Sunday, December 12, 2010

Catching Up in Early December

At the tree farm (as Daddy grunts and curses under the tree with a hand saw)
Levi's Wedding

In mid-November we went to Chicago for Jenny’s brother Levi’s wedding. It was the first chance for the kids to meet Levi. Meeting him helped Oliver fill an important picture of this uncle he’d been hearing about. Karri joined us for the flight over. The kids managed to nap through the middle of the flight. It generally went pretty well. Like her big brother, Zaeda insisted on wearing her own backpack (“bah-pah”).

In Chicago we rented a minivan and a condo. Mike joined us later that night. For the kids room we took a queen sized mattress off the box spring and just put it on the floor. That way they could climb on and off easily and wouldn’t roll off in the night.

We had a free Saturday to explore Chicago, so we went to the Navy Pier and visited all the tourist-oriented shops. Travelling with Mike and Karri, foodies who had done their homework on the best grub Chicago had to offer, allowed us to try some things we may have otherwise missed. We hit a hot dog place at the pier where Jenny just asked me to get her “Something that represents Chicago.” That was their Chicago Dog, a beef hot dog covered with hot peppers, sauerkraut, mustard and several other things. Weeks later, she can still taste it. Later, we drove and searched until we found a crowd surrounding a little pizzeria famous for a butter crust deep dish and a technique of layering long-sliced sausage in the pan. That was my favorite.

The wedding on Sunday afternoon was at a beautiful Catholic Church where my new sister-in-law Megan’s father, a local deacon, officiated. Afternoons are an unpredictable time for the kids. Both of them were dressed in their best and found themselves in a strange place meeting new people. Mid-ceremony, Oliver fell asleep in the pew. Zaeda decided to get chatty during their vows and had to be whisked to the back of the church so she could gesture at the “babies” (angel and cherub statues) and run around making interesting tapping sounds with her shiny shoes.

Afterwards, everyone went to a nearby restaurant where we did our best to keep the kids clean before it was our turn to join family photos. Once the photos were taken, the food arrived and the clean kids we’d been preserving all day disappeared. Zaeda took a single French fry and dipped it into a bowl of ketchup 20 times, sucking it clean until the fry itself gave out. She looked like a vampire.

Here's the ketchup vampire. Sadly, I relied on the camera in my new Blackberry, not knowing I'd later have technical trouble getting them off the camera, and they looked lousy anyway. So no more pics from Chicago!


On the dance floor, Oliver joined the boogying partygoers and found himself a corner where he seemed to be doing how own Tai-chi routine, completely separate from the rest of the crowd and much slower too. When I finally asked him what he was doing, he said he was playing Spiderman.


Christmas Time

Yesterday we went to a fundraiser at the kids’ daycare. “Breakfast with Santa” included pancakes and a chance to talk with the big man himself. Oliver told Santa he wants to be a chef.


Guess who enjoyed this more....

After that we went to Karri and Mike’s restaurant where they are celebrating 10 years being open. Congratulations to Philly Bilmos in Vancouver! They recently had visits from morning TV shows around Portland and word is out that they’re the best. We’ve known that for ten years! Also, balloons for the kids!

Aunt Karri at Philly Bilmos

Balloons!

We got our Christmas tree last weekend and everything is set up. It about killed me cutting it down and carrying it this year and I wondered if I’m just getting old. It wasn’t till we got home and I measured it that I realized it was several feet taller than we gotten in the past. I needed to cut off a huge piece of the trunk just to get it in the house. At least I had my power tools here at home. Much easier.

My helper


Everyone had great fun decorating the tree. Zaeda surprised us with her focus and patience. Time after time, she took an ornament for the tree, carried it across the living room and either hung it up herself or asked for help. For Oliver it was like seeing old friends. “Look! The guitar!” or “There’s the Pinocchio I broke last year!” What I like are the ornaments the kids have made, or those with their pictures in them. It’s nice to open a box once of year and enjoy those little surprises.


Recent stuff on the kids

When Oliver doesn’t want to do something he now proclaims that he will “never ever ever” do it. For example, “No! I won’t hang up my coat. I’ll never ever do it. Not in a million years!”

Zaeda has a thing with rain boots. She constantly lines a pair up side by side and tries to put them on. Sometimes she aligns them at our feet and says “help me.” Once she has them on she walks across the room and kicks them off. Repeat.


