Today Carol had a hair appointment. It's spring break so Audrey planned to go with her. This morning Audrey told Carol she wanted to go and get her hair cut short again. Carol was nervous about it given the time investment Audrey has made in growing her hair, but Audrey was sure. Off they went.
I had no idea they had been discussing short hair, so when I got home from work I was surprised. I think it's incredibly adorable. I'm so happy to see Audrey's beautiful eyes again!
Meanwhile, life goes on.
The whole reason for getting caught up on videos was because I had the video from Audrey's ice show to post. Anal retentive person that I am I could not post that before older videos as that would leave my online video collection out of order! The ice show video is the last of the ten videos in the previous post. The first album at left is photos from the same event. As I think I've mentioned Audrey has continued into the Spring session of figure skating lessons and is loving it.
This album really is miscellany. Some random notes:
Melrose has a symphony orchestra that claims to be the oldest continuously running community orchestra in the country. Carol and I finally attended one of their concerts on a date night. We really enjoyed it. The quality was quite good and the conductor was amusing and educational. And they didn't look anywhere near 100 years old!
We have a longstanding activity called Icky Pie. Carol gives the girls a bunch of cheap dry ingredients and they mix them together and love it. This last time they added some liquid and baked it. It looked pretty good but boy did it taste bad. Way too much baking powder.
Our neighbor Scott Burtnett is a great photographer (he produces television commercials for a living). He took a couple of cool candid shots of Carol and me while we were at their house having a casual dinner.
A couple weeks ago I volunteered once each in Charlotte and Audrey's classes. In Audrey's I read with Audrey's reading group of six kids. Man, they are really good readers for second grade!
Audrey had her first significant project for school this year. It was called a Bio Blast. She had to choose a heroine from history, research her life, report what she learned in several increasingly complex forms and finally dress as the person and deliver a short presentation in front of the class. Audrey chose Susan B. Anthony. Her final piece was a protest sign with a slogan on one side and her biographical summary on the back. Audrey came up with that idea all by herself. She did a great job and we were really proud of her. I just discovered video that I thought was lost; I'll post it soon.
Carol took an art class from the same teacher that the kids take classes from. She really enjoyed having that creative outlet again. I hope she continues.
Today was the latest chapter in our one-on-one days with the girls - where each girl spends at least a few hours alone with one parent. The girls really need that separation. Charlotte has been asking forever to go to Chucky Cheese so Carol took here there and then they went shopping. Audrey and I went to Concord to go canoeing. We paddled from the South Bridge to the Old North Bridge (one of the locations of the first battle of the American Revolution). It so happens that battle took place on April 19 so there was a large reenactment going on nearby and lots of people at the site. We beached our canoe and had a little picnic.
After canoeing we went for ice cream in Concord center. The commuter rail tracks are right behind the ice cream shop and Audrey enjoyed balancing on the rails. She really wanted to squish a penny and the next train was about 20 minutes away. So we waited and ended up squishing several coins. Check that one off the list of required childhood experiences!
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I recently realized that I had gotten really far behind editing and posting videos. For the past couple of weeks I've been catching up and now have ten new videos to share dating back to last summer. Here they are in chronological order. Click each image to watch that video.
Enjoy! |
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We did manage to capture a couple of shots that followed a story before it devolved into improv. But it was fun. We'll try again in a year or two. |
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For Charlotte's sixth birthday I managed to capture "Happy Birthday" at both celebrations. |
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We still can't believe we have an 8-year-old. |
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Audrey liked it so much we signed her up for the Spring session. It's much smaller with more individual attention. Audrey is working on learning to spin. I'm thrilled that Audrey has discovered an athletic activity that she seems to love. |
Happy St. Patrick's Day!
We continue to have very mild weather this winter. We've even had several days in the 60s.
Last weekend the forecast was very favorable. Carol and I decided to visit our two favorite places: Ipswitch River Audubon Sanctuary and Crane Beach. We packed up snackage and a blanket and kites and off we went.
We hadn't checked the web site for Ipswich River but it turned out to be one of their two maple sugaring weekends and we couldn't get in at noon when we arrived. OK, change of plans: we headed for Crane Beach which is not far away.
We had a great time at the beach. We flew kites; the girls built sand castles; we watched all the dogs walk by (part of the beach is an off-leash area during non-summer months and it is very popular, with good reason); and we had a picnic. The sun was warm enough that the girls took their shoes off for the entire time and their feet did not get cold. At one point our kite went for a swim and I had to wade in up to my knees to rescue it and I survived. We spent a couple of hours on the beach. We all felt anticipation for those splendid beach days we will have in the summer.
We packed up and headed back to Ipswich River. By now the crowds had mostly departed although there were still a lot more people than we usually encounter there. And the ground around the visitor center was well trodden.
We brought bird seed to feed the very friendly birds but they were not very hungry. Perhaps they had been well fed by the earlier throngs. We still enjoyed the Rockery, the walk around Rockery Pond and the hike to the Old Stone Bridge. We saw a beaver - a first - and also a muskrat. Also the red wing blackbirds are returning and we saw several.
On the way home we stopped at Soc's for our first ice cream of the season. The girls both spontaneously told us what a great day it had been, which is music to a parent's ears.
During the girls' winter break from school we made our annual pilgrimage to the southwest. This year we didn't have such a bad winter to escape from, but temperatures in the 70s and 80s were still pretty nice.
We usually go to both Tucson, AZ and Palm Desert, CA, with a little side trip to Las Vegas for Carol and me. We have another trip with Carol's parents coming up so this year we only visited my parents in Palm Desert.
