Back to hiking

Family of deer seen during our hike

A couple of weeks back, we had been to a concert in Los Altos Hills. We passed by a trail head and it brought back an old familiar feeling of hiking to us. The air was fresh with the smell of the trees, and we remembered the exhilarating feeling that comes with hiking and being one with nature in the California hiking trails. We decided to try and hike again, this time as a family.

We set out to the Almaden Quicksilver County Park and decided to do a “trial run” the following weekend. This consisted of planning a small one-hour long hike and practicing our method of packing and hiking with the little ones. The park is located in New Almaden which is south of San Jose (the original town named Almaden is in Spain). It has an old post office that was opened in 1841. The community is named after the New Almaden mine which was opened in 1848. This mine is the oldest and was most productive quicksilver or mercury mine in the US.

The website of the county park summarizes the park with the following note: “Welcome to Almaden Quicksilver County Park, spectacular in natural diversity and a landmark of California history. The park is the site of over 135 years of mining activities and former home to more than 1,800 miners and their families. The park encompasses 4,163 acres, occupying a majority of Capitancillos Ridge. During early spring, the park offers one of the most spectacular wildflower displays in the region. Remnants of the mining era also offer an exciting look into the mining operations of the latter part of the 19th century.”

We started off our hike with the baby in a hiking backpack carrier worn by my husband. I carried our backpack which was packed with whatever we thought we would need for our short hike. Our daughter walked alongside us. The initial part of the hike, like all trails local to us, was uphill. We managed to do it and decided to do a 2 mile roundtrip hike as part of our practice run. We wanted to see how our daughter would do with the distance, and whether our son would stay content in the carrier. We reached the top with not much difficulty and had a bit of trouble keeping our daughter entertained on the way down (she kept wanting to stop and collect pebbles). We were treated to a sight of a family of deer on the way back at the old mining site. We didn’t hike far enough to enjoy good views, but enjoyed our time out in nature very much. Aside from an incident of our daughter’s water bottle leaking in our car and a bit of fussiness from the baby, there were no issues whatsoever.

This was also a good chance of me to do some reflecting and processing. I lost a friend about three months ago, and the feelings about her passing have been coming in waves. She was an old friend with whom I have been hiking many times and camping a couple of times. I recently wrote about my memories of her and recalled some of our moments spent hiking together. I realize that I will have to process this loss from time to time while also continuing to live my life to its potential as much as possible. The hike gave me another opportunity to think about her. It also gave me a chance to process some thoughts I have been having about my work and career and where I would like to see it go.

I would like to update this post at some time or write a new one about the history of Almaden, after I visit the old mining museum and learn more about it. Until then, here’s some Depeche Mode for you.

Now I'm not looking for absolution

Forgiveness for the things I do

But before you come to any conclusions

Try walking in my shoes

Try walking in my shoes

You'll stumble in my footsteps

Keep the same appointments I kept

If you try walking in my shoes

If you try walking in my shoes

PS: Speaking of shoes, my husband and I also fished out our nice hiking boots which have been occupying the top shelf of our shoe closet for far too long, and wore them on this hike.

The party

The smash cake

It is a Monday morning, and I have actually been looking forward to this time to catch up on my routine and work. Our weekend and the past few weeks have been hectic. We celebrated our son’s first birthday on Saturday, and it turned out to be a successful event and enjoyable celebration.

We had a garden party, and our backyard looked beautiful with all the decorations. After some thought, we decided not to invest in traditional party decorations and to just get our backyard in good shape for a party. We bought a tent and a folding table. We borrowed another two folding tables and some chairs and brought out our patio table. A few tablecloths and flower vases later, our backyard was transformed into a lovely garden party venue. Our friends and family helped us set it all up, and I was very satisfied with the overall look of our place.

We had outdoor speakers and a customized playlist of our favorite music. While compiling our playlist, we started out with “garden-themed” songs that included flowers, gardens, leaves, butterflies, trees, birds or fruits in the lyrics (quite a range). I added in a twist that all the artists had to be English, to go with the English cottage garden and afternoon tea party vibe. But, being that our musical tastes are more oriented towards post punk, new wave, shoegaze, dream pop and alternative rock, we focused on music that we really enjoy and ended up adding a lot of non-garden themed music to our playlist. The artists included David Bowie, The Cure, New Order, Buzzcocks, Sex Pistols (God save the Queen had to be on the list!), Gary Numan, Slowdive, Ride, Siouxsie, Simple Minds, Bauhaus, and The Jesus and Mary Chain. We included one - yes ONE - song for our son, and that was “Baby Shark” of course. Anyway, the music put us in a good mood to enjoy the party.

