Sabriya’s Strawberry Birthday Party. She has a bunch of friends over: Nora, Towa, Natasha, Vincent, Lillian, and Jack. Last year’s theme was watermelons; this year it’s strawberries. The kids make some strawberry-themed crafts, and eat copious amounts of strawberry shortcake.
For good measure, there’s a piñata that shaped like a treasure chest with a big strawberry pinned on one side. (Confession: This piñata was purchased for Liya’s Pirate Backyardigans birthday party four years ago, but never used, and we decided its time had come.) Jan’s unsure about this, since he’s never seen a kid’s birthday party where the whole piñata thing actually worked anything like what was planned. Bree’s party turns out to be no exception.
To avoid injury, Jan corrals all the kids behind a “Hose of Safety” line back from the piñata, which is hanging from a backyard tree. Jack gives the piñata a modest hit and it instantly falls to the ground; the built-in loop for the rope has broken. Jan re-rigs the piñata and the kids try again. Another kid hits it and it falls to the ground again. Jan gives in and lets the kids whack the piñata on the ground until it cracks open. The piñata is shaken in the air by hand until all the candy falls out, whereupon the kids fall upon it and gorge themselves.
During dinner, Angela explains the concept of a pseudonym to Anya and Liya, offering as an example the possibility that a secret agent might operate under a pseudonym. Liya tries to think of which pseudonym she would use if she were a secret agent. She settles on the name, “Pumpkin Picante”.
The girls have started competing with each other to see who can drink the most milk each day. Tonight at dinner Anya proudly announces that she has single-handedly finished the quart carton of chocolate milk that had been delivered just this morning.
Cheetos on the grass…ah, summer!
Enjoying summer while she can
Here’s a (ahem) YouTube duckumentary highlighting Cozi’s successful setting of the world’s longest row of rubber duckies.
Family camping at Cougar Rock Campground, Mount Rainier National Park. Now that Bree is four years old, we think she’s ready (that is, we’re ready!) for camping. In previous years, Jan’s taken Anya and Liya while Angela’s stayed at home with Bree, so this will be our first family camping trip.
The drive down to the campground, on the southern side of Mt. Rainier, only takes a 2 1/2 hours or so, including a quick stop at a grocery store along the way to pick up shredded cheese for tomorrow night’s chili (can’t have chili without cheese, you know).
We set up our new family tent, which goes pretty quickly. Jan starts a fire, and Angela sets out the makings for a hamburger dinner. Liya and Anya are happy to take out the brand-new pocketknives they’ve just received from Uncle Chris. Their first whittling project is the same as that which has been given to all young homo sapiens from the dawn of time: sharpening sticks to toast marshmallows.
It’s a spectacular day, perfect for some hiking. Our plan is to do one of the hiking trails at Paradise, but the Cascades Mountains have received so much snow this spring that the trails are still buried in late July. After lunch at Paradise Inn, we walk around back to take the short hike to Myrtle Falls — only to discover a twenty-foot wall of snow blocking the way.
We head back down the mountain to the Carter Falls trailhead. It’s only 1.1 miles to the falls, but it’s all uphill, and Anya and Bree get tired out and keep stopping. Jan runs up ahead to the falls, and comes back to say that the girls still have another 10-15 minutes to go. Anya and Bree give up and want to go back, but Liya’s up for it, so Angela takes Liya all the way up to the falls. Meanwhile, Jan heads down with the other two. They make their way back to the rocky bed of the Nisqually River, and have a fun time making dams with rocks and glacial silt before Liya and Angela rejoin them.
Everyone eats a lot of chili for dinner. (Good thing we stopped to pick up cheese.) After cleaning up, we head to the campground’s amphitheater for a nature talk. All the girls get “National Park Junior Ranger” badges. Bree is particularly thrilled with hers.
When the early morning sun filters through the forest, if you’re very quiet you may see some friendly woodland creatures.
We break camp around 11:00, and stop by the ranger station on the way out so that Bree can turn in her Junior Ranger activity booklet to receive a Junior Ranger pin. As we drive out through the park, we play a game of “Rubberneckers”, a sort of travel bingo game in which players receive cards of things to look for. Some cards like, “Tree”, or even “Blue Car”, are pretty easy, but in this forest, everyone wants to avoid receiving urban cards like, “Skyscraper”.
We stop for lunch at the Railroad Diner in Elbe, Washington. The restaurant itself is fun — it’s constructed from a series of restored railroad cars — and the food’s not half-bad either.
Seattle to Amsterdam. This morning we set out on a 2+ week trip to Europe: Amsterdam, Paris, and the French Alps. We have our calmest departure from home yet, owing to the fact that earlier in the week, Angela had thought Tuesday night was Wednesday night, and so had gotten ready a day earlier than she’d planned. Jan’s mom drives us to the airport. The flight to Amsterdam is mostly okay. We know Bree never wants to sleep on a plane, so we give her some Benadryl, which has the desired effect of knocking her out for some of the flight. Anya hardly sleeps at all. The plane actually arrives early, so we have to wait on the tarmac for our gate.
