This evening over dinner at Bing’s, Anya was singing a song she’d learned at school that included words something like “watching channel 4”. Anya then paused and said, “What’s a channel, anyway?”
This incident goes on my list of technology paradigm generation gaps. Also on the list: When we visited a hotel a few years ago that didn’t have TiVo, Anya was baffled as to what we meant when we said her favorite program wasn’t “on”. And: This past summer, we happened to be in our basement with the girls and pulled out some photo albums that predate their birth and the digital camera era. The girls were confused: “Why are those pictures in little books?”
Liya’s sentences. These days I stress out about how “smart” Liya is. We would like her to attend Anya’s school, which requires a 97 or above percentile on some random intelligence test. While Anya progressed fairly predictably, learning letters & phonics before words before sentences, Liya seems more sporadic. She still struggles with some letters yet she (at barely 4) can write complete sentences! Here are the sentences Liya writes:
i love u…mommy love liya…liya love daddy…anya love bree…liya love anya…liya love mommy… Ah, the ways we parents convince ourselves of our children’s superior intelligence!
Are they getting younger, or are we getting older? We love to shop at all the local stores in Madison Park’s little three-block village. Since moving here years ago, one place we’ve always passed by is a clothing store called The Yankee Peddler. The clothes were just way too fuddy-duddy for us—aimed at older people, apparently. Recently we both independently rediscovered this store. Their offerings aren’t so bad now. Really, they’ve become quite nice, stylish even. It’s impressive how much this boutique has been able to change so that their products now appeal to us. Hey, wait a minute…
This afternoon Jan, Anya, and Liya built an AM radio using Anya’s recent birthday gift: a Snap Circuits set. It was very cool to snap all the parts together, switch it on, and hear a DJ’s voice coming out of the little speaker. For Jan the coolness was mitigated somewhat by the fact that he had no idea how the circuit actually worked, and the instruction book provided no explanation either. For their part, Anya and Liya were puzzled as to what a radio is or does, since we never listen to the radio at home, and when they’re in the car with us we listen almost exclusively to CDs. Still, it was a fun way to spend some time together this afternoon.
With all the leaves falling now, Anya has resumed singing one of her favorite fall songs—a song she made up a few years ago. She sings it to the tune she learned in preschool as, “Sand in My Sandals”, which is the same as a Japanese children’s song she knew called, “Musunde Hiraite”:
All of the trees
Have no leaves,
no leaves.
All of the trees have
no leaves.
Monster dental hygiene. Liya was making monster sounds at bedtime because she didn’t want to brush her teeth. Angela explained: “If you’re a monster, you need to brush your teeth. Monsters always take very good care of their teeth—because a monster without teeth is just not very scary.” Thus informed, the Liya monster consented to having her teeth brushed.
Zap! After dinner we enjoyed some fresh home-baked cookies—and did some more Snap Circuits experiments. The last was the best: a water alarm circuit that made a sound when two wire leads were placed in a cup of water. Anya and Liya eventually learned that, when their fingers were wet, their own bodies would conduct electricity (a mild amount from some AA batteries). Jan had each girl hold one of the wire leads in one hand, then touch the other girl with their other hand. Each time they did this, the speaker went off. We all thought this was hilarious. You could even say this circuit induced laughter.
Overheard at the breakfast table this morning, one girl to another: “Stop whistling at my food!”
Then they started thinking of other things the other girl shouldn’t whistle at. They they started arguing over whose turn it was to name something that the other girl shouldn’t whistle at.
Liya’s been a little worried about bears recently, but Grandma made her feel better by saying that we just needed to put a sign on our door that said, “No Bears”. Liya diligently made a “No Bears” sign, and Grandma helped put this on the front door. The sign is now underneath the “No Solicitors” sign that was already there. So now we’re pretty much covered.
This morning Jan noticed that Sabriya’s left eye looked different than the day before: the eyelashes on her left eye were pointing up, while the eyelashes on her right eye were pointing down. We eventually realized that the epicanthic fold on her left eye had finally revealed itself, so that eye now looks more Caucasian than the right. Presumably this will happen to the right eye later. (That’s what happened with Liya.) For now it’s kind of funny that her eyes look different.
Anya had her very first sleepover last night. She stayed at the home of her friend Katie Harding up the street. As it turned out, Katie’s part of the neighborhood lost power in the early evening. Jan stopped by to check on them, but they were all having a good time by candlelight. In the morning, it seemed that both Katie and Anya were a little sad to have the fun end.
Liya wants to have a sleepover too. She asked Jan, “Daddy, can you call Maddy’s mommy and see when I can have a sleepover?” She paused, then added, “It would have to be when I am five.”
Anya self portrait
Milestones Galore. Today:
-Anya successfully used chopsticks to take pickles out of the pickle jar
-Sabriya drooled and started losing her newborn hair
-Liya successfully ordered friends & family by age and ranked them by how much she likes them AND last but not least
-Angela put all 3 girls to bed by herself, by 8PM!
