Easter & Snow

Easter & Snow

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My sister Tricia always prepares a delicious feast for Easter, and this year was no exception. It's becoming a family tradition. Carol and I and the girls usually attend, plus my sister Elizabeth and Tricia's friend Caroline and her mother Eva.

Last time we visited Audrey informed Tricia, "You know, you can buy eggs that open up and you can put candy and treats inside of them." So in addition to the great food, Tricia and Elizabeth hid a bunch of eggs for the girls. It was cold and rainy outside so the egg hunt was indoors. Audrey and Charlotte had a blast.

We're having backwards weather this year. In February we had two weeks of relatively warm weather and no rain. Everybody in Seattle got spoiled. Now for the past week or two it's been close to or below freezing at night and mid-40s during the day. On Friday afternoon it snowed pretty hard at the house for an hour or so. Enough that the girls were able to go out and make snowballs and catch snowflakes on their tongues. By the time I rode home it was all gone.

Carol has been going to physical therapy for two weeks now for her neck and back and this week she started to see results. Today I could tell by looking at her that she was feeling better. Her body just looks more relaxed. She's been living with pain for quite a while now; I'm glad she's seeing improvement.

This afternoon Audrey and I worked on a little project together. We made some stop motion animations. Here's the best one we made:

Making the animation entailed two jobs: one person moving the train a little between each frame and the other clicking the button. We switched off and Audrey did a great job at both tasks. She was amazingly patient. We'll make some more sometime soon.

Sisters

Sisters

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When Carol and I started getting serious (8 years ago!), obviously the subject of kids came up. I'd always been ambivalent about the idea but Carol definitely wanted children. We settled on "One, maybe two." To me that always meant one and it turned out to Carol that always meant two. When Audrey was about 6 months old, Carol started feeling a very strong urge to have another child. I resisted for a short time but obviously I eventually surrendered. It should also be obvious that now I can't imagine not having done so.

One of our main reasons for having two kids was so they would grow up with siblings. As Charlotte gets older, the girls are really starting to enjoy each other's company.

Charlotte can't get out of her crib on her own yet, so when she wakes up in the morning she patiently (usually) calls out "Daddy", "Mommy", "Audrey" until someone comes. If Audrey is awake and Carol and I are still downstairs, Audrey will sometimes go in and climb into Charlotte's crib. We can hear them giggling and playing. Eventually Audrey will come to our room and tell us that Charlotte wants us to get up.

Of course the girls have their conflicts, but these days they play together well much more than they argue. They often disappear into Audrey's room and play with dolls or trains peacefully for half an hour.

Being full-time mom of two young kids has wreaked havoc on Carol's upper back. Charlotte is coming out of her clingy phase now, but for months she had to be on Carol's hip much of the time. Carol finally sought some help for the pain a couple of weeks ago and is now getting physical therapy and seeing some improvement.

Audrey's swimming lessons have been going very well. Audrey is much more cooperative and she gamely tries everything the instructor asks her to do. We're just wrapping up a six-week session but I'll sign her up for the next session and we'll keep it going continuously now. It's a half-hour lesson one evening a week at the YMCA five minutes from our house. I come home from work a half hour early that evening and Audrey and I go together.

I've been spending most of my free time being a geek. I've been saving for more than a year to buy a new iMac and finally bought it two weeks ago. I used to run a bunch of computers at home to perform various tasks (my own mail and web servers, for example). Now I've coalesced most of that onto the new iMac. Someday soon I'll buy a big external hard drive for backup and then I'll be able to power down the last "extra" computer that is still running for that purpose. I started controlling when computers are running (instead of the old 24/7 for several of them) a year ago and I can see a significant change in the monthly power usage graphs we get with our electricity bill.

One of the main reasons I wanted a new Mac was for video editing. I have a collection of 8mm color movies from my maternal grandparents. I also have the camera and projector, which date back many decades. The movies go back as far as 1947 and show my mother as a teenager. The latest are from about 1968 when I was 8 years old. I will capture them all digitally. I started this project two years ago but the tools I had at the time were too limiting. Now I have excellent video tools on the new Mac.

I project the film on a homemade screen, aim my digital camcorder at the screen and capture the resulting digital video to the computer. Then I'll edit it all to put it in order (the film segments are randomly spliced together). After that I'll record audio commentary from my parents and sisters and finally produce a DVD that preserves a good chunk of visual and oral history of my family.

