East Meets Pacific Northwest

A boy and his bike

2010-03-07T11:37:00.000-08:00

While I've been puttering about at home, setting the roomba free to roam, blogging, and loving the sound of silence, thinking all the while that the guys were off at a thrift store to get rid of a little bit of our garage clutter, this is what they actually went out to get:

Pretty tough bike for a boy in a bunny coat.

Busy boys

2010-03-06T18:00:00.000-08:00

The boys were very busy today, all three of them. After the morning cartoons and cornflakes, they started their energetic day by helping Papa remove the rest of the railings from the deck. So nice to have the unobstructed view of the creek and yard back! (We had to put up the railings some years ago when we started the adoption process - our former China agency mandated it as a requirement for our homestudy completion. Even our insurance company didn't think we needed rails on such a low deck, but we couldn't argue at the time.)

Then, J and Roni did a little painting in his bathroom to get it - finally - all one color again after having the doorway closed off a long while ago. A little spiffing up soon to be joined by new flooring. D slept through this part, but when he got up to inspect it, he declared it, "Stinky!" One of his favorite insults.

Next there was some ferocious trike racing and a failed attempt at a two wheeled ride, and then they burnt some of the rails and toasted some marshmallows to end the day. J loves marshmallows, but D mostly dropped and walked on his. Not a sugar boy. He's more of a cracker king.

And what was I doing during all of this? Watching old movies from Netflix and doing a bit of this
:

and testing out my newest fiber craft, needle punching. A big of a lumpy sheep but it is a first attempt. Fun, though, and it will be a great way to use up all the yarn I keep producing.

J Day!

2010-02-21T10:46:00.000-08:00

February 20 is the anniversary of J joining our family, forever know to us as "J Day." We celebrated a day late this year due to other things going on (and the fact that we can't keep track of the day of the week, much less the day of the month).

The tradition has become to do something fun first, so we went to the park with the trikes and the kids rode like a speed demon (J) or a tipsy not-so-speedy demon (D) and used every piece of playground equipment at least twice. Then a little soccer ball kicking, some geese feeding, and on to part two, which is lunch at a chinese restaurant. After all that energy building, they inhaled their egg flower soup, fried rice, and broccoli beef.

Sadly, I forgot to bring a camera for any of this!

J's favorite part is the third part, where he gets to pick out a toy to buy. This was a very time consuming process in the aisles of Target as every toy had to be looked at and analyzed for its potential fun. Until he saw a monster truck and then the decision was easy, as monster trucks rule J's world. Although he's still rather regreting losing out on the opportunity for blendy pens and has started a campaign to get us to go back for them.

Two years! It doesn't seem possible. He's changed so much, grow so tall and is a little boy now instead of a toddler. He talks a mile a minute and runs even faster. He loves to have us "check how big my muscles are!" though he still seems to think those muscles are located in his elbows. His favorite things to do are to jump off of anything, dig for pirate treasure in the back yard, and ride very fast on his trike. He stalks sugar and thinks that it is necessary an hourly basis if he is to survive. He cries very quickly and easily but has forgotten his upset a moment later. If he is very, very angry with us he calls us "goo-goo heads," the ultimate insult at preschool apparently. We are frequently exasperated, often stunned, and we love him to bits.

A spot in the sun

2010-02-17T14:36:00.000-08:00

It has become an almost-annual tradition for my sister and I to head to Arizona over the President's Day long weekend to visit our mom in her snowbird winter home. This time the trip coincided with the Vancouver Olympics, so we skipped some of the outings to watch the DVR'd opening ceremonies and some of our favorite sports (snowboarding and moguls at the top of that list - as much as "favorite" can be a sport related word for me when I never watch any non-Olympic sporting events).

But there was still plenty of time to watch the almost scary number of birds wrestling at Mom's backyard feeder and dipping into her fountain, and the bunnies racing around in the front road. We tore ourselves away from the televised snow to dunk Mom in the complex's outdoor pool and lounge in the hot tub. Aunt Virginia lured us to her new condo with offers of homemade bon-bons and the promise that the Olympic figure skating would be on her screen as well.

And of course, my Knitting Olympics sweater which I started Saturday morning. And some spinning with my new spindle.

We also remodeled a flight jumpsuit into an off the shoulder dress with a potentially plunging neckline and a feathery ruffled red skirt that my sister swears she will be wearing to a dance. The military has mysterious ways.

We even moved far enough away from the TV to visit the Botanical Gardens where every cactus had a sunlit halo and came in weird and wonderful shapes. Even a few glass ones scattered in with the others.

It was a great trip and wonderful to spend so much time quietly with my mom and sister.

Meanwhile, the menfolk had fun at home celebrating the Spring Festival/Chinese New Year by going to see the dragon and lion dancers in the International District. J called to tell me that he was "very brave, Mama, I didn't even cover my ears for the firecrackers!" They ate beef noodle soup and endured the rain and had all sorts of adventures.

The weekend had a lot of holidays - Mid-Winter Break, Roni & I's seventh anniversary, CNY, Valentine's Day and President's Day. (Small aside - I was particularly impressed that there is such a thing as a red box of chocolates decorated with a monster truck, which is J's favorite wheeled vehicle.) We didn't celebrate any of them as an entire family, but they were still all a success.

We're still here

2010-01-28T14:42:00.000-08:00

I'm falling behind on my duties to the grandmas by not putting up new blog entries. Except, the grandmas have both been with us off and on for the holidays and since, so they've been in many the pictures and are not feeling as urgent about pictures as they might otherwise.

And then there is the great disappearing picture mystery - somehow the folder with all the Chrismukkah pictures has disappeared in the transfer to the new CPU. I think my mom has copies, but somehow a blog of child adventures just isn't the same without pics!

But we're all still here, and still happy, and still sleep deprived, which is a whole 'nother posting.

In the meantime, for more entertaining reading (warning: inappropriate language and snakes) my sister is doing a better job of blogging.

http://www.kcharrold.blogspot.com/

Dear Santa

2009-12-16T20:24:00.000-08:00

J dictated his letter to Santa to me. He really wanted it to just say, "Dear Santa, I want a Power Ranger, from J" but I told him he had to say something nice first and also explain if he'd been good. So this was his second attempt:

Dear Santa,

Thank you, Santa, because you give things to little kids if they've been good boys. I was good because Mama didn't yell at me or scream at me. I ask when I can take my seatbelt off when I don't hear the engine. I don't say bad things about the dinner. I always ask politely for milk.

Please, I want a Power Ranger.

D has also been good. D would like a car.

I like you Santa. Please.

J

Christmakkah begins

2009-12-14T19:59:00.000-08:00

We've been celebrating the first nights of Hanukkah. J is finally old enough to really participate; he loves to light the candles, eat suvganyot (sp?), and spin the dreidle. D is a bit bewildered but the one thing he is definite about is that a kippah is not going to stay on his head, thank you very much. Roni ordered the powdered sugar donuts, but did the fillings himself. I made latkes of ever improving quality, and the two of them were our dinner Friday night. We've since added vegetables so we won't die by the end of the eight days.

Sunday we drove to a tree farm to get our Christmas tree, our first time cutting our own since I was a kid and we cut a couple of spindly trees on our property and put them together to form one decently bushy tree. It was kind of fun wandering about looking for the perfect tree - it had to be round, not too tall, not too wide, very straight, and not be one of the expensive types (I'm tree cheap). We found a perfect grand fir, compared it to all the others, declared it the winner, and then realized that we'd left the camera in the car. Then discovered the batteries were dead. Then discovered after charging the batteries that the camera was dead. So, no pictures of Roni cutting down the tree, but he did a masterful job while the rest of us sipped hot chocolate and gave advice.

Then home, via Costco for a new camera, where we put the kids down for a nap. Roni headed out to the pump house where he tried to change the filter but instead broke off the filter and the pipe it was attached to. Oops. So, no water for us for the next 24 hours.

When the kids got up, we had a great time getting the lights and ornaments sorted out and everyone put some on. J's favorite is his Snow White apple from last year during his crazy-for-Disney phase. D really likes the glass panda since he sleeps with his panda bear every nap and night.

So, an expensive day, what with electronics and plumbers, but in the end a lovely one.

Such . . . creative . . . children

2009-12-06T10:29:00.000-08:00

A long while ago, Roni's mom gave the kids fingerpaints, which I promptly put up in a very high cupboard. Today we finally remembered them and got them out for the kids, who had a blast.

Unfortunately, the blue turned out NOT to be washable. Oops. Yesterday was my friend Paige's annual cookie party, which is always chaos and great fun. The children created these, complete with the ever traditional Christmas dinosaur and foot. They also are very stuck together in places, creating permanent cookie towers. But I can personally attest to the fact that they are very tasty!
(Not sure why the picture keeps turning itself sideways.)

It's good to be with family

2009-11-26T21:05:00.000-08:00

Success. Great family, good food, and the house hasn't looked this cleaned up in a long time! D had a great time at his first Thanksgiving feast, and J helped us sing the turkey song to his uncles, aunts and cousins on our phone calls back and forth. The turkey turned out perfectly, and although I forgot the rolls until the end, we definitely weren't short of food! This was a very good day.

Swedish turkey?

2009-11-26T08:36:00.000-08:00

Is mine the only husband who thinks that Thanksgiving cooking should be done while blasting "Dancing Queen"? I don't think that the Swedes are particularly into Thanksgiving, or turkey. I blame it on a childhood devoted to the annual Eurovision competition.

Though we do have lefse, which is Scandinavian . . . but Mr. Al bought it, so it is more likely Norwegian lefse. (He says they were out of Danish lefse - Thanksgiving is ruined.)

Preparations are in the early stages:

Getting chilly around here

2009-11-13T11:51:00.000-08:00

The weather has set its pattern for the darker months - cold, damp-to-soggy, and all around bleakness. I actually like this type of weather in small doses. Perfect for knitting in front of the (gas) fire, hot chocolate excuses, and without all that blinding sunshine my house looks less dusty. But it is making the boys suffer from cabin fever already. J wants to be out there digging and running and jumping and tricycle riding - drawing letters just doesn't cut it for him. We try indoor dancing and how-many-can-you-run laps around the living room/kitchen/hall circle, but that gets old quicker, and unfortunately Mom can be really unreasonable about long distance couch bouncing. D doesn't mind as much, he's content to follow J around and copy him (shirt off? me too! hopping on one foot? me too! crying because he can't eat Halloween candy for breakfast? me too!) but that can be dangerous for him. If he gets too close or bumps some important J project, D is liable to be punched. We're working on that, but it would be a lot easier to work on it if the sun was shining!

D has started daycare for real this week, after visiting multiple times over the last couple weeks. Three days a week, same as J, and overall it is going as well as can be expected for such a big change in his days. He is very sad when being left, and cries when Roni shows up to pick him up, but phone calls during the day have assured us that he's playing and eating and napping with everyone else in a generally happy manner. Roni picks the two of them up earlier than when it was just J. We'd both like to have him home longer before starting daycare, but Roni has no other options if he is going to go to job fairs and interviews, and we really need Roni to have a job!

Belated Halloween pics for the grandmas:

These shots better work!

2009-10-31T17:00:00.000-07:00

Today was one of the few days that the H1N1 vaccine was available in our county. They were going with high risk populations first - pregnant women and very small children, health care workers, people 6-24, and teachers/day care workers. Three out of four of us fit those categories, so we left Dad at home and headed off to one of the clinics offering the shots.

I went early, because in the only other shot day I'd heard about, my cousin waited for 1 1/2 hours to get his daughter the vaccine, and they ran out of shots by the time their turn came (luckily they had flu mist left, so his daughter got that). But apparently, not early enough!

I should have realized when I couldn't get through the intersection without waiting through several lights that we needed to get up a lot earlier, but I thought maybe there was an accident. when we passed the clinic, we could see that the line was very long, but it wasn't until we parked quite a ways away and hiked over that I realized that the line was many, many lines that snaked and doubled back and twisted all around the building. They'd used yellow "caution" tape to create the Disney rollercoaster type paths to keep everyone in order. There were hundreds of people.

Three hours and 45 minutes later (!) the three of us got through the doors and then soon after were rubbing our sore arms/thighs.

Next plaue scare, I come more prepared - lawn chairs, a lot more toys than the wimpy two I had, the stroller for napping and a food cooler. We were lucky that the woman in front of us had family to call to bring snacks and she shared the goldfish with us. Then Joey found left-over grapes from yesterday's lunch in my bag, which kept us from full meltdown.

The kids did really well for a very long time, and it wasn't until the last hour that I had to threaten to take away Halloween or switch carrying them on a five minute rotation. And we were even luckier that it didn't rain until we were coming out of the building!

And now we won't die, so that's good too.

The dream of sleep

2009-10-29T09:18:00.001-07:00

A full eight hours of sleep has become rather mythological around here. Something like the golden age of Greece, with stories of how it used to be in that long ago time. The Greeks had their minotaurs and sun chariots, we had sleeping until 10:00 on Saturdays and ear-plug free ears. It is all lost in the hazy, distant past.

I don't know when I last had eight hours of uninterrupted sleep - or even eight hours of interrupted sleep - but it wasn't recently, and the people around me are starting to suffer because of it.

There was a brief stretch of time - about four nights in a row until I ruined it by saying out loud how great it was - when younger son slept much of the night. However, older son makes up for it by waking up each morning at 5:00-5:30 and insisting that it is time to go downstairs. Attempts to use logic - "It is still dark, everyone else is asleep, therefore it is still night and you don't get cornflakes now" - were worthless, as were threats, bribes, begging, and tears (mine). When J is awake, he's awake and that isn't going to change. And no, he doesn't want to watch cartoons downstairs by himself, or play with blocks, or get a yogurt or anything else that lets us sleep. He will stand by the bed and stare at me in a really loud way (until I had J, I didn't know staring could be loud) and if I manage to persist in my stubbornness after that, the poking and pleading starts until his dad drags out of bed and down the stairs where they are really loud and perky directly under our room, so I am awake anyway.

