Community - Growing Up in Santa Cruz

Growing Up and Growing Older

Brad Kava — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 17:06:00 +0000

One of the worst things that happened when raising my son was that no one told us that breast feeding in the middle of the night and not brushing his teeth right then could cause cavities. I wished someone in obstetrics had mentioned that. Instead, we had to take him to a pediatric dentist, where he was put under anesthesia and a great dentist did the work. His mother and I were in tears of fear watching this not quite a toddler on the chair. That’s one of the guiding principles for this magazine ever since. We want to get as much information out to parents as possible. This month we have a pediatric dental column to help with things they might not have told you yet. It’s so important and can be overlooked amongst the trials of child birth. We are trying to cover child rearing experiences for all ages, from birth to grand parenting with content provided by local experts and local writers. You won’t find that in online parent guides or many other magazines, which use syndicated writers. Here you will find everything homegrown in our county, something I’m really proud of. I love this line from our special needs columnist Tovah Petra Kolodinski, who is both a writer and an expert: “In some ways, a newborn experiences the world much like we experience Halloween— loud, unpredictable, and filled with strange sensations.” Perfect for the season, in which we celebrate births and the frenetic end of month holiday. Susan Tatsui-D’Arcy, who is an educator and owns her own school, took a break from more serious topics to bring us a fun Halloween treat. Yum. And we have two of my favorite stories ever: one on the top baby names here in California and in the rest of the country. I find parents’ choices so fascinating. What’s the strangest or most unusual baby name you’ve heard lately? The other piece we love is our fashion column in which writer Malia Fort takes a look at what older and younger people in Santa Cruz are wearing. Love, Love Love. Our finance column also has lessons you’ll keep for a lifetime: the most important being that kids start learning about finance at a much younger age than you would expect. There’s much more here to entertain and teach. Have a great read. PS: As we go to press, we saw major changes in federal and state regulations for pain killers for pregnant women. We’ll investigate with local doctors for the next issue. If you have ideas on the important topic, please send to editor@growingupsc.com Thanks for reading!

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Stepping Up In Scouting America

Tarmo Hannula — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 15:30:16 +0000

The local Scouting America Unit 505 held their annual Bridging Ceremony Aug. 28 to recognize merits and those advancing up the ranks of cubs to Scouts in an organization that celebrated its 115th anniversary in February along with their official name change to Scouting America. Scout leaders handed out 30 merit badges, and five Webelos—both boys and girls—graduated to Scouts during the festive dinner that drew a wealth of families and community supporters. Webelos, an acronym for We’ll Be Loyal Scouts, was created to prepare younger Scouts for upper “ranks.” “This is a family-oriented Scout environment where we take a holistic approach on how we work together as a Scout family,” said Trina Coffman-Gomez, District Committee Chair for Loma Prieta Silicon Valley Monterey Bay Council. “Today we celebrate our Scouts’ growth and achievements as they move up to the next level.” Erik Sorroza, a parent with two children, 12 and 6—who just joined Unit 505—said her kids love being a part of the organization. “At first I was afraid they wouldn’t like it, but they integrated into the program well and have made many friends,” he said. “We enjoy the hospitality, all the different types of people in our

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The Festival of Dreams Returns to Santa Cruz