We had a lot of cake and sweet treats to serve up. This included a two-tiered garden themed cake, with one layer of vanilla cake with chocolate mousse filling, and another layer of chocolate cake with whipped cream filling. The buttercream frosting was delicately decorated with a fence, grass, flowers and butterflies. The Happy Birthday lettering on the cake was designed to look like a sign post on the fence. We added a “ONE” banner on top of the cake, along with a single candle. We had a second cake to serve as a smash cake, which was also a vanilla cake with blue frosting and flowers and grass decorations on it along with the number “1”. We had a few vegan cupcakes to cater to our family and friends’ preferences. We added vanilla and chocolate cake pops to the cake table, just because. The table was decorated with flowers in a basket, and a chalkboard milestone sign of our son’s first year. As I write this, I feel rather impressed with myself/ourselves for pulling this off.

The food was mostly handled by my husband. We had tea sandwiches (chicken salad, egg salad, pickled red peppers and cheese, and cucumber sandwiches), all of which were very tasty and which we made at home with some help from a family member. During the party, when I was serving myself some of the food, I had to actually ask one of our guests who helped make the sandwiches which ones I could eat due to my dietary preferences. Another guest was very amused to witness this conversation and we talked about how I was the one who had the “vision” for the party, and that I had delegated the actual execution of it: to my husband who did the menu planning and shopping based on my suggestions, and to the family members who helped to put it all together on the day of the party. We also served petit toasts with vegetable spreads which I had carefully selected during our trip to France. We arranged these on two three-tiered trays and served them up as appetizers. They were devoured and enjoyed by everyone. The spreads were of four kinds: tomatoes, olives, mushrooms, and aubergines. We added mini croissants and an assortment of scones to the mix. And finally, we served two varieties of quiche: Quiche Lorraine (which contains bacon) and Quiche Florentine (a vegetarian quiche). My husband added an extra touch to the quiches by recruiting my nephew to make signs with stamps on toothpicks to indicate “Vegetarian” and “Bacon”, which made them look quite professionally done!

We had a water table set up for the children, along with many of our daughter’s toys around to play with. We also bought several bottles of bubbles to hand out to the younger children so they could blow soap bubbles in the garden. Our party favors were flowering plants from our local nursery. My husband and I picked out the flowers, of the perennial variety, along with colored cardboard gift bags that we could fit the pots in. We also added a cute little tag with our son’s name and a heart sign written on it. We had found these tags while in France, and I happened to pick up exactly the number of packets we needed!  A little bonus was that that one of these little blue teddy bear shaped tags was left over, and my friend used it to decorate the knife for the cake! I think that the children (and the parents moreso) enjoyed picking out a plant to take home with them.

And finally, over to the star of the show – our little one. He was enjoying himself, dressed in a little collared shirt, shorts and flipflops and walking all over the garden (staggering really, since he’s just started taking his first steps) beaming at everyone and having a good time. He entertained us all as he dug into his smash cake to the pumping beats of “Cake in the Ocean”. Our daughter, who usually does not like to share the spotlight and is especially fond of birthdays and being the center of attention, was charmingly graceful and well-behaved through the party (disclaimer: this does not apply to her behavior just before and after the party) and took on her role of blowing out the candle on the cake quite well. We captured the celebration with a few photographs and received several thoughtful gifts from our family and friends. My parents were even able to attend through video call and witness the cake-cutting and smash cake during the party. We concluded the day tired but happy with our big milestone celebration at the end of this monumental year.

ETA: A few days after the party, as I was feeling a bit smugly satisfied with our Pinterest/Instagram worthy party (oh, the irony!), I tuned in to Season 2 of "The Letdown" which is an Aussie show on Netflix. The initial few minutes had her stressing about her son's first birthday party and trying to wrap her head around DIY stuff for the party (because Sophie did it!)...cue me feeling a bit sheepish.  Then, when she goes to a salon and says the same exact words that came out of my mouth a few days prior - Just a little trim and a blowout, please! while secretly expecting the hairdresser to do some kind of magic to tame that ugly postpartum hair, I turned off the television. But I also can't wait to go back and watch the rest of the show. I can relate so well to shows like The Letdown and Working Moms these days, and on the other hand I cannot relate at all (like, at all), to the Indian shows on Netflix (modern twist on romance). Anyway, going back to the party, we all know they are too young to remember and we all know that we try to have a good party for ourselves for making it through that rough first year. Baby can can look back at the photos when he is older. Thankfully "do it for the gram" (go look it up) does not apply to me since I have a whopping one photo posted on my Instagram. And maybe, we could have had a simpler celebration and it would have been just as perfect, but both my husband and I quite liked it (especially the music) and thankfully we didn't spend a ton of money on it either (we did not have catering for example, and a family member took photos for us). I suppose it is just another one of those things we are stumbling through in life and learning from in the process. And now, on to toddlerhood!