Not that I'm bitter.

When J is asleep, he sleeps very soundly! Which is a good thing, because he insists on sleeping in the hall outside our room and we make a lot of trips past his little sleep cocoon - he's always been a floor sleeper, but the hall is new since bringing home D. A couple of times we've almost stepped on him, but now we're used to keeping strictly away from the closet side of the hall as we come and go. When I come up for bed I find him contorted like a pretzel, twisted around a pile of things he accumulated from various rooms as he was settling in after his stories and good-night kisses: extra pillows and books and bears and motorcycles. For a while he was putting on a sweater of Roni's over his pjs but lately he's switched to clutching a scarf of mine or a pair of my big woolen socks over his footie pajamas. He just likes to have something of ours with him.

On the rare days that older son sleeps until 6:00, or the heaven that is 6:15, younger son has been up three, four, eight times during the night. He sleeps very well from 8:00 to about 10-11:00 and then usually wakes up crying about every 45 (or 15) minutes for a couple hours. On lucky nights it is enough to go in and turn him on his side, retrieve his hand towel and panda from where ever they have landed, and he'll settle back to sleep for awhile. On unlucky nights, the only thing that soothes him is if I climb in bed with him and he can sleep plastered on top of me. Which is great for his bonding and his sleep, but I can't sleep that way. He squirms and likes to have his head jammed up against my chin and I'm a side-sleeper anyway. So I doze on and off, my thoughts drifting randomly between absolute warm fuzzies that this amazing, adorable little boy is actually mine, and counting exactly how many minutes of sleep I'm losing with every fifteen minute chime of the clock downstairs.

Sometimes bringing him into bed with us helps him sleep, but then there is still the squirming and kicking and plastering, so both Roni and I aren't getting sleep, so it is better to keep it to one awake adult in his room.

Roni does his share, but D often wants nothing to do with him at night so takes longer to go back to sleep, and I can't sleep through the crying, so then we're just both awake. (Another aside: much as I love him, it just makes me crazy with jealousy that Roni can fall back asleep again in about 4.3 seconds after getting up while it takes me 15-20 minutes to get back to sleep.) Lately, a few nights I've resorted to earplugs which gives me sore ears the next day but works really well! On Saturdays, Roni will often take the boys to the pool in the morning and I crawl back in bed. (Have I mentioned what a great husband he is!)

I know this is just a stage in our lives, but I am a sleeper by nature. Nine hours is about what I need to be a happy, patient, organized person. Right now, I'm a bit . . . we'll say short tempered and weepy and leave it at that.

Halloween was only one day when I was a kid

2009-10-28T17:21:00.000-07:00

So, in the important question, "Am I the kind of parent who steals Halloween candy from her own children?" the answer has come down to a resounding Yes. In fact, I will even steal the best candies - the Reese's cups and the peanut M&Ms and the Almond Joys. I figure I have to steal now before they get old enough that they are counting, categorizing, rating, and hiding the candy and all that they offer poor Mom is the awful black licorice.

Why do they even have candy, this far from Halloween is the other question. Roni decided to take them to the Zoo's Pumpkin Prowl Sunday night, which turned out to be a preview of the real event for little kids - I guess to have the practice wearing costume without screaming, which D definitely needs. They got a bag full of andy, some beanie-baby bears, and little LED flashlights amoung other loot. D was slow to catch on that if he got out of the stroller, people would give him candy for that minimal amount of effort, but he did figure it out eventually. J, on the other hand, remembers last year, so he had Roni and I help him practice saying trick-or-treat before they left so he wouldn't mess up and risk losing any candy.

D was a caterpillar (cause we have the costume from last year) and J was a fireman - just don't look inside the reflective yellow jacket because I don't think real firemen's coats have floral linings.

Getting into the Halloween spirit

2009-10-24T16:20:00.000-07:00

We went out this afternoon to meet up with cousins to explore the corn maze and pick out pumpkins, which is becoming an annual tradition, complete with picture taking on giant pumpkins.

My favorite part is always the corn maze, which is designed to be the state of Washington. We entered on the Idaho border and had to find our way out at Neah Bay. Cousin Todd wanted to hit I-90 and hightail it west, but we let the kids pick the directions at each intersection and ended up spending a lot of time exploring the rural parts of Eastern and Central Washington.

It was a grand adventure until we somehow lost Todd and A and then J face planted into a major puddle. He recovered well, after the screaming died down, and we explained that he couldn't strip off for the remainder of the maze. Mud from toes to his hair. It was a very dramatic splash.

We spent some time in the barn maze as well. Less muddy and with a slide that they thought was so great they had to go around twice.Then we began the great pumpkin search. I have strict pumpkin criteria - they must be round, smallish, and deserving of the label "cute." Also, J must be able to lift them. J participated enthusiastically, but D was more interested in his apple and rather angry that the pumpkins got to ride in the stroller instead of him.

Nothing cuter than . . .

2009-10-07T20:20:00.000-07:00

. . . little kids in footie pajamas from their grandma:

A little natural beauty

2009-10-07T19:30:00.000-07:00

Amazingly glorious weather took us out camping this weekend, near Northwest Trek and Mt. Rainier.

We were the only people staying in the campground tent area the second night, which was both wonderful for privacy and a little bit horror-movie-spooky while walking to the bathrooms in the dark.

We also learned that if you are going to take a little boy who hates covers camping in October, he is going to be a little boy popsicle by morning, despite your best efforts to keep him covered.

I'm not sure if I've been to Northwest Trek before - certainly not as an adult. It is a wonderful place to take kids!

Panda mania

2009-08-31T15:48:00.001-07:00

We’ve been joined by the Polish team for the Deaf Olympics at our hotel (though the city is spelling it Deaflympics). It was a very full dining room, with blond, athletic people. Our waiter came over and asked us, “Where are they all from, they are so tall!” We couldn’t get Poland across, but he got Eastern Europe.

At night, as we tried to put to bed too overly tired children who were both wailing at having their fun time ended, we could only be grateful that we were unlikely to be waking up the neighbors.

While Roni was off on his bullet train to the south Mom and I got the kids up and out, off to the zoo. Thank goodness for my mother, is all I can say. There is no way that I could have handled the two kids, the two strollers, the backpack, the umbrellas, the water – all the stuff that it seems to take us to get two small boys out into the Taipei heat. At home, it will be slightly more pared down, and J will go back to being a walker – we haven’t used his stroller in almost a year before coming here. But for now, getting into a taxi is not a quick leap from the curb!

The Taipei zoo is great. Not the world’s biggest or best layout, but where else can you spend the day for $1.65 (Mom and the kids were free, though the guard gate “carded” Mom, to her thrill) in a green, entertaining setting. Complete with misters in the trees and juice/tea/water machines every few feet dispensing 30 cent bottles. Plus, we took travel advice and took the shuttle train to the top and so our whole visit was a downwards stroll.

Our first destination, and the highlight, was the Panda exhibit. My mom is crazy for pandas – way back when she visited the first pandas in the U.S., brought to Washington D.C. and she’s liked them ever since. And I know that it is anthropomorphizing, but there is something about those pudgy faces that makes you smile.

They had it set up so that you got a ticket time when you first entered the zoo, so we rushed there to make our time. However, we’d timed the day of our visit perfectly – today is the first Monday that all the schools start up again here, so the zoo was nearly empty after what was apparently a jam packed weekend. There were all the Disney type waiting areas set up with their snaking turns, but today they were unused. We just wandered to the main door and were smiled inside. There is a narrow walkway across the panda enclosure and people are supposed to keep moving to let the people in line behind them to have their chance to see. But as there wasn’t much in the way of lines, we could stay and take lots of pictures. The keepers were setting up large bamboo branches in stands in the floor and pretty soon the pandas lumbered in and started to eat. Camera phones clicking on all sides. We stayed for quite a while, watching them on the far side of the enclosure eating carrots or something large and orange, and then were finally waved out with the group.

But after hitting the panda gift shop, Mom really hadn’t had enough pandas, so we went back to the front door and asked if we could go in again. The lady said sure (or the Mandarin equivalent) so we went in and got to just stand and watch the pandas wallowing in their bamboo and wandering to the ponds for drinks for a very long time. Conservatively, I’d estimate that Mom and I took 50-60 panda pictures, just to make sure that some of them would turn out, taken through the glass. In the evening, Roni was astonished that anyone could need so many pics, but as I may have mentioned, we are pro-panda people. J

We wandered the rest of the zoo, hitting our favorites (the penguin house is a little sad, and I always avoid cat enclosures as they need so much more space than they ever get) like the elephants and zebras. The camera battery eventually died, done in by the pandas, but we had enough cute pics of the kids in sun hats racing or rolling about to mark the occasion. We focused on animals that had air-conditioning as well, so I saw more snakes and lizards than strictly necessary. D eventually faded out, but J stayed awake, probably fueled by his evil plotting against his brother. Sibling rivalry is in full force at the moment! The hotter J gets, the more he becomes sure that D is the source of his problems. A well rested, cool J can tolerate his once-beloved-when-mythical brother. A hot, cranky J is a secret squeezer.

Back at the hotel, I popped the kids in the tub and with grandma in charge, went off in a taxi to find that yarn store the receptionist had written down for me. It was a combo store called MamaBear, with quite a bit of yarn and even more beads. A big set of tables was surrounded by happy women working wire and beads into decorative thingies. The yarn took up several walls and rows and was all in plastic to protect it from the humidity. None of it was from Asia, as far as I could tell, so I ended up with yarn from Spain and Italy, but I’ll still be able to tell the boys that I wove or knit their scarves from yarn from our trip to Taiwan. So my yarn diet needs have been met. (Though there is unlikely to be much knitting, weaving or spinning time in the near future.)

We went just a couple of steps right of our hotel to a Thai restaurant for dinner. D was more interested in stacking the metal water glasses and J with his motorcycle, but the food was good for those of us who focused on it. Roni found us by spotting us through the window just as we were finishing the ice cream course, back from the south where his vendor visit was a little strange but interesting none the same.

We’re all packed up now, as we fly home tomorrow and have to be out of the rooms by noon. We’re definitely ready to get home and get back to whatever the new normal is going to turn out to be. Unfortunately, the non-stop EVA flights to Seattle are night flights, which is great for sleeping kids, but not so great for killing a day when we’re packed, without a hotel room, and feeling a little done.

So, I signed us up for another tour. It’ll kill half the day (see? The tourism excitement is definitely fading!) and we’ll see a part of the northern coast that we didn’t see on the last tour. I’m using these van trips as a way to test the waters for the day when we come back on our own and make our way around the island to really show the boys where they are from. So these are just little tastes to show us good places to go and how things work.

Fast train

2009-08-31T06:01:00.000-07:00

This morning I got up to meet an important supplier in Taiwan. This meeting was schedules just because I am here, making it a good opportunity. I found that it might be a learning experience for me. This vendor is a big corporatation. I started this trip riding on a train that flies at 300KMH. It was great! I rode from one side of the island to the other side in 90 minutes.

The meeting went well. The lady took me to a good restaurant where we had a feast of endless dishes. But the most enjoyable thing was the ride on the train.

Markets and malls

2009-08-30T15:59:00.000-07:00

We split up in the morning, with Roni and the boys going off to a Pixar exhibition and also to Da’an park, Taipei’s giant park in the middle of the city which includes a major play area. It was the first place in Taipei we took J when we first got him, and it was equally a hit this time. The three boys all came back hot and dripping and having had a fabulous time running around. The slides were the favorite. The Pixar presentation was a little over their heads except for some movies that J really liked.

Mom and I hit the weekend market again, to make sure we’d at least touched every tourist souvenir available to us. I don’t wear much jewelry so we mainly admired in the jade market section, but we did manage to get a few trinkets and we each got another water color picture at the craft market. I keep fingering the clay teapots in their amazingly carved configurations, but what am I going to do with such a tiny teapot? My display shelves at home are already dangerously overloaded, and the mugs I drink tea from are bigger than the teapots. I also love the laughing pigs, and it may be that we’ll have yet another of those at home, but I can tell myself it is for the boys when they’re older, not for me. :-)

We all met back at the hotel for nap time, and then we were going to be off to the zoo. Grandma, who has been dubious about it (just because last time we took her to the Taipei Zoo, the trip lasted ten hours – but I maintain that the part where we took the gondola to tea town and walked in the wrong direction for what seemed like hours doesn’t count) but we promised, promised, promised we’d only be there a couple hours so she agreed to come. However, the boys’ naps really stretched out – they ran a LOT at the park – and then we’re still working out the logistics of all those little shoes and strollers and snacks and assorted paraphernalia. So we didn’t get to the lobby until 3:30 and the zoo closes at 5:00.

Instead, the receptionist called her friend with young children to see what she’d recommend for a Sunday afternoon (they are so nice to us here!) and then sent us off to the Living World Mall. This place has to be seen to be believed. It is an eleven story building, or collection of buildings, with a giant round multi-story ball dropped into the middle of it. There are escalators going every which way, but they never go to all the floors – you can ride up or down for two or three levels, but then you have to go search for another way to get to the floor you really wanted. The same with the elevators. Our original goal was the a BossBaby (BabyBoss?) that makes up the seventh floor, but the elevators we found didn’t stop on the seventh floor. It was a bit like a Vegas casino – designed so you don’t know if it is day or night or where the exits are. Each floor had a theme – lifestyle or Cinderella Avenue (women’s clothing) or furniture. There was a stage on a bottom level, that we watched from a railing four stories higher, where Asian flamenco and belly dancers performed.

