KatysBlog

My son Paul started 8th grade yesterday at
Jordan Middle School (Palo Alto)
and today he turned 13. He spent the summer reading

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, plus the Mildred D. Taylor series
that he started with
Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry in school last year, plus re-reading John D. Fitzgerald’s

The Great Brain series. John even got Paul to read
The Stainless Steel Rat but Paul said he did not like it.

Pretty good for a boy who spent two years in schools
for dyslexics and learned to read in 4th grade!
Paul had a good summer, including summer school, a SCUBA lesson at the Monterey Bay Aquarium, and camping for a
week at the
Lair of the Golden Bear U.C. Berkeley alumni family camp.

Jordan Middle School has been wonderful for Paul. He is in a special three year program
(6th through 8th grade) for kids with behavioral and cognitive learning disabilities.
After so many years in the wrong school, finding the right school for my boy has been
a great joy. Paul works very hard, gets good grades, and is just blooming. He is sad
that his best friend went to Palo Alto
High School a year before him but he is learning how to keep up a relationship
with someone outside of his class and he is making new friends too. We all have hopes
for a good year.

Jessi starts her Junior year in at
The Harker School (San Jose) next week. Besides taking Advanced Placement or Honors
everything, singing in the Harker Conservatory, wrestling, testing for her karate
black belt, and staying on the
Honor Roll, her job this year is to decide where to apply to college. Eeek!

Harker is very serious about college applications and they seem to do
well on acceptances to preferred schools. Jessi told me that one of the
college advisors last year said he would come to school in a full Scottish
kilt with all the trimmings if his group all got accepted to their first
choice schools. They did and he did.

Harker has started planning for their annual weeklong college trip to the
East Coast. So far, they plan to visit Boston College, Boston University,
Harvard, MIT, Tufts, Wellesley, Brown, Yale, NYU,Columbia, Princeton, the
University of Pennsylvania,George Washington, American, Georgetown, and
Johns Hopkins University.

We have been reading the
Fiske Guide to Colleges. Jessi is interested in schools with both great
academics and a superb music program so we requested that Harker also consider
visiting Oberlin College, Carnegie Mellon Univ. (CMU), West Point (United States
Military Academy at West Point), and St. Olaf College. We are also interested
in some schools in Canada and England but we will have to get there
on our own.

This is going to be a wild year.

We camped last week at the
Lair of the Golden Bear U.C. Berkeley alumni family camp. Most years, we
hang out in the art grove, at the pool, and in the creek. This year, we tried
something new: day hikes.

My brother Pete, my husband John, our two teens, Jessi and Paul, plus J.R. (borrowed teen),
and I joined ten other hikers at 7:30 a.m. in the Camp Blue dining hall to make sandwiches
and get directions. We drove out of camp to Pinecrest Lake
to start. We walked half way around the lake and then started to climb. There has
been a great deal of water in the Sierras this year so the mosquitos were out in
large numbers. From the lake at 5,600 feet above sealevel, we climbed at least another
thousand feet over granite and through bay laurels to Cleo’s Baths.

The water at Cleo’s Baths is very cold and very deep this year so there many people
jumped from the
cliffs into the pools. They came up gasping and delighted and ready to climb up
again. There are great basins and holes wallowed out of the granite from the rush
of snowmelt causing the boulders inside to spin and grind. Some are full of water and
others are empty. J.R. crawled into a deep hole and lay down on a warm boulder to take
lots of pictures. Paul kept looking for higher cliffs to jump from. Jessie and I sat
on the warm granite and talked then played a game of Set with the little kids. We hiked down after lunch
very happy and covered with bug bites.

After a day of rest, we were ready to hike to Natural Bridges. Again starting at
7:30 a.m., this hike required an
hour’s drive down through Twain Harte, MiWuk, Sonora, and Columbia. The Camp Blue hike
leaders took the steep fast trail down with breakfast in their packs while the rest
of us walked down the switchback trail through poison oak, blackberries, scrub oak,
manzanita, and grass to the creek.

After breakfast, we got ready to swim. The highlight of Natural Bridges is a long
high cave with the creek running through it. We brought black inner tubes to float on.
The first part of the cave is flat about ten feet over the water, at least forty feet wide
in all directions with water dripping, showering, or cascading down from the ceiling.
From there,
we floated into two high chambers with amazing yellow and brown and white
stalactites and limestone formations. The final area opens onto a hillside where the
creek enters the cave and there are warm granite hillocks to dry off on. We saw
banana slugs and a large yellow brown crawdad and lots of minnows. I was barefoot. I
wish I had worn my Tevas so that I could have done more climbing.

Jessi and I outlasted everyone because we took so long watching the crawdad creep from
one granite basin to another. We got to float alone back through the caves.
It grew very quiet and Jessi started singing opera. Hearing her lovely voice and enjoying
her playing with the resonance was a profound delight.

We drove back to the Lair after stopping to visit and have lunch at the Columbia Historic Park. What a great day!