Cuteness

Here are some photos of the cuteness we have been seeing in our house this holiday season. 

Lillian ice skating with all her friends at Winter Lodge.

Nathaniel with his hair now long enough for the ultimate in one year old fashion statements, the teeny tiny pony tail.

He Walks!

Lillian's First Art Exhibit

A piece of Lillian's art work from her art class at school was chosen to be part of an art show at our local library. Her oil pastel drawing of an Indian mask was one of the small selection of Kinder art on display. Once Lillian learned that her art was being displayed we had to rush right over to the library to check it out. Lillian questioned where the rest of her art was and art work from everyone else in her class. I had to explain that they only had so much wall space to display the art and that they had to choose only a few pieces of art from each grade level.

 

 

Tea Party Movement

While we're not huge fans of the Tea Party Movement in our household, we do enjoy a warm cup from time to time. This morning we found the kids in a self organized tea party at our newly relocated toddler table. The sunny location and good company certainly warmed their souls on this cold winter day.

 

 

 

Nathaniel Turns One

This morning we celebrated Nathaniel's birthday one day early with banana cake with chocolate frosting and one little candle. Eric managed to not find the same recipe he used for Lillian's cake earlier in the year, so it was a little more banana-bready than we might have liked but still good.  The whipped chocolate ganache got rave reviews all around though. We followed it up with a park celebration with all his big sister's buddies. The girls decorated the party area in the park with grass clippings. They got him presents which were a stump from a bush that was found in the park, a wand cobbled together from a used up glow stick, and finally there was performance art that involved dancing on the picnic tables and doing gymnastics in the grass. He found the whole thing a little disturbing, and rightly so. Happy Birthday little guy!

 

 

 

 

 

Spooky Good Times!

This has been a full week of Halloween festivities. Last weekend our friend Katherine hosted a pumpkin carving party with a spooky alley and lots good fun for all the kids. We forgot Lillian's costume so she dressed up in one of Rebecca's fancy dresses for the costume parade. On the big day Lillian's school started the day with a Halloween concert for the parents.  Then her class had a Halloween party followed by a school-wide costume parade. This time we remembered the costume so Lillian got to scare her classmates with the scary shark costume that she found at a rummage sale a few weeks ago. The school parade also featured a spooky zombie dance by the teachers. Later that evening we gathered with some friends to go trick-or-treating around our neighborhood. Lillian was far more excited about visiting our local haunted house (or haunted volcano as the case may be) than collecting candy so we didn't visit many houses. Nathaniel dressed up as a giraffe and went along for the ride. He enjoyed riding on his mom's back and watching all the crazy action from the big kids.

 

 

 

 

 

Oktoberfest!

We finally had a Saturday where we had no scheduled activities, so we made our own fun by taking a morning bike ride to Rengstorff park.  Lillian continued her sampling of the cities monkey bars, while Nathaniel managed to fill his pants with sand.  We all tried out the big cement slide, but Nathaniel found the experience upsetting, even when he was just watching his sister ride.  On the way back we stopped by Steak Out where they were hosting an Oktoberfest celebration to benefit the German International School of Silicon Valley.  We ate some sausage, chicken and pretzels and drank some beer while watching people in lederhosen.  It was a pretty good time.

 

 

 

 

Flying Trapeze

Last weekend Kristen's friend Angie had a birthday party at Trapeze Arts in Oakland. Her and a bunch of other mommies learned how to fly through the air with the greatest of ease! It was great fun, but now Lillian is getting ideas about running away to join the circus.

First Crush

After last year's cider making experiment, Eric decided to try his hand at making his own wine. His co-worker has a grapevine of some sort of wine grape and when Eric expressed an interest in making wine from his grapes, a giant box of grapes appeared on his desk. Without access to a press, we went with the old fashioned method using people power to crush the grapes. Lillian had great fun stomping on grapes while Nathaniel crawled around. I will note that we did ask Lillian to clean her feet before the crushing began, but the true cleanliness of those feet will never be known. Also only a small amount of dog poop was consumed in the process, thankfully none ended up in the crushed grapes.

