Just Photos

Stanford Picnic

One morning a few weeks ago, the girls and I packed a picnic and a blanket and headed over to Palo Alto to see what Stanford had to offer us. 

Once we parked the car, we walked a bit until we found a grassy patch under the trees by the Cantor Art Center.

We shed our shoes and stretched out on the blanket.

And enjoyed being outdoors on a beautiful day.

When one of us started getting antsy, circles were run around the Rodin sculptures in the garden.

And when we needed a restroom we made our way to the arts center itself.

On our way in, Alice played "shake the bees" among the lavender.  Then I realized that "shake the bees" meant trying to pinch the bees off of the top of the plants with her fingers.

We entered the Cantor Center by way of a spectacular, light-filled room and an array of bronze sculptures, including Rodin's famous The Thinker.

Spirits were lagging by the second floor, so we thought we'd just head home.

And maybe take a rest.

But, as we strolled by Memorial Court and the main quad, we realized that it was the perfect spot to take a spin on the balance bike.

Alice saw this innocent looking trio walking towards her and shouted, "Mom, hurry, we have to get away from these three monsters!" They actually didn't seem that offended.

She greeted The Burghers of Calais.

As the afternoon wore on, spirits once again dipped a bit.



There was a standoff which resulted in my having to pretend to leave so that Alice would follow me to the car. She began wailing but followed along behind me, her head hanging, shoulders drooping, feet dragging, and arms crossed in a pitiful self-embrace. I'm guessing that crying children trailing behind briskly walking mothers aren't common around campus, judging from the two different people who emerged from nearby buildings to investigate the racket and come to the rescue of what they were sure was a child in serious distress.

And even though we lost the car for a while and spent nearly 45 minutes wandering among what seemed like hundreds of identical buildings, we arrived back to our two hour parking spot after nearly four hours and saw that there was no ticket on our windshield.  

We decided that Stanford has plenty to offer three adventurous girls on a lovely summer day!

Adults Only

When we decided to move to California, I joked that priority #1 would be to find a place to live and priority #2 would be to find a good an available babysitter.  There were a couple of other items on the list that ended up taking precedence over the babysitter (like the grocery store and the gas station), but not many.  Now that we've come to the end (I hope) of many months of dwelling in the logistics of new baby, new job, new city and new house, we've been making up for lost time by getting out on our own for some dates.

For our anniversary, Matt surprised me with an aerial tour of the San Francisco Bay. 

Not surprisingly, I was a little nervous once I figured out what we would be doing. I irrationally became even more nervous when I saw that our pilot was wearing braces on his teeth.  (I'm sorry, but they just scream "I'm really working hard in pre-Algebra this year" to me.)  I relaxed a little when he told me that he had spent eight years in the Peruvian air force and had been flying for about twenty years. Then I became nervous again when, before takeoff, he asked for our help in "watching out for other planes in the sky."  He barked some important sounding code commands into his radio: I relaxed.  I noticed the "low fuel levels" light flickering on and off: nervous again. 

Finally, once we got up in the sky, I loosened up and really enjoyed the experience.

 

This guy doesn't seem to get nervous.

 

It was quite an outing and a fantastic introduction to the Bay area.

 

A few weeks later, I planned a day of wine tasting in Napa to celebrate Matt's birthday. (Yeah...so maybe each of us was motivated by just a hint of self interest. cough airplanerideforme cough winetastingforMatt cough)

I decided that as long as we were in for a penny, we might as well be in for a pound, so I found someone to drive our car for us all day. I wasn't sure if the expense was going to be worth it, but...

 

...it most definitely was! We visited four different wineries and tasted a few different wines at each. It felt like a mini vacation in a day.

  

We can't wait to see what else Northern California has to offer. But, I promise that in the meantime, I'll return to our regularly scheduled programming of squishy baby photos and funny Alice stories.

Out of Words

It's hard for me to know what to say about our Baby Jo.  Our sturdy, pudgy, gregarious Joanna lights up our lives every day.  But, unlike writing about her older sister, I can't just quote a bunch of funny things she says or record a few naughty deeds and call it a blog post.

I wrote up a whole post entitled "The Sweet Spot" in which I tried to accurately describe just exactly how delightful Joanna is these days without descending into something boring or trite.  I failed in the description and succeeded in being both boring and trite.
 

In that discarded post, I described the little horizontal jig that Joanna performs when we rescue her from her crib or bouncy seat.

