Oliver's Haunted Imagination

It's almost a month since Halloween, and Oliver just spent an hour drawing this picture of a haunted house. He threw just about everything in here, so I'll list them all clockwise.

12:00  Bats and ghosts on the roof

3:00 A ghost flying down and the head of a giant horned monster and a vampire

5:00 A brown bunch of Frankenstein monsters and some red werewolves

6:00 The front door

7:00 Red werewolf, black skeleton, orange jack-o-lantern, black on brown mummies

8:00 A crow

10:00 Ghosts and a witch flying on her broom

11:00 More bats

Fancy lady has stool, will travel

Jenny's grandfather Don built a little step-stool long ago that was given to us when Oliver was born. We've used it for brushing teeth and that kind of thing.  Zaeda has started carrying it around the house as her portable passport to slightly higher things. As I type this, she is carrying it from room to room, seeing what she can get into.  In her hand is some floss (all pulled out) from the top bathroom drawer.

 Zaeda is also quite into dressing up.  A couple days ago she disappeared into her room and emerged as this fashionable character:

Our New Home and 5 Year Old

In September we went to the happiest place on earth, conveniently located in Anaheim, CA. Jenny found a Mr. Incredible costume for Oliver – who became Mr. Incredible’s son, Dash, the fastest kid on earth. He loved that costume so much! He demonstrated his Dash speed by pointing to objects in the distance, then sprinting to them and back. While it was fun to see him do this in the morning, but the end of the day walking around Disneyland, the kid was bushed.



It's the REAL GUY!


Zaeda wore a Disney princess costume, which she loved. “Princess” is a word she says about 20 times a day. There is herself in the princess costume, any number of princesses on TV or her princess toys, and often just any picture of a girl or lady in a fancy dress.
The kids wore their costumes every day, for 5 days in a row. The frilly trim at the bottom of Zaeda’s dress came clean off. They picked up some food and spilled juice and general dirt and dust. But the kids had fun. What kid doesn’t have fun at Disneyland?

Dale and Zaeda

Princess pooped

There is gold on treasure island!

Since our last post (too long, I know) this family has been busy going through some major changes. In the month of October we moved twice. At the beginning of the month, we left our old house on NE 23rd. It was bittersweet walking through that empty house at the very end, cleaning it up and thinking about all our memories there. I wonder how well Oliver will remember that house and that neighborhood. Zaeda is too young, I think, to remember it at all.
Without a new house ready, our temporary home was an apartment at the west side of town, near the hospital where the kids were born. We rented month-to-month, not knowing how long it would take to close the purchase.

Killing time in the apartment. Improv robots.

Meanwhile, the realtors, lenders, and everyone else involved in the home sale transaction really came together to move a difficult sale through a myriad of complicated regulation and banking requirements. So, just 4 weeks after moving into the apartment, our new home was ready and we were moving out of the apartment!

This is home

I remember what I thought 10 ½ years ago: I NEVER WANT TO MOVE AGAIN! All that packing, living out of boxes, changing your contact info for mail and utilities….. it turns your whole life upside down. I’m so glad to be done, except that we’re not quite. Now a week into our new home, we still have plenty of unpacking to do. This is the stage where we run across something we’ve packed and moved twice and ask ourselves “Do we really need this??”
In our new house, we have a great deal more space to spread out. It takes the kids no time at all to redistribute their toys from the spare bedroom we’ve designated “The Play Room” to all the other rooms of the house.

My good friend Danny, a home theater/networking expert, helped me get some new equipment and set it up in the house. He did quickly and correctly what would have taken me many hours of cursing. Next we’re shopping for some furniture. This is home! The cats are exploring, the dog has a nice bed in a comfy spot, and we are starting to actually cook meals again.

Oliver and his best buddy Nolan at their school halloween party.

All the kids in Oliver's class

Just after moving in we met some neighbors walking along with their kids. They invited us to a Halloween party up the street, followed by trick-or-treating. It was nice to discover that we live in a neighborhood full of families and kids the same age as ours. And the neighbors were nice as well. I was invited to join a regular poker group – a game I haven’t played much, so I had to study up. It's good to feel welcome.
With all these changes, we had one more hurtle in terms of big events: we hosted the first birthday party for Oliver where his daycare friends were invited. The Burgerville near our new home has a designated party room downstairs, which we filled with balloons and dinosaur-themed games. Before we knew it, we were surrounded by noisy 5 year olds popping balloons, spilling milk, and tearing into cake. Everyone had a good time, but perhaps Oliver most of all.