The food hall on the 3rd basement level, not to be confused with the food court on the 1st basement level (no idea what the difference was, but the names were different though the hall looked like a court to me) was amazing. Never before have I been able to order pasta in pesto sauce with steamed clams in a food court/hall. For $4.00! And Roni’s meal came on a metal tray with the soup pan perched on a flaming sterno can to keep it warm. All eaten with plastic spoons from the same plastic trays that you’d find in any mall in the world, with a Subway in the background (to Mom’s joy) but with a lot more taste and options than you’d ever find in a U.S. suburban food court.

Another aspect that you’d never find in the lawsuit happy U.S. was on the fifth floor, where we spent most of our time (BossBaby turned out to be a much more elaborate and expensive childrens’ activity area than we needed for a short time – somewhere to spend an entire day). The fifth floor of this mall was Kid’s World. There was an arcade with enough lights and noise to make you ADD if you weren’t already, but there were also a lot of those little coin operated rides for toddlers that was perfect for our two. They rode little trains and planes and automobiles and had wonderful time. But the best part, that you’d never have in the U.S., were these giant animals scattered all around the various stores. Putting in a few coins starts them up and then little kids drive them slowly around the mall. They walk/roll anywhere the kids steer – in stores, down the passageways, through crowds of children. When the time is up, the kids just hop off and walk off to the next amusement (or, if you’re us, put in more coins because it was so fun). They don’t go fast at all, but J did almost barrel over a couple of strollers and a clothing rack, and when I looked down below, there were all sorts of exposed gears and chains that were American lawsuits just waiting to happen. We miss a lot of fun by thinking everything has to be beyond safe.

We also went down and outside where there were other kid entertainments. I took turns with each boy in a little boat that you paddled with hand cranks, and then J rode a motorcycle in shaky circles on a tiny track.

All in all, I recommend the Living World Mall for small children to wile away an evening. And the adults can always look at the teapots and weird architecture and flamenco dancers.

We also discovered that D, who we’ve been thinking of as a sweet, mellow type, is really a secret maniac. By the end of the evening he was leaping and running and cackling with fiendish laughter. He also has the grip of a gorilla, and he’d latch on to a nearby arm and squeeze as hard as he could, complete with grunts of exertion and a determined-and-crazed face until we’d yelp and pry him off. Then he’d laugh hysterically and go pounding off to find a new target. I pushed him around on a little blue wheeled thing for a very long time (he would only steer when he was going backwards despite the urgings of a lot of Taiwanese little old ladies) and when I finally took him off to move on, his angry bellow could be heard throughout the mall. We didn’t even know he had a bellow! Dr. Placid and Mr. Hyde I’m calling him now.

Off to the sea

2009-08-29T20:55:00.001-07:00

Family pictures, at the top of the page for my brother who has complained I write too much and include too few family shots. Here you are, Andy:

The boys spent a really long time in the bath today, and had a ball. D loved the water, and J has always been able to stay in the tub until his toes peeled. We gave them lots of bubbles and containers to pour water from, and they were delighted. They played separately for the most part, but with some tossing of the ball back and forth.

We wandered down the street and around the corner to order chops for both boys from a little shop that we pass frequently. They’ll be ready Monday. I still need to find a place to have D’s name written out on a wall hanging as we have for J, but if I recall we got his at a night market, so we’ll probably find someone there again.

After nap time – which worked this time! Joy! – we climbed into another van and headed off for the northeast coast, to see where the East China Sea meets the Pacific. The part we visited wasn’t beachy (a word?) but had lots of rocky outcroppings where the hills go down to meet the water. We stopped at a couple of scenic view points to look at the way the wind had carved patterns into the sand stone and lava, which were interesting, and drove by the Bay of Two Colors which may be geologically fascinating and was in fact two colors, but since one of them was brown and the other was sea green, it didn’t seem startling to me. Purple. I could have really been amazed with purple. J

Then we climbed up, up, up into the hills along one of those switchback roads that make you feel as if at any moment you come around a corner so tight that you’ll be behind yourself. Perched up on the hill is the town of Chiufen, sort of a Taiwanese Positano, a town of narrow alleys and steep steps that looks stacked on itself. Gorgeous views, and definitely a place to come back to and stay in a B&B so we could just lounge on a terrace sipping tea and looking out over the hills and sea. Which we could have done, in a more brief version, but since we were tourists with only an hour, we wandered down the main shopping street tasting interesting and unidentified foods and buying dragon puppets and smiling pig piggy banks.

Roni and I switched kids every five minutes as J decided he needed to be with the other parent, and with him in tow and hauling D, we slowly lost water weight.

Then back down innumerable steps to the air-conditioned van, back down the twisty road, past Chicken Cage Peak, and back to Taipei.

As we came back into the city, we saw people burning huge quantities in paper. Apparently, this is the only month on the Chinese calendar when the ghosts can come out of the underworld, so these people were burning ghost money for the ghosts to take back with them when they had to return so they would be able to buy things in the underworld.

Fruit and bread in the hotel room, and then everyone to bed.

Our first full day as a family of four (+grandma)

2009-08-28T15:55:00.000-07:00

We’ve been here long enough to fall into a morning pattern. I get up between 4:00 and 5:00 A.M., usually when J bolts upright and says, “I’m hungry!” (his version of good morning) and fill in the previous day on the blog, and Roni either starts listening to his podcast downloads or goes jogging. (In this heat! Amazes me.) Now we’ve added a new cast member, who sleeps the latest as he doesn’t have jet-lag. Poor mite has no idea the way his body clock is going to be screwed up in a few days! A few minutes before we are ready for breakfast, number one son is sent to ring grandma’s bell and ask her if she is awake. Then we eat and eat at the buffet, and we’re ready to head out for another day.

Friday’s big event was the trip to AIT. It went smoothly and relatively quickly – Mei-Ru got us in and up the three flights with no line waiting, and it seemed much faster than last time to be called up to the first window where we got copies of the immigration medical report and D’s medical card and vaccination record and handed over the copies of the court documents that TWCA had given us (we got them back). A wait, and then to the next window where an American official asked us when we’d met D, if we’d know which child we were adopting before we came to Taiwan, and if we’d gotten updates. We also signed and he notarized a vaccination paper (the second time that no one has been interested in the one that JOH has us notarize). Since nothing had changed in our home study details that we hadn’t already sent updates for, that was the end of that part, and we waited for just a few minutes until we were called to the final window, #8, where we got a visa pick-up receipt and were told our visa would be ready on Monday. From the time Mei-Ru picked us up in the lobby to getting back into the car – with a brief stop at a swimming suit store – it was only two hours. Speedy!

We met another family while we were there, adopting a toddler girl who was very energetic and emphatic! They said they weren’t sure who’d break first, them or her. We told them that they had a female J on their hands and to stock up on energy vitamins for themselves.

Mei-Ru is limping badly as she jammed her toe, so she’s pleased that we haven’t needed her guide services this trip. She’d never be able to handle a lot of walking. She did bring to AIT a lot of maps with suggestions for children’s activities which gives us more options for the kids. We’ve signed up for a half day coastal trip for Saturday afternoon, just to see a section of Taiwan that is new to us. Of course, most sections of Taiwan are new to us.

We went later in the day to Taipei 101 with the vague idea of eating at the food court we’ve heard so much about in other families’ postings and then heading to the top. The food court did have great offerings, but it was jammed with people. We wandered with our trays for a long time before giving up and taking them out into the heat again to sit on some cement steps and bolt our food. We won’t do that again! Though J and I loved the sushi and Mom and Roni were happy to find a Subway. D slept through it.

We decided it was too hazy to go up, and we have had a number of views of Taipei anyway, so we spent the money on Hagen-Daz instead and were just as happy. Then we walked over to City Hall and visited the Discovery Center which has some exhibits about how Taipei has developed and changed over the years, from the very earliest settlements through the Japanese occupation and into the modern days. There was a very neat short movie in a circular theater which had 360 degrees of screens and the whole seating area rotated. It was about the wishes children have for what Taipei could be like and explained with pictures and cartoons the plans that the city has for making Taipei a more attractive and environmentally sound city. Really well done and our favorite part of the center.

Kid-wise, it has been a little bit Cain and Abel, though Abel is oblivious to the undercurrents. J really wants to be doing whatever D is doing if it involves his parents. He wants to be carried if D is, but it has to be by the same parent which the parent arm muscles aren’t always up to (looking at you, Johnna). He got in and out of the stroller as if he was a D mirror, and grabs the other hand if one of us is walking with D. The two of them had a bit of a tinker toy war as J didn’t want to give up any of the long sticks and D apparently felt life wasn’t worth living with a short stick. J got hysterical when he and Roni arrived back from getting tickets at the train station and Mom and I, with D, not realizing that J wanted to come too, went down to the lobby to arrange Saturday’s tour.

But J is also doing really well at sharing food, and he still calls him “My D” and saves little stickers and such for him. He’s handed over some of his markers and little cars to share with D. So there is encouragement for the future, once his shaken world falls back into balance. They’d better work it out now while J has the advantage of size and speed, because all indicators are that D will be the bigger of the two as adults, so J will want to be on his good side!

Dinner was at the Mongolian grill restaurant across the street. An eating style that involves steaming hot pots and fire-heated grills in hot, humid weather may not have been the brightest choice, but we enjoyed it anyway. My hair got very curly. D D was persistent in trying to get food balanced on two chopsticks clutched tightly together and did as well as the adults did really – I dropped a lot of little rice bits in my lap. We basically trashed the table, but a bottle of wine (the same Yellow Tail we often have at home) made us not care that we were likely a source of puzzlement and amusement to our table neighbors.

And I have never seen so much red meat being squeezed into a bowl in Mongolian restaurants at home! The Taiwanese diners reversed our ration – their bowls were almost entirely beef, deer, mutton or pork, which a few vegetables balanced on top, while we had a little meat and then crammed in all the veggies we could. But both cultures met equally when it came to the watermelon and ice cream for desert.

All in all, a good first full day as a family of four + grandma.

Introducing our new son!

2009-08-27T14:40:00.001-07:00

D Day! He is such a doll – all bushy eyebrows and pudgy cheeks and the cutest little giggle when he succeeds at bonking someone with a tinker toy. We’re totally crazy about him already.

Mei-Ru picked us up at 8:30 in the lobby (we were half an hour early) and we headed to FengYuan, carrying bags of presents and still rather anxious. Well, except J, who wasn’t entirely sure what was going on – I think he’s heard about D for so long he’d started thinking of him as imaginary, like the dragons or pirates. He fell asleep – announced that he’d take a nap because then it would be faster.

After a brief stop in the office to drop off the bags (why aren’t we allowed to give them to the foster mom ourselves?) and to sign a single, simple paper that finalizes our acceptance of the adoption, we drove to his foster mom’s apartment. We walked across a little stone path through someone’s ceramic pot garden and across a narrow cement walkway over an urban stream, and then there he was in Mrs. C’s arms, peering out the door at us!

He was so very quiet. She told us that that is how he reacts when he is uncertain or upset – he gets quiet and doesn’t interact very much. And it must have been overwhelming to have all four of us plus Samantha and Mei-Ru suddenly stuffed into his living room, shaking stuffed animals at him. J showed him each and every thing we’d brought – the stuffed dog, little lion, ball, noisy truck, and the no-spill drinking cups. It was the cups that broke the ice a little. He liked to screw the lid on and off. Then he was willing to play with the truck a little bit. Roni and J got right down on the floor with him and were persistent until he gave J at least a bit of a smile. I plopped down nearby and asked his foster mother questions through Samantha’s translations, but even with the lists I’d made, it was hard to concentrate!

We all trooped out to the car, and he transferred to Roni’s lap without an trauma, but was again very quiet, and extremely vigilant, watching every move any of us made with big eyes. There were a couple of baby store stops for formula (why is a 2 ½ year old still on formula?) and diapers and a little backpack. Then we were on our way back to Taipei, just a couple hours after we arrived.

We unfortunately didn’t get to meet his birthmother, which I’m sad about. Or J’s. We don’t really know why, as the agency maintains a lot of privacy about the birth families. So we left our packages and the book I’d made of J’s first year with us and TWCA will get them to the birth mothers.

On the ride back, we practiced D’s Taiwanese name, which we’ve been doing for months, without noticeable effect. The “Bo” syllable gives us trouble. There are Os and As and some sort of Rs in there, and all three adults pronounce it slightly differently and Mei-Ru was quite amused by most of them. We persist, and seem to be showing some improvement. Highly embarrassing not to be able to pronounce your own son’s name. We’d listened to the videos over and over again at home, trying to get it. I guess it is like the Hebrew R or CH - if you don’t grow up with it, it will never come easily.
The most successful toys during the car ride were the tinker toys that J got out and the markers/coloring book. He and J took made long connected sticks and bonked everyone in the car and soon D Bo-Hsiang was laughing along with J, to our thrill. He also made himself a multi-colored kid while scribbling in the coloring book.

We stopped for lunch at a freeway food court where we relearned the difficulties of feeding a toddler from chopsticks, and J indignantly told me that D stole his chicken right off his plate and now “his germs got on my germs and the germs are mixed and that’s not good!” D devoured the meal, really, which was great to see. (Roni, on the other hand, did not like the flavor of his “thin noodles with large intestine” even though he requested the intestine be left off, so we took pity and shared our fried noodles and dumplings.)

