Welcome to...Canada.

This should have been written a long time ago.  I suppose it should have been the first entry.  It would have been, if I was that organized.  Oh well.

We asked for Alaska.  Most people are shocked to learn we wanted to come here instead of jockeying for Germany or Hawaii, but there you have it.  Rick and I have talked about Alaska for years, and when we finally got the chance to go (and get paid for doing so), we took it.

Because I'm a planner, when I was packing for our summer in Arizona I also wedged what little winter wear we had into the suitcases. Over the summer I installed a roof rack, obsessively checked the weather report and booked hotels.  I even hunted down snow chains for my van, no small feat with a seasonal item in an area that doesn't usually need them anyway.  (As it turns out, my snow-preparations were unnecessary; even though the year prior had seen 18 inches by mid September, we didn't see any snow on the road at all, and the first substantial snow was in mid October this year.)  It would take 55 hours, 48 minutes to drive 3,460 miles with five kids, two cats, and a husband I hadn't seen in two months.  I had extra gas, stuff for sandwiches, a full spare tire, a shovel, cat litter, a full medical kit, and a trusty dog-eared copy of The Milepost, the go-to atlas for Alaska and particularly for the Alaska-Canada Highway.  There were a few bumps, the largest of which was the massive stuffed polar bear that Aeryn had acquired over the summer at the flea-market and which she insisted had to come with us.  We crammed it into the luggage carrier, hugged our Snowflake family, shoved our obese cats in their carriers, and started the drive.

The first day we made it to Salt Lake City.  Mostly desert, some mountains, full of Mormons.  Not much different from Arizona except the mountains are bigger and the Mormons more plentiful.  (We'd made the drive to SLC already at the beginning of the summer, so perhaps we were a little jaded.)  Day two took us to Great Falls, Montana.  We had a lovely but too-fast visit with some friends in Idaho.  Montana--well, they aren't kidding when they call it "Big Sky Country." I've driven all around this country but that is the longest horizon I've ever seen.

And on the third day, we went international.  I spent more time gathering paperwork for the border crossing than it took to actually cross, and half of it wasn't even needed.  It took longer finding a bank to exchange dollars for loonies than it did to jump countries.  (Fun fact, the first thing after the border-station is an LDS church.)  We took a quick breather at a tiny museum and visitor's center in Alberta to celebrate, and then dug in for a string of 10 hour driving days.

Frankly, most of Canada kind of blurred together.  It is incredibly clean, which you don't really notice until you get back to the States and see the first front-yard full of junk in 1000 miles.  (Americans are slobs.  Trust me.)  Everyone we met was really friendly, eager to talk and share information about road conditions and make suggestions about places to visit, either on the Al-Can Highway or Alaska itself.  There's something about long stretches of utter wild that make you crave the company of other people.

Food wise, it was interesting.  Our first stop was at a Safeway to get Kinder-Eggs, which were one of the loves of my childhood in Germany.  You probably haven't heard of them.  They are small, hollow chocolate eggs with a toy inside; Americans are considered too stupid to eat them without choking on the non-food item within, so they are banned from importation to the States.  Seriously.  It's a thing. 

The big pizza chain in Alberta is called Boston Pizza; it is supposed to be just fantastic, but we didn't love it.  The further north you go, the smaller the towns get, and the bigger the portions.  We had breakfast at a bright orange restaurant/hotel that catered mainly to logging crews and truckers.  The waitress and cook seemed amused when we ordered the girls each a short-stack of pancakes; we were quickly and politely told that one stack would be enough.  Sure enough, each pancake was roughly 9 inches across.  This was a pattern that held throughout the rest of Canada--huge servings of anything, usually covered with gravy. 

And then there was British Columbia.  This was the one glorious, golden day of the trip.  Due to a quirk of the planning process and Canadian geography, we only had 6 hours between stopping points, and I am so glad, because this one day made the trip worthwhile.  We saw herds of forest bison, Dall sheep, caribou, and black bears right on the side of--and sometimes right on--the road.  We drove on windy roads past vibrant, icy turquoise rivers and towering, snowy mountains.  We had massive sandwiches at a tiny diner, and met a couple Arizona Mormons who worked in Alaska during the summer and were on their way home with their over-friendly dogs.

A dozen or so reindeer on the road marked the beginning of the wildlife.

We saw around sixty bison over three hours. They were just chilling on the side of the road.