School has been on winter break. That was excellent timing because it gave me time to play with my new toy. This semester I'm taking "Microarray Bioinformatics", which is a very core area at my workplace (although not directly in my job). I found the midterm last week to be pretty difficult, but when grades came out I scored well above average. So I guess everyone found it pretty hard!

Finally, with the arrival of Spring bike season is getting underway. I've been commuting year round for three years now and I still love the fact that I don't have to struggle for physical conditioning in the Spring like I used to. I can just start adding miles. Yesterday was a cold but otherwise gorgeous day and I rode 55 miles with my Saturday riding group and felt great.

Kids Are Mirrors

Kids Are Mirrors

The other day we were driving home from the grocery store and Charlotte was unhappy and crying. Audrey turned to her and said, very calmly, "Charlotte could you please quiet down. I can't hear the road." Charlotte continued to cry. Eventually, Audrey said to her (again, very calmly),"Charlotte, it looks like you're having a hard time. We're almost home." The latter is exactly the kind of thing Carol or I would say to one of them. Audrey went on to try to entertain Charlotte by being silly and sure enough in a few minutes she had Charlotte laughing.

The girls play together well quite a bit these days. They'll go on camp outs in Audrey's room in a fabric teepee we got from Uncle Bob, Aunt Torii and cousin Alex. They drag pillows and sleeping bags in and make the room dark and play with shadows they make with flashlights they got for Christmas. Or they'll just play with dolls in the living room for 30 minutes. It's wonderful.

Audrey has been learning the alphabet for probably a year. In the last month or two she has mastered the whole thing and can even recognize most letter in lowercase. Carol came up with the idea of using connect-the-dots exercises to get Audrey to start writing letters. She took to it right away and then started writing letters on her own. Next thing you know she was writing her name. You can see one of her first attempts in the photo album.

Charlotte's talking gets better every day. It's so nice to be able to understand what she wants most of the time. And it's extra frustrating to all of us now when we can't understand what she wants. Charlotte is also toilet training herself. She wants to be like her big sister.

We're having our annual nice February days. Every year we seem to get a couple of gorgeous sunny days this time of year. Usually they even get warm - up into the 60s. This year not quite so warm, but enough that Carol and the girls have been able to go to the beach and the playground and play in the sandbox and the dirt pile in the back yard.

Speaking of the dirt pile: we plan to landscape the back yard this spring. That includes removing the 14 yards of dirt that have been in a pile there since we built the garage. When we told Audrey the dirt pile was going to go away, she got very upset. She loves to play in it.

Audrey took one six-week series of swim lessons at the YMCA last summer but she didn't seem quite old enough for organized lessons. She just wanted to play. So we took some time off and we've just been having unstructured play in the pool every week. Now we've signed her up again and tonight was her first lesson in this series. There were supposed to be six kids in her class, but two didn't show up and two others were there but wouldn't get in the pool. So Audrey and one other girl got all the teacher's attention. Audrey did great, cooperating with all the teacher's instructions and trying everything the teacher asked except jumping from standing position at the edge of the pool. I'll work on that with her during family swimming. She also wants some goggles, which I think will help.

Charlotte's Speech is Accelerating

Charlotte has discovered the magic of language and her speech skills are really taking off. She's even putting together lots of two-word sentences and every once in a while three.

She'll now regularly say "Audrey's room" or "my room". Yesterday Carol was futzing with car seats and Charlotte said "Audrey's seat." This morning when I was serving her breakfast she rested the side of her head on her hands and said "Mommy sleeping".

Charlotte's stuffed puppy, who used to be called "puppy", is now "baby puppy". Charlotte loves to "sort" different sizes of the same animal. If she sees two different sized pictures of the same animal she'll point to them and tell you that they are "baby" and "mommy", or if there are three "daddy" might join them.

It used to be that if you asked Charlotte, "Can you say 'giraffe'?" (or whatever) when reading a book, she'd say, very adamantly, "No!" Recently she tries to say whatever word you're prompting her for.

Charlotte is also a neat person. She loves to clean her own face or wash her hands and she loves to put toys away where they belong.

