Melina's boyfriend(s)

For the last three out of four weeks, we've been hiking with our friends Sibelia & Simon and their three boys. Melina LOVES these boys (she has said several times that she wants to move in with them). On our first outing we went to Lower McLeay Park and Melina had fun running down the trail at top speed with the boys. It made me a little nervous not to have her anywhere in sight, but Sibelia (who has retained her sanity up to this point) to me to just relax and know that Melina has the presence of mind not to jump off any cliffs. (Not that there were a lot of big cliffs around, but the trail did wind along a streambank). Pretty soon we came up on them all playing at the Old Stone House (a castle-like ruin) down the trail.

Our second outing was to Silver Falls State Park, where there really are cliffs, so the kids had to stay closer. On the safe parts, Melina and her friend S.T. (short for Siddhartha) raced each other up the trail. Apparently they had some sort of contest going whereby if Melina won, she got a pet (like a bunny or a kitten). Apparently she won three pets, which luckily have not materialized yet.

After our hike, we went to a restaurant in Silverton. Melina and S.T. sat across from each other, apart from the rest of us, entertaining each other by blowing bubbles in their milk and stuffing French fries into holes in the floor. (We discovered this part later).

Yesterday we went for a "snow hike" around Lost Lake on Mt. Hood. This was a 3.5-mile hike, which was pretty ambitious to begin with, but it turned out that half of it was still covered in deep snow. We managed to do it anyway. Melina and S.T. raced each other where possible, and the boys had fun whacking bushes with sticks. Only one person fell into a hole and nobody slid down the steep snow field we had to cross above the lake. By the end everyone's feet were soaking wet, and we richly deserved the ice cream bars we got at the little country store there.

The only drawback to all of this running through the woods like a wild animal is that now Melina expects that level of freedom whenever we go hiking with friends. It's a matter of teaching her that some people have different rules than other people do. I have a few friends who are very easygoing, relatively underprotective types (well, not necessarily *under* protective, but not overprotective) - and others who like to have more control. Finding a balance between these different parenting styles is a constant challenge.