The bears were the coolest.  I stopped to get a picture and then this guy started walking towards the car.  We got the hint.

Can you believe how clear that water is?!

These trees were everywhere.  It was like being in Lothlorien.

Pictures like this made the cold worth it.  But it was still effing cold. 

The highlight of the day was Liard Hot Springs--a natural hot spring in the middle of a forest marsh.   There was a half-mile boardwalk from the campsites to the spring.  It was ridiculously gorgeous, despite the bear country warning signs.

Though initially unsure because of the hot sulfur-smell and the fact that it was about 40 degrees outside, the kids loved the springs, and had to be dragged out. (*Aside* The low point of the day was getting out of the springs, because it was 40 degrees outside, and the changing rooms were open and friggin' cold.)

After BC, the rest of the trip was a little dull.  Not as much wildlife, though we met some wonderful folks during lunch on the side of a gorgeous lake.  We stopped at the Yukon Beringia Interpretive Centre in Whitehorse, a fun museum about the last ice age and the Bering land bridge. 

Rick and Brenna nerded out with the docent about this skeleton.  Rick found the spear marks on the leg bones; the docent was impressed.

Organizing the animals in the kid's center was Echo's contribution to the exhibits.  The kid may have OCD.

The Yukon itself was rather desolate after the bounty of BC.  It makes sense, I guess, but I remember it being really cold and really grey, with dark, severe pines and rocky, barren mountains.  We passed the grey miles by reading Furiously Happy by Jenny Lawson.  (Hilarious, but not as good as her first, Let's Pretend This Never Happened: A Mostly True Memoir.)

7 days after beginning, I was glad to finally be back stateside, even if it was on the other side of a foreign country.  There's no place like home.  Canada was nice, though, and it was a nice start to our rather rocky first months in Alaska.  But that's another post entirely.

They have to warn people about fueling their planes at the gas station.  It's a whole new world up here, people.

Picky, picky, picky.

Confession time: I don't like cooking.  Part of it is that I'm pretty easy to please in the food department--I will eat the same thing three days running without batting an eye.  Another part is that my kids have broken my will to cook.  My minions balk at childhood staples like mac and cheese, mashed potatoes, and quesadillas.  Half of them like pizza, but not sandwiches; the others pass on the pizza for peanut butter and jelly--but only with raspberry jam.  Well-planned meals are often met with "Can I have a sandwich?" and negotiations for how many bites they have to eat to continue living in my house.

Hi, I'm Carla, and my kids are picky eaters.

However a more fitting term would be "erratic" or "inconstant" or "disgusting and ungrateful."

Several weeks ago, I proudly made shepherd's pie for the first time in my adult life.  It was delicious.  Leah, however, thought I was pulling a fast one.

"You said we were having meatloaf," she accused.

I nodded. "We are.  It's under the potatoes."

"Huh."

A moment passed as they all considered this.

Then, Bren, who is otherwise respectable and a model citizen, sniffed: "I didn't know it was possible to ruin meatloaf."

Aeryn chimed in. "Yeah, I don't need dessert tonight."

Part of me was all Beast: "Then go ahead and STAAAARVE!!!!"  Another part of me--a quieter, calmer, and more sarcastic part--could only think: "Really?  I know what you've eaten, and this is at least meant to be put in your mouth."

I really don't get it. When I was a kid, I never questioned having to eat whatever my parents served, no matter how much I hated it.  One of the worst was something my dad used to make called a "garbage omelet"--shredded corn tortillas, onions, peppers, ham, mushrooms, cheese, and whatever else he could find in the fridge, sandwiched in runny eggs. Loathsome as it was, I knew better than to try to weasel my way out of eating what my dad made; I couldn't pretend to be sick because my dad wouldn't care, and until I was older, the only alternative to eating what was on my plate was going hungry. Oily fried spinach with slimy onions and limp bacon, chicken swimming in grease, garbage omelets...I hated it, but I ate it.

Not my kids.  They will turn their noses up at legitimate food, and yet eat the most disgusting non-food without any sense of shame or concept of sanitation.  I have seen these little savages psych themselves into throwing up over a bowl of beans, but then straight-up eat dirt, boogers (theirs and their sisters'), scabs, earwax, toenails, crayons...  As a toddler, Brenna used to snack on the cigarette butts that our upstairs neighbors would throw on the goose-crap sprinkled lawn.  One time Leah helped herself to some anonymous caramel she had scraped off the bottom of our grocery cart. The current champion of nasty is Echo, who has a frankly disturbing love of cat litter. 