Amsterdam, Day 1. It’s 8:30 am local time in Amsterdam, and we have to pass the day until 3:00 pm when we can check into our rented apartment. The catch is that it’s 11:30 pm back home, and so regardless of what the daylight says, our bodies feel like we’re all pulling an all-nighter. Our trip also gets off on something of the wrong foot when Liya gets sick getting off the plane; five minutes later, she throws up again in an airport bathroom. (Bree, for her part, is pretty excited that she sees a photo of tulips in the bathroom. She’d read a book set in Holland before the trip, and happily points out: “Tulips!”)
We fumble with the train ticket machine, then board a train for Centraal Station. Arriving at the station, Liya gets sick again three more times in quick succession. Urg. We can’t tell what’s wrong–maybe she’s just really, really tired? We check our bags in the station and then wander across a plaza to Smits Coffeehuis for some waffles and hot chocolate. Liya starts to revive a bit.
The girls are pretty excited to be in “Hamsterdam”. Jan and the girls spin increasinly implausibe stories about a city full of hamsters. Liya also enjoys reading Dutch on signs. A sign for a “doorgang” (passage) leads Liya to speculate about a gang of doors roaming the streets.
We’re struggling to think of an activity we can in our exhausted state, when we see a tour desk for a canal tour operator, and it hits us that a canal tour would be perfect. The girls alternate between looking around and lying down. Jan gets excited when the boat turns down the Herengracht canal, where our apartment is located, but the boat turns off before we pass our rental place.
We have lunch at Gebr Bakery, which has some great sandwiches; Anya and Liya enjoy their cheese plate. We ask a waiter to name the cheeses, and he tries a couple of times. Each time he starts in English, then ends his explanation in Dutch.
Back to the station to collect our bags, then a cab ride to our rental apartment at Herengracht 361. We’re met by the owner, a man named Wytse, who lets us in and talks us through everything. The house is charming: red with white trim, a Dutch step gable on top, right on a beautiful canal. Inside it’s pretty interesting. Most notable is the incredibly compact and steep traditional staircases–they’re more like ladders than stairs. A tumble would be bad news, so every single time Bree goes up and down is something of a heart-stopping sight. Anya takes a room on the third floor, while Liya and Bree take the very top room room on the fourth floor. It has a small window that looks out onto the canal. Also visible from the window is the hoisting beam that’s used to get big stuff into and out of the house (to avoid the ladder-like stairs).
Everyone passes out on their beds instantly. When Jan’s alarm wakes us up for dinner two hours later, all the girls have to be shaken awake and dragged out of bed. They shamble, zombie-like, as we walk to the nearby Jordaan area in search of dinner. Anya starts to melt, so we stop at the next nice quasi-familiar restaurant we see, which happens to be Xinh, a Vietnamese place. They give a nice wide booth in the back, in which Anya and Liya lie down and pass out again. We have to keep rousing them through the meal to try and get them to eat something. They wake up a bit after the meal when we see a playground outside the restaurant. While they play, Jan gets cash and goes shopping in a supermarket for groceries for breakfast. The first bit of fun is trying to identify which kind of the 20 kinds of Dutch-labeled milk to get. Jan watches someone pick up a carton of “biologische halfvolle melk”, which Jan’s phone tells him isorganic semi-skim milk; that’ll do. Jan pays at the register, and then begins to pack up the purchase, only to learn that everyone’s expected to bring their out bag. He has to shell out more change for a reusable bag.
Back at the apartment, the girls become wide awake. We finally get everyone in bed and back asleep at 11:00 pm.
We’re staying in the red house.
Amsterdam, Day 2. We eat breakfast at the apartment, then make a pleasant short walk through narrow streets and along canals to the Rembrandt House Museum. There are beautiful and interesting scenes around every corner. The girls enjoy watching swans in the canals. We all watch as a moving company uses a sort of portable escalator to load furniture into the door on the second floor of a narrow house.
We all find Rembrandt’s house pretty interesting. We enter through the kitchen, where Anya and Liya take out sketchbooks we bought for the trip. They spend a long time in the kitchen drawing ewers and urns with pastels. Bree follows their example, scribbling in her own notebook with markers. The most fascinating bit of old Dutch home life is probably the box beds: sort of like armoires containing small beds in which Rembrandt & co. slept sitting up. The only downside to the house is that it doesn’t display much actual work by Rembrandt.
We have a good lunch at nearby Cafe Tis Firs, then walk back to the apartment. In the afternoon we walk to a nearby bike rental outfit. They don’t have any bikes small enough for Anya and Liya, but instead they rent us a tandem bike and a bakfiets, a cargo bike with a wheelbarrow-sized box in front. We’ve seen parents pedaling them around town with kids in the front, and it looks like fun. Jan tries out the bakfiets with Liya and Bree in the cargo box. It’s really wobbly, but manageable. We leave the bike store, and almost immediately find ourselves biking through crowded Leidseplein square. Both the tandem bike and the bakