7/5/2005 I am in the unusual situation of having too many photos that I want to put on the site for this entry. So, I might have to make it a long rant on some topic...what I'm not sure yet.

I took Bryce hiking with me a couple weeks ago up at Point Reyes National Seashore. I have been up there a couple times before but this time I was carrying a 12 pound child and a backpack full of stuff to keep him happy. I took the steepest route from one of the main trailheads up to the high point in the park and then took trails from there in a loop of about 10 miles back. It was quite foggy and wet again, as it often is during the summer along the coast. I was doing fine with the wetness until I got onto a trail that wasn't used very much. The grass had not been cut and was about waist high for much of the trail; normally that wouldn't be a problem, however it was so foggy that moisture was condensing on the grass. As I brushed past the grass the water rolled down my legs and into my socks and shoes; I was soaked from the waist down. It wasn't terribly unpleasant, but I did feel that maybe there should've been a warning somewhere about the condition of the trail. Bryce slept almost the whole hike; waking only so that I could change his diaper and feed him a bottle while I walked along with him bouncing in the carrier.

My Mom came to visit last week. We all went out to an A's game on Tuesday night. For a day when the weather in San Francisco was in the mid 70's things really got cold fast. The game started at 7 pm and by the time the 4th inning rolled around we were all bundled up. Bryce was in his A's gear but it was so cold that we had to put a sweatshirt on over it and wrap him in a blanket.

Last Friday Bryce had his third set of hearing tests. The audiologist determined that he will get digital hearing aids for both ears and hopes that they will be available by the time he is six months old. In the mean time we have already been contacted by people from the SF unified school district who will be starting Bryce in what they call Early Start. Early Start is a program that provides speech therapy and lessons to infants as young as Bryce so that they can develop normal speech despite severe hearing loss.

We spent the 4th of July weekend at Pinecrest Lake at my family's cabin with about 20 of my relatives. I hadn't been up to the cabin for about ten years before this and was surprised how beautiful the area is. I can't quite determine if I grew up in places that are beautiful or if my sense of beauty is derived from the places that I grew up. Regardless, I had a fun time. I spent the first day on a long and difficult hike up the river that feeds the lake. There was no trail, so I scrabbled over large slabs of granite and through Manzanita bushes until I got lost. It might seem hard to get lost while you are following a river but I did. The canyon that I was in was shown in detail on the topo map but because of the steep walls and my inability to use "dead reckoning" I couldn't tell if I ever reached, passed without noticing, or just never found the connecting overland route that I was looking for. After fording the river on a slightly submerged large tree and wandering around for an hour in disgust I turned around and headed back the way that I came. It was about a six hour hike in all, and even after re-reading the description in the hiking book I couldn't tell how far up the river I had gone.

The rest of the weekend after my adventure I spent in recovery and trying to relax at the cabin. We went for another much shorter and easier hike around the lake on Saturday; and I built a nice fire for s'more making on Sunday. Most people were playing cards constantly or reading or sleeping. Having a lot of people around makes it easier to have leisure time since Jen, Dory, Danielle and Brian all took turns taking care of Bryce.

I have quite a few photos of Bryce that I want to put here so I have decided to put up an auxilliary gallery page for this entry: Click Hereto see the rest of the photos.
6/17/2005
5/27/2005
5/1/2005
4/15/2005
4/5/2005
3/24/2005
3/13/2005
2/5/2005
12/28/2004
11/29/2004
11/3/2004
10/2/2004
9/10/2004
8/23/2004
8/8/2004
7/21/2004
7/2/2004
6/8/2004
5/4/2004
4/20/2004
3/28/2004
3/10/2004
2/10/2004
1/15/2004


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