I explained how her hands are in constant motion, wrists rotating, palms flipping from one side to the other; how she examines those two hands like a scientist looking at a slide under a microscope; and how, even when I try to still them as I feed her by giving her my finger as an anchor to grab onto, she still maintains a steady open-shut regimen with her fingers on mine, like she's running on a battery that needs to fully charge before she can stop.

I gushed about her thighs, her dimply knuckles, and the roll of pudge where her forearm meets her hand in a single crease, and I mentioned how she follows Alice's every move with an expression on her face that most people reserve for watching unicorns waltz with angels.

I wrote about how I can make her laugh by bicep curling her up to my face and nuzzling into her neck, and I detailed the way that, when I pick her up and hold her right in front of me, she looks right in my eyes, grabs my face with both hands, and beams as if to say, "You're mine. I'm so glad we're together."

It's all been said or thought by a million parents before.  And that doesn't make any of the things about little babies at this stage any less wonderful, but it does make it hard to try to write them down without cringing.  You may as well write about how delicious chocolate is, how exciting it is to see a rainbow, or how exhilarating it is to run a marathon (I wouldn't know, but I've read it enough times to know I don't want to read about it again).

One of the reasons I keep adding to this blog is so that one day, when the kids are grown up, I can look back on the photos and stories, and they will spark my otherwise terrible memory.  I want to remember just how enchanting this baby is right now and how she makes me feel every time I squeeze her close.

So, rather than feebly describe the details, I'll just leave it at this: we're falling more and more in love with this little girl every day.

New Normal

We're getting used to a whole new life out here.

Two little girls. Warm weather. Fantastic parks and library. A wild almost-three-year-old imagination. A chubby, jovial baby who can't stop watching her sister and beaming. An increasingly creative vocabulary. More night sleep.

Things are a-changin'.

Alice has started calling Joanna "my baby." As in, "My baby is sleeping;" "My baby can't eat ice cream because she doesn't have any teef;"  or "Mom, I fink you need to feed my baby."  We were talking about occupations the other night at dinner and I asked Alice what she thought her job was.  I was expecting an answer like "swinging on swings" or "learning more about animals so that one day I can fulfill my destiny by joining Diego and Baby Jaguar at the Animal Rescue Center."  However, without thinking for even a second, she answered, "My job is to take care of my baby." And then my heart exploded.

 

Although Alice's vocabulary is pretty great for a three year old, she does still commit some hilarious malapropisms, and she always does so proudly, loudly, and convincingly.  We were talking about how it's important not to throw our trash on the ground, and a little while later as we were strolling around town she saw an apple core that someone had tossed on the sidewalk.  She seized the opportunity: "Hey, look! Someone left an apple quarter on the ground.  We call that...[pause for dramatic effect and the emergence of  a humungous, self-satisfied smile]...GLITTER!"

We're all using our imaginations a bit more these days, as Matt and I have been delivering butchered fairy tales and flimsy princess stories when Alice asks us, "Can I hear a story from your mouf?" And, I'm not sure where she got the idea that there were crocodiles all over our house, but we are now on the perpetual alert.  The other day we had the following exchange:

Her: I have to go potty.
Me: Okay, go ahead.
Her: But! [She holds up her index finger to convey the gravity of what she's about to say.] We have to find a potty that doesn't have a crocodile in it.
Me: ...

 

The parks here in Mountain View and in the towns nearby are so clean and well designed that we've been having a lot of fun trying new ones every week.  Even when we're not meeting anyone in particular, Alice has no trouble making friends.  Often she targets children who are about five years older than she is and far too busy doing big kid things to even look in her direction.  On the day I took these photos, Alice spent a good thirty minutes shadowing a pair of ten-year-old girls.  She squealed at their antics, narrated their adventures ("Haha! She runned up the slide! She throwed the sand!"), and issued cautions ("Careful, gores! You shouldn't climb over that fence!" "No running!").  When it was time to go, she interrupted their play to announce, "I have to go home now. Sorry. It's time to go home, gores." They gave her a confused look as if they were just then noticing her for the first time, and then shrugged and continued playing as Alice hopped onto the platform on the back of the stroller and chattered all the way home about her hilarious new friends.

