extracurriculars

Jacob has been into Ninjago for a while, and is pretty sure he's going to be a ninja when he grows up, so we thought it best to enroll him in karate classes. We found this great karate place just a couple of minutes from our house and Jacob has been loving it.

Fingers crossed that this teaches him discipline and self-control instead of increasing his already violent tendencies.


We have had a lot of trouble finding a sport for Caleb. Then we were watching this video one day

And decided to look for parkour classes in our area and guess what! It's a real thing! So he started taking these classes in San Jose and has really been having fun with it.

I had a cute video of him in class, but it's not working well with blogger for some reason.

It keeps the family busy, but I am really happy Caleb has found something that he likes so much.

Birthday Time!

March 1st is a special day in our house. Not only is it the day before Dr. Seuss' birthday, it is both Caleb and Joseph's shared birthday! It has been a lot of fun to have them share the day.

Here is Caleb opening one of his most highly-anticipated gifts...

... a bow and arrow! This has been super fun and only confiscated 6 or 7 times in the past 3 days.

And I haven't been sewing much lately, but I did put in some time to make a scripture case for Caleb since he received his first set of real scriptures this year. I made a similar really cute floral case for Emily when she turned 8, so it was fun to work with Caleb to choose fabrics this year.

That night we did a trifle because trifles are delicious. I also knew that Joseph loves them and Caleb would be getting a cake at his party on Saturday.

This year, since Caleb turned 8, we invited a few friends over and had a little party. Anyone that knows me knows that organizing things like this stresses me out so we kept it small and I relied a lot on Joseph to keep things running smoothly.

Joseph made this perfect cake the night before.

He also made this simple but so awesome pinata.

Caleb blowing out his candles.

And a terrible picture of present time.

It's been so fun to celebrate Caleb and Joseph. Lots of other stuff going on, but for now I am breathing a sigh of relief that the birthday party is over and beginning prep in earnest for the baptism next Saturday.

Rainbow Bridges

So, California has this crazy thing called Winter Break, colloquially called "ski week" by the locals. It always catches me completely by surprised, so we found ourselves this week all at home (minus Joseph) with nothing to do. I have a really hard time sitting around all day, especially in a small house with four young children, so on Tuesday I decided to venture out and see what we could find. We were lucky to have a sunny day, as it has been raining most days for the past couple of months. Great for the drought, but a little tricky for finding free entertainment.

Anyway, on Tuesday we headed out to the Rainbow Bridge Park in Palo Alto. It is a lot like the Park for All Abilities in Austin, built to accommodate the needs of all children. When we first arrived, the kids raced to a dinky little playground that was within view from the car. They played there for a long time, talking about how it was the best playground ever and that they never wanted to leave. (We really hadn't been to a park in a long time.) All the while I was saying, "I think there's an even better playground just across the field over there" but they were happy.

Elinor is a climber. She has been working for a long while to become the "master of strong." I think she's pretty close.

I finally put my foot down and we headed to the real reason we had driven out to Palo Alto, and it was totally worth it. This playground was amazing! There were always new things for the kids to find and discover. They could have stayed there for hours.

There was this big hill in the middle for all the slides to run down.

I do not enjoy these kinds of toys, but Caleb and the other kids had no problem with it! Caleb spent a long time here pushing any kid (or adult) who wanted to ride.

 

We totally need one of these in our backyard.

 I got hungry though and we left. We grabbed a quick lunch at Chipotle and then headed home.

It was super nice to get out of the house. This little crew of kids is so fun! It is so nice to not have diapers and to have them all able to more or less eat independently! I am not far enough out of that stage yet to not fully appreciate these small luxuries.

Black out!

The other day Jacob and I were at home, just hanging out. I was doing laundry, Jacob was wandering around doing whatever it is that 4-year-olds do to keep themselves occupied. Then, in the middle of all this exciting activity, the lights abruptly went out. My immediate thought was to flee to Target because that is often my immediate thought. Jacob was not excited about that though, so we lit a few candles and I proceeded to clean the kitchen and then both bathrooms while Jacob continued to wander around in his 4-year-old manner.

3 hours later the big kids were home from school and the power was still out. In fact, the power had gone out at the school as well, so the poor teachers had been bravely carrying on by the light from the windows. I decided at this point that we had to do something so we walked to Safeway in the rain and bought 3 Duraflame firelogs. We had to walk because, as it turns out, the garage door is electrically powered and Joseph had the other car that is normally kept outside.

As you can see we were in very poor spirits due to the hard times we had fallen on.

But anyway, these logs are great for our situation since they are so benign and steady-burning because we don't have much of a hearth so any kind of spark ends up in the carpet.

And that is how we ended up, on a Friday night, gathered around a fire roasting marshmallows* and eating Amazon Prime Now PF Changs.

In all we were without power for about 6 hours. Things were getting pretty dire - my phone battery was at like 4% and in power save mode by the end of it all. We did survive the ordeal though, with all 7 gallons of milk in the fridge intact.

