Creepy Crawlies

A few days before our trip I took the girls in the stroller up to our local park. It's uphill all the way, and the Phil and Ted's, ergonomic though it may be, when packed with girls and diapers and snacks and drinks is a bit like trying to take a Sherman Tank for a power walk. It was a great workout, and we weren't exactly racing along the streets.

Anna was not asleep, so that means she was talking. And talking. And talking. Like quite a few prolific talkers, she doesn't need much in the way of actual 'conversation' so I usually keep my iPod on low and throw out the occasional 'yes, uh-huh' or 'really' at random, and that seems to sustain her momentum. Halfway to the park she suddenly broke from her monologue and said 'That's Shelly's house'. To which I replied 'yes, uh-huh-, really'. This time she was not to be fobbed off. 'Mom, look that's Shelly's house!'.

In the space of 5 seconds, maybe less, I thought: 'wait, what? Who's Shelly? how come I don't know anything about any Shelly while my daughter has clearly been over to her house? Is this how I find out? LK's been having an affair, taking my daughter over to her house and I've been completely oblivious and this is how I find out?! Oh My God, what am I going to do, what.....'

"Mom, Shelly is a snail form Sunny Patch Friends and that is her house - look!".

We had literally been going at a snail's pace and Anna had been pointing it out. Turns out, the 'other woman' in our relationship wasn't some ho called Shelly, it was TV, and more particularly a TV show.

I stepped back from the precipice.

Because of this one TV show, Anna now calls all snails 'Shelly'. When we went to England she was in hog heaven because my Mum and Dad's gorgeous garden:

















Contains about 10 snails per square foot. It's a veritable Marks and Spencers food court for snails.

Anna set about collecting them all.

My Mum suggested she keep them in an old fishtank (read, snail Auschwitz). Anna thought this was a brilliant idea, completely oblivious that she was hastening their demise. She is absolutely fearless when it comes to all things creepy, crawly and slimy. She had the time of her life with her 'Shelly's'. We counted them, we raced them (riveting), she even found a gorgeous stripy one. I suggested we call her 'Speed Racer' because of her go-faster stripes. "Or..... we could call her Shelly?" suggested Anna.
































England was kind to Anna. Thousands of Shellys, lots of frogs, slugs and wood lice to capture. So imagine my horror yesterday when I saw the biggest black widow spider I ever saw in my life, just taking a gentle stroll around our property.

There was no mistaking her - fiercely black, with a perfectly round body, like a spider wearing a latex fetish suit. About the size of an old 50p, it took half a can of Raid before she finally twitched herself on to her back - displaying that tell-tale red hourglass on her abdomen. I finished the job with the non-so-delicate heel of my English winter boots. No show and tell this time round.

Imagine what could have happened if I hadn't spotted her first? In California, Mother Nature bites back.

I think our little Gerald Durrell needs to take up stamp collecting.

Camping

This weekend a bunch of LK's high school friends (who all seem to live within a 1 mile radius of their former high school - God this town is weird) organized a mass camping trip. I of course declined their generous offer of a night under canvas in a rattlesnake infested camp ground with a 3 year old and an infant - because I am not insane.

Lucy and I deigned to visit for an hour or two and had a wonderful time watching the kids swimming in the river fishing for crawdads, while the adults sipped a margarita.

Now that, is camping.








































I left just as the reality of nothing but hotdogs for dinner was really starting to hit, and I headed back to civilization almost giddy with the idea of an evening alone with the remote control. How hard up do you have to be to consider an night with an infant a vacation?

Meanwhile LK and Anna braved a night in a borrowed tent with a blow-up mattress missing its plug.




That Garnet Hill duvet just screams 'roughing it in the wild' doesn't it?













Santa Barbara is a peculiar bubble. You only have to drive 30 miles north to be in complete wilderness. Full on camping territory, including a Ranger Station which always makes me think of pic-a-nic baskets. LK's friends more or less had the campsite to themselves, except for a couple of well-meaning I'm sure, 7th Day Adventists who distributed literature on the first night no doubt alarmed at the sheer quantity of tequila being unpacked from the assembled Winnebagos.

Poor old LK did not get to experience the campfire drunkenness. Apparently Anna, exhausted by an afternoon of 'swimming' in a knee-deep California 'river' pitched an exhausted tantrum, screamed for Mumma and demanded they both bed down for the night at 9pm. I feel a tad sorry for him, but not too much considering I know full well that if I had stayed the night, I would have been tent-bound by 8:30pm with two children while LK whooped it up with his cronies. Plus Lucy is not sleeping through the night, and I didn't fancy trying to boob her in the pitch black night while venomous things slithered and crawled around us.