 

 

 

RockClimbing Part Deux

Last week Lillian had shortened school days due to parent-teacher conferences. The extra time in the afternoons gave us an opportunity to revisit some of our favorite afternoon outings like Full Circle Farm and Rock Climbing at Planet Granite. It has been several months since we last visited Planet Granite, and Lillian was a little more confident than the last time, but still not didn't have the confidence to go all the way to the top of the wall. Maybe next time. Nathaniel enjoyed crawling all over the gym, chewing on ropes and generally getting himself underfoot as much as possible.

 

 

 

 

Picture Day

Lillian dressed up in her cutest little dress and put a fancy bow in her hair for picture day at school. The results were darn pretty cute!

 

Walkathon/Caminata

Yesterday Lillian's school held their big fundraiser for the year, a walkathon. The walkathon was good fun for all the kids with a big pep-rally and lots of fun and games (and awesome, home-cooked, Pan-Latin-American food). Lillian was a trooper and walked 52 laps, or a little over 5 miles and raised over $100 for her school. They had lap prizes every 20 or so laps, and Lillian collected a water bottle, a button, a bracelet and pink hairspray. She really wanted to make it to 65 laps where she would have gotten a cold fruity drink, but the walkathon ended before she got that far. I think next year she will have no problem making it to 65 laps.

 

 

 

Good, (not so) clean fun

We're in the throes of our annual fall heat wave. Today it was over 90, and Nathaniel really wanted to play in the mud puddle at the park. So I stripped him down to a diaper and let him smear mud all over himself. After all, that is how pigs beat the heat. It was good fun, but all good things must come to an end and the clean up process wasn't much fun for either of us.

 

 

 

Nathaniel at 10 Months

Nathaniel had his 9 month checkup recently and the mirror next to the exam table at the doctors office was a big hit! As far as his growth stats go, he is 29 inches long, and 20 pounds, pretty close to average for his age, his head size though is in the 90th percentile. Much like his father he struggles to find hats that fit his enormous cranium. If he keeps this up we may have to start calling him HEAD. Don't worry though, we won't be letting him cry him self to sleep on his huge pillow.

SF Zoo

It's been a long time since we've been to the zoo. Three years to be exact! So when Lillian started asking about going to the Zoo, we thought it was a great idea. Our trip to the San Francisco Zoo was delayed by one week by an unexpected and short lived fever. One of the biggest highlights of the trip was the playground with some seriously old school playground equipment. Lillian has recently mastered the monkey-bars and the rings were a new challenge to be conquered. This visit unlike the last, we were able to see just about everything, as her 5 year old legs had much more stamina than her 3 year old ones. Nathaniel enjoyed riding in the carrier checking out all the sights and sounds, he even managed to stay awake for most of the trip.

 

 

 

 

Bike Trek

Kristen recently acquired a bike with a baby seat. Now that the whole family has bikes we decided to try a bicycle outing all the way out to Shoreline Park. Three quarters of our family enjoyed the outing, with the littlest member not too happy about having the strong headwind in his face. On the way back from the park, we ended up sending daddy and Lillian on ahead while mommy let Nathaniel play near a trail-side water fountain.  Nathaniel was very excited to see daddy and Lillian return in the car to take him home.

Spider-Baby!

No sooner does he start crawling, than we find Nathaniel climbing up the slide on the playground like a miniature Spider-Man.

They've formed a drum circle...

It's summer, so that means Mountain View is having its biweekly Thursday Night Live celebration.  Downtown is closed to traffic for an evening, and there are lots of great attractions for the whole family.  One of these happened to be an African Drum circle.  Lillian joined her friend Leo from around the corner, who was kind enough to share his Djembe.  Eric with Nathaniel along for the ride also banged along with the beat.  It was so much fun, next thing you know there will be a full blown hippy jam fest.

Primer Dia de Kindergarten

Today was Lillian's first day of kindergarten. She will be attending a spanish language dual-immersion program at Mariano Castro Elementary School. She started her day with much anticipation, waking all of us up at 6 am.  She was fully dressed with her backpack loaded up, all ready to go to school. She was a little disappointed to learn that we would have to wait for over two hours to actually leave for school. Once we got there she had a grand time meeting her class and her teacher. We were quickly whisked away to the gym for coffee with the other new Kindergarten parents, so we didn't see her again until the school day was over. We found her in a great mood, wearing a paper hat of Bono el Mono (we wanted to post a link but couldn't find a good one).