Back at the hotel, I tried to get him to take a nap but he was too vigilant, even with his head nodding. So we all went to play in the little park behind the hotel, which was a big success. He and J raced/toddled up and down the slides and across the climbing bridge and then just raced around in general. D it seems is rather fearless, and we’re going to have to watch him like a hawk. He was perfectly happy to race off the edge of the raised park without pausing – Roni had to catch him in mid-air several times. But it was so great to hear the two boys laughing together as they ran around the people doing their slow exercises and then ran equally as fast around the marble hotel lobby.

Dinner was an ordered in pizza from Dominos – might as well get him used to his mama’s cooking style now J - because it was just too much to go back out again in search of food.

J’s showing some signs of sibling rivalry already. He protested mightily leaving me with D when Roni took him off to Starbucks so I could try to get D to take a nap. And when D stumbles and falls down, J falls down right away so we can help him up too. But he’s also bringing toys and water bottles to D and talking about “my brother” a lot in approving tones, so we’ll hope that that side wins the majority of the time.

Getting D ready for bed was peaceful, but then he wouldn’t lie down for anything. J was completely unconscious but D just sat there, staring, resisting our efforts to coax his head onto the pillow. He was so obviously exhausted, and worried again, and he wasn’t going to relax enough to sleep. We dozed a little, though Roni and I tried to stay awake, but every time I’d look at him, he was still staring out at the room. It was heartbreaking! Finally I got him to sit on my lap and held his head against me - he fell asleep sitting up and I was able to lie him down and he was out for the night. So little to have to be so worried – we’ve shaken his whole world.

It has been a very different experience from our first day with J, and I have to say that I prefer the version where our new son is not vomiting noodles due to his extreme hysteria, but it is also clear that this isn’t easy for little D, and as much as we try to make our family a happy place for him, he’s going to need lots of time and love. But his little smiles give me a good feeling about the long term.

Hurray! Hurray!

Ceramic city

2009-08-26T14:57:00.000-07:00

We took it a little more easy today. We were templed out, and it was hot (shouldn’t be a surprise at this point, but every time we go out of the air-conditioning it still somehow seems shocking that it can be so humid) and Roni had to go off to meet with representatives of one of his company’s vendors.

J and I spent some time sitting outside (couldn’t convince him to watch through a window) watching the excavating machines working on the new subway line that is going down SongJiang Road, directly in front of our hotel. I sat on the step knitting while he stood stationary, mesmerized by the noise and the dust and the giant digging claw. We’d have been there for hours if I hadn’t demanded to go in after 30-45 minutes of breathing in the exhaust fumes.

Tina at the front desk had tried to find a yarn store for me and drew us a map for a place a few blocks away, so Mom and I and J set off to find it. One block later, J was on strike. Reminding him of the 45 minutes I sat by the machinery did not help – he was just too hot. He hollered the whole way there and the whole way back, and umbrellas and hats and shady covered walkways were met with nothing but despair. Grandma became the target of his rage, despite being entirely innocent and not even interested in finding yarn. When we finally made it the three blocks (and to be fair, they were very long blocks) the tiny shop had beads and ribbons and cloth, but no yarn. I’m sure underneath that hot, sweaty face, J felt vindicated in his objections.

But he was quite cheerful the rest of the day. We decided to do our last real shopping (fooling ourselves here) before we get D and have more significant priorities! So we loaded into a taxi and headed to Yingge, the ceramic town on the outskirts of Taipei. Except that Roni showed the driver the wrong line in the tour book and instead of ending up at the ceramic museum in Yingge, we were deposited at the historical museum of Sansia, the next town over. A museum of which the guide book says, “It’s only worth a visit if you can read Chinese.” That is not us. But there was a temporary exhibition of dyeing cloth with indigo which gave me some ideas for my yarn dyeing, and little miniature recreations of the town when it was apparently a dyeing hub (or some place that sent this exhibit was – not being those Chinese readers) so it was a pleasant five minutes. Then off to find another cab and to the correct museum.

Which we were only visiting for the gift shop and the café. J We’d been there before, and it is an excellent museum well worth the visit if you have any interest in ceramics at all – which I do, heavily – but our time was limited, so we got more of the bowls that Mom got last time, ate a wonderful lunch with mango smoothies and herbal iced tea accompaniments, and strolled to our second destination, the “old street” which is now new, cobblestoned, and wall to wall pottery shops. My idea of shopping heaven. I did restrain myself. Really. It almost all fit in my backpack when we left, and some of it was presents. J But I pretty much held, turned over, and mulled about every crackle glazed bowl and clay teapot in the town. J concentrated on the water filled bird whistles and a little toy mechanized fan (that we all not-so-secretly coveted), Roni endured the endless parade of clay with patient grace, and Mom joined me in the pottery lust.

My new little dragon statue is very cute.

So are the bowls.

All of them.

Roni had to be back in time to meet the vendors for dinner, so we bundled into a cab (you can get to Yingge cheaply and easily by train in about 20 minutes as we did during our last Taiwan trip, but we weren’t sure of the time tables and Roni had a deadline). We’d forgotten to take the stroller, which appalled us all when

we started out (even J said we should have it in case he was tired) but J did really well – the morning horrors were the meaningless past to him. He and I set out from the hotel to buy fruit and bakery goods from the little shops behind the hotel, with a few more minutes watching the road crew and their machines, and then we settled in Mom’s room for the evening, the adults watching CNN and J with his Clifford DVD. We made it an early night because we knew we’d be up by 4:00 anyway as that seems to be the sleeping in limit, and also because we wanted to be rested because TOMORROW IS THE DAY!!

Dragons everywhere

2009-08-25T15:35:00.001-07:00

Day three in Taiwan is sort of a sweaty blur of dragon temples, flaky pastries, and air-conditioned lulls in a van. Mr. Pong (Pahng?) picked us up in the morning and we headed out to visit some of the older temples in Taichung. The first was a quiet Taoist temple, the oldest in Taiwan, that has been restored. It was serene, thick with incense, and heavily decked out in ceramic scaled dragons and phoenixes. This particular temple was dedicated to the goddess of mercy. Mr. Pong showed us how people cast two sort of semi-circle blocks to see if the god is willing to answer a question. If, in three tosses, you get a yes combination, then you draw a stick from a pot and then find the fortune that matches the number on the stick in a cubbyhole. The paper helps give you your answer, though he said that the temple people generally have to explain the meaning as it is written in a very old, poetic Chinese style that even native speakers have some trouble interpreting.

The next temple made the first look almost bare. It was Confucian, bustling, and in the middle of a very busy market area. Dedicated to the god of the sea, which apparently used to come right up to the area though it is no where near now. Again, a riot of guardian dragons, a fish pond where they let J feed ravenous koi and turtles, and what was the reddest room I’ve ever seen, filled with small statues of ornate historical or mythological people (I had no idea, really, who I was looking at) and below them little glass boxes with startling plain wooden carvings of people from all walks of life just going about their days. Despite the shocking red of the boxes, the unpainted wood came as a visual relief and it was interesting to see how people had carried water and played games and gardened in long ago times.

I know I should know a lot of specifics about the names of these temples, when they were built, exactly what the gods did for the people, but it was so hot (high 90s) and humid and we spent a lot of energy just trying to remain upright. I’ll look it up later in the Taichung brochures and add it in. We enjoyed the visits, but it was filtered through a wall of semi-solid air, so we weren’t as focused as we could have been. The umbrella sunshades only accomplished so much.

We had some time to roam after the visit, wandering through the street stalls and trying out all sorts of pastries and candies and woven fans but passing on the smoked oysters heaped in pans in the sun at this point. There are temples everywhere in the city, some the massive and ancient ones that we were driven to, others just little alcoves or single rooms tucked in with all the other businesses in the street. I like the idea of all those dragons and lions watching out for the neighborhood.

We parked Mom in an air-conditioned back room at one point, guzzling grapefruit juice to prevent her brain from pickling, while we sought out woven fans to get the air moving. It cracks me up to watch Roni asking vendors, “What is it?” because it inevitably leads to puzzlement and calling out to the neighbors and someone hunting down a high school aged daughter who speaks a little English and valiantly tries to come up with the name of whatever fruit on a stick has been candied as a flavor treat. I’m more a buy-and-try person, but Roni is the inquiring-minds-want-to-know type.

We also sang happy birthday to a high school student and his friends who asked us to sign his birthday card in English – Roni added some Hebrew as well which mystified them.

We walked next to La Kang street, an ancient byway since restored into a shopping street but with the older architecture and brick/wood doorways restored. It was actually a lot of fun, despite our melting. We bought clever wooden puzzles that we tried to solve all evening, and J turned out to have a natural talent at a pachinko like game and won a little set of wooden pencils with a sharpener that had him ecstatic all afternoon and left pencil shavings across Taiwan. Mom bought some sandals and a scarf and we all added little odds and ends to the shared shopping bag – a seed pod that heats up and is used in massage, a little bowl, a spinning top, etc.

Then, stunned by the length of time without air-conditioning, we fell gasping into a 7-11 as we waited for the van driver to find us. J has proven to be a hit every where we go, and in there was no exception. It was about 60 seconds and again people were handing him candy and wondering how he came to be living with us. They are all delighted with him. Clearly, no one has any idea the true devilishness lurking behind that dimpled grin! If they knew the depths of his stubborn willfulness, they’d back away slooooowly.

To be fair, we’ve dragged J across 15 time zones and a date line, his nap time has been on the seat of a van, we all wake up at 4:00 A.M. every morning, and it hit 98 today. The food is different, he’s stuck in a hotel room with no place to dig, and Phineas and Ferb isn’t playing on the cartoon channel. But no matter how predictable and explainable it is, his charming ways are rather diminished here, and we’re all struggling a little to maintain our calm. He’s rather an emotional rollercoaster at the moment, with no flat parts in the middle of the ride.

Then there are the funny moments. When he’s frustrated with us, he’s been shouting, “Li li!” over and over, a new phenomenon. At a calmer time, I asked him what li li means. “That’s when I was Chinese,” he told me earnestly. Still clueless, but amused. Later on, after telling us 4000 times (counting conservatively) that he was hungry in a sing-song voice, (about 6 minutes after lunch) he finally said, “Mama, my tummy is crying for food!”

Back in Taipei, we wandered the neighborhood a little, noting the changes since we were last here. The bento stand is now a coffee shop, the bakery has spiffed up its façade. The noodle place where we met a nice woman named Jenny who had lived in Texas is still here, and our favorite fruit stand. We had had enough of noodles for a while, so we went to Mos Burger, fast food Taiwan style. My shredded beef burger had rice patties rather than a bun which was really tasty, and they had fabulous thick mango drinks.

One more day before we go to get D, and I’m getting more and more tense. It is going to be such a dramatic jolt for him – he’s lived with his foster mother since the end of September, and we’re just pictures in a book to him. We’ve got a truck and a stuffed tiger to offer, which seems a bad trade on his part. I’m worried about how J is going to react to the change in his life as well, and in the earliest hours of the morning when I’m staring at the ceiling, I wonder how I’m going to cope as well. It is weird to feel so impatient for something to happen and so nervous about it at the same time.

And then we ate again

2009-08-24T05:46:00.001-07:00

Quotes of the day:

“Who’s the woman in the box?”
- Roni in the Wenu Temple (The answer was, “That’s Buddha, reclining.”)

“Daddy! Momma made a star! Momma, make the next one look like an elephant.”
- J after I cut him a slice of starfruit

“Maybe I’ll write Al and ask him to buy a couple extra meals-in-a-bag for when I get home.”
- Mom, the adventurous eater

“It might be fish, or it could be potato.”
- Johnna, who liked it, whatever it was

“I was very brave today, trying all those new things.” “You ate a piece of fruit.”
- Roni, protesting all the food criticism he was getting at dinner

***

Today’s focus is really going to be food, though don’t worry, we’ll talk about sleep some too. And I’ll throw in a couple of tourist destinations for variety.

After a buffet breakfast – the Golden China has a great one – J and I headed up to our room while Mom and Roni had another coffee. While we were there, the tour driver called up to tell us he was there earlier. So J and I rushed around gathering up all the luggage. My urgency apparently made J a little nervous because by the time I hauled the last bag to fling it into the very full elevator, he was shouting, “Mama, come, hurry, the van is here!” over and over again. I hurled it all out into the lobby, then we went looking for Mom and Roni. Who, of course, had already gone up to the room, then down to the lobby, while we went up to the breakfast room and then to the room. Eventually we were all on the same floor and into the van.

It turns out that we were the only people on our tour, so we had the van to ourselves. Not a seat belt to be seen, unfortunately. J roamed around like it was a stationary room. Scary, but not the first time in Taiwan that he hasn’t been restrained.

We drove through the hazy hills to central Taiwan, through toll roads and long, long tunnels and through rice, taro & betel nut farms.

Our first stop was brief, in Puli, at a monument to the destruction of the 1999 7.3 earthquake that leveled a third of the city. There was a tourist center next to it, and Mom and Roni bought plum liquor and J and I ate red bean and fermented rice popsicles. The rice one was great – not so crazy about red bean in a frozen desert. Roni and Mom took quite a while tasting the various alcohol options (what could “essence of ostrich” be?) so J and I went to sit in the shade of a pavilion with benches built from pottery wine urn broken in the earthquake and listened to a band play.

We ate a great lunch in a steamy restaurant overlooking Sun Moon Lake, where swarms of dragonflies darted above a floating garden by the tourist boat docks. A giant lazy susan delivered dishes of fish, chicken, deer and mushroom. All very tasty, though we didn’t eat it correctly, dumping our rice out of the bowls and onto our plates.

