Tonight Anya had a total meltdown during dinner—over a slice of bread. She wanted her slice cut in half, and Angela ended up giving her two halves from different slices. It was really, really important to her that both halves come from the same slice. This point was apparently worth proving with a half-hour meltdown.
We had to “put down” the mountain ash tree in our backyard today. It was a beauutiful tree, but it had had some sort of sickness for years, so we knew this day would eventually come. The tree finally split right down the middle, and threatened to fall into the neighbor’s yard. An arbosirist came to cut the tree down, and all we were left with was firewood.
Jan and Satoru (passing through Seattle again) played with a “fire piston” Jan bought a while back as part of the lead-up to Caveman Barbeque. On a recent episode of “Survivorman”, host Les used a fire piston to start a fire. With this device, you basically slam a wooden piston into a cylinder, compressing the contained air quickly to heat it up–in principle hot enough to ignite a coal. The video showed him trying once, and immediately getting a coal he could use to start a fire. Jan and Satoru tried about 30 times, and were only able to get a coal once. Somewhat disappointing, and our hands were a bit bruised from all the slamming, but it was still kind of cool that it worked at all.
Anya and Liya went with Jan this afternoon to see a musical, “A Year with Frog and Toad”, at the Moore Theater. The girls especially liked the silly way the man playing the Snail walked.
What? No Trades? Jan remembers the shame of not having trade-able food in his lunchboxes in grade school. I remember having weird food, such as a Pork Sung sandwich. So, in an effort to protect our daughter from lunchbox faux pas, we stuff her lunchbox with yummy, trade-able, recognizable foods, some of which are actually healthy. Then we found out that kids aren’t allowed to trade foods in the lunchroom anymore. Whaaa–?!?
This weekend the first baby gate went up in our house – the first time in two years we’ve had to deal with one.
Liya’s going to kindergarten in the fall. We were elated to hear that this coming September, Liya will be attending the same school as Anya! Liya’s birthday is just before the cutoff, and we spent a long time thinking it over before deciding to have her start kindergarten in the fall. It should be fun for both Anya and Liya to go to school with their sister, and we’re glad that we’ll finally have only one school to commute to!
At the SCDS Spring Concert tonight, Anya’s class sang, “How Do You Talk to a Dinosaur?” The kindergartners were followed by all the other grades except the 8th graders. Jan and Anya had fun seeing how much bigger the kids in each progressive grade got. Overall the evening was fun, and it ended on an exciting note: as everyone left Town Hall, the kids began to shriek when they realized it was snowing.
Mmmmmm, Cheerios!
Today I fed Cheerios to Bree for the first time. She immediately dived in and ate them all, making MMMM sounds and giggling all along.