GIZMMaX

Z's at that particularly grabby age, and fast. But you could say I'm almost as fast with the camera – and the camera loves her.

We had planned for a little birthday BBQ party for Drew on Saturday, but we ended up with a spring winter storm, the whole gamut: rain, freezing rain/snow mix, snow. Of course the girls wanted to be out with their umbrellas (above, the rain is just starting to freeze), and even a little cold wasn't going to deter them – but the freezing rain did cause us to reconsider the (small) party so we postponed a day. While we were having a quiet belated lunch, watching the snow fall, I was amazed to see these big wet clumps the size of golf balls, but without the weight. In the bright morning sun, next day, the sight of the snow covered blossoming trees, the further mitigation of my already mild (knock on wood) seasonal allergies, made me think that snowballs do grow on trees. On the way to church, G worried she wouldn't get the chance to play in the snow for as fast as the stuff was melting. But not only did she get to play in the snow, she also had Mary and Jude (and later BB, post-nap) to play with her. The weather was just right for our first BBQ of the year.

In this video, the girls are enjoying their bit of cake with Jude and roaring at each other as they have been the last couple of days at the dinner table, except I missed the more amusing parts. Unfortunately, I neglected to get a picture of my masterpiece: second time's the charm, Drew's birthday cake: he requested the same one that I made for G. Except this time, I did two layers (instead of four, which could be the reason why it "sank" in the middle the first time), and I tweaked the chocolate frosting proportions a bit. Interestingly, when we finished singing the birthday song in English, G told me that we, the Chinese folk, should have sang the song in Chinese and let the others sing it in English. I told her we could forego the Chinese version in the presence of our guests since we already sang it to Daddy in Chinese when he awoke.

The women and babies viewing the snow throwing antics from a safe distance up on the deck.

I heard there were more eruptions from Mt Redoubt over the weekend, that some ash actually fell on Anchorage. I was hoping to see some new pictures on the AVO/USGS website, but there were only a few new spectacular ones from last week.

Webcam image from 23 March 2009 (AVO/USGS).

Ash cloud seen in the geostationary MTSAT data (26 March 2009), courtesy of the National Weather Service, processed by the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. We are at the extreme edge of the view of the satellite which is over the equator in Asia.

Behind our house, bordering four or five properties is a storm drainage culvert that empties out into a little 50 foot long open "creek" and disappears into another drain running directly beneath our property. Most of the time the creek is just a trickle, but on rainy days or with the fast-melting snow over the weekend, the creek is a torrent of water and the land surrounding it is partially flooded – our house is on high ground with the backyard sloping down to the culvert so that only a portion along the back fence is soggy. (During the wet season, Drew's seen frogs living down there and this summer I'm going to have him take the girls down to catch them for fun.) In the evening, with the sun gone down, we sat together on the back porch and imagined that we were living next to a river, soothed by the sound of running water.

It made us think of the time we stayed at a traditional ryokhan, Hotel Taiseikan, with my aunt and her husband. One of those places where you deposit your street shoes at the front desk and you don't see them again until you leave; where you eat your meals and sleep on wall-to-wall tatami; where dinner can run 10 and 13 courses or removes, all brought in by a woman in a kimono and those wooden thong shoes; where you lounge around in "pajamas" all day. This one had to be accessed by a cable car from the road.

We had our meals with my aunt in their room (top), while the modest little number overlooking the river (above), where we had tea only, was our room.

This was the little vestibule entryway to our room, which is connected to a hallway and the rest of the ryokan, like a hotel.

This is the ryokan from the other side of the bridge (over the river). Though I can't point out our exact room in this picture, I can tell you that the hot springs, separate for men and women, were located behind that wooden screen in the center left of the picture. Drew and I both availed ourselves of those particular hot springs, and he stayed much longer, attaining the "boiled octopus" state, yudedako. Apparently it's a Japanese saying, which I found mentioned here and here and here.

G dreams of flying. I remember when she was our only child, we would talk about the birds we saw and how they were in the act of flying. I would ask her, "Can you fly?" and she would say, "No," like you're-so-silly no. But lately, she likes taping large paper hearts to her back and pretending she's soaring all over the house. Once she even asked me, "Can you teach me how to fly?" As if she's ever seen me do it. I told her to ask her dad – and she did. He was about as dumbfounded as I was for an answer.

