priceless moment

I woke up this morning to Sawyer yelling, "Mom, come look, I cleaned the house!"
It had been a long Hallows Eve — lots of candy, little food of any substance — and Sawyer had awoken in the middle of the night, puking and shaking. I gave him a slice of warm bread and a couple sips of milk. "Mommy, you are making me feel so much better," he said. We went back to sleep in my bed. Arden climbed in at some point early. And, the next thing I know Sawyer's downstairs yelling that he cleaned the house. I have no idea how long he'd been awake. I came downstairs and the house was spotless. Everything — every last shoe, every last toy — was off the floor or neatly lined up along the wall. (I won't even get into what it means about a mother's cleaning abilities when her 4-year-old is overwhelmed by the impulsion to straighten the house.) He'd even unloaded the clean laundry basket I'd folded the night before and separated them into his pile and Arden's pile on the couch (maybe not so helpful but super cute). I was pretty stunned and my reaction at the time may have been a bit underwhelming, so a little while later I found him upstairs getting dressed. I got down next to him and said, "Sawyer, you did such a wonderful job cleaning downstairs. I'm really proud of you." He sort of gasped and put his hand on his chest and said, "Mommy, that makes my heart feel warm."

Not a typical morning with my son. Maybe it had something to do with puking up the Halloween candy.

And on the First Day of Halloween ...

Halloween is a 4-day celebration this year, giving us ample opportunity to wear all our dress-up clothes. Thursday is the preschool party, Friday is trick-or-treat downtown, Saturday is the party at the school and Sunday is trick-or-treat in Fraser. The doctor outfit is my personal favorite, but Arden really wants to be a princess. Sawyer just wants Arden to be his prisoner.

Top or bottom?

We finally moved the kids out of their cribs. They were still sleeping in modified cribs, Sawyer's converted to a Daybed. Arden's was just a crib with the front panel removed. Scott scored this bunk bed from one of the properties he manages. It isn't in perfect condition, but the kids are just thrilled. They think it's a rocket ship. One thing's for sure — nobody's sleeping tonight.

Counting

Yet another hilarious moment with my kids. God bless preschool.

Counting from Reid Armstrong on Vimeo.

Chinese, Spanish and, um, Gypsy Kings.

Counting more from Reid Armstrong on Vimeo.

I'm pretty certain Sawyer's voice only possesses 26 octaves.

School work

When I picked the kids up from school today, the teacher gave me a picture Sawyer had made of a fire truck. The outline of the truck was formed by a line of very tiny holes. I looked at the picture closely and couldn't figure out how Sawyer had made such a straight line. When I asked, the teacher showed me a big square piece of styrofoam and a tack. The preschoolers place the paper on top of the styrofoam and use tiny pen-dots drawn on the page to guide them as they punch the tack into the dots on the page to make the picture. The teacher showed me a sample from another kid. The punch holes were all over the page and I could see the dots she was supposed to use as a guide. Looking back at Sawyer's picture I still couldn't see a single pen mark on the page. I pointed this out the the teacher, and she stared at it kind of baffled and then took it to the window. Even holding the page up to the light there wasn't a single pen dot visible. Sawyer had used the tack to perfectly punch through each pen dot on the page. The teacher was almost speechless. Not because this means Sawyer is destined to be a genius. It's just so quintessentially Sawyer. He's a perfectionist about some things. I don't know where he gets it. But to hit each of those hundred tiny dots so exactly must have taken incredible patience — something he doesn't always have. And because he's a perfectionist, he often get frustrated about projects like that. I can't even imagine how long it took him. I'd have taken a picture of it and posted it here or framed it or something, but as we were walking out the door he gave it to his little friend Sydney who was crying because she'd skinned her knee. And that, too, is so quintessentially Sawyer.

Church Park Fire

It's been a rough and interesting two weeks around here.

Following my last post, we have met "Shoulder Season" in Middle Park. Summer sweetly lingered through the first weekend of October. Then, in a literal fire storm, winter reared its head.


The fire broke out last Sunday. I was home by myself, supposedly cleaning. I hate cleaning. And, I'm really slow at it. My house eternally suffers for it. Scott called and asked me if I'd heard about a fire near Fraser. He'd received a call from a coworker who was packing his stuff to evacuate. I looked online and the county's emergency website was down. I called my editor. No answer. I called our photographer. Yes, there was a fire. He was on his way. My editor was on a mountaintop somewhere looking down at the fire.

I called my editor again. This time he answered. Yes, he could see the fire and it had doubled in size in the last 15 minutes. I threw one sentence to that effect on the newspaper website and then made a call to the county's emergency public information officer. She said the fire was now 300 acres and that every firefighter in the county was responding. She told me where it was — Sheep Mountain near Church Park, which is located 5 miles west of Fraser. The Town of Fraser is 15-mile-drive south of my house by road, 12 miles as the crow flies. I walked out onto my back deck and looked west. No smoke. I craned my head to the south, in the direction of Fraser. No smoke. I wrote another update online.

The phone rang again. This time it was another coworker who lives up the road from me. "I have pictures," she said. "I can see flames shooting over the ridge." From her house? I looked west again off my back deck. Nothing. And craned around to the south. Nothing. I needed a map so I walked out my front door to the car and — there it was, like an atom bomb had gone off.

What I did not realize, being so new to the area, it that the mountain 5 miles south of my house — the one that appears so clearly as the backdrop in all the photos I take of my kids running through fields — is Sheep Mountain. My heart hit my stomach.


I put photos online and another update. People were being asked to prepare for evacuation. The winds started picking up. I couldn't help but stand there are stare at that cloud of smoke. It was mesmerizing. The slurry bombers came in and for the rest of the afternoon it was a full on air attack and I had a front-row seat. We all did.


From the other side of the mountain it looked like a volcano had exploded.


The weather grew cold and damp that night and hundreds of firefighters poured into the area. They fought to save roads and fought to keep the fire from coming across that ridge. The fire grew to 500 acres and came within 2 miles of houses and a young life camp. But not a single structure burned. Sawyer wanted to know if his Uncle Brian and Uncle Sam had saved everyone from the fire.

In the days ahead, I wrote a least 15 more updates on the fire and two long, feature stories. By the end of what turned out to be a very long week (in one 14-hour day I wrote the story about the fire, put it online, edited fire photos from readers, helped design the paper and then drove two hours to pick the paper up at the press and deliver it) snow had arrived and blanketed the mountaintops. The bone-chilling, moist weather put a final finish to the fire. It is now 100 percent contained and crews are breaking down camp and pulling out.

This was the biggest fire of its kind that Grand County has ever seen. But with 3 million acres of dead trees surrounding us in the Arapaho and Roosevelt National Forests due to the pine beetle epidemic, it won't be the last.