Angela’s started over her baby blanket knitting project. Her knitting technique is much improved since she began the first attempt (the “manta ray” blanket), and this time she’s been extra, extra careful to count stitches. She’s undoing the first blanket as she goes. Jan calls the emerging new blanket, “Son of Manta Ray Blanket.”
Anya holding Sabriya
This week is Cozi’s summer vacation week, so Jan had the chance to see Anya and Liya’s swimming lesson today at Medgar Evers pool. Anya scraped her knee running around on the way into the pool, and was in such a funk that she didn’t get in until the last five minutes of her lesson. Liya jumped right in for her lesson. She can do a great crawl now, and is learning to tread water. Liya’s also getting completely comfortable putting her head in the water.
Today her instructor was teaching her to do the elementary backstroke. “Bring your arms in like a chicken! Put them out like an airplane! Down at your sides like a soldier! Chicken! Airplane! Soldier! Chicken! Airplane! Soldier!” Liya loves her instructor.
The Blue Angels have returned to Seattle this week. As part of their airshow and preparation, six Navy F/A-18A Hornet jets pass repeatedly over our house, often just a few hundred feet up. They are LOUD. In recent years they’ve stopped supersonic flights over Seattle, so the Blue Angels no longer actually rattle the windows and set off car alarms throughout the neighborhood like they used to, but they’re still really LOUD. Did we mention that they’re LOUD?
Astonishingly, Sabriya manages to sleep through most of it.
Our little hapa haole club: Sabriya, Anya, Emily, Piper, Elena, Sydney, Alexander, Liya
Our friend Beth, who lives in Japan, comes to Seattle each summer with her girls Emily and Elena. (Jan went to school with Beth at Waseda University in Tokyo way back when.) This year they had a packed itinerary, but we caught up with them at the home of our friends Joe and Kristina Belfiore. We also had a chance to meet the Belfiore’s new twin daughters, Piper and Sydney!
We went to the wedding reception of our friends Angel and Leah today. They got married earlier this month (7/7/07) in Vancouver when Sabriya was due to arrive, so we couldn’t be there for the wedding itself. Luckily they held a local reception for their Seattle friends. In accordance with their style, they held the reception at… a bowling alley. It was nice to meet their friends and relatives, plus we had a chance to show the girls bowling. Anya and Liya seemed to enjoy rolling the ball down the lane, and the little railings that helpfully block off the gutter for little kids dutifully steered the ball towards the pins. Jan ended up with the lowest score.
“Gecko Girl” Anya likes to climb up the door jambs throughout the house. If someone tries to walk through while she’s wedged high up in the doorway, she generally demands that they give her a password before she’ll let them through. She’ll be doing 5.12 technical climbs at Vertical World before we know it.
Sabriya reached her original due date today!
Sabriya’s doing very well. She’s probably over 7 1/2 pounds by now, pushing 8. Angela’s doing well too, and is getting back to a normal routine. (Today she was out of the house for almost the whole day.)
Now all we have to deal with is your garden variety total sleep deprivation.
Jan attended Cozi’s quasi-annual all-company offsite meeting today. This year it was held at the University of Washington’s Botanical Gardens. The setting was great, and the offsite was fun. The only bad thing was that Seattle had its first really hot day in weeks, and by the afternoon the meeting room was sweltering.
Anya beat Jan in a game of Go before bedtime this evening. This win was possible only with a mammoth handicap (9 stones on a 9x9 board), but it was still a really fun game. Angela had fun watching too.
Angela is now back up to cooking dinners for the family again. Yay! Day one: steak, corn, and bread-the steak was even grilled on our new kitchen range, and the hood successfully sucked away all the smoke (quite a contrast to the time we invited people over for hamburgers and had to eat while the fire alarm was going off). Angela loves our new kitchen remodel!
Zucchini cars at the Cozi summer picnic. This year’s event was hosted at the home of Sam Bergin and her husband Chris. They live on a horse farm waaaay out in the country southeast of Seattle. Anya and Liya enjoyed the pony rides and the bouncy house. The most interested activity was probably the zucchini car races set up by Joanna Powers and her husband Mike. All the kids (and some adults) created cars by sticking wheels and decorations on pieces of zucchini and racing them down a cool four-lane track. Jan’s zucchini went faster than most, but was ultimately bested. The girls enjoyed adding gummy bear drivers to their zucchini cars. We also had fun introducing everyone to baby Bree.