Making cookies with the kids. Of course they licked the mixer beaters!


Not long ago, we moved Zaeda into the bedroom with Oliver. So far it has worked out much better that we expected. While they don’t go to sleep at the same time (Oliver stays up late, Zaeda wakes up early), they show an amazing ability to sleep through one another’s noise. We also now have more of a family bedtime routine; Zaeda dishes out kisses and hugs at the end of the night. Oliver demands a story that he will help steer if he doesn’t like how it’s going.

Oliver is now in pre-kindergarten. It’s the big kid class at their school and he’s pretty proud. They are learning about graphs and writing in journals. Oliver is now reading simple words and we hope to work a lot more with him on reading skills.

Zaeda loves to sing “Row Row Row Your Boat” while being rocked back and forth on her heels. She comes up to us, takes our hands and says “row row!” She is very interested in declaring who people are. She points at mommy and says “Mommy!” Same thing with “Oliver!,” “Daddy,” and the many other people and pets she knows. She’s combining words too. For example, the little kids’ backpacks were a big deal on our last trips and she really likes the word “backpack.” Last week, she looked at my mom’s purse on the table and said “Nanna backpack.” I was so surprised. Her other favorite word is elephant, an animal that can be found in every other book the kids have. When we see one she says “Ella!” really loud. She likes to grab a book (usually one of her favorite 2 or 3 which we’ve read a thousand times) and find one of us parents, yell “book!” and then turn around so we’ll pick her up and read to her.

Speaking of loud, Zaeda likes to scream for pleasure. She gets excited and just belts out a piercing, glass-shattering scream. If you ask her to stop, she smiles very big and does another one louder. I think this is a girl thing.


Jenny’s License

It’s official: Jenny was recently presented her Broker’s License at the US Customs building in Portland. It’s been a long process and I’m so proud of her!


I haven't added a video in a while. This was a practice run for trick-or-treating back during Halloween.

Sunday, October 31, 2010

Birthday Cake and Pumpkins

4 years old!!!!
We asked him what he wanted on his cake and he showed us his Batman book
 Computer problems have led to a delay in posting, so this is another photo and anecdote dump!  The household is as busy as ever. Last weekend we celebrated a birthday party for Oliver, so the house is filled with new toys. Oliver and Zaeda spent the next morning aligning dominos and knocking them down (with Zaeda specializing in the second part). There are Lincoln logs and Playmobile pieces all over the place and the kids couldn’t be happier.

 
Oliver turned 4 this month. His specialty these days in the medley, where he bursts into a song, then transitions to another song and another. He does this all the time. Popular Oliver medley songs include “Davy Crockett Theme” (TMBG version), intro songs for “Little Einsteins,” “The Cat in the Hat” and several other cartoons, the ABC song, a Frankenstein song to the tune of “My Darlin Clementine” and the big one – “Walking on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves.

 
Questions question questions.
  • Why? What do ___ eat?
  • How does (something improbable)?
  • How do we get bacon? Do pigs poop bacon?
Here’s a typical recipe question: "What do you get if you mix chocolate milk and broccoli and eggs and toothpaste together?"

 
Zaeda has reached the same breakthrough age that Oliver reached around her age; she is suddenly communicating lots of single words like these: milk, juice, mommy, daddy, Ollie, please, help me, up, no, yes, bounce, bubble, night night, goodbye, hi, etc. The big surprise has been that she is using sign language. It’s something they teach her class at school. Jenny and I had the books, but we didn’t really work on it with either child. Now we’re catching up with Zaeda as she gestures very specifically. This physical and verbal explosion is tons of fun to watch. We’ve broken out Eric Carle’s “From Head to Toe” book, which encourages kids to mimic animals with specific motions, like wiggles their arms and stomping their feet. Oliver has always enjoyed the book and now his sister is watching him and doing her best to keep up. They make quite a team.

 
The downside to her new confidence and physicality is the trouble she’s getting into around the house. The newest example is pushing or carrying her little kiddy chairs around the house, setting them up somewhere and climbing up to get at something.

 
Yesterday, Zaeda joined Oliver’s medley by singing bits of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, with all the gestures and a pretty clear “Up above…”. Very cute. They get along so well, except when they don't. Next weekend, we'll move Zaeda into the bedroom with Oliver. We expect that neither will get to sleep the way they do now.