Her moments of frustration over communication are getting further apart (but louder :))

I've mentioned those noticeable developmental leaps that children take - where all of a sudden one day they seem different than the day before. Charlotte just went through one of those. Language is part of what we notice, but she's also generally happier and more independent all of a sudden.

It's a joy watching the girls grow.

Audrey Turns Four

Audrey Turns Four

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Today was Audrey's 4th birthday. Well, technically her 5th if you count the day she was actually born. Wow. It's hard to believe we have a four-year-old.

Carol tells the story that when she was afraid as the mother of a newborn, she'd remind herself that someday Audrey would be 4 and that particular set of fears would be gone. Here we are.

Audrey had a fantastic birthday. Carol spent the evenings this week making cake layers and then was up late last night assembling it. She made a 5-layer castle cake with ice cream cone towers at the corners. It had chocolate windows and doors and drawbridge, with a big 4 on top. It was gorgeous and Audrey was thrilled.

I blew up a whole bag of balloons last night and made a big pile of them in the living room. We could hear Audrey exclaim when she came out of her room this morning. She and I and Charlotte played in the balloons for a long time this morning before the party.

Carol had invited four of Audrey's friends for a party at our house from 11:00-1:00. Ian and Andrew are children of friends from when we were all single. Ian was born 2 weeks after Audrey and Andrew is a little older. Harper is Audrey's best friend from pre-school. And Molly is the daughter of friends that Carol I know from our dancing days at the Century Ballroom: Cori and Mark. Almost all of them brought a sibling and a parent or two.

Carol made little snack bowls for each kid and we made quesadillas (a real favorite lately). She also made a "sensory table" like at pre-school. She froze toy rings into various molds (cupcake tins, bundt pan) and the kids could work to get the ring melted out of the ice. The balloons were also a big hit. For a while the kids were rubbing balloons on their heads and sticking them to the wall and having great fun.

At noon they all sat down for cake and the beautiful castle got destroyed. The house got a lot quieter all of a sudden. But even when the kids were at full tilt the house didn't seem as chaotic as it had during previous gatherings. Maybe I'm just getting used to it.

Then it was on to gift opening. Audrey's friends gave her some great toys and she loved every one. After that the party wound down with kid hugs all around. Overall a great success we think.

For several months Audrey has been asking for a princess vanity she saw in an insert in a Disney DVD. Carol and I debated because it's entirely plastic and we'd prefer to get her something more "real". But her desire for it was so unwavering we finally decided that we would go with her taste instead of ours. Unfortunately when I assembled it last night the central feature (princesses that magically appear in the mirrors) didn't work. So after the party, while I slept on the sofa and Audrey watched a movie and Charlotte napped, Carol went back to the store and exchanged it. I assembled the new one while Aunt Betsy (my sister Elizabeth) played with the girls.

We had a nice dinner with just us and Elizabeth, and then Audrey opened "family" gifts. Aunt Betsy gave Audrey a new princess dress (she long ago outgrew her previous one and Charlotte wears it now, even though it's pretty decrepit). Grandma and Grandpa gave Audrey some princess accessories and some cool new clothes. Then we finally unveiled the vanity. Audrey loved it. She wanted to take it to bed with her.

Charlotte got a couple of small gifts too because we figured she probably wouldn't understand why only Audrey was getting loot. In the end, Audrey did a pretty good job of sharing her new toys with Charlotte.

We think it's interesting that Audrey loves princesses so much because she seems like a tomboy at heart. But they are definitely her favorite thing at present. We just go with it.

It felt like we (mostly Carol) put a lot more energy into this birthday than any previous one. When kids are two they barely appreciate the concept of birthday. At three they're getting a little more savvy. But this year Audrey was very aware of when her birthday was and what it meant (both the aging part and the gift part). She's been telling us for months what she wants for her birthday. The vanity was a constant, but also every time she saw something she wanted she'd add it to her imaginary list. So the party was a lot of work (again, mostly for Carol) but it felt like it really paid off and Audrey enjoyed "her special day" (her words!). Thanks, Carol, for all your creativity and work!

We went to bed early because we've both been up late the last two nights. But my brain wouldn't turn off, so here I am at 12:45 AM finishing up this post. That's one thing off my list! Maybe I can go to sleep now. Good night!