She insisted on having a pair made up for BB, even colored them herself. (Yes, BB's blurry, top, because she couldn't stand still long enough for me to take the picture, but I kept it because she's smiling.)

Z's not what you might call the waterworks as I've seen some other kids are, but she is that perpetual faucet drip. And when she's teething, as she has been this week, I sometimes consider getting her one of those drool bibs. Anyway I'm no doc, but it looks like two of them are giving her trouble: the crank baby.

p.s. Had you going with the title for a second there, didn't I?

My cell phone took a spectacular fall (from Z's grasp) at the grocery store, snapping into two neat pieces, originally being a flip phone. We were thinking of getting another phone anyway, maybe switching carriers, and now there's no question about it.

I was sharing this out with some friends – the credits are longish, meat's in the middle – and I thought, why don't I keep it here for future reference.

Some people have all the patience. I'd like to think I've got some small share of the virtue, but of course I have my moments, my days.

I was surfing some blogs that I read and came across this project for a fabric tissue box. It's true what she says about pulling out tissue after tissue; and this was "cheap and easy" if you don't count the fact that I indulged in a really nice pair (with coupon) of pinking shears. I completed the majority of my tissues on Saturday evening only to find that I might be too early for the phenomenon in Z's case. But my effort was not in vain: BB loves the colorful fabric tissues on their own, and when not interrupted (by G), she likes to stuff them into the box one by one and then pull them out one by one.

Furthermore, I used portions of my fat quarters to make beanbags, ten in all, which the girls were treating as cupcakes after dinner. As I was finishing the last, I was reminiscing on the last time I made a beanbag: I would guess about fifteen years ago when my aunt Terry (小阿姨) helped me to buy my sewing machine. But I credit my recent crafting fire to Megan. If she can successfully craft with three kids (about the same ages as the girls) and one due very soon, you would think I could too.

Top crater in the Redoubt summit crater (21 March 2009) via AVO/USGS.

A good time to remind yourself how vulnerable your house is to break-ins is when you lock yourself out of the house – like we did today. I, for one, can be thankful that the weather was highly agreeable and that we could lounge on our back porch while Drew figured a way to get us in (without the use of a ladder: at least two of the windows were unlocked). Ultimately, he jimmied the stationary side of the sliding glass door with a trowel, in spite of the inch-thick wooden stick "locking" the other side in place.

I remember the one other time in recent memory that we locked ourselves out. This was in Alaska, and as we were debating whether or not to call our landlady, G, who at the time was just beginning to potty train, announces that she had to use the bathroom. Drew instantly disappeared out the main door of our triplex only to reappear moments later through the door of our apartment. Evidently, he'd monkeyed onto our second-story balcony – desperate times and all that – and entered through the sliding glass door, which was only sometimes locked with the same high-tech mechanism, a thick wooden stick.

First, some quotes:

G: Are you listening to what I'm telling you?!
BB: No!

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G: And when I'm older I'm going to drive a car and make cakes and...
Me: Get married?
G: And get married and blow bubbles.

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G "reading" Fancy Nancy: I am so proud of my whole family. They eat [with] their pinkies up and call each other 'darling'.

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I've been reading about making one's own butter by shaking some heavy cream in a jar with a marble. (Note: I don't think you necessarily need the marble, but hearing it rattling around gives you an idea of what's going on in the jar.) The girls with one baby food jar each shook vigorously (see also here) for about a minute before they lost interest: G was impatient for her butter and BB would rather pretend she was drinking the cream. But it didn't take long to get to the whipped cream stage; getting to the next step of cream-to-butter was a little more intensive than I imagined: I had to take over. The butter itself was creamier than the store-bought, though in future I would add some salt for flavor; the buttermilk went into our coffee cake.

G's been playing with what some people call cornstarch goop, or quicksand. Initially though, because I was going from memory, all we had was cloudy water: wrong proportions. But it turned out in time by adding more cornstarch, overdoing it on the water, adding more cornstarch – at the expense of over a pound of the powdery. When I let BB have a go of it, she barely got one hand starchy before she became disinterested, or disgusted. She's at that funny age where (some) kids don't like to get their hands dirty, even though she's the sloppiest when it comes to eating. Anyway, later, once I manage to get my hands on some liquid starch, I want to make some gak and silly putty (different proportions of white glue to liquid starch).