Jennifer Choate — Fri, 10 Oct 2025 14:58:21 +0000

“Dreams come in the service of health and wholeness.” This quote was one of the mainstays of the late, great Rev. Jeremy Taylor, and still serves as an inspiration for most of us modern dream workers. We all dream whether we remember our dreams or pay attention to them. Every animal studied has dream-like interludes in their sleep including all mammals down to duck billed platypuses, as do cuttlefish and octopuses, and even spiders! This ubiquity of dreaming supports my own pragmatic and Darwinian view that dreams, like all persistent features of successful species, come in the service of survival aka health and wholeness. Even though some people think that dreams are simply cerebral mis-firings with no meaning at all, recent studies have shown that dreams help us process events of the previous day, they integrate and sort memories, and they help us balance our emotions. They also seem to be rehearsals for the future, and they stimulate creativity! There are many examples of this link between dreams and creativity including Robert Louis Stevenson who loved dreams and believed that “brownies” brought him ideas in dreams for novels such as Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Also, Paul McCartney, another dream enthusiast, dreamed that Mother Mary came to him in a dream and told him to “Let it be.” He got the tune of “Yesterday” in a dream, too, but not the words. If you are interested in your dreams and would like to meet fellow dream enthusiasts, consider attending the Festival of Dreams, Santa Cruz at the Museum of Art and History on the weekend of October 10-12. This fourth annual event which began in 2017, but was not held during Covid, will be jam-packed with talks and hands-on workshops designed to help you learn to decode the intricacies of your own dream-life. The Festival includes a pop-up art show, a poetry reading, and live dream-inspired music. Our keynote will be Dr. Apela Colorado, founder of the Worldwide Indigenous Science Network. The Festival is crowned with a fantabulous Dream Ball on Saturday evening where you get to dance with your new tribe dressed as a meaningful dream character. The Festival of Dreams is a regional conference sponsored by the International Association for the Study of Dreams. The IASD is an academic society founded in the Bay Area in 1983. Dream pioneers at the time include in addition to Jeremy Taylor, Patricia Garfield, Kathleen Sullivan, Gayle Delaney, Robert Van de Castle, Stephen La Berge and others. According to the mission statement, the IASD is designed “to promote an awareness and appreciation of dreams in both the professional and public arena … and to provide a forum for the eclectic and interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and information.” Although the IASD sponsors rigorous academic research and has publications for scientific articles including the peer-reviewed journal Dreaming, what most people appreciate is personal dream sharing which is done in groups or one on one. As an example of the meaningfulness that dreams can contain, I will tell you two of my dreams, both of which feature the symbol of a baton. No need to interpret that in a Freudian manner! Dream: 10/5/24 I am traveling with others trying to get to some goal. I am driving the second of the two cars. At one point the other car is dead. I have a hot electrode to jump it, which is more like a wire or baton than a jumper cable. I touch it to the car’s battery and feel a mild shock in my body, especially my hand. Then I successfully start the car. I hear the engine chugging and then catching and turning over. I feel relief, satisfaction, and accomplishment. While the dream didn’t at first strike me as important, we are all uniquely blind to the meanings of our own dreams, as Jeremy used to say, it was. Working with it in the safe space of my own dream group helped me to understand that the energy that restarted the second car came from me. That I have energy I am not usually aware of which I pass through the “baton” to the car. The process is mutual. The shock I felt in my body during the dream shows that even as I give energy, I also receive it from the Universe. A few months later, I had a pair of identical dreams about another baton. Dreams: 2/23/25 and 2/24/25: I see an object, possibly a baton, with two colors on its long axis, perhaps magenta and dark green. Somehow, I associate it with Christmas and try to convince others repeatedly of that, but they don’t understand or agree. I feel frustrated. I had the same dream two nights in a row which makes me even more curious about its significance. Magenta is a color of optimism, passion, and enthusiasm. Forest green is a color of growth and renewal. This baton might also refer to the environmental crisis and its potential recovery. Christmas is the celebration of the birth and rebirth of the divine masculine. Batons are used to clobber people, so the issue again seems to be about my own power. That I cannot convince others of my view in the dream reminds me of my feelings of helplessness around the devastating political polarization I witness in our society every day. So, what I get out of these two or three small fragments is that despite often feeling powerless, I do have the strength to fight for what I believe in and to fight the forces of reactionary thinking. Maybe we will even succeed. Dream groups promote intimacy and build community. Dreams have the power to help us understand our authentic selves. They are profoundly spiritual: working them is my spiritual practice; they help us be in touch with humanity and the Universe; they entertain us with stories, and they help us understand where we are in history and how history might unfold. There are many dream groups around the Bay area, and for anyone interested locally I recommend contacting Katherine Bell of Experiential Dream Work or Marsha Hudson and Norman Brown of the Love and Power Institute for Planetary Sustainability. To me dreams are endlessly fascinating, and I look forward to learning more in October and to meeting others interested in dreams as I am. I hope to see you at the Festival of Dreams, Santa Cruz! To learn more and register, go to FestivalofDreams-santacruz.eventbrite.com

