He Wrote Back!!!!

A couple weeks ago, Erin wanted to show us some interactive art thingie she did in her class that was based on Peter H. Reynold's book "Ish".  We browsed his website and came across this in the Contact section:

Snail Mail

I actually love snail mail... so feel free to send me a note the old fashioned way at:

c/o The Blue Bunny
577 High St.
Dedham, MA 02026 USA

Robin set down and wrote out a "letter" to him consisting of a few pictures, and probably the word "Butterfly" which she is currently fond of writing.  We sealed it up, popped it in the mail.  I put a little note on the back envelope that it was from a fan, "Robin, age 3" and briefly described the drawings she did.

LOOK WHAT CAME IN THE MAIL TODAY!!!!!!!!

I'm so excited!!  I'm so curious to know what's inside.  We will have to browse other authors' websites for similar invitations to communicate. 

Happy Father's Day 2013

What says "Happy Father's Day" more than running 26.2 miles?  Not much.  Brian ROCKED the San Francisco Marathon today, with a time just shy of 4 hours.  Fantastic! The girls and I hustled out to meet him at the finish line.

With flying feet and big grins, B finished one of the toughest 15 marathon courses with a fantastic time.

The girls were ecstatic to see the medal him at the end.

And because he is hardcore parkour, we went to the SF zoo afterward with my folks to spend some quality time with the carousel and petting zoo. 

Happy Father's Day y'all! 

Gotta Take The Bad With The Good

We went to a restaurant tonight.  And it was insanity. We left before finishing our meal, cutting the grilled-cheese dinner short and nearly threatening to never take the kids out to dinner again.

Later that evening I went my monthly Mom's evening get together.  There were 6 moms.  This is what everyone brought:

Yup.  Perspective. Again. 

Extreme Teeth Brushing

Do you read the blog Crappy Pictures?  You should.  The writer/mom has limited artistic skills and a fantastic sense of humor.  She posted this a few days ago about brushing teeth.

Which brings me to this:

Extreme, backwards-off-the-couch, bend over teeth brushing with light-up toothbrushes.  Yeah, it was an inspired parenting night.

Splashing in January

Yesterday we went to the Berkeley Marina to go play at their park.  It was a beautiful day, about  54F.

Whatever the water temperature was, the girls didn't seem to mind.

Spice Therapy

It's been a rough day all around, so decided to take myself to a local chinese food place for lunch.

This place is kind of known for the "extras".  Last time we ordered take-out we got a beer, some fried appetizers and a couple pieces of baklava.  For free.

So it was no surprise then when the waiter walked by each table, and set down a huge bag of organic greens, gratis.  Because nothing goes better with spicy eggplant chicken than 2 pounds of uncooked greens.

And the spicy peppers did really elevate my mood.  Now back to the Holiday Madness. 

http://www.yelp.com/biz/asia-palace-restaurant-moraga

What Is It????

We hung out for a few hours on the Monterey Beach. Lovely beach weather for any time of the year, much less November. The tide was rolling out, and each wave deposited these little jellyish things.

 

Any clue what they are? The seagulls were fascinated with them, as were we. I scoped up one in a
bucket with some seawater to see if it would do anything.

  It didn't move so either it was dead or vegetable in matter. Any ideas?

What happens when Robin gets the camera

Oh, and then she drops it and cracks the lens. 

Belated Mother's Day Present

To honor Mother's day this year, my parents bought a well in a Cambodian village in our girls' and my nephew's name. So that other mamas could have clean water to drink and raise their babies healthy.  When my mom told me I cried, it was beautiful.

And here is a picture of the well:

I think I'm changing my Christmas gift list a bit.

Surprise package!

We got a surprise package in the mail today!  It was from a dear grad school friend, Dr. Deanne. 

In it was 3 Science Magazines, 3 fresh Mad Libs, a lovely note, AND ..... a 7 pack of stick-on mustaches.

Do they make us look sophisticated or what? 

Then the girls decided to try the new facial decorations in other ways. 

Thank you, Deanne!  We're loving the 'stashes and we will have so much fun with the Mad Libs on our drive to Yosemite on Sunday!  You rock! 

Honest Neighbors

A few weeks back we cleaned out the garage.  By cleaning out the garage, I mean we put a LOT of stuff on the curb, posted to Freecycle.org, and let everyone come n' get it.  About 500 books, some random kids toys.   We had a sign saying "Free Stuff" and in small letters, "If you find something you really like feel free to throw a buck or two into the mailbox."  Just about everything was taken. And, amazingly, there was $16 in our mailbox!

Then today, when getting the mail, there was this in the mailbox:

Murder on Moraga Way

OK, this is already old news to most of the people who read this blog, but holy bananas, this happened a few doors down from us!!!!

More here
and here

This was today!

Here is my picture:

 We heard the sirens just about 12:30.  We passed by at 12:50 on our way to pick up Robin.  There were 9 cops, some unmarked police cars, and 2 motorcycle cops.  On the way back, 20 min later, there was one ambulance and 1 fire truck.

Both the house involved and the neighbor's house were cordoned off.  Holy bubble breath!

Champagne and Chocolate Women's Half Marathon

That's right folks!  Dr. A ran another women's half marathon, this one sponsored by See Jane Run.  It took place in the lovely, flat Alameda, CA on a mild California morning.  While the race organization could have been improved, the course was lovely, the drinks/goo was plentiful, and all the participants were very, very gracious.