Jenny making the prehistoric cake

The cake and the boy are ready. Check out the volcano!

Isabella and Oliver

Wyatt and Oliver

Zaeda thinks the cake is good!

Zaeda and her best buddy Finn. They crawled together in the daycare baby room over 2 years ago.

The Potty Talk Gang: Wyatt, Nolan, and Oliver

Last Days on NE 23rd Avenue

Today marks two weeks until we finally move out of our house and hand the keys to the man who bought it from us.  While we’re relieved to have sold our home at last, there are mixed feelings about leaving the neighborhood.  We’ll be leaving so many good friends among our neighbors: The Moores, the Lapours, Sarah, Jerome, and Everton,  Chris, Jen and their kids.  This has been a great community to live in and we’ll always appreciate the people that shared our streets. In recent years, our kids have together scratched a great deal of colored chalk on these sidewalks.

Stole this pic from Kathy's blog. The grumpy kid is ours.

We bought this house just over 10 years ago, in May 2001, with just our one cat (Peet, 11 now and still very healthy despite his dangerous road-crossing, neighborhood-prowling lifestyle).  The house needed cosmetic fixing, but over the years, we seriously remodeled the place. We expanded the second floor and added another bathroom between 2004 and 2005. We updated the downstairs bathroom in 2006 and both the kitchen and the garage in 2008.  I sometimes wonder what it would be like to finish the basement into a living area. I also regret that I never put as much effort into landscaping as I should have. The little problems with the place will not be ours to worry about much longer; we’ll have new projects and challenges.

We thought we’d be moving into a new home at this point, but that’s not the case. We are still shopping. We’re hopeful, but cautious and realistic about a complicated home purchase we’re trying to complete. It could be a while. In the meantime, we’ll be renting, and looking, and waiting…

Something to love about Portland

They show movies in the parks. I was excited to hear they were going to show Wall-E in Alberta Park, just a block away.  I expected it would be a small scale projection. In fact, they had a surprisingly large theater-sized inflated screen 15 feet high!  We got there well before the show and the kids caught a magician-juggler fellow doing his thing up close. We soon realized it was a long time to wait until dark and that keeping the kids up late for a movie they’d seen many times was not worth the crankiness.

Zaeda running through Alberta Park. Picture taken by Oliver.

Another thing to love about Portland

 Here we are at our regular anniversary spot in the Rose Garden arena with a couple hundred other people. It was such a warm pleasant night. As always, we packed in food, wine, and a blanket. This year they had a mask-making activity table swarming with kids. Oliver and Zaeda joined the mix and soon had their own custom masks.

What a morning!

This was last Wednesday. Jenny had to be at work early, so I got the kids ready. The night before, Zaeda had discovered on old pair of Converse shoes that had been Oliver’s. They fit her just fine. She liked them so much she took them to bed with her. In the morning, they were the only shoes she’d wear.

They were laced and it took forever to get them on her. Once they were on, she danced around and soon was tugging them off. This went on all morning.

Oliver meanwhile had decided that his pirate costume from last Halloween, which had been bundled up under the futon, was exactly the thing he had to wear to school that morning. Under it, he decided to wear a tank top over a t-shirt. I was running out of time to fight them on their wardrobe choices so I just took a picture. Move it along, Blackbread!

The funny part was the way my kids marched proudly into their respective classrooms that morning, Zaeda stomping around and pointing and exclaiming “My shoes!” to everyone and Oliver posing grandly in front of his little friends and shouting “Aye, Me Hearties!”

Summer Days

Dessert time on the front steps

Oliver CANNOT stop himself from making a goofy face when the camera is pointed at him

So I tell him something funny to break his goofy face and get the smile

Neskowin beach, July 30, 2011

A boy and his dog



Silly faces



After lots of running and splashing, Abbie takes a break to watch the kids



The short low flight of Spiderman kite. That's about it.



A girl and her dog



Proposal Rock





Zaeda is starting with the silly faces too