The cheapest/easiest flight was into San Diego. One thing we've wanted to do with the kids near San Diego is visit Legoland. Our kids are just the right age for it so we decided we had to do it. At the last minute a friend even hooked us up with some discounted tickets that saved us a bundle.
Legoland was fun. We were there when it opened and did the whole park. The best attraction was the "driving school"; it has 20 or so small electric cars on a miniature street grid with stop signs and traffic signals. Kids can drive wherever they want for about five minutes. The girls also drove boats and rode jousting horses and a log flume ride and Audrey climbed a LEGO firefighter training tower. We also wandered through Minitown which has LEGO versions of various places like Manhattan, Washington D.C., a New England fishing town, San Francisco, the Las Vegas strip, etc. and a whole Star Wars section with recreated locations/scenes from the movies.
After our fun day at Legoland we drove over the mountains to Palm Desert to start our visit with Grandma and Grandpa.
We spent a day getting settled in before Carol and I made our annual escape. We usually drive across the Mojave Desert to Las Vegas. We really love the drive across the Mojave on back roads, but we were tired of Vegas. So we decided to visit Los Angeles instead.
While researching what we should do in LA we came across the debate between two restaurants who claim to have invented the French Dip sandwich: Phillipe The Original and Cole's. Both are in downtown LA.
Our first stop when we arrived was Phillipe The Original. It's in Chinatown so we got to explore that area and the Pueblo which is the area where Los Angeles was first settled. The French Dip at Phillipe was pretty good. There's not really a lot of range to ruin a French Dip or make it spectacular, but it was good. One interesting thing at that location is they serve it "wet": they dip the open face of the roll in au jus before serving it and they don't serve it with a bowl of au jus. A regular in line also told us to get the tapioca pudding and they were right, it was delicious.
After that we explored the Pueblo area and also made our way to the old downtown area, especially Broadway. I have been to LA area many times but I had never been downtown. I was surprised to find an area that could be mistaken for parts of Manhattan if it weren't entirely (not just partially) Hispanic. I loved that seemingly most of the big old movie houses are still there. They aren't used as theaters any more but there are at least a dozen along Broadway that still have their marquees and big vertical signs and beautiful edifices.
Then we made our way to the ocean near where we were staying in Marina Del Mar. We passed through Venice on the way and the sun was about to set. We used our phones to search for a place with a view and found a fantastic one: the rooftop bar at the Hotel Erwin. We got there in time to enjoy the full sunset and it was very romantic.
Our main goal while in LA was to visit the Getty Museum. Neither Carol or I had ever been. We toured the entire thing, spending 6 1/2 glorious hours enjoying art with no kids. Getty collected mostly European paintings and furnishings from the 13th-19th centuries and it is all arranged chronologically. It's a great review of art history. It's also a stark illustration of the scale of wealth of the very rich: Getty not only had enough money to buy all that art, but also enough to spend $1 billion building a museum and institute to hold it all. Nice hobby.
We each had our favorite works of art. One of mine was a pastel by Jean-Etienne Liotard (I had never heard of him before). Imagine trying to make that picture essentially with crayons! It's more amazing in person with the texture of the hair, the velvet and the dog fur.
After the Getty we wandered over to Hollywood Boulevard. We came across what we thought was a movie shoot but soon realized it was setup for the Academy Awards. This was on Thursday before the awards on Sunday. There is a photo of Carol on the red carpet in the photo album above.
The next day we drove up into Malibu. I had been part way up the Malibu coast before but didn't realize it is more then 20 miles long. We went maybe two thirds of the way and then took small roads over the mountains into the valley. Then we drove Mulholland Drive along the crest of the Hollywood Hills to get back to LA. I entertained the idea of hiking up to the Hollywood sign but after reading about it online it didn't sound all that interesting. You can't get close to the sign without trespassing.
Once back in LA we headed for the other purported origin of the French Dip sandwich, Cole's. For you Seattleites, Cole's would fit right in in Pioneer Square - liked a cleaned up J&M or Merchant's Cafe. This sandwich was also pretty good. Carol liked it better than Phillipe's, but mainly for the better ambiance. After lunch we hit the road back to Palm Desert.We returned to some very happy kids who had spent about 4 hours a day every day in the pool with their Aunt Betsy. Grandma and Grandpa were pretty tired. We took the girls to the city's new aquatic center for several hours two days in a row. Audrey discovered water slides and couldn't get enough of them.
My old cycling club from Seattle has been having a "desert training camp" in February for the past two years. One of the members lives in nearby Indian Wells part of the year and started inviting the club down for a break from Seattle winters. Last year I brought my bike on the trip and rode with them, but I normally don't get to commute by bike from Christmas until early March so I'm not really in shape to keep up with them in February. Last year I rode with them for about 20 miles before being dropped. It was fun, but not worth carting a bike to California for. This year we just joined them for dinner Saturday night and we had a really nice time.
Airfares were much higher this year and another part of getting a cheaper fare was taking a red eye flight home. I figured we'd survive it and the girls would miss school on Monday and that would be that. But it was more miserable than I imagined. We learned that when Charlotte gets beyond tired she gets goofy and chatty. But poor Audrey gets shaky and unable to function. I remember from my own childhood how painful it felt to be exhausted and not able to go to sleep. We got home at 7:00 am, had some breakfast and then we all went to bed and slept until noon. The girls were really confused. They kept asking if they had slept all night and all day, and what day it was. The combination of jet lag and the red eye was too much. It took all week to recover. Won't do that again.
The return trip notwithstanding, we had a really great vacation.