 
Pumpkin Farm with the Petersons

We started our Halloween preparations on a beautiful fall day. We met our friends the Petersons in a great little bakery in Aurora . Then we all went to a nearby pumpkin farm. As with so many of these farms, it was really more of a theme park experience, but I’m gradually learning to appreciate the ingenuity and fun these farms have in executing these big weekends. The farm we went to had a log cabin filled with hazelnuts! You just tossed your kids in there and let them play in all the nuts. The nuts themselves were empty shells – the results of a bad crop, I suspect. Or maybe they were the duds mechanically culled from nut harvests. In any case, the kids had fun.

 

 


 
Oliver and William hopped around and got dusty on some inflatable horses
 

 


 

YMCA Daycare Halloween Party

 
All the kids dress up and parade around Portland State University before coming back to the school for a snack.

 

 
Carving Pumpkins with the Robars

 

 
Halloween Night!
Tinkerbell ready to get some candy!

 

 

 
Tonight is Halloween. Captain Hook and Tinkerbell aligned forces to seek out candy in our neighborhood.  We went up and down the block and gathered enough sugar to keep us all hopped up for a month.



Sunday, September 12, 2010

Colorado


In the many times I’ve flown, there has always been an unhappy child somewhere on the plane. I consider it part of the experience. The discomfort of air pressure changes are a big deal for little kids, a strange ear ache that arrives in a crowded and unfamiliar environment. But those crying children were never mine, and while I seldom felt annoyed, and even felt empathy for the children, I never experienced feeling responsibility for those unhappy kids – until this week.

In the flight to Denver, we managed to keep Oliver busy with a sticker book. Zaeda fell asleep just before we boarded and so she snoozed a good part of the way. Oliver was concerned with just one question: ‘Are we in the air yet?” I realized as I looked out the window at the passing tarmac, the blurring landscape, that he couldn’t see any of it; his point of view was just too low; it was all sky for him out the window. So he had to take our word for it that we were in the air. When we hit turbulence and the plane dropped a bit, he was thrilled and said “Whoa!!” and giggled in a way that some people on the plane may not have appreciated.
The kids were only challenging the last 10 minutes as we heading in for landing. They were just squirming in the limited space, and that ended soon enough as we got out of the plane, and soon enough, the kids were with grandparents to spoil them.
The flight back seemed to take three times as long. Zaeda was tired and well past her naptime, but she didn’t sleep. She crawled over the three of us, either squealing and giggling, or moaning and crying. Oliver was fidgety. He’d placed all the stickers he was going to bother with and he wanted to move. He was kicking the seat in front of him. “Are we in the air yet?” he asked, again and again. We were all exhausted by the time we got home.
Back to Colorado: While in Denver the kids played in the back yard. We got out to a Natural History Museum (Dinosaurs!!!)

Jenny and I spent a couple days in Estes Park in the Rocky Mountain National Park. Beautiful. Relaxing. We slept in. We ate. We goofed off. Just right.




Goofing off at Restoration Hardware

Walkin on Sunshine


We proudly attended a local chili contest in Vancouver’s Esther Short park, where our own Mike and Karri brought home an award. We stopped by the local farmer’s market and bought some produce, including my favorite, Gravenstein apples, which have a limited window of availability because they don’t store well once picked. We had Gravensteins on the family farm and I try not to miss a chance to buy them when I find them. I took a bite and of course Zaeda saw me eating and was at my side in seconds, waiting for her turn, so I gave her a bite. Then Oliver saw her eating, and in no time the two were passing my apple back and forth, and though I’d lost my apple, I’d gained an adorable moment.

A Sunday at the World Forestry Center -- that place between the zoo and the children’s museum that we hadn’t been to in years. It was actually a lot of fun. Unlike the other places, the WFC was practically empty, and they had plenty of stuff for the kids to play with.

In general, Oliver and Zaeda are playing together more and more. She’s at a stage where they can have little games together, like hiding in the closet or a bit of wrestling. Recently we had some kid music CD playing in the house, and when it ended, the next CD started and it was “Walkin on Sunshine” by Katrina and the Waves. The kids immediately started dancing.

Sunday, August 15, 2010

R-E-S-P-E-C-T. Find out what it means to Oliver

They sometimes survey the kids in Oliver's class on the meaning of words. Last week's word was "Respect."  What does that mean?  Before that, the word was "Love."



Oliver's Dino Land artwork. He writes his name now on most all of his creations.