Angela got a look on Friday. What do you think?
Jan’s stepsister Anne is visiting Seattle with her husband Jon and their kids Henry and Katie. They stopped this afternoon to visit.
Our friends Satoru and Hiroko Nakanishi came down from Vancouver with their eight month-old boy Towa. We all walked down the street to eat a picnic dinner in Madison Park, where a summertime concert happened to be playing. We ran into numerous neighborhood folks, and ended up hanging out way past the girls’ bedtime.
Anya made a fun little mask for herself last week.
Sabriya is a great burper. She’s very reliable, and hardly ever spits up. Yay.
With all the commotion since May (and all the recent lousy weather), it hasn’t felt much like summer. We haven’t even done most of our usual summertime activities, let alone gone for a trip somewhere. Still, today Jan and the girls finally made it a Lake Washington beach for an afternoon of sand and water. Madrona Beach is close by, and has a cool feature: a water pump at the head of the beach that creates a river of water running over the sand down to the lake. This creates some serious dam-building (and dam-destroying) possibilities. The girls also got to show off how much they’ve improved their swimming technique this summer. Liya treaded water in water over her head, and Anya swam out to the first floating rope and back.
One of our daughters is a very, very determined individual. This daughter—who shall remain nameless—complained today that her underwear was too tight. Upon inspection, it was determined that she had the underwear oriented the wrong way, but had nevertheless managed to jam her entire waist through one of the leg holes. :)
Bree is just on the verge of starting to smile. A few times today we looked at her and she looked back with a tiny, fleeting smile before reverting to her “Curious” expression. At one point Angela got a big open-mouthed Bree smile, but Jan missed it.
Happy 4th Birthday, Liya! Liya turned four today. We had seven of her friends over for an afternoon party: Annika, Audrey, Ella, Jacob, Lily, Katie, and Maddy.
When asked months ago what kind of party Liya wanted, she’d replied, “A Backyardigans Pirate party”. The Backyardigans are her (and Anya’s) favorite TV show, and there’s one episode where the characters play at being pirates and say “Arrgh!” a lot. There are tons of Backyardigan-themed party favors and pirate-themed party favors, so we did our best to combine the two. Angela marked up a Backyardigans banner, for example, with a black marker to give each of the characters an eye patch.
Jan didn’t think it would be much of a pirate party without a treasure hunt, so he spent a good portion of the past week designing a custom Backyardigans Pirate-themed treasure hunt for Liya and her friends. Designing a treasure hunt with clues and maps turned out to be complicated by the fact that most four year-olds can read neither clues nor maps.
The final treasure hunt only depended on the kids’ ability to read their own name and individual alphabet letters. Each child was given a little card with their name on it and a letter. They searched around the backyard (Backyardigans, see?) for a big letter that matched the card they held. Underneath the matching letter, they found another card with their name on it and another letter to find. By following a sequence of letters, they were eventually directed to the letter “X”, which marked a wooden treasure chest. Each of the cards the child had just collected had a picture puzzle piece on the back; assembling the pieces created a picture of a Backyardigans pirate character. Looking in the treasure chest, the child found a bunch of little party favor boxes, each marked with a Backyardigans pirate character. The child got to keep the box marked with the picture in the puzzle they’d just assembled.
The hunt went well. Each child had a different sequence of letters to follow around the yard, so the kids didn’t end up all traveling in a giant pack. The number of letters each child needed to collect was also geared to their age. Katie, one of the oldest kids at the party, finished the hunt first—just seconds ahead of her sister Annika, the youngest child there.
After the treasure hunt, Angela led all the kids through a craft project: making a little pirate ship and sailing it across our wading pool. This activity, too, was a hit.
Overall a good time was had by everyone. Happy Birthday, Liya!
Yesterday Anya’s new school, where she will begin kindergarten next week, held orientation meetings for both parents and new students. Anya was fine going to the school and meeting her teacher Ms. Leunow, but when it came time for us to leave, she freaked out. We eventually managed to join the parent orientation—only to have a teacher come get us a few minutes later to say Anya was still upset. We went back, calmed her down, and tried again, with the same result. Sigh.