Maya
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The Post Where I Literally Murder my Readers with Boredom…
This was one of those weekends where you are so very busy, and you take a peek at the activities that are planned, and you think, if I had no child, this would be a COMPLETELY different weekend. Not better. Not worse. Different. Friday, I took the day off of work, and chaperoned Maya’s class to the Monet Exhibit at the Legion of Honor in San Francisco. All I can say is, WOW. There are some paintings that just look…DIFFERENT…in real life. I’ve seen pictures of Monet’s Japanese bridge with waterlillies for as long as I can remember. On posters, greeting cards, whatever. It’s background noise for the eyes. Then,…
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Sunday Morning Thoughts…
I just got up, looking at a few blogs, and the first two I came to had some interesting coincidences… 1st, my mom’s blog talked about the sexualization of children, about how dressing young girls in adult’s clothing, and visa versa, is dangerous because it sends very confusing messages to the world. This reminded me of when I was a girl, and I wanted to get my ears pierced…I wasn’t allowed, because my mom said that earrings were a symbol of being a certain age and maturity, and so I didn’t get them done until I was 16. I’ve put a lot of thought into when to allow Maya to…
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Uh Oh…
I just saw this article. If signed, children under 8 need to ride in a booster seat, and children under 12 need to ride in the back seat. What’s the big deal? Well, Maya’s been riding in the front seat for a little while now…the Volvo doesn’t have any airbags (too old), and on the Camry, we have the passenger seat pushed all of the way back. Ted reasoned that many small adults are in the front seat, so she would be OK. I read some reports that said that there is no proof that kids who have been harmed by passenger side airbags in the front seat were ‘properly…
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Russian Cooking Class
The main fundraiser at Maya’s school is a Spring Festival, which combines with a live auction, and raises much needed funds to keep the school doors open. The big ticket items tend to be the quilts, which are made from squares made by the students and sewn by dedicated parents, trunks made by woodworking parents, and excursions put together by the teachers. One of Maya’s teachers, Zhanna, is Russian. She emigrated from the Ukraine about 10 years ago. Her offering for the auction was a day of cooking, where the parents and kids would learn to make traditional Russian food, enjoy the pool at her condo’s clubhouse, and all around…
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Our Summer So Far…
When planning our summer, with me working from home and Maya home as well, one concern that I had was too much TV/Video games. If we lived in a neighborhood full of kids, this wouldn’t be an issue, because she would be out playing with them enough of the time to counter-balance the time spent on XBox or Disney Channel. But we don’t. The other kids in our neighborhood are in summer day camps and their parents are at work. If I were a stay at home mom, I could keep her occupied for much of the day – we could go on day trips to the zoo, the park,…
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Ode to Vegan Lunchbox
Inspired by ‘Jennifershmoo” and her Vegan Lunchbox, and requested by Cherry, here is yesterday’s lunch. Maya takes her lunch every day to Girl Scout Camp, and I ordered one of the cool Bento Lunchboxes that Jennifershmoo turned me on to. We’re not vegan, so there’s dairy in here. Lunch is a homemade bean and cheese burrito, rolled like a wrap (with pineapple/mango salsa in case she wants it), apple/apricot sauce, grapes and cherries, and a Costco brownie bite that came with the lunch Cherry and I had at a new Japanese place near Kohls. Who ever heard of brownie bites at Japanese restaurants? Not me, but Maya will be glad,…
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Happy Father’s Day, Dado
I thought that maybe I could have a guest blogger today, to wish her father a very happy Father’s Day. She’s not as verbose as I am, but she loves him VERY MUCH. So, with no further delay, here’s Maya. Happy Fathers Day, Dado! I love you! You are the best! Love, Monkey
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School’s Out For Summer
Yesterday was the last day of school for Maya….can’t believe she’ll be in the 5th grade this fall. They had a play at her school yesterday, on Westward Expansion. It was a musical, with touching, sad numbers like “Trail of Tears”, and a rousing number at the end about the Golden Spike. Fun. I may be biased, but I thought Maya did great. She was in the back for much of the play, but for the Golden Spike number, she was in front, looking great. I couldn’t get many pics because there were parents in front of me…but we asked her to recreate a pose for us. 🙂
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Black Diamond Mines
Maya’s class had a fieldtrip today to the Black Diamond Mines, in Antioch, CA. (That’s Maya’s BEST friend, Jackie, in the picture to your left.) I had never been there before, so I was happy to volunteer to drive some of the kids, and go check it out. The mines were for coal in the mid-1800s, and many men who came to California looking for gold ended up working in the coal mines instead. Actually, though we found out that CA coal is inferior to coal from Washington State or China, so when that coal started coming into CA, the mines closed down, and the cities disappeared. I kind of…
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A Fish?