And speaking of Z, her third tooth, the left front on top, broke through on Monday, cutting faster, I think, on account of help from the bottom ones. But the happiness was short-lived, for Z got shots – only one! – at her well-baby appt on Tuesday, yesterday. Since I was already in the habit of dosing her, I had her good and ready with the Motrin and there seemed to be significantly less trauma than in visits passed.

Lately, whenever Z's content, I tell you, she fairly purrs like a cat, though not in the same way: it only sounds like it.

This is my first attempt. I thought I might try and catch her unawares making the sound, which you hear the slightest bit of in the very beginning; but upon review I realized it was kind of boring watching the back of her head, rocking like a champ, even if she were otherwise distracted by the camera.

Attempt number two: at the very start I'm trying to cue her to the purr because she's capable of repeating sounds now. And I'm gratified with a brief but unmistakable sample. At the end, Z manages to grab hold of the camera leash and yank it towards her for an unexpected close-up.

Guilty, Your Honor. By reason of over-watering: I've managed to kill off most of the night phlox and fragrant cloud seedlings, and I don't wonder that the poppies and strawberry sticks will be far behind. I'll also be very surprised if the spring onions make it. I'm just not cut out for this gardening business.

Yesterday was one of those I-wish-the-weather-would-stay-like-this-forever days, perfect for the kids on spring break this week. In the late afternoon, shortly before Drew came home, I reattached the swing for them – and tried to teach G the rudiments of swinging –, and to keep the one not on the swing occupied, I turned on the hose.

There are a number of gouges in the grass from where G and BB were digging when there was snow, and with the addition of water, it makes for some good slippery mud.

G managed to stay upright, despite a few very close calls, while stomping in the mud, but her skirt was dirt splattered nonetheless. BB was not so lucky, although it could have been worse.

We started in on our square foot gardens over the weekend, two 3x3 squares filled with Mel's Mix. I won't kid you: Drew did all the work – I held a board here and tugged on the mixing tarp there – and us four girls just "watched". Really, G and BB probably wanted to "help" by mixing the dirt, which contained a couple of kinds of compost, but they ended up having more fun playing with the hose.

On the left, you can just make out how wet BB is. And Z's sporting her beautiful new sun hat. Her skin is much fairer than either G or BB's so I'm making a special effort to keep her topped off at all times.

The finished boxes. They still require the square foot marking planks and of course the plants, but Drew wants to give the soil some time to settle/rest. The black stuff underneath is some of that weed cloth, which we'll trim down later, to keep not only the weeds and grass but the resident mole out of our business.

And the crown jewel of our gardening endeavor: our strawberry pot. Unfortunately, the thing only holds ten of our sixteen plants, so Drew put the rest next to the house (not in our SFG box) under the overhang to see how they might do. With any luck they might bear fruit, but there's the mole, squirrels, birds and any number of unknown-to-us soil problems to contend with. In any case, we plan on getting at least two or three other varieties of strawberry plants (from the local Earl May), the entirety of those two 3x3 boxes to be protected by a netting prescribed by Mel.

Sometimes of a Saturday morning I like to make muffins for breakfast, preferably blueberry. This morning in particular Drew thought it might be nice to first set them out on the back porch to cool a bit. But the girls were so anxious to eat them, they just stared out at them all the while, G protesting, "There's a fly out there and he's going to do a yucky on my muffin. And I don't want it."

Horror of horrors – Friday the 13th! – G turned four today.

G helped to make this delish chocolate buttermilk cake. You can't tell from the picture, but the frosting ended up being more like syrup because I mis-read how much chocolate I needed. But chocolate with cream is chocolate with cream, right?

For some reason, when I started the birthday song, it came out in Chinese, but there was more participation (on G's part) because of it. Poor BB was green with that same envy that G felt during BB's birthday. All day we talked about how BB's birthday had already passed; that she'd have to wait until next year for it to come again; how the last time G celebrated a birthday we were in Alaska; that this was G's cake and present.