Sun Moon Lake used to be two lakes, apparently. We weren’t clear on whether it was an earthquake or the newish dam that brought the two together. It is high in the mountains and a huge tourist destination, but having to recover a little from the recent typhoon.

We went next to Wenu/Wunwu Temple, bright red and gold, with dragons swarming all over it. Beautiful gold and red wind-bell blessings were hung on every railing. A man showed J how to put a coin in a machine which sent a little mechanical woman into a door, then out again with a tiny paper tube that contained a fortune. J’s said that he needed to think, as well as be educated. Roni got one too – his said that he should be honest and he would have a good career.

We tried dragon's eye there - a sort of mini-lychee that you peel and eat carefully around the seed. J was thrilled at the idea of eating an eyeball. Which he actually had the option of doing at lunch, but then he chickened out.

Then on to Syuanguang temple dedicated to a Buddhist monk who spent 17 years trekking through out Asia spreading the Buddhist teachings. He walked through the Himalayas and clear down to the southern tip of India. A statue of him with his bamboo backpack as well as small relic of him is displayed, and also the reclining Buddha that led to the Roni quote above. Out in the garden, near the Buddhist nun on a cell phone, was a huge bell that we all took turn ringing. The low chime went on forever! It was beautiful.

The last stop was a brief and rather sad look at an aboriginal village. I’m against people-as-exhibits so I’d have skipped it. There weren’t many people on the street we visited – the guide really wanted us to see the houses made in a traditional style of wood and bamboo. Just looked like run down public housing to me. It is a relocation reservation really, for the ita Thao people, famous for their festivals with Pestle drumming. Maybe, but it didn’t look like a fun place to live. There are only about 250 people, we were told, the smallest of the aboriginal tribes in Taiwan. There was a stop for a serving of tea in a gift shop like place as well, where they talked Roni into a traditional robe and almost talked Mom into a Chinese cypress carving that smelled fabulous. Again, not my favorite part of the tour so far.

Before we reached the hotel, our guide stopped at a huge fruit stand because of a conversation we’d had about the breakfast buffet and how we couldn’t identify all we were eating. The place was like an explosion of color. We bought various types and then came back to the hotel, borrowed a knife, and ate dragonfruit (J’s favorite), star fruit (not favored by any of us), Buddha’s head (looks like a big mutant artichoke but very soft and falls apart in segments, each with its own large seed), passion fruit (seedy and sour but yummy), and mango (not new to us but the favorite of all the grown-ups.) The pictures show the dragon's eye and dragon fruit.

Other things we learned today: Taichung City, where we are staying tonight, means middle city of Taiwan. Taipei means northern city of Taiwan. There is a southern city following the same pattern, but I didn’t catch the name.

Our hotel here in the middle city is quite fancy, though the swimming pool, which we sent Roni to check out, turned out to be the size of the bed and to already have a dozen Taiwanese teenage boys in it, so we passed. Our plan is dim sum for dinner and an early night. Mom is struggling to stay up already and it is only seven. J finally fell asleep in the van about 30 minutes from the hotel, after a day of manic energy and radical mood swings, but we made him wake up so that we’ll have a chance at a quieter night tonight. Yes, ending this entry back on the topic of sleep. J

***

Later: Dinner was very funny, ultimately tasty, and through out a comedy of misunderstandings by the dim Americans. Despite the guide, the front desk manager, and the hotel brochure’s assurances, there is no dim sum restaurant in this building. We settled down instead in a very mauve Chinese restaurant, where Roni and Mom were quite unhappy with the options, then went down one floor to a “western” buffet. We caused the waitress a great deal of trouble before we finally understood what “semi-buffet” meant (the western part is apparently the existence of a buffet rather than the food). Semi means we each ordered a main course and then selected our side dishes. It was an amazing spread – seafood and meats and fruit and veggies of all description. J and I loved the various mussel and shrimp options. But we all sort of forgot that we’d ordered a main dish – there were so many meats and such, and the entrees didn’t arrive for a long time. Mom was just settling down with her dessert plate when a half a chicken arrived for her. Same with Roni’s salmon and my mutton. Really delicious and elegantly prepared and we were all too full to really enjoy it.

My family needs to work past their eating style – poking a dish suspiciously and saying, what is it? in a dubious tone. But it made for a hysterical meal and we certainly got enough to eat and it was very tasty.

Two and a half days to D!

Never too tired to shop

2009-08-23T06:29:00.000-07:00

Oops. After our weekend market visit we just laid down for a minute to get that nap we missed this morning, and now it is 9:00 at night! Even J went to sleep this time, after an apple and an Arthur DVD. He is going to be up at 1:00 A.M.

We haven’t bothered to unpack much as we’re heading out again tomorrow. We signed up for an overnight tour to Sun Moon Lake. It’ll be one of those hop-on-hop-off bus tours, but since we don’t know anything much about Taiwan, it will all be new and interesting to us.

The market was bustling. It is under a freeway overpass, next door to huge Da’an Park. Stretches for blocks. There are three sections: misc. crafts, plants, and the jade market. We made it through the first two before needing lunch, beef noodles and dumplings at a tiny store where J bounced off the walls and knocked over stools. Great dumplings though, and the noodle bowls were vast.

My favorite section for looking is the plant area because of all the bamboo, twisted into multitudes of shapes and wrapped with red ribbons. Mei-Ru says that because bamboo are always growing higher and higher in those little sections, they symbolize good fortune in achieving things so people like to give them as gifts. The plant area was also welcome today because there were huge misters in the ceiling, spraying down cool upon us.

My favorite section for buying is the craft area because there is just about every possible souvenir that a person could want to poke at and wonder what they’d do with it when they got it home. Buying little carved zodiac animals is inevitable, though I managed to not do it yet. Did get a picture that I wanted the man paint and two aromatic wooden wall pictures though. Lots of pent up tourist shopping inside me.

Afterwards we were too tired to do more than come back and take what turned into six hour naps. Oops again. Now we’re not sure what to do. Wake J and wander? Would he ever go back to sleep? Leave him asleep and we all get up at 1:00? Either way we’re screwed!

The view from our hotel room window.

Sorry this blog is so sleep obsessed. We'll move on to D news soon, I promise!

***

Added later: We wandered out to walk about a bit, but there isn’t much open or going on in our neighborhood at 10:30 at night. So we came back to order room service. Sort of a mini-fiasco, typical of us. First, we couldn’t get into our room, because both Roni and I forgot to take the room key with us when we left. (We’re a little groggy.) So J and I headed to Mom’s room to wait, while Roni got the key. Since we were there, we called room service from her room, but wanted it delivered to our room. This caused everyone great confusion, with Roni just saying the same thing over and over as I hissed, “Be nice!” in his ear. Eventually they hung up, so we went back to our room to try again, where a very sweet lady showed up at our door to take our order just as Roni was starting again on the phone. This is a very friendly hotel, and I’m sorry that we’re such difficult guests with our padded bed and chocolate sundae demands.

Aside about the beds. The last time we were here the beds were basically plywood on wires, wrapped in a thin layer of quilting. We saw some on the street in the middle of being constructed and really, that is fairly accurate. So I asked Tien if she could request Western style beds when she made our reservation, if they were available. I’d heard that some hotels have rooms with different types of beds. Soon after we got in, during one of our less successful nap times, they arrived with mattress toppers to add 3-4 inches of padding. So much better!

Still sleep obsessive topics . . . tomorrow more tourism posting.

Sleep? I vaguely remember sleep.

2009-08-22T19:02:00.001-07:00

It takes this much stuff to get us to Taiwan. Gone are the days of single carry-on travel!

As happy as I am to be in Taipei, all I can think right now is, “Surely he must sleep sometime!?” We’re ensconced in the Golden China Hotel, on the 12th floor, and thanks to the miracle of Tien and Mei-Ru, we even have soft mattresses because the maid and her helper just left after putting extra padding on our beds. All Roni and I wanted was to sink into the softness and sleep a couple hours. But J will have none of it. He has hollered, sung, thrashed, and generally made himself very unpopular. He has also proven more stubborn than his parents. We tried talking gently, ordering, putting him on step, confiscating BowBow, and just generally thinking bad thoughts about him, but he would not lie down, would not be quiet while not lying down, and would not stand for either of us to sleep. So I’m writing this. It’s 9:38 A.M. Taipei time.

It was similar on the plane once he woke up. He couldn’t stand that Roni, early on, or I later in the flight were still sleeping and poked, kicked and shouted until we gave up.

Sure, here it looks like he is sleeping like an angel, but this is at 9:30 at home, while we waited for Tina to pick us up.

Other than that, and right now, headachy and cranky, that seems like a lot, the trip went well. We went out for Mongolian stir-fry because there was no food left in the house, then separately ran last minute shopping errands. Tina got us to the airport in plenty of time, our flight was pleasant – frill-less economy seats, but the attendants were friendly, the plane was clean, and we all had our own seatback screens. Great lavender hand lotion in the bathroom.

J kept fairly busy with pipe cleaners, tinker toys, markers and a spirograph set. Not to mention Shaun the Sheep videos. I had so many toys for him, as well as the paperwork, my knitting, and enough reading in case we were stranded on the tarmac for weeks, not to mention snacks and lotions and potions, that I could barely lift my carry-on bag, much less fit it under the seat. But we went through most of it – except the knitting (I managed 6 rows of scarf) and the reading (I got through one Vanity Fair article). Traveling with a 4 year old is very different than traveling with my friends. My world travel buddy Andrea never required a lot of entertaining. He also turned out to be surprisingly (and newly) modest– he refused to change out of his pajamas unless Roni and Mom would hold up blankets to protect his privacy.

Mom and I tried to be adventurous in our meal choices and regretted it at breakfast – the Chinese option turned out to be bland sweet potatoes in gelatinous rice with optional fish flavoring and what we thought was chocolate frosted cake was tofu. Mom kindly offered to switch with Roni, but he declined to give up his chicken patty and pancakes.

Mei-Ru met us at the airport and whisked us to the Golden China, where we even recognized the front desk staff. There is a new bakery next door, so we found the ATM and after a brief stop at

Starbucks for Roni’s wellbeing, we picked out a variety of mystery pastries, came back to the room, and attempted that doomed naptime.

Mei-Ru is picking us up at 11:00 for lunch and a trip to the weekend craft market, which was one of my favorite tourist parts of our last trip here. Roni and I have promised not to turn on each other out of exhaustion.

We don’t see D until Thursday, which seems very far away at the moment. But we’ll all handle it better with a couple of days to acclimate. And maybe sleep. Have I mentioned sleep?

P.S. added later - 86 degrees at 6:30 A.M. when we walked out of the airport, and the humidity was like breathing semi-solid air. But I almost like it, because it makes it feel like we really are somewhere different. Counteracts the Starbucks a little.

We’re a day ahead here, on the other side of the international date line, so it is Sunday.

I forgot to mention our J scare. The Starbucks is on a corner, with two perpendicular entrances, both with automatic sliding doors. J, unwatched, was standing near one watching the scooters roar by. He stepped close enough that the door opened. One more step to see better and he was out and the door closed behind him. He didn’t know where to stand to get it to open again – must have just seemed like a wall sprang up. So when I turned around he was screaming Mama! and racing around the corner to look for me. We all darted out various doors to chase after him. He’s so good about sticking close that we were all briefly freaked out and he stuck to my hand during the rest of our walk.

The physics of this is complicated

2009-08-21T06:55:00.000-07:00

Two suitcases, one duffel bag. Four or five mountains of stuff. I'm not sure the laws of space and time are going to let all of the latter fit into the former. We may have to rethink our money saving plan of putting J in a duffel instead of buying him a plane seat. :-)

But we leave tonight for the airport! More hurrahs!

I keep getting last minute emails from our agency rep that trigger extra trips to the store. They are helpful, but it would have been more helpful if they'd arrived last week. Yesterday's first email told us that D likes "cars, balls and crackers" so I sent my mom out for the first two, in airplane travel sizes. Rice crackers we can get everywhere there. The second one said that we should bring baby clothes to TWCA rather than other gifts listed in the travel guide as that is what they'd like to have. So, out go the nuts and such that I bought, and off to collect some clothing (gently used is fine they said so that helps speed things up as there is a place down the road). The third one said that we'd get our extra foster fees amount soon. Soon? We leave tonight! I think we'll be able to send it through Google PayPal to JOH (our agency) so I'm not running to the bank to withdraw thousands of dollars at least. Though now that I think of it, I need to run to the bank anyway to get dollars to pay our agency facilitator when we arrive in Taiwan.

I'm getting very foggy with all the plans and prep. Yesterday I forgot that I was supposed to stop at my mom's after picking up J to get the things she's been collecting for me. I'm forgetting words and losing track of sentences in the middle. I need a bit more sleep and a little more sitting calmly and thinking about what needs to be done. But I'm just so excited!

A little too excited, because it gave me all sorts of extra energy and ideas, one of which is going to result in another trip today. Somehow I thought it was a good idea to trim J's hair on the back porch last evening. We're going to need a trip to the hair cutters to fix that idea. I tried to convince myself that it looks OK, and it does if you look at only one side of him at a time. Each side looks good - neither side looks like the other. Maybe if I hadn't been talking on the phone at the same time, trying to say good-bye to family? Multi-tasking should only be taken so far.

Yesterday I spent some time at school, planning on getting the library back in order since I won't be there when school starts. Our district is in contract negotiations so no one even knows what the first day of school is going to be - either the 2nd or the 9th. Parents must be going crazy, trying to make plans.