If you remember, our good friends Cherry and Eric came over for dinner last weekend. In addition to the lovely ice cream and homemade sauces that Cherry made, they also brought us this lemon. I know, it looks like a grapefruit. I suspect that Cherry has been waiting to see if it pops up on my blog, because it’s so huge, and because, well, blogarreah. Well, finally, it’s time. Every time I see this lemon sitting next to our other fruits, I wonder, “What shall I do with this lemon? Lemon pound cake? Lemonade? What?” The most common use for lemon in our house is as a sort of bath…
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As Promised…
Here are some pictures of Maya and the ducklings. We live too far from her school to walk the whole way, but we park at a library about a mile from the school and walk. We bring the dog, so she gets her exercise in as well. One stretch of the walk is on a bike trail, and there is a little canal running through it. There are often ducks in the canal, and we’ve been waiting for ducklings since September. Well, we saw them a few weeks ago, but only this week did we remember to bring some bread to feed them. And today I actually remembered the camera.…
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You want some Yogurt?!?!
One of the blogs I sometimes read is the ever-popular Dooce. Sometimes it’s interesting, sometimes boring, like all blogs. Well, this little post reminded me of when Maya was a baby, and would torture me by trying to get me to get her in and out of her crib over and over and over again. Don’t tell me that babies don’t have that kind of motivation. It was torture. So here’s the scene…she’s upstairs, and I’m downstairs. She’s in her crib, in a loft, so her voice carries VERY well to the downstairs. She replays the things that I say to her, to get me to come up there. “What’s…
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Happy Birthday Monkey!!
My first plan was to have a post, with 10 pictures, one from each year of Maya’s life. But the pictures grew unruly, and though I loaded them all into blogger, because of different sizes, etc, it didn’t look that great. Plus, it kind of took away from the post, rather than adding to it, because I was focusing on the captions, rather than the thoughts that I want to express. Then Ted came in with his Mac, and made a slide show in about 2 minutes, using all of the pictures I had scanned. So I will direct you to view my beautiful baby, as she goes from about…
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The weekend so far…
This is a four day weekend for me. 🙂 Friday, Ted and I both went on a fieldtrip to Sacramento. Why both of us? Because it’s better than working, that’s why. So we drove 3 kids to Sacramento. First the class stopped at the old Governor’s Mansion, which was pretty interesting. It’s an old Victorian house, with 23 rooms, and they have it done up like it would have been in the early 1900s. Our tour guide was full of misinformation, which made us wonder, does he know what he’s talking about with this place at all? He told our class that MLK was shot in ’66 or ’67, that…
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In Case You’re Wondering…
Maya came home safe, sound, and happy from her overnight trip to Hidden Villa, in Los Altos Hills…(See, I didn’t say WHERE she was going before, in case some mad fucker was reading my blog and decided to go get her! But she’s home safe now, so I can say it.) She had a wonderful time: saw TONS of stars, took long hikes, made friends with a 3-week-old baby goat (kid) named Rosemary, had Frosted Flakes for breakfast, gave herself a sponge bath because she wanted to be clean but they weren’t taking showers, made a camp fire, learned a new camp-fire song about baby sharks and decomposing bodies and…