At least we're all smiling nicely for this picture.

G got a set of wooden building blocks for her birthday. When she started playing with the blocks, she said she was like Jack: she's been associating elements of everyday life with elements from her storybooks lately. Note: She "read" an entire book to AhPoh when she called last night to wish the girl a Happy Birthday; and BB did her part to surprise by singing the entirety of a butterfly song.

I checked out an audio book – on cassette tape – from the library today thinking that there was a tape player in the car, but I was mistaken. Our last car, the Suzuki, had both a CD and cassette player; the Siena has only a six-CD player (and radio). I don't remember 8-tracks, but both our Datsun and Ford had those old analog AM/FM radios with the pull-push station keys. And my favorite album from my parents' vinyl collection was the Carpenters (with the brown jacket). Anyway I find I'm going to have to dig our tape player out in order to listen to this recording.

I half considered that my time away from the computer during this Lent might make me more anxious to post, but it's had the opposite effect: I haven't really thought of blogging and, consequently, though I know there's plenty to report, I really can't think of anything off the top of my head, mind all ahoo. In order to start somewhere, the following are the newest five pictures on the camera.

Here's an effort on my part to let them play in the kitchen sink (as opposed to the bathtub) more often. For one thing, it's easier to make bubbles and maintain them in said sink; and for another, with only one playing at a time, there's less possibility of a humungous mess and arguing/crying.

At last glance, everything finally has a sprout to it. The last to come up were the chili peppers, and before that were the mint, which had a bit of struggle because evidently we were supposed to sow them right on top of the soil and not cover them up. The "weeds" you see up top are the sweet pea and the strawberries are going strong.

This was a short-lived fifteen minutes in which Z seemed to have the paci figured out. But as I say, short-lived. After she churned it for a bit, she decided it wasn't for her and spurned the thing.

I had to smoosh the camera into my face to get this picture: too close up for the camera in my particular position. But I'm so fond of baby proportions that I didn't want to trust to my memory to keep such an image forever.

Drew and I attended our parish school's annual auction dinner over the weekend – an honest-to-goodness date night! Some friends in Alaska attended one last year so though we've never been to one ourselves I was passingly familiar with the program: the evening opens with dinner – BBQ sandwiches and the usual BBQ fixin's for the ranch theme – and silent auction on a large number of items, such as gift baskets, gift certificates, jewelry, sporting goods; followed by open outcry auction (like you see in the movies) on big ticket and handcrafted (by the students) items, e.g. a table and set of chairs that G's preschool class helped to paint, and with their handprints and names on the underside, LASIK surgery on two eyes, weekend packages to places like St Louis or Omaha or Eureka Springs. (I'm absolutely inspired to go to the last based on pictures and personal recommendations on the beauty of the area, northern Arkansas, in general.)

In the first part, Drew had his eye on this painting (left) by Don Smith, which I bid for him and didn't win; and I liked a Coldwater Creek scarf/shawl, and we were the only bidders. We also entered a raffle drawing for a new Sony digi cam, but I don't think our odds were very good. But arguably the most exciting part, the second, of the evening was the live auction. There was a lively volley for some items, like the reserved first pew for next year's first communion mass or the above-mentioned weekend getaways; others, not so much. Drew "won" for us dinner for two at Benton's Steak & Chop House: our anniversary dinner. The highest bidding of the evening went to a Miller (beer) neon sign ($1900) and dinner for ten with Fr Rogers ($1925). In the former, I wonder that the winner intended to pay as much as he did, being egged on as he was by the crowd and going head-to-head with a collector (and later getting a standing ovation); in the latter, Father told the crowd that it was our chance to redeem ourselves for bidding so much for a neon sign and offering only $100 for religious artwork done by students. But in fact, the top two bidders both agreed to pay said amount, so Father retains his reputation of being the biggest draw at the auction dinners.

At home, the girls reportedly had a good time with the babysitter, our pediatrician's oldest daughter, a college student. When I told G on Friday that Daddy and I were going out and that a "big sister" was coming to stay with them, she said she would show the big sister all their toys – and she did. There was no crying from anyone when we left, though G showed signs of balking as I was putting my shoes on; and everyone went to bed quietly and obediently when the time came. The only hitch was that Z's window overlooking the driveway was still open when we pulled up so that she started crying almost as soon as we turned into the drive. And getting up for mass the next morning was a little brutal what with daylight savings.