I'm hoping for the 9th because it will 1) give me more time before I have to start using up sick leave days for time off with D and 2) the library is NOT back in order. There was an unexpected math meeting going on so I couldn't pull the bookcases back or arrange the tables, or do any other clean-up after the summer decimation. I had to send Mom & Mr. Al - my volunteer helpers - home. I did get most of the check out/in software reloaded after a couple of hours of cursing technology (every summer they reimage our computers and reinstall all the district software, except my library software because we're the only school with that particular library program - since it isn't standard, they won't help with it, even though the district purchased it - end of mini-rant).

I also got my sub arranged - very luckily the same woman who subbed for me during J's leave is available again. Great to have a competent replacement. My new principal wasn't in, so I had to email her: "Hello, hope you've had a nice summer, I won't be here in September."

Cat care is arranged, plants are deeply watered, knitting project is started so security won't think the pointy metal things are weapons, J has picked his books and stuffed animals, passports are piled on the counter. Just the shoving into cases left to do. If you hear a loud "sproing" noise, it is the sound of failing suitcase zippers.

Was there pillaging?

2009-08-19T17:04:00.001-07:00

Our house looks a little bit like my Viking ancestors have been rummaging through it. There are piles on all the available surfaces - floor and furniture - so that I'll remember what needs to go with us to Taiwan. Lots of last minute shopping for things we need to take with us.

In addition to that, I have been to Target, Fred Meyer, Goodwill, and five different shoe stores, none of which have sandals in J's size. Is it really too much to ask that stores still sell sandals in August? The velcro on his other pair is giving out. We may resort to black electrical tape. That ought to impress the agency and consulate people of our ability to appropriately care for a child. (McGuiver points?)

Our tickets are confirmed and paid for, after vast searches of websites, many emails to the travel agent vacationing in Taiwan, multitudes of calls to our agency, and even more calls to Roni at work and to my patient mother who wants the credit card miles. We leave at Saturday at 2:00 A.M. on Eva Air, arriving in Taiwan a day later due to the International Date Line. When we come back, our plane lands at an earlier time of day than when we left Taiwan, despite the 13 hours in the air. This amuses me greatly. Hope the amusement helps with the economy leg cramps - there were no seats left in economy deluxe.

But we're coming, D! We hope you know that, and that you will welcome us.

Our AIT appointment is for later in the week, on Friday the 28th, but we wanted to go now so that we can show Taiwan to J for a couple of days, get our systems at least a little into the new time zone, and to give us time to spend the night in Fengyuan where D is if he needs us to.

J is unbelievably excited. He doesn't want to wait until Saturday at all, and keeps demanding that we go "get my D right now!" He carried a picture of D around at daycare all day today and the teachers told me he showed it to every child, teacher and parent who he came near.

New update photos came last night. A video too, but for some reason we got only the sound and not the picture. It was still useful to give us more practice at pronouncing his Taiwanese name correctly. We're miserable at the tones, but we keep trying.

Here are the latest pics:

I didn't do as much prep today as Wednesday's I spend driving my cousin to chemo. I won't be able to do that after this, and I'm rather sad about it. I hate that she is going through this, but it is rare that I get to see her so often, and I like the time we get to talk. We'll have to try it under more pleasant circumstances in the future . . .

I did make it to the TECO office to pick up Roni's visa, and make another couple of futile shoe stops (including violating all my principles by stepping foot in a Walmart.) I also picked up (not at Walmart) a few presents for the agency people and D's foster mother.

Tomorrow I'll spend much of the day at work trying to get the library in order since I'm going to miss the first weeks of school. Whenever school starts - there is still no official first day of school set as contract negotiations aren't going well. It must be making parents crazy not to know when they need to send their kids this late in the summer.

Then Thursday evening and Friday for packing and last minute purchases, and we're off to the airport that night in the saintly Tina's minivan. This woman has picked us up returning from so many countries at so many strange hours that there should be a medal cast for her, but she's so nice she'll likely settle for a Taiwanese teapot.

298 days later, exciting news at last!

2009-08-18T06:48:00.000-07:00

At long, long last, our wait for our son is almost over! We have finally received word of our final ruling in the Taiwanese court, and we get to go get our new son! Hurray!

His original referral pic from last October:

At 8:30 P.M. on Sunday, we got the call from our agency. I almost didn't answer the phone as I was worn out from all the yard work and didn't feel chatty. The news gave me a lot more energy!

It had been 298 days from our first phone call and email with a possible referral to this phone call. We knew that there would be a wait, but as it passed six months, the usual far end of the waiting period, it became harder and harder to be patient. J's adoption was five and a half months from referral to meeting. Our wait for D's adoption will have been more than ten months. We watched a lot of families with far later referrals travel and got quite discouraged. Intellectually we knew he was coming, but emotionally we grew a little doubtful. I haven't written about D's adoption before this, because of privacy issues and also because it stretched on so long that we were feeling rather as if it would never happen. But now it is really almost here!

D is two and a half now, and hs been in foster care for eleven months. We've sent pictures of our family and home to him, but this is going to be a big adjustment for such a little guy.

J is beside himself at the news. He was ready to get in the car and head to the airport when we told him the next morning. He has been asking for months, "Why we no go get my D?" He has also made a long mental lists of things that he will teach D when he arrives. Topping the list are "not to drink poison" and "to not holler down the stairs at bedtime." He's also been practicing his seat belt directions so D won't "fall out of the car and be smashed." (J has a very vivid imagination and it tends towards the gruesome. His idea of joy would be to ride in an ambulance after being saved from a "mergency" by a fire truck/police car combo.)

Tien, our agency rep, asked if we could be in Taiwan by Wednesday (which means leaving Tuesday due to the International Date Line) but even with our eagerness, that was a little overwhelming (Roni was aghast at the idea of wrapping up his only-six-week-old job in one day)so we're shooting for this coming Saturday. The combination of finding flights that work and getting an AIT appointment have made things a bit complicated, plus the agency recommended travel agent is in Taiwan on vacation, 15 time zones away, so our actual departure/return dates dart around the calendar and there has been a whirl of phone calls, emails, and web site searches. At the moment, we're traveling either Saturday, August 22 or Wednesday, September 2.

Our timeline so far:

10/22/08 - first call about tentative referral

11/20/08 - dossier sent to TWCA in Taiwan

02/27/09 - court hearing

07/06/09 - first ruling call

08/16/09 - final ruling call

D's update picture from June - he's really starting to leave his toddler stage behind:

A bit of gardening

2009-08-18T05:28:00.000-07:00

One of my goals for this summer (from an unrealistically lengthy and elaborate to-do list) was to replace the weedy, gravely section of our backyard with a new patio. There used to be an old cabin at the creek's edge, which was torn down after my parents built our house. The circular driveway became a large section of the back lawn, but it was never very successful as the soil was too shallow. Add to that a couple of very dry summers where we didn't water enough, and eventually only the dandelions were thriving (and moss - how do we have moss in dead dry lawn?)

I've built a brick patio before, so I knew the basics. What I didn't figure in was the extreme hardness of a driveway packed down by 40+ years of cars, and my extreme inability to put down the knitting needles/spinning fiber/loom/book/TV remote and actually work on it.

Roni got it started (in March, I think) by digging out a section near the steps. Which then languished until it grew very, very weedy. After a pointed conversation in July, he rented some machinery thingie (I didn't see it, but apparently you stand on it and it somehow makes weedy dirt into ragged weedy dirt piles) and made the spot bigger. Which is when it became apparent that neither one of us is all that energetic, and it was going to cost a lot to keep renting the machinery thingie. (Though we now have a ball hitch for the SUV.)

So, we turned to our usual home renovation method of throwing money at people more skilled and persevering than ourselves. Enter the landscapers. Monday the bulldozer came, Tuesday the frames were built to my desired shape, Wednesday the cement was poured, boards off Thursday, dinner on our new patio on Friday. Yea!

We switched from brick to cement for budgetary reasons. I had a couple of small pads poured at two locations by the creek as well where we've struggled to keep the growth down in the sitting areas. (Should have had them done bigger, but it gives me a future project.)

However, after all that, I was shamed by my lack of energetic participation - it was my to-do list after all - so we are doing the finishing garden work. We had 16 yards of topsoil delivered on Saturday and after a trip to the nursery and the Amish furniture lot, we have been shoveling, assembling, and sweating since.

Roni has made multiple trips to the hardware store to get cement wall blocks and boards. We've cut back creek brush, shaped raised beds and filled in around the patio and disassembled parts of the deck railing for posts. Sunday, Mom and Mr. Al came to help - they assembled the new gliding bench for the creek side pocket patio, moved some dirt, and tended newly planted/transplanted green stuff. J was amazingly energized by all the digging potential and became crew boss, bucket carrier, and king of the hill. The dirt may never come out of all his crevices.

We'd be done, except that exciting news turned us to packing, leaving partially filled raised beds to await our return.

Overcome by fiber fumes

2009-08-10T09:53:00.000-07:00

Sock Summit 09 started with a bang - the noise Paige's car makes when it is rearended and then pushed into a semi. So, 20 minutes before Roni was going to drive me to the train station on Saturday, we upended our plans, cancelled the train ticket, packed a bag for Roni & J, and drove the SUV to Portland instead so we could bring Paige and her kids back at the end of the weekend.

J didn't handle the drive down very well, "It's a long time. Why it a long time? Why we go such a long time?" Three hours of that. Oy. Four was almost the last birthday for him.

But we made it, picked up Paige from her sister's, were dropped off at the Convention Center, and entered into yarn bliss. Oh, the color! Everywhere, things to pet and covet. The marketplace was beyond fabulous.

I hadn't managed to get into any classes - 30,000 attempts to get into 5,000 spots crashed the server the day sign-ups started, but we were happy just to wander, fondle, and see the sock museum, knit some stitches on the world's largest sock, and talk to vendors. I really want another shot at the classes someday, however. All the wonderful knitting I saw "on the hoof" really made me want to learn.

The funniest part was at the end of the day when Paige and I laid out all our new treasures and were reminded yet again that we have definite color preferences. All my yarn was pretty much the same colors (though in amazingly beautiful variations) and her skeins also had a pretty clear similarity to each other. Green-red-purple dark tones for me. Blue-green-purple for her.

My one color anomoly was a 2 1/2 pound bag of alpaca/wool fiber that started as one brain of 10 oz. Then I added a second, cause they were only $10. Then Paige pointed out that that was silly-cheap, and why not get them all? So, I did. Luckily, the woman had only four left or we would have had to leave one of Paige's kids out of the car to fit in my fiber.

My treasure - only add four more skeins from the next day.

My budget melted down a bit, but every bit of it will get used! There are some fabulous woven scarfs, and lace knit wraps coming up in the future.

Paige's stash additions - also partial as she added more the next Marketplace session as well.

We sat in on the Luminary Panel on Sunday - amazing group of women, including the inventor of "ssk, " Barbara Walker. Imagine originating a stitch combo used thousands and thousands of times a day by knitters everywhere. Also, Judith MacKenzie McCuin who someday I will get to take a spinning class from, and Pricilla Gibson-Robers, who wrote Kniting in the Old Way which is helping me become brave enough to knit a sweater without a pattern telling me every single stitch to increase or decrease. Full list of participants here. Then we sang happy birthday to Elizabeth Zimmerman (it would have been her 99th), her daughter Meg Swanson (someday I will have the skill to make one of her sweaters!) and headed home.

When I talked to my uncle and told him that I'd spent the weekend at a sock yarn event, he said, "Was it some kind of assigned therapy?"

No one knows if there will be another Sock Summit - if there is Paige and I will be there.

The ride back was happier for J with Paige's kids to entertain him. It was very crowded with six of us and all the stuff they'd needed for a week's vacation (and the fiber) but we made it in, all the doors shut, and we got home. J didn't fall asleep until we hit our exit, at 10:30 p.m. Just like a grown-up! he said today.

Birthday Boy

2009-08-10T09:46:00.000-07:00

J turned 4! Amazing to us that he's gone so quickly from a toddler to a rough and tumble little boy. He's very proud to be 4, but is also spending a lot of time planning to be 5. He really wants to get to ride a school bus.

After days and weeks and months of relentless sun, it turned grey and chilly for his lake park birthday dinner. Mom, Roni, Mr. Al, Aunt Virginia and I were the invitees. We huddled together for warmth and ate a little extra cake to add warming fat layers. J ran around like a mad man, bouncing like a pin ball off of objects in his way. A little excited, maybe?
He was thrilled with every present: a police car (I'm going to regret those siren buttons), a tow truck (the police car has been breaking down a lot already), a Handy Manny from Aunt Virginia who didn't realize that she was picking such a favored cartoon character, a sock monkey (they vaguely scare me, but J slept with it that night) and a sand/water toy (which was the only one we didn't immediately take away so the sand wouldn't ruin it).

He finally got to snatch the Thomas train off his cake - the delay of which had led to a meltdown at the Safeway store. He was also thrilled that there is such a thing as S'mores icecream, pointing out each marshmallow to us all.

Can I just say again, ohmygosh, my kid is 4!

Summer bloom

2009-08-03T17:55:00.001-07:00

This is my favorite time of year in the garden. The zucchini are starting to reach amazing sizes, and the rudbeckia is finally blooming. The bees are going mad for the flowering lemon balm, oregano and thyme, and the hammock is ever ready. I parked it right next to the blueberries so I can pick and eat them without standing up.

We spent a couple hours at the river park today and had a great time, other than being terrorized by a Canadian goose that did not want to wait for us to throw the bread crumbs - we ended up chucking all the crackers at once and making a break for it while it was distracted. I don't go to this particular park very often - it is the nicer one, but farther away. It is shadier, so worth the drive today.