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Santa Cruz Symphony Offers Family Concert

growingupsc — Fri, 02 Feb 2024 18:21:38 +0000

Here’s a concert that will please the entire family, and inspire young audiences toward future musical experiences. The delightful and humorous musical creation, Carnival of the Animals by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns will take families and young music lovers on a tour through a variety of animal behavior in the form of four short movements. Plenty of imaginative parody of the animal kingdom is showcased in a masterpiece originally written in 1886, but not performed in public until 1922, a year after the composer’s death. Many believe that the Carnival of the Animals, which highlights stringed instruments, gave inspiration to the John Williams score for the Harry Potter films. This orchestral work will be the culmination of the Santa Cruz Symphony Family Concert on February 25, 2pm at the Civic Auditorium, in which young performers from will play side by side with adult musicians from the Santa Cruz Symphony. The Symphony collaborates with many other youth arts groups and organizations to put on its Youth and Family Concerts during the month of February. It’s an innovative opportunity for students who are learning to play orchestra instruments to play with larger ensembles. The Family Concert on Sunday Feb. 25 is the culmination of a week of Youth Concert performances for thousands of local 4th and 5th-graders, all of whom have worked through the dynamic Link Up musical introduction program created by Carnegie Hall. Our local teachers use the Carnegie curriculum to teach the youngsters about the music that they will hear at our Youth Concerts, a program that reaches 4,000 Santa Cruz and Monterey County school children. Some members of the Santa Cruz County Youth Symphony, Santa Cruz Ballet Theatre, Kuumbwa Jazz Honor Band, El Sistema Strings, and the Cabrillo Youth Chorus participate in the Symphony-supported Youth and Family Concerts. Saint-Saëns’ lively zoological suite of starts off with the dramatic Royal March of the Lion in which the regal king of the jungle enters our imaginations by way of high trills, glissandos from two pianos, and plenty of orchestral splendor. In the movements that follow audiences will experience sonic portraits of kangaroos, elephants, wild donkeys, birds, tortoises, and the final movement—the most famous and most performed—devoted to the swan. Two pianos conjure up flowing water and the gliding movements of an elegant swan. And the cello takes center stage here as it follows the gorgeous movements of the swan itself. There will be lots to listen to and animals identify in this carnival of inventive sounds from the imagination of a beloved French composer. Young listeners should pay attention for some especially magical solo portions, dazzling and vigorous piano work and a few themes that will sound very familiar. The annual Family Concert is a way for parents and young ones to enjoy a highly accessible symphony concert. Fun and lively, the music is perfectly suited (and specially chosen) to introduce youngsters to the unforgettable magic of live orchestra, and of the individual instrumental sections that make up symphonic performances. Come enjoy the music, led by Symphony maestro Danny Stewart, and see how the audiences and musicians of the future are inspired. by Christina Waters

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Heroes of the Storm

growingupsc — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 17:25:27 +0000