A few pictures from my sweaty self:

The 3 mile point.  We crossed a bridge.  It was lovely but smelled like estuary and skunk.

Hard to make out, but we actually had a beautiful view of downtown SF and the Bay Bridge.

Oh, and did I mention the GIRLS RAN A 1 MILE KIDS RACE?  1 Mile people. This is not a fun run, if you're in the 2-4 age group.  This is serious business.  Both girls did great and apparently were self-propelled the entire time. Here's Brian and Robin coming into the home stretch: 

Honestly, I'm so proud of my girls for doing this race.  It's way farther than most kids fun runs, and if I'd known it was a whole mile I might not have signed them up.  But they were spectacular.  Hopefully B will upload some of his pictures and video of Erin crossing the finish.  It was a sight!

First CSA box

We joined a local CSA last week.  We did this in PDX, but hadn't found one here that was as close as our last one was.  Our drop point is 2 blocks away, on our street.  So with the girls in the bike trailer we rode down the hill for the first pickup. Behold the bounty: 

It's all fruit.  This threw me for a loop.  This time of year, all we'd be getting in the PDX box would be fennel, some lettuce, fennel, one box of strawberries, and more fennel.  We got used to fennel.  This is all fruit.  All drupe fruit.  About 6# of it.  (We'd already eaten about 1/2 the cherries, 7 apricots, and 1 peach by the time we got home.)

Running Date!

Brian and I got to go on a running date yesterday. Erin was in her preschool, Robin went to her by-appointment preschool.  We both use a GPS-based app on our phones to track and share runs.  So here are the stats from his and my run.

                                              Brian                            Ashleigh
Distance                                4.31 Miles                   3.9 Miles
Time                                      44:31                          42:29         
Pace                                       10:15/mile                  10:53/mile
Calories                                  524                              411


So there you have it, folks.  Proof that when men and women exercise side by side men 1. go further 2. faster, and 3. burn more calories.

Or, I had the "pause when pace slows below 3 MPH" turned on and part of my workout was truncated.

I feel a rematch in our near future.

Fenuwhat?

Fenugreek people!  At the farmer's market!  Fresh!  I nearly bought it.  I have a habit of buying random veggies at the farmer's market in hopes of discovering wonderful, fresh, new flavors.  The farmer asked me if I knew what it was.  I said, "Nope.  No idea."  He told me fenugreek - that it had a sweet, licorice-y flavor.  I told him I was very familiar with the herb, having taken it to boost my milk supply when I was pumping milk for Erin.  He smiled, nodded, and said that is just what it is for.  I put it down, and said, thank you, but no thank you.  We're all done with that.

I miss TV.

Not really.

We had to pack up the TV and the Tivo for the kitchen.  Only now am I starting to really miss the ol' Boob Tube.  We watch plenty of shows on DVD, so it's not that we're depriving ourselves of much-needed screen time (so kidding).  And I broke down and bought a season of Sesame Street for the kids to watch on the computer or iPad.  But I just miss scanning through the 80ish hours of shows that we rarely actually watch.  Funny how I'm missing the TV/Tivo more than the oven.

Oh, and whatever happened to "How It's Made" from Discovery channel?  I miss that show.  If anyone can find full episodes, I'd be grateful.  I found snippets on the Discovery.com site, but they're partial segments peppered with lots of annoying advertising.  Because I REALLY need to know how that fiberglass hot tub is assembled.

The Postman (sometimes) Commeth

We had an issue with postal delivery recently which made me think we were subject to some good ol' fashioned postal theft. We do live on a busy street. . . Mystery one: Erin didn't receive a Valentine's card from my parents Mystery two: Erin and Robin didn't receive a message from Grandma and Grandpa from Hawaii. Mystery three: an old class-mate said she was sending a package ... which has never appeared. Concurrently, I'd read recently about some mail thefts in our area. So I started to lock the mailbox. Then the belated Valentin's arrived. The postal sorting mis-read the zip code. The Hawaiian message arrived at Grandpa and Grandma's house with postage due. The item from my old classmate is still not here, but I"m starting to think it has more to do with strangely coinciding system glitches and not nefarious neighbors pilfering our greeting cards.

Thankful for warranties

We bought a new iMac in November.  It's already in the shop.  I probably should have taken it in a few months ago because it was having strange connectivity issues with the router and the wireless keyboard and mouse from the get-go, but I'm pretty forgiving of technology.  The issue finally got so bad that every time the computer would wake after "sleep" it would need to search for the internet connection for a minute or so, then the keyboard would drop out for a few minutes, then the mouse.  I had self-assessed the problem via iMac forums to be a configuration file issue, but took it to the Genius Bar nonetheless.  It is a new, expensive computer still under warranty after all.  They suspect a hardware problem. Hopefully we'll have it back in a few days.

Now, at this point in my life I loves me some Apple.  Our house is lousy with iThis and iThat.  But I think I've visited the Genius Bar about 10 times in the last 2 years.  I mean, I go there so often that they guy I usually got has said, "Wow, Robin is getting big."

Just ranting here.

What happened today?

Um,  how did I miss this?  He's got a kid with Trisomy 18?  Um, last I checked median survival time of a kid with trisomy 18 is 14.5 days.