopping to visit friends on the way and on the way back.  It was a great trip, and we’ve probably got 17,000 posts we could do.  Luckily for you, we won’t have time to do that many, but we’ll try to do some so that you can see a bit of what we saw. 

We took the route that brought us in by the north entrance, since we stayed at Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel for the first few nights.  Gorgeous scenery abounded on the way in.

And, really, what’s a road trip log without pictures of the car’s inhabitants?  With lovely scenery, to boot. 

Sim usually sits where Naomi is sitting in these pictures, but a bout of carsickness made it necessary to get Naomi as far forward in the car as possible.  Happily, the carsickness was not of the eruptive kind, just the intensely uncomfortable kind.  The move in the car helped.  The carsickness was only because of the 100 miles of winding road we had to take at one point in the trip.

Amusingly, we’d brought along a library book called You Can’t Take Your Body to the Repair Shop.  Their take on carsickness:  “The purpose of carsickness is to spread vomit all over the inside of the car in order to teach your parents a lesson about long, boring car rides.”  Yeah. 

You’ll be happy to know that, on the way back, Naomi’s carsickness on the same stretch of winding road was nowhere near as bad.  The move to a seat farther forward, gum chewing, eye closing, and – probably – the fact that we were driving it in the afternoon rather than the morning all helped.  We were all grateful.

Our first stop on the first morning was Mammoth Hot Springs, which we could see (and smell) from our hotel.  Sometimes it’s just too bright out there, especially for those of us who come from often-cloudy areas.

As cool as these pictures are, they still don’t do justice to the thing in real life.

Nor can you smell them.  The kids were divided on their opinion of the smell.  Some were reminded, fondly, of eggs.  Others thought the structures were cool, but the smell decreased the value of the tour. 

Can you IMAGINE being the first people to discover this place? 

This was the one and only boardwalk that Tess walked.  She was happy and excited, but it worried me too much to have her walking around when there were signs everywhere telling of the disaster and sadness that awaited those who stepped off the path.  Other boardwalks, Tess rode in the Ergo. 

Source of never-ending income

Hannah wants to earn some money.  This morning, as she checked her chore chart to see how much she's earned this week, I heard her murmur, "I need to earn more money."  Then she set off for the place of never-ending income:  the laundry.  She's been doing the laundry and folding it for the last week and a half.  And all I can say is:  Teach your kids how to do laundry.

Of course, when I started a load of diapers yesterday, she came upstairs and confronted me:  "Mom!  How can you be running that load for so long [I use a longer cycle for diapers, because...yeah, you know.]?  I have more important things to wash!" 

But you know what?  I'm willing to deal with the small problems that come up to have her doing the laundry.

Easter

Easter happened, despite our family being sick.  We actually had a very nice Easter.  We didn’t get to the Vigil Mass because of illness, but we were all better enough to go to morning Mass and then to the local relatives’ for egg hunts and dinner. 

Just as an aside, we highly recommend the policy that we’ve adopted that states:  When a child gets up on Easter morning after 6 a.m., he or she may proceed downstairs to the living room and open his or her Easter basket, regardless of who else is up or not up.  He or she may not eat the candy, but usage of other, non-messy portions of the basket is fair game. 

This means that Michael and I get to sleep in on Easter morning, because the kids are all enjoying their Easter baskets and do not care that we’re not up.

 

We do the same thing for stockings on Christmas.  It works well for us.  We get downstairs and take photos of a fait accompli, of course, but there are lots of photo ops on Easter. 

Tess was fine with Easter baskets, but not terribly enthusiastic.  Well, she was enthusiastic about the toys in the other kids’ baskets, but they weren’t enthusiastic about having her play with their new stuff…  

Poor kids.  It’s always cold on Easter, and I’ve been getting them dress clothes that aren’t terribly warm for the past couple of years.  But this year, I thought, “Sweater dresses!  Perfect for Easter!  Of course, it was around 70 degrees on Easter this year.  Tess was the only one whose dress (which is one I made for Hannah when she was that size) reflected the weather.

Sim fared only slightly better.  At least the sweater vest wasn’t a full sweater. 

New dresses are new dresses, though, and the girls were not upset with their clothes. 

They also liked their matching hairdos.  I didn’t force the matching ‘do on either Sim or Tess.

We set up the tripod and used the timer.  Tess and Sim aren’t too impressed. 

 

New markers!  New coloring book!  New clothes!  Fun!

It looks like Tess was totally eating the contents of all those eggs, but I think what she’s got there is rice puffs.  Too bad!

Speaking of photo ops on Easter, someone (me) forgot the camera for the egg hunts.  So we have some pictures, but until Michael uploads them from his phone, I won’t be sharing them with you.

I’m glad I got this posted during the Easter season, at least!  Which finishes next weekend – I made it just under the wire.