*And yes, I know it is not totally kosher to roast in the fumes of a Duraflame, but I looked it up and it seems like there are no toxic chemicals, it just makes your food taste weird. And the sugar content of the marshmallows was enough to overcome that for our kids.

New York, New York

 Joseph and I were lucky enough to take a kids-free vacation to New York last summer and it was awesome. I don't have many great pictures, but I sure loved this trip!

Here we are in the airport just before leaving. It was early in the morning and we were both pretty groggy.

We had left the kids to party with Grandma and the cousins. They had such a fun time! It makes me wish we lived closer.

My mom had booked us a super nice hotel room and had flowers and treats waiting for us when we arrived. It was awesome to come to a room that had been prepared just for us!

I had filled our schedule pretty tightly with different things to see. This is us on the High Line, which is a linear park built on an elevated section of an old railroad through Manhattan. It was a really fun walk on a beautiful day. I believe we did this just after leaving the Google campus, where we had breakfast that morning.

The New York Historical Society happened to have a Mo Willems exhibit going on, which we of course stopped in to see. Mo Willems is the author that got Caleb reading and holds a special place in all of our hearts.

We were able to see a Broadway show, which is always a treat. This was Finding Neverland, which quickly became a hit with the kids once we got back home and played the soundtrack of them. This is the show that "We're All Made of Stars" came from that the kids were singing in the parking lot last summer.

We also took a nighttime schooner "city lights" tour which was fun. I might prefer the Staten Island ferry, but it was cool to see the city lights and the Statue of Liberty all lit up.

This was in the Nintendo store, which was one of my favorite places that we visited. I've been trying to convince Joseph to use this as his Google or Linked-In profile picture. :)

We were able to eat tons of really good food, bike through Central Park, and stay out as late as we liked. It was such a fun vacation that it already has me thinking about the next one! I'm so grateful to our parents for helping out so much with this.

Elinor's surgery

Since she was a baby, Elinor has had a hard time breathing and sleeping. The ENT had told us a year or two ago that the size of her adenoids is 3++ on a scale from 1-4, so very enlarged, but we still dragged our feet in scheduling the surgery because it is, after all, surgery.

After being told that she would likely go another decade before growing into her adenoids, we finally bit the bullet and scheduled the adenoidectomy for January 3rd. We were lucky to get an early slot in the day, since Elinor had to be fasting when she went in. I took her to the surge center while Joseph got the other kids off to school and the registration process was very quick and easy. Within half an hour we were here, in a room with Elinor in a gown, socks, and hat.

This is my favorite picture from the day

This picture was taken after Elinor was given a medicine to make her "relax" about the whole process. The medicine made her absolutely, hilariously crazy. She spent the next 20 minutes asking me why I had three noses, singing songs about losing and finding her socks, and talking about that girl in the mirror who looked like she was about to hit her head on the bed, and then proceeding to bang her head on the side of the bed.  I remember trying so hard to understand what she was saying, then repeating it back to her as a question, only to have her look at me, bewildered, and say "Mom, you don't make any sense."

After that they took my little girly away and I tried to get some work done, but the doctor was back less than 20 minutes later to tell me everything had gone smoothly and I could see her in a few minutes.

When I got to the post-op room, poor Elinor was crying big humongous tears that were just so sad. She looked pretty beat up and miserable. She just kept saying, "I want to go home" and "Get me outta here!" over and over again while trying to pull out her IV and remove her pulse-ox. They let us leave early, and soon we were home.

 She gradually began to feel better, and then was almost back to normal later that day. She stayed home from school that week, and we did have one pretty scary middle-of-the-night major nosebleed, but besides that the recovery was pretty seamless.

Here she is on her first day back at school, one week later. She also happened to lose her very first tooth that day!

Our Elinor is completely back to normal now, with far less mouth-breathing throughout the day and with much more peaceful slumbering at night. I am glad we went through with the surgery, but also grateful to have it behind us.

Kinder buddies

We currently have 3 kids at one school, which is just down the street from us, and it's awesome. A few fun coincidences have worked out for us this year:

1) Emily and Elinor's classes are both piloting a new science curriculum, and are the only two classrooms in the entire district doing this.

2) Caleb and Elinor's classes have been matched up for 2nd grade - kinder buddies, so Caleb and Elinor are often paired up to work on projects together.

Today was the 100th day of school, so 2nd grade buddies came in to work on a craft with the kids. Elinor was thrilled to be able to work with Caleb.

From Caleb's teacher

From El's teacher

I love that the kids are so excited to work together, especially because I know it could go the other way too.

Family Picture

I've been updating the kids' photo albums and realized that I miss having a record of all the milestones and things we've been up to. I'm going to work on starting this up again in 2017. For now though, here's my favorite photo from a family photo session at Stanford in December:

Good old Jacob, always keeping things interesting for us.

We can be anything we want to be

After swimming lessons, the kids put on an impromptu clip from Finding Neverland in the parking lot.  Note the choreography and parts.

Making my move

We went to the park to get some shots for a whatsyourmove.com entry. Maybe we won't win, but it was good family time.