J had a new (very old) bulldozer to use in the wood chips. J's toy was very popular with the other little children, some of whom didn't quite understand that it wasn't theirs. J's pretty good about sharing, but a little tentative about getting things back. His method seems to be to stand very close to the child playing with his toy and hope they'll get the hint. They don't.

Melting

2009-07-30T09:15:00.001-07:00

102 degrees. What else is there to say? We don't move much, and we huddle in the dormer window of J's room, where the only air conditioner, a tiny thing, is making a valiant but losing effort. 102. What is the point of living in the Pacific Northwest and going through all that gray and rain for so many months if summer is going to be miserable too!?

OK, on the not miserable front:

My friend from Maine just spent a week with us and it was wonderful. We have what we call a "vacationship" as we don't speak or email too much, but once or twice a year we vacation together and have a grand time. We were friends and roommates in Israel and she is the reason I am a librarian and also the reason I dated my husband long enough to marry him (nagged me until I called him). We've traveled together on four different continents, and although she is a little bitter about my lion survival plan, which involves shoving her in front of pouncing lions and running while they are distracted, she has overlooked it enough to continue to be my friend.

We had a great week. We walked and biked the river trail, went to the Arts & Crafts Fair, canoed in the lake, and ate terrific vegetarian meals. She let J "help" blow dry her hair, read him stories, and was willing to dig holes with him while I sat in the shade. She didn't mind going to six different stores looking for the perfect side table. She gets along swimmingly with my husband and my mom, and doesn't mind just reading during a lazy afternoon or talking about knitting. Excellent vacationship.

The intrepid canoers. Though, now that I look at the pictures, it reminds me that it was a row boat, really - but we did paddle.

Bee vs. Boy

2009-07-19T18:23:00.000-07:00

Yesterday afternoon's knitting (me) and sawing (Roni) was disrupted when ear splitting screams erupted from the deck. I look out and see J jumping up and down, shrieking. Turns out that wasps built a nest in his little plastic workman's table and when he reached for the drawer one of them stung him on his thumb. I was actually relieved as I thought he'd disemboweled himself with a plastic hammer or something.

So Roni spent dusk spraying wasp nests. The tool table wasn't the only one - they've also built nests in three of the dormer eaves. We spread death in all directions, making J very, very happy.

Here he is doing his impression of a dead wasp. He's also fascinated that the bugs sting with their bottoms - didn't get that on camera but be assured that he is acting it out alot.

And here, fully recovered, working on his tow truck skills. His goal is to grow up to be a tow truck. Not the driver, mind you, he wants to be the truck.

Also making him very happy is his new air conditioner, installed yesterday. His room is on the sunniest part of the house and does get the warmest of all the rooms. He is also not at a stage to understand that it will cool off soon after the sun goes down. Doesn't help that he goes to bed before the sun goes down, of course.

Roni loves it too. Caught him studying accounting in there in the afternoon.

Adding a just occurred conversation:

J, coming from his Mighty Machines show in the office: I spilled Papa's drink, I need a towel.

Johnna: There is one on the chair in the kitchen.

Roni: What do you mean, you spilled my drink. How did you get my drink?

J: I just had it.

Roni: How did you "had" it?

J: I just did.

Roni: You took my drink?

J: I just wanted it.

Roni: You can't take my drink!

J: I just did.

Is this our future?

Yes, the woods again.

2009-07-16T10:10:00.000-07:00

I'm thinking that I need to change the name of this blog to "We camp, I buy fiber, nothing else happens." Really, we don't have anything else to report.

J and I went camping. Deception Pass this time, with my L.U. (loyal underling - though she's looking for a different job ((weep)) that might offer more benefits such as hours or money, but that is a lengthy aside for another day) and her son. We told everyone it was to give the boys time to bond, but since her son is 18 and J is 3, the chances of lifelong friendship developing are smallish. He was great for sharing the piggybacking though, so we like him.

It was a great place for J. Lovely sandy & rocky beach to dig in and a lake just steps from the sea shore in case he wanted to swim. Next time we'll rent lake boats. The adults were happy too - fairly private spot, the bathrooms not too far away, red & pink wine and some rum for the more difficult moments of wilderness life, such as the times when the L.U. drives clear back to civilization for a job interview that turns out to be scheduled for a different Tuesday.

J is reduced to bliss by marshmallows and fire-poking-with-stick. There was a little trauma the second night when he had first a nightmare and then a catastrophic night diaper failure an hour later, so Mom was a bit groggy by the end of the trip, not to mention sunburned and deeply in need of eyeliner, but I'm still counting the trip as a success. Roni got to a casino in his absence and got back out only $7 down so his time alone was also a happy one.

And I came back to a delivery of alpaca-silk-camel fiber combos, so all is right in the world.

After getting up this morning, J asked me what we were going to do today. I told him (with secret delight) that he was going to "school." There was a brief pause, then an ecstatic intake of breathe, and then he proceeded to tear around the house, getting ready as fast as he could shove his little body into superman underwear and his little feet into the wrong sandals. His love of daycare is a little amazing to me, given the turnover in adults there - we arrived this morning to find another letter in his file telling us that the director was gone. Again. This one lasted only a month or so. He's on his fourth teacher in the same classroom. And he hasn't been there a year yet! I know that corporate daycares tend to have a lot of turnover, but surely this is excessive, and should send up some red flags. But, he is so very happy there. He only cares about the kids anyway and they don't turn over the way the staff does. And the people who do stay are very nice to us, his vocabulary has grown in leaps and bounds, and he can tell his colors apart now so my worries about him being colorblind have been alleviated. So he gets to stay, even if no one else adult does, as long as he's happy and safe. That's really all I expect from a daycare anyway - they aren't required to get him into Harvard.

Random trips to the wilderness

2009-07-13T09:34:00.000-07:00

OK, maybe not wilderness but there were trees at least. I've been a bit remiss about posting since school got out, so here are a few of our adventures this summer.

Camping with the Frost's extended family over Memorial weekend:

Camping with Grandma just a few miles from home - we're working our way through the county parks with camping potential:

My road trip to the Black Sheep Gathering on the last day of school. It was a blast, and I barely resisted becoming a shetland sheep owner. If I hadn't had to go back on Amtrak and doubted their willingness to have sheep roaming the aisles . . . also loved the Jacob sheep, but found those horns a little intimidating.

And my cousin's backyard definitely doesn't count as wilderness, but we had a great time there, complete with the Italian branch of the family and a band.

It's been a pretty good summer so far.

Facing the Fish

2009-07-12T17:00:00.001-07:00

A rather gray day today, so we spent some of it indoors at the Aquarium. It also doubled as an anniversary treat, as today is the 2nd of our yearly anniversaries due to our double weddings. (I forgot AGAIN! Every summer I miss the date until a mother or mother-in-law calls. Embarassing.)

Loved the dome room where J worried about the shark danger and we watched a giant sea star make its slow way down a window. But the highlight was watching the sea otter feeding time - they smashed clams with great abandon and sucked down each one without a chew, racing their fellows to get the most into their stomachs before they were all gone. Lunch from the Market with interesting delicacies from the Korean food stand to try and bagpipe music played by a couple of teenagers to round off the meal. Urban life has its moments.

Biking in the sunshine

2009-05-18T11:55:00.000-07:00

Yesterday it finally felt like summer around here. Warm and blue and blooming flowers everywhere. We took advantage of the brief respite from grey and headed out on our bikes, driving first to Matthews Beach Park and then switching wheels and getting on the Burke-Gilman Trail into Seattle. Of course, this is us, so things didn’t go smoothly. We got started an hour (or two) later than we’d thought, bike helmets were forgotten or broken, we switched cars and bike carriers after getting everything loaded and then deciding it wasn’t secure. But we did eventually get pedaling.

From the trail we road into the U District for the street fair. I was underwhelmed by the offerings – I remember a lot more funky artists in previous fairs, and less mass-produced imports – but we got to eat street food and watch violin playing unicyclists and a rather frightening woman dressed entirely in grocery bags, so it was a success. J was ecstatic to eat a hot dog on a stick (corn dog) once we taught him to eat from the side, rather than jamming the pointy end deep into his mouth to bite off more.

J melted a bit in the heat, and we were way past nap time, so on the way back, he fell asleep in his bike seat. Not the most comfortable ride back for either he or Roni, as his limp leg kept slipping out of the foot rest to kick Roni in the back of the knee with each rotation of the pedal. And his poor little head had no where to rest so he was either bent in half or trying to slump onto Roni’s moving backside. It was pretty funny to watch from behind, once I decided it wasn’t likely his neck really would snap. He’s always had a talent for sleeping no matter how much noise or movement is going on, but this was a personal best.

Mom took a scary but recoverable spill when she bumped a curb, and Roni and J were almost wiped out by a right-on-red driver who didn’t slow or look at the crosswalk before whipping around the curve, but other than the near deaths, it was a lovely trip.

We rounded out the day by taking a spaghetti and salad dinner over to Tina’s to admire their new hardwood floors (so much more hardworking than us, they’re installing their own!) J was braver this time and was willing to bounce on the trampoline a little bit. And there is nothing better than his giggle when he’s chasing around with other kids! Melts my heart.

The rest of the weekend I devoted to spinning, continuing in my theme of ugliest-and-brightest-yarn-ever. Exhibit B is shown. (Exhibit A is in a lead lined box buried deep beneath a mountain to avoid it hurting anyone.) B has already been dunked in blue dye to tone it down to something a little less blinding. It is my first effort at long draw spinning, though I was using top rathe than roving so the results were mixed. Lots of underspun spots, and it would have been better navajo plyed to keep some of those colors apart. But I got better with the one handed part with the practice. I also made a calmer skein with my usually short draw method with some wonderful natural cream pygora B & silk top that I got from Paradise Fibers. Amazing stuff, and it smelled pepperminty the entire time due to a small vial of pepperment oil that the producer, Peppermint Pastures, include with the fiber.

Mother's Day

2009-05-11T11:22:00.000-07:00

Mother’s Day went very well. Roni worked very hard in the kitchen, with J’s semi-help, making bagels and muffins and salads for our brunch. Mom came over with Mr. Al and the sunny weather meant we could sit out on the back deck where there are yet to be any flowers, but the green is lovely anyway. (Sitting outside also meant no one commenting on how the dust bunnies are becoming more dust sheep lately, and walking down the stairs is like threading an obstacle course.)

It still amazes me that I am a mother, and that J has been with us for over a year. He is an amazing kid, and we are beyond lucky to have him.

After the feast, we cleared the table for a cut throat game of Froggy Farkel which the three year old won! Despite not knowing the rules, or how to score, or why we were so insistent that all the dice land on the table each time, it turns out little J is a bit of a dice-shark. Luckily he accepted cheese cake instead of cash for his winnings.

J was a little confused over the weekend why Saturday was Papa’s Day (Roni’s 39th birthday) and Sunday was Mama’s Day, but there was no day for him. Explaining that pretty much every day is J Day didn’t work, as a true “Day” is marked with cake, preferably one with a fire truck on it, and definitely chocolate. And he has a point. Everyday would be a little brighter with some chocolate cake in it. But as the Wii has for the first time this year finally told me I was “normal” when I got on the scale, we’re going to have to continue to limit the chocolate cake intake.

Tangled in fair isle

2009-05-11T11:10:00.000-07:00

I’ve been searching for knitting classes without a lot of success. There is a lot I still don’t know how to do, but it is getting harder to find classes to sign up for – so many for beginners, but the intermediate classes tend to be for types of knitting I’m already comfortable with. I know how to read lace charts and how to knit a sock, I’m already a Continental knitter, and I’ve made cable sweaters. For spinning, the classes seem to stop after the basics and basics plus classes, though I do plan to take one of the dying classes in the near future.

What I do want to learn is how to do more styles of casting on and binding off, how to design my own lace shawl, how to knit without being so strictly tied to a pattern. There are classes like that at some of the big events, but not so many at the local LYSs I look into. Spinning-wise, I want to learn how to do long draw properly and how to plan my yarn more intentionally rather than just seeing how it turns out between my dying attempts and my spinning endeavors.

I did find one that I attended the last two Saturdays. “Celebrating Steeks” gave me a chance to retry some fair isle. We knit a small tube, intended to be felted and turned into an even smaller bag, with the intention of learning how to knit a steek and then how to prepare it for cutting.

Watching me attempt to knit with yarns held in both right and left hands (I’m a left hand-picker normally) while knitting in the round with dp needles was entertaining for those who witnessed it. I think that any one of the skills – yarn in right hand, two colors, and correctly tensioning the fair isle, while following a chart, adding a steek, and knitting in the round with those larger than usual for me needles – would have gone smoothly, but putting them all together led to some tangles and turmoil. I can’t say I enjoyed knitting the tube, but it did get better looking as I progressed through the rows, and I can see where knitting fair isle on a circular needle would be much simpler as a learning project.

The steek prep-and-cutting was fun though – we learned how to secure the edges with back stitch or a crochet stitch (crochet is also new for me) with the possibility of machine zigzags or no special sewing at all for projects with appropriate yarn. I’d never knit with true Shetland yarn before and it really is “sticky.”

Now, of course, swept up by the finishing of one 10” x 10” square of fair isle, I want to immediately start a sweater. But a pillow or something that size might be a bit more sensible. Though I do have the yarn for a Kauni damask cardigan already, and then there is this sweater, which I look at every day online . . .