We've* slipped into the habit of having Alice watch the iPad almost every afternoon after quiet time. I know, I know.  Why should I need an hour of iPad quiet time immediately following ninety minutes of standard issue stay-in-your-room-and-maybe-fall-asleep-but-usually-just-go-to-the-bathroom-poop-in-the-little-potty-and-try-to-transfer-it-to-the-big-toilet-and-try-to-"clean"-it-with-a-Clorox-wipe-but-just-make-a-mess-fit-for-a-truck-stop-restroom-and-also-slam-the-door-a-bunch-of-times quiet time? All I can say is that we started allowing it as a bribe to get her to stay in her room for the standard issue quiet time, and now none of us is willing to return to a life without that additional hour of peace. Especially not Alice:

Alice: "Hey, Mom, can you help me find the iPad so I can watch a video?"
Me: "Well, I think you forgot to ask first if it was okay for you to watch a video."
Alice: "Oh, well, did you do a good job at quiet time today, Mom?"
Me: "Um, yes."
Alice: "Well, then it's okay to watch a video now. Please get the iPad down."
Me: "Okay. Here you are, darling. Also, should we have frosting for dinner or just bacon and gummy vitamins?"

* Who's "we," you ask? It's just me really, as I'm usually the only one home with the kids at that time of day, but I think it makes me sound less culpable if I say that "we" are to blame. 

If a Tree Falls in the Forest...

When she thinks no one is looking or listening, Alice is at her best.  Now, don't get me wrong.  By "best," I don't mean most well behaved or precocious.  I mean that she lets down her guard and follows her instincts and does whatever it is that seems like the most Alice thing to do at that moment.  It's almost always something she knows she shouldn't be doing, something that leaves a big mess, or something that results in my receiving emails about a subscription to the Mickey Mouse Clubhouse YouTube channel that I am quite certain I never signed up for.

Due to a previous incident involving Crayola bath water coloring tablets, I make it a point to check on her after she's been messing around in the bathroom for more than 10 minutes.  (If you're interested in the previous incident that led to this policy, just visualize what Willy Wonka's murder scene might look like if it happened in my upstairs bathroom.)  I knock on the door, and depending on what she's doing inside, she sings out, "Don't come iiiiin!" (usually) or, "Come iiiiin!" (occasionally) as if she's in her office and I'm her secretary coming in to give her a message. Her answer, by the way, has nothing to do with whether she's finished going to the bathroom and everything to do with whether she's creating another disaster scene or not.

 

The other day I left some chopped up chocolate on the counter to use in a birthday cake for Matt. I ran upstairs to do something and came back down to find Alice, mouth and hands sticky and brown, holding a chunk of chocolate in her hand. "I was just testing to make sure it wasn't too hot," she explained. 

One of my favorite things to do is pause for a few minutes outside her bedroom door when I hear her in there at night or during (not so) quiet time.  The other night, as part of the ongoing torture that is sleep training a four-month-old, I found myself perched on the steps between Alice's room and Joanna's room at 1am.  I stayed long after Joanna had fussed herself to sleep though, because Alice had woken up and was on a roll, yakking (to herself? to her one hundred stuffed buddies that she must! sleep with every night? to an imaginary friend?) and I couldn't stop listening. 
 

Her monologue went something like this: 

"Everyone! WAIT!! Throw that to Diego! 
Lookkit! She's eating the gum! 
Ooooops! [Laughter] I forgot something! 
Remember when Dad throwed the snowball? Haha, that was funny. 
HEY! You knoooooow? I'm Alice. Yeah! [Peals of laughter; Squeals]  
That was funny. [More hysterical laughter] 
That was funny."

You may be wondering about the body art on display in these photos.  I have only a few comments to make on the matter:

1. Dry erase marker does come off of human skin with a decent amount of scrubbing.

2. It does not come off of walls or rugs with mere scrubbing.

3. Since, according to Alice, the marker got all over her body "by accident," I'm going to start an awareness campaign to prevent accidents like this from happening in the future. I think we can all agree that dry erase markers shouldn't be allowed to deface our young accidentally. 

4. This exact accident happened three separate times in two days. Isn't there some piece of old wisdom we could apply here? Oh yes, I think it goes like this: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Fool me thrice, put the markers up high out of reach, for goodness' sake."

Joanna's face registers disappointment, but she's taking detailed notes about pulling off stunts like these in a few years.

A Phone Time Was Had By All

Clockwise, starting at the top left and ending in the center: Finding her feet; Sisters relaxin'; Little Bon Bon; Little A making little A's; Washing off the day; Getting into trouble, again; Hiding from spectacled bears in the closet; Pure delight; Little girl, big fish