Poor Daddy thought he was confused trying to decipher the girls' English pronunciation and Chinese, now there's the new dimension: the hodgepodge combination using both, the same that I confused my family with. Today's example: G drew some pictures for him and wanted to gift two in particular. I assume she couldn't remember the English for "[pieces of] paper" so she substituted the Chinese – "Daddy, don't forget your two 'zhi'". Out of context, a Chinese phrase can sound like a lot of different things and Drew wasn't attending as he was looking for his watch, and he thought she said the Chinese for "rabbit", or "tu zi". Of course that put him off even more thinking, "What rabbit?" Add that to my resume: adept translator.

One of G's classmates found a live ladybug at school on Thursday – and that cued me to release our ladybug that evening. I'm kind of going to miss the little chap, but I'll be glad not to have to carefully balance his water supply anymore and his buzzing against the roof of his pie box won't startle me at night.

Interestingly, on Saturday, as I was heading back into the house from the back porch, a ladybug landed on my upper arm. I only glanced at him, for I was going to call G and BB to come see the ladybug, but maybe it was the same that I let loose: it was the same shade of orange but I couldn't swear to the dot pattern. I wonder how far ladybugs roam during their lifetime.

I bought Chutes and Ladders, among other things, at the consignment sale this week. When G wanted to play with it, I told her she'd need an adult to play along. She thought about this for a minute, and said, "But these kids," pointing to the box (left), "don't have an adult keeping them company."

I recently started reading a book on left-handedness, and I'm beginning to wonder that some of G's zingers are because she's a southpaw, wrt different hemispheres of the brain, left- and right-brain connectedness, etc. In the book there's a chapter on cutting (with scissors) – I learned there's no such thing as "universal" scissors because they're still right-hand biased – and it got me to thinking about the peculiar way she holds and uses her scissors: with the blades pointing downwards towards her. So I ordered her up two pairs of true left hand scissors, one for home and one for school.

Last week, I felt compelled to rotate the girls' clothes, go through every single item, which is not inconsiderable when you're trying to dress three of them. Naturally, G has the fewest amount of clothes – I could swear she recently got taller because there are a number of pants that were long enough yesterday and will now wait in the box for when BB can wear them. BB's got a decent set because even though I gave a lot of clothes away in the latest move, a lot of them were too cute not to keep and of course there was the great possibility that Z would be a girl, so Z's just rolling in the wealth. To give you an idea, I made three separate piles (to be sorted into drawers at a later date, i.e. when it's warmer): Z's was at least twice the size of either G or BB's. Thankfully there are two big kids' consignment sales (here and here) coming up and I hope to stock up on some summer items for G, and to a lesser degree BB.

The Costco blueberries out of Peru are fantastic! I hope when I go back, they still have some.

"My tummy hurts. I want to eat bwuebwerries [sic]."

So now maybe you're thinking you're tired of hearing (and seeing pictures) of the older girls, not getting enough of the baby. Well Z started making a new noise, which sounds a lot like la-la-la; but after watching her mouth a couple of times, I think it must be more like na-na-na because she holds her gums together – her single tooth isn't in the way yet – to make the noise, rather than putting her tongue to the roof of her mouth, if that makes any sense. If you tune BB out a bit – just can't get away from the older ones, no matter how hard we try –, you can catch Z do it a couple of times. I wish there were a good way for me to video her without her knowing.

February, for some reason, seemed a long-ish month to me, maybe because of Drew's trips; accordingly, I have a large number of pictures to post.

31 March 2009

30 March 2009

29 March 2009

28 March 2009

26 March 2009

25 March 2009

24 March 2009

23 March 2009

22 March 2009

21 March 2009

19 March 2009

18 March 2009

17 March 2009

16 March 2009

14 March 2009

13 March 2009

12 March 2009

11 March 2009

09 March 2009

08 March 2009

06 March 2009

05 March 2009

04 March 2009

01 March 2009