Expanding my spinning

2009-04-21T09:01:00.000-07:00

I am just an intermediate spinner - I'm getting better at being consistent, but I'm not yet able to intentionally choose a particular type of yarn weight I want and then produce it - still in the "let's see how this turns out" stage.

My usual style is sort of a modified short draw as I mainly spin with commercially prepared top, which results in a worsted or semi-worsted yarn. My goal is to learn to do long draw and make woolen fiber, but I'm not there yet.

Lately it has been fun to branch out into new (for me) types of fibers. I've been buying bits here and there and now that I've gotten the sweater yarn long term project finally about wrapped up, and freed up some bobbins, I'm starting to explore these new fibers. Yesterday was so beautifully sunny that I spent some time on the back deck with a bag of llama fiber. I have two colors of top, a cream and a pale tan/cream mix. Just 3.9 ounches, so I plan to spin the colors into separate singles and then ply them together and hope that I'll get enough yarn to knit something real.

The llama staple is longer than the Finn I've been spinning lately, but very soft feeling. It isn't as clean as I'm used to and there are bits of veg. matter in spots, but it is still easy to spin. I've heard that llama can be very dusty and that even pre-cleaned, the resulting yarn can use another bath when it is finished. The single so far is fairly thin, but I'm not managing to get rid of the occasional lumpy spot, which I wasn't getting with the Finn. Pretty sure it is me rather than the fiber, however. It is also a bit - hairy I guess I'd call it. I think this yarn is going to be fuzzier than what I've been spinning.

I've got lots more to play with - some merino/silk, pygora, and some baby camel/merino mix that I bought at the fair. Plus some blue faced leicester in natural and hand painted colors, and also the Jacob roving that I got at the fair. If only the pesky day job didn't get in the way of the spinning!

And then the spinning is getting in the way of the knitting. I'm not making a lot of progress on the many projects I have on the needles. Mom's cardigan is languishing because I'm afraid that it is turning out too big and I don't want to acknowledge the truth of it. My Aeolian shawl is coming along, but it is white and delicate so I couldn't drag it places like camping, which means I now have a camping-knitting lace scarf in a dark color to finish as well. And then there is the cable cardigan with the Roni-created stain that needs to be reknit partially, and the t-shirt strip rug for the bathroom that I'm reknitting in a different stitch, and that red sweater that needs sewing up and . . . and . . . and . . . I need to schedule some enforced project completion soon.

My Aeolian swal in progress. 2/31 yarn, 50% cashmere/50% linen from Colourmart. The thinnest yarn I've ever knit with! It really needs smaller than size 2 needles, but I was afraid that either the shawl would turn out too small, or I'd be knitting extra repeats for the rest of my life. So, it will be very open and airy fabris.

Shepard's Extravaganza

2009-04-20T09:41:00.000-07:00

We took a break from our brief camping trip to go to the Spring Fair in Puyallup. This was a carefully crafted plan by me to make sure I got to do a little wool shopping - I picked the camp ground location because of its proximity to the fair, and its advertised Shepard's Extravaganza.

I'd never been to the Spring Fair before - it turned out to be a scaled down version of the Fall, really a perfect size for J & Roni who don't feel the need to look at every cow, every chicken, and every wonder gadget selling booth, which is the tradition in my family.

J's favorite part was the rides, Roni's was the sour dough chili bowl, and mine was the wonderful shopping opportunity in the wool barn. J unexpectedly turned out to be terrified of the tractor moving wood chips into the barn at one end, so Roni had to take our sobbing, clinging boy out to wait, so I rushed a bit, but I still managed to get some fabulous fiber - an emerald green/black romney & alpaca mix, some hand painted BFL, and the softest thing I've ever felt in a fiber, a baby camel blend. I spent some time talking to a woman about her jacob sheep flock, so I got 4 ounces of a soft grey from her sheep as well to try.

I spent some time looking at the fleeces as well that were for sale after the judging, but I'm not prepared yet to try to process a whole fleece, not with my little hand carders. But it was interesting to read the judges' comments to learn what they look for in a fleece, and also to see the completely different types of locks the different breeds have. Someday, when I have a drum carder and I've learned to spin woolen using a long draw instead of my usual short draw, I'll jump into fleece buying. But for now, the fiber storage dresser is going to be hard pressed to fit my already processed purchases as it is.

We came back to the wool barn as our last stop of the day to watch a herding dog demonstration. No sheep to be herded, however, (oddly, sheep were the only animals that we never saw at the fair - horses, cows, multitudes of goats and chickens, even lamas and pheasants, but nary a sheep to be found) so the dogs demonstrated their skills at moving small duck flocks about the pen, through a tunnel and over ramps. The dogs seemed dedicated, but the ducks were very unhappy about their adventure in bridge climbing.

Sleeping in a tent

2009-04-20T09:00:00.000-07:00

The first camping trip of the year went well. The weather cooperated beautifully and Dash Point State Park turned out to be a lovely location to try out our new gear and J's camping stamina. Not too far, trails through the woods, and a sandy beach at the end of one trail so J could dig for hours.

The tent is very tall, to the point that I think I'd have difficulties putting it up by myself. And 6' 4" Roni can stand up in it without trouble. It is six sided, so lots of room in the corners for each person's bag of clothes and sundries. Our new extra thick sleeping mats were wonderful, and the new bags kept us toasty. We had a little trouble keeping J in his - he didn't like to have it zipped but he thrashes so he kept coming uncovered. Plus, he was so excited about the whole camping experience that when it was his time to go to sleep he meandered in circles around the inside of the tent for over an hour instead, repeatedly coming to the mesh window to check on us and the fire.

The fire was one of the hitches in the trip - the wood wasn't very dry and while it kept going for the most part, it was with more of a smolder than a roar. I also had to take myself for a walk at one point because I was becoming far too controlling of Roni's efforts in fire building. I'm learning, slowly. It did get going enough for smores, which was J's only real concern. He ate his weight in marshmallows and then polished off the rest of the chocolate when I wasn't looking.

Second hitch: despite the mound of belongings we brought with us, we managed to forget the lantern, Roni's glasses (and contact solution) and - the true emergency - coffee makings. So when I got up in the morning, in true car-camping fashion Roni'd already made a Starbucks run, proving we weren't even remotely in the wilderness. But this was just a test camping; we'll get farther out and for longer next time. And we definitely need to pare down our supplies. For a single night's camping we managed to bring enough to fill the Highlander to the roof. That must change.

Off to the wilderness

2009-04-17T10:03:00.000-07:00

OK, maybe not wilderness, as we're heading to a state park with all the running water amenities, but we're still all excited about going on our first camping trip of the year. We car campers like to have a little civilization with our wilderness.

And we've upgraded! Here is our new tent:

We needed something bigger as on last year's trip, Roni's head and feet were tucked tightly against the walls of my only-adequate starter tent. Also, due to a mishap with a hot propane lantern that fell outside, the old tent has a round hole melted in it, at perfect height for water and mice to enter the tent.

So, we are now the proud owners of the REI Camp Dome 5 person tent. Very tall and plenty wide, so there should be lots of room for two adults, two kids and all the assorted paraphernalia that car campers require.

Once the online REI shopping spree began, I also added two of these three season sleeping bags, supposedly good to 20+ degrees. I doubt they'll be used much at below freezing temps, but they'll be warmer than the slumber party type we've been using. And Roni's is extra long so he'll fit. And I got 3" self-inflating sleeping pads as well. We will be camping in comfort!

J and (eventually) D will still need new warmer bags, but since this is just a test run camping trip, we'll take enough blankets for J, and he can use my old sleeping pad for his younger and more tolerant bones. He slept on the floor for months, so he'll be happy.

That's the end of the new list, but J and I hit the Goodwill and Fred Meyer to add to our permanent camping kit, so we've pots & pan & mismatched silverware & plastic dishes & cans of propane, so I think we're set. The goal is to have a kit we can just grab and go with any time the camping whim strikes. There is so much of the state that Roni & J have never seen, and many places I haven't been to in years. The boys and I will have the summer to explore, and Roni can join us on the weekend trips.

The weather report is encouraging too, so even though this is a very brief trip, it should be a great start to the summer!

Here we go a WASLing

2009-04-15T14:32:00.001-07:00

This is the second day of the WASL testing at our school. There are at least four days to go, plus make-up days, so it makes it a very quiet time in the library. Two classes without standard desks are using the library space, and then at the end of the regular test period all the students who need more time come into the library to finish.

I send out an email that the library has reopened when the final student leaves. Yesterday the email went out at 2:16. Today I don't think we'll be opening before school is out as two students still remain. Poor things! Nearly seven and a half hours they've worked on their reading tests. And towards the end they've dealt with numerous interruptions. Some unavoidable, some very annoying. How are a bright gold "Quiet, Testing" and a bold red "Library CLOSED" signs not enough to keep students from banging through the doors, hollering out their presence? They look so indignant when we shoosh them away.

Here is the library, set up for the students:

Other than a little supervision duties and some test collection from classrooms, I've not been assigned to many WASL duties, so I've been cataloging books and cleaning up catalog records.

Other library news: a little while ago my aide and I decided that we'd switch out our plain office chairs for something more challenging. My back has felt better, and the balancing is fun. The kids also find it quite entertaining.

Here is my L.U. (loyal underling - she named herself) on her new "chair."

Celebrating Spring

2009-04-13T11:37:00.000-07:00

We had a great time on Saturday coloring the eggs. J. took great care and pride in his coloring, and the shrink wrap sleeves amazed and delighted him. He's getting pretty good with his balance, so with a little mom help he got to pour the boiling water on some of them to shrink the sleeves.

We only broke two eggs, and we split the damage between us, so it was a success! The eggs won't be very edible as I forgot them while boiling and some of them boiled for over 15 minutes (oops) but how many hard boiled eggs could we eat, anyway?

I'm puzzled by the inclusion of a brown dye pellet. Wouldn't people who wanted brown eggs just buy brown ones?

Sunday we went for brunch to my aunt's house, who had the usual fabulous feast, including a special lamb dish for Roni, who couldn't eat the ham. He brought along matzabrai (sp?) for his bread since all the flour products were also off limits until Pesach ends next week.

J is still a little confused about why a bunny hides his eggs, but he enjoyed finding them, and his slightly older cousin was good about leaving some of them for him - his detection skills mean that the eggs needed to be in pretty obvious spots!

The brunch timing meant no nap - he held up well, but was asleep in the car on the way home before we got to the first traffic light.

Also, to show that all the holidays were covered, on Wednesday we had our Pesach Seder. It was just the three of us, and J's attention span was sorely tested, but it was a moderate success. We remembered all the items for the Seder plate this year! And although J's mini-meltdown left Roni alone at the table at one point, reading the prayers alone, J did last long enough to open the door for Elijah and to hunt down the hidden matzah cracker. And really, considering it is all in Hebrew, and J is only three and had been sick all week, it went as well as could be expected!

Working day

2009-04-13T08:36:00.000-07:00

So, it is another working day. I feel so good here, it seems like everybody is sick all the time maybe it is our company but it is kind of amazing.

I am looking at my computer and thinking "NOT ANOTHER DAY !!!". I believe I will be a great rich person just traveling the world and seeing great places but not me I am here down town well, not really but very close.

I added another story: http://www.reuters.com/article/oddlyEnoughNews/idUSTRE5305VQ20090401
which explains what drinking is doing to you.

Anyway, I will keep with that later. Got to go back to work.

- Roni

It is a quiet day here at the library, as well. Tomorrow the state testing begins, so all the classes are coming in to get books to read after the test, should they finish early. But they don't need me for the physical check out, though I try to roam and offer suggestions for choices. So I've been behind the counter cataloguing and sticking labels in books, and it isn't very exciting. But it will be worse tomorrow. Once the testing starts, all talking ceases and for two weeks it is as if the energy has been drained from the building. I wish I dared get out my knitting then . . .

And, honey, remember that you are a relatively wealthy person, traveling the world. You live in a foreign land! You get to go camping in a new tent this weekend! In a month or two you get to go to Taiwan! But I agree that we do need to figure out where we're heading in the next few years - not locations, but purpose seems to be a bit lacking for us lately.

Re: the drinking story. Is there a worry there? The one bottle of wine a month is too extreme?

- Johnna

Spinning my wheels

2009-04-12T07:57:00.000-07:00

I've been working off and on to spin enough wool for a sweater - time to break out of hat sized amounts of yarn! I was very happy with some goldish yarn that I'd made, so I tried to dye a big batch of Finn wool the same colors, but ended up with more and darker brown patches than I meant to have.

I've spun and spun and spun over the last few months, if we take that to mean every once in a while I got a chance to spin a little while J. was otherwise occupied. So the time span was long, but the spinning time was sparse! But now I have plied seven skeins of what seems to be sport weight wool.

And I don't like it.

I had almost convinced myself that I liked it and then a knitting friend visited and commented that it looked like 70s appliance colors. Harvest gold, wasn't it?

And now I know I don't like it.

Luckily, there is more brown dye in the world, and it will be going back into the pot. A more solid color will open up options for patterns anyway as I won't have to worry about the effects of variegated on the pattern.

But it seems like a lot of work to have done to make sort of ugly yarn!

These are the singles - I like them much better than the plied yarn. The gold stands out more than the brown in the singles. I still need to take a picture of the plied yarn.

Our new experiment

2009-04-10T19:15:00.001-07:00

Roni has finally talked me into trying a blog, nervous as I am about
- family privacy
- being to boring to post about
- our already obsessive computer use

But it could be fun, so we're going to give it a try. At least Savta Tova and Grandma Sue will have a new source of grandson news.

- Johnna

We need this blog because in a few years, we'll want to go back and stare at our previous lives.

- Roni