While you and your family were sheltering from torrential rains, Manuel Rodriguez, 50, and his brother Joel, 58, were digging underground conduits to help restore power to Aptos. Not only was the work torturous in horrid conditions, but the two were far from their homes in San Luis Obispo County working six days a week, staying in a mobile home in Watsonville and driving back south for one day to see their wives and children. And, to make matters worse, the retaining wall around Joel’s house in Atascadero had collapsed and friends there were helping him out with sand bags. He figures there was at least $15,000 to $20,000 of damage. “The best part of the job is that you are helping people,” said Manuel, who was with a team completing the conduit on a Saturday after the storm had cleared. “And you are in a different place every day. You’re not stuck in one place every day. You travel all the time and you do something different every day.” They work for MGE Underground, of Watsonville, which subcontracts for PG&E, part of the thousands of heroic workers who showed up in Santa Cruz to help with the devastation. There was a PG&E crew that worked 10 hours New Year’s Eve on top of poles in biting rain on Clubhouse Drive in Aptos after a Eucalyptus tree knocked out power for 4,500 people and destroyed a pickup—a photo of which was picked up by the New York Times and illustrated the storm around the world. “I was so impressed they were out and they didn’t stop until the power was back and it was pouring, really pouring,” said Santa Cruz County’s Probation Chief Fernando Giraldo, who watched the work from his window. “I thought we would be out of power for days. I sleep with a CPAP machine, so it was very concerning to me. I was shocked they came and did it so quickly working on top of those poles for hours. The endurance! That’s a young man’s job. They were great.” In Lompico, Comcast went the extra mile to restore internet access. Most of them already had power because they had generators, but the internet was gone because the company requires commercial power to operate over a large area—and many Comcast employees have homes there and had already suffered in the CZU fires. The employees solved the problem for their neighbors by creating a temporary network by running fiber over the canopy provided by tree tops—keeping those who were already cut off by flooded roads and no electricity able to work and study from home, and stay up on the most important news. Some of the homes still don’t have power, but they have internet, while they await a more permanent solution. “This will be my 29th year with Comcast and 25 in the Network department, so working during storms is nothing new to us here,” said Engineering and Network supervisor Ron Poole, who worked from December 27 to January 20 with no break. “At first, the thought was that we are actually going to get some much-needed rain. The first storm hit and we had expected damage to our plant, then the storm fronts just kept coming. Aside from the CZU Fire in 2020, this has been the biggest event we have had that impacted our outside plant structure.” The crews feared mudslides and falling trees, which were happening all around them, but there was a silver lining. “It felt great to see all of the modems come online, and service restored. People were thanking us the whole time. We truly felt bad for them and knew that commercial power wasn’t going to be restored for 10-14 more days.” Verizon also stepped up, to the relief of the Zayante Fire Protection District. “Verizon has arrived!” they posted on Facebook. “They have brought with them this portable cell tower which will help support communications in Lompico Canyon and Lower East Zayante. You might start seeing better signal on your cell phones so give them a try. “Should be set up and running in two hours. Thank you to Verizon and the County of Santa Cruz for making this happen in our community! Note: these are limited range units and we have a lot of trees. But we figure it’s worth a try and anything is better than what’s available now.” You could barely see Capitola’s beachfront, one of the busiest tourist attractions in the county, after the rains flushed down thousands of trees. Organized by Save Our Shores, dozens of residents donned gloves and filled a giant dumpster with driftwood, barely scratching the surface of the work still needed to be done. “We had close to 100 people show up to clean up Capitola Beach,” said city councilwoman Yvette Brooks, who was out there working. “For two hours volunteers picked up debris and created a human conveyor belt to haul larger logs into a green waste dumpster. “I am so proud of Capitola, its residents, community volunteers and staff. Although our city was hit hard with damage to infrastructure that will cost us millions of dollars, our village is strong and it’s moments like this when I know Capitola shines bright with resiliency.”

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How You Can Help the Storm Cleanup

growingupsc — Fri, 03 Feb 2023 17:12:26 +0000

The Volunteer Center of Santa Cruz is organizing storm cleanup efforts in Felton Grove for the next several weeks. To sign up to be an emergency response volunteer, request flood clean-up assistance, or donate to the Volunteer Center of Santa Cruz County and support its efforts, visit scvolunteercenter.org. For more information call 831.427.5070. This Google Map set up by Coastal Watershed Council leader Laurie Egan has a number of contacts for area cleanup supervisors: bit.ly/3j37NjfThe Community Foundation Santa Cruz County has launched a disaster fund to help residents and small business owners. The money will go to nonprofits serving vulnerable populations. Donations will also go to small businesses in coordination with local business improvement districts. Donations can be made to the Santa Cruz County Disaster Fund at www.cfscc.org/disaster. To get FEMA help, for Santa Cruz and Monterey counties, storm victims can apply online for federal aid at DisasterAssistance.gov, call FEMA at 800.621.3362 or download the FEMA app.

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