I am not an experienced camper. As a child, the one and only time I spent a night in a tent was in the Guides, resulting in an anxiety attack and my thoroughly cross Mum having to come and collect me from a muddy field outside Ripon.

Camping in England means everything suffused in drizzle, firewood too soggy to light and cows tripping over your tent ropes at 5am. Camping in California is the polar opposite. It means punishing heat and dust, poisonous creatures, large wild animals with pointy teeth, grass too dessicated and prickly to sit on and campfires in designated fire pits only. Aren't I making it sound fun? I think it's a vacation if you're a child and you don't have to worry where the next hotdog is coming from, whether you remembered to pack the toilet roll, and you don't care that you've swum in, slept in and lived in the same pair of knickers for the last 48 hours. To me it seems like an awful lot of packing, cooking and washing.

Camping seems to be ingrained in the American psyche much more so than in England. Probably because there is genuine 'wild' here and not just that bit by the river off the A64 near Knaresborough. As far as I can tell, people take a lot of pleasure in moving the entire contents of their house in a massive camper van to somewhere with a nice view and then sitting in a deck chair by that vehicle for the weekend. British people will happily hike 15 to 20 miles in one day but have a desperate need to return to their couch for a cup of tea by nightfall. We are strange races.

It was beautiful to be able to drive across the mountains and see a side of California far removed from the manicured environs of Santa Barbara. It was wonderful to see all the kids splashing it up with their friends. Mrs S. as usual had the forethought to bring inflatables, glow-in-the-dark bracelets and alcohol. The real camping essentials. Our kettle corn was a pale rejoinder.



















I don't think the idea of doing it next year with an 18 month old is any more appealing somehow, but I know I would enjoy waking up to this view through the top of my tent:

All Creatures Great and Small

Most of the time we live a very sanitized domesticated life here in California. A life very different to the one I had imagined when coming out here. I'd heard about bears, sharks, mountain lions, coyotes, rattle snakes and black widows. I more or less expected them to greet me as I left the luggage carousel at LAX. Obviously I know now that those are the least of your worries in South Central LA.

Two days after LK and I met we went hiking up Jesusita Trail in the hills behind Santa Barbara. The sun was about to set and we were more or less the only people up there. We got to the top and took in the gorgeous views of the city below; the white-washed buildings with their red roofs, the ocean and islands stretching to the blue and gold horizon. LK cracked a couple of cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon (the signs were all there ladies, why didn't I run?), which promptly exploded from all the bumping up the trail. I immediately slurped what I could from the top of the can and LK said 'damn, you're my kind of woman'. *Sigh*. We paused, to take in the beauty of the moment and then he turned to me and said 'man, look at those lions'.

I must have literally gone 'wh-what?'. I do remember thinking, 'why aren't we running, should we run now? what about now?' I was just about to hurl myself off the ridge when he added 'we should have been surfing, not hiking'.

He was talking about lines of incoming waves, not lions. Lines not lions. The first of many, many verbal misunderstandings that have left him oblivious and me gathering fistfuls of sizeable rocks .

In the UK there is practically nothing in nature that can harm you. There is one poisonous snake, an adder, that I have personally never seen and my Mum and Dad have only seen once. Snakes are only active when it's sunny, thus making it even less likely to see a rare snake in the wilds of cloudy North Yorkshire. Other than that, nothing. The real James Herriot was knocked over by sheep, and I've heard tales of angry badgers, but that's about it. California has wilderness, and creatures with teeth and barbs and venom. We went to a party last week at an avocado ranch just outside Santa Barbara which is regularly frequented by bears. LK has seen mountain lions when fishing with his Dad. We used to have a black widow spider in the corner of our shower (think of that next time you reach for the Timotei). I also once trod on a potato bug when walking out of the bathroom of our 'studio' (converted garage) in Carpinteria. If I hadn't just been to the loo it could quite literally have scared the crap out of me, because have you seen one of these things?










Wow, that picture is about true to scale too. They are like ants on steroids. Urgh.

We've also come across snakes too, but they are fortunately few and far between.

Not so yesterday as it happens.

We got home from work, said goodbye to our nanny, shut the door and then five seconds later heard her scream, and then start banging on the door pleading 'fuck, shit,' bang bang bang 'God let me in, Jesus Fucking Christ'. We opened the door and she was laughing saying 'oh my God, there's the biggest fucking snake out there'. True, a two-foot long snake, was lying right across our path. Right here, where less than a week ago we took this picture of Anna on her first day at pre-school:















I know, cute picture, but there could have been a snake lurking in the shrubbery that very second!! And dear God those snakes can move fast. Not as fast as a nanny and a Mum holding a two-year old though. It sped straight towards us and we literally flew back in to the house. Anna thought it was hilarious, and now has a much-expanded vocabulary which I'm hoping she won't be using at her new pre-school.

God I hate snakes.