I mean, seriously?  Cat litter?  Shouldn't this be a self-correcting problem?

Somehow I've convinced them over the years how undesirable most of these are, and, in all fairness, Leah has developed a sudden and unexpected love of scrambled eggs.  I don't know why or how.  I'm not going to ask, just in case she decides I've taken too much interest and she has to hate them again. 

However, even if they're eating regular food, they still occasionally eat like jerks.  See exhibit A.

Exhibit A

This is a bowl of Marshmallow Mateys.  You may have noticed the lack of any marshmallows except for a couple blue fragments the monsters somehow managed to miss during their gleaning.  This is one of the harsh realities of parenthood that you somehow never hear about.
I suppose you're hoping there is some point to this tirade.  No, not really.  I guess if you must find some value in this, I can throw you this bone:  Pick your priorities.  I have no idea why my kids all stop eating like humans around 3, and I don't know what prompts them to start again, however grudgingly, as they age.   If they choose to live on raw carrots, apples, rice, breakfast cereal marshmallows and the occasional chicken nugget until they are 7, that's their business--it's mostly healthy food, and there are other battles more deserving of my time and energy.  I tried fighting this one, and it just made me miserable and my dinner cold.

In the meantime, if they don't want to eat, it means more for me.  Silver lining.

It's spring...I think.

So...it's been a while.  Sorry about that.  I could make excuses about the last miserable weeks of pregnancy (which mainly consisted of me eating anything that sat still long enough, relevant blog post to follow at later date), or how I've more or less been trapped topless on my couch for the last several weeks in various stages of sleep deprivation as I nursed an apparently bottomless pit of a newborn. I could even cite how frustrating the last five minutes have been trying to type out these few sentences while the two-year-old taps everything--keyboard, monitor screen, me, books, and little sister--with her wand while alternately singing Twinkle Twinkle and demanding to watch Octonauts, and the aforementioned little sister wakes up from her 5 millisecond nap to scream for more milk. (Aside: It is now three days later.  These kids have stamina.)

But I digress.

Life has pretty much continued as normal.  It's the beginning of Break Up, which is Alaskan for what the rest of the world calls Spring.  This quaint term refers to the ice on the rivers breaking up.  In real life, this means that our thigh-deep snow is turning to knee-deep slush and ankle-deep water, depending on the area.  We are firmly at or above freezing during the day, which means that it is now possible to make a real snowball, which I've been assured is a sign that Break Up is underway.

To celebrate, the kids built a snowman and took a snowbath a la Finland, because, hey, that's what you do in the spring.  (Video included on FB due to technical difficulties on the blog.)  They rolled around in the snow and then came in to hug mom, because they're the devil.  In other news, Rick may or may not be a bad influence. 

After justice was done upon them, we went to Mush for Kids, a yearly event in Fairbanks where they celebrate sled dogs.  In case you haven't heard, dogsledding--or mushing--is kind of a big deal up here.  Apparently the dogs still have a ton of energy a couple weeks after the Iditarod and the Nenana Classic.  The solution is to attach them to sleds full of screaming kids and have them run laps.  There were also pens of disinterested puppies to pet, some fluffy bear-dogs, and an alpaca because, well, why not?

It's hard to describe, but there is definitely a Spring-y feel to the air.  The snow is sloughing off the roof and there is such a constant drip-drip off the house that it sounds like it's raining. We've cranked open the windows since it's a toasty 45 degrees, trying to get rid of the stale foot-fug that's accumulated since November.  In one of my favorite books (Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett), Spring in a forest is described as "the brighter sun and longer days that would pump a million gallons of sap several hundred feet into the sky in one great systolic thump too big and loud to be heard."  It feels like that--like the world is about to come alive again, and feeling that impatience surge in your own veins, a restless desire to burst outside and run anywhere--everywhere--to feel the sun on your skin and cleanse your lungs with the icy-fresh air and exalt in being alive again, too.

Of course, there's still the slush for now.  Which will be followed by the mud, and then two waves of mosquitos, and eventually the few weeks of omnipresent sun before we start sliding back towards winter.

It's going to be awesome.

*Editor's Note: within 24 hours of this post, it was snowing again.  Go fig.