Puffy AmiYumi: cutest possible rock duo plays in Seattle. Jan went to the Puffy AmiYumi concert at Seattle’s Moore Theater tonight with friend Bruce Ryan (visiting from Memphis). This pair of singers is so unbelievably popular in Japan that they comprise an entertainment/fashion complex unto themselves and routinely fill huge venues—but in Seattle they can only fill half of a fairly intimate concert hall. Their eclectic mix of songs cover a wide swath of the pop-rock spectrum, which made for an odd blend of concertgoers. Jan sat/stood next to three Japanese twentysomething women who shouted “Kawaii!” (Cute!) for most of the first half hour, further to the sides there were some older guys rocking out, while in the next row back two kids that couldn’t have been older than seven fell asleep after the third song. (Puffy has their own kids’ animated show in the U.S. on the Cartoon Network.) Between songs Ami-chan and Yumi-chan gamely read in English from little prepared notes, saying nice things about Seattle and their tour of Starbucks headquarters. The show tended to the thrashing guitar-and-drums side of the Puffy spectrum, but was nevertheless high energy and fun all around. Oh, and cute.
Bree is starting to lose her baby hair.
Not a bowl. Jan: Liya, you can’t have a raspberry cup for dessert. Mommy just said you had a bowl of ice cream.
Liya: No, I didn’t! I didn’t. I didn’t have a bowl!
Angela: She had an ice cream bar on a stick.
Liya keeps waking up in the middle of the night, often simply because she has a stuffy nose and can’t breathe properly. One of us has to get up and give her a tissue, but there’s a problem: Liya can’t always manage to blow out through her nose. She gets confused, and blows out through her mouth, or else she inhales through her nose instead of exhaling.
Tonight we tried a game inspired by Stacy Lewis: Jan put a piece of tissue paper on a table, and had Liya try moving it by exhaling through her nose. Once she had the general hang of it, they played a little game to see who could blow the paper all the way to the other person’s side of the table. Anya couldn’t resist joining in. The game ended with much huffing, puffing, and laughing.
This morning Angela enlisted the help of Anya and Liya in cleaning the floor of the dining room in preparation for Thanksgiving dinner. The girls went a bit overboard with the cleansing solution, so Angela gave them rags to help mop up the floor. To make things more fun, she tied the rags in little slippers around each of their feet. The girls happily “skated” all over the room until the job was done.
We had Angela’s cousin Ty over for dinner, along with his wife Susana and their daughter Zoe. We had all the usual dishes—roast turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes, green beans, gravy—plus a “corn souffle” recipe from Jan’s coworker Bridget McDonald. This consisted of just enough corn bread to hold two pounds of cheese together. It came out pretty good, and Jan and Ty couldn’t eat enough of it.
Beautiful weather for the second day in a row, so Jan really wanted to go for a walk this afternoon. This ended up taking the form of an “adventure” with the girls to retrieve his car from regular service at a dealership downtown. With the girls along, even a couple of bus rides, a walk, and a stop at Whole Foods is a pretty satisfying adventure. After retrieving the car, we topped off the trip with a stop in the Arboretum for a walk. The girls played a game of “Doggies” inspired by friend Maggie Tai: Jan threw sticks, while the girls presented to be dogs that fetched the sticks.
Now that it’s past Thanksgiving, Seattle Center has opened their annual holiday ice rink. This year both Anya and Liya got out on the ice. They started on the great aluminum “walkers” they offer kids. (Purpose of walkers, as stated on the wall: “To save adults’ backs”.) Anya eventually gained the confidence to shuffle around without the walker, and Liya tried that for a while too. Jan held Sabriya on the side, who slept through the whole thing.
Afterwards we met up with our friends Philip and Jennifer Yu. After sharing a snack, their son Kaiden wanted to go skating—so back we went to the ice rink. This time Angela held Sabriya while Jan skated with the girls.
Another hour of skating later, the girls were both exhausted. They managed to hold it together through dinner with Philip and Jennifer until we got home and they could collapse in bed.
Kiwi! It’s harvest time once again. We have three giant kiwi vines that run along our backyard fence. They mature late in the season, so we’re also trying to let them stay on the vine as long as possible. In past years we’ve been caught out by an early frost, so in general we try to harvest around Thanksgiving. Since today was yet another sunny day, we decided not to push our luck any more and bring in all the kiwi. Anya and Liya helped Jan do this, and it still took the better part of an hour. They ended up harvesting two big boxes of kiwi, which weighed in at about 80 pounds. The kiwi have to ripen for a while indoors before they’re ready, and even then Angela thinks they’re too sour. The best solution for this is to make kiwi ice cream, since enough sugar and heavy cream can make pretty much any fruit taste yummy. The only problem there is that each batch of ice cream only needs a dozen kiwi or so, which means we can’t get rid of it fast enough that way. Our neighbors and coworkers should prepare themselves for entreaties to take home kiwi.
Jan’s birthday is coming up, so Angela was talking about gift-giving with the girls. Liya thought for a few minutes, then said,”We should give Daddy blocks! Daddy likes blocks.” Too bad we already have Lego Duplo blocks, regular Lego blocks, Logiblocks, Jenga blocks, domino blocks, Cuboro blocks, foam blocks, … you get the idea.
Jan went to Palo Alto for a board meeting.
Yesterday Liya visited Dr. Fred Provenzano as part of an evaluation that officially kicks off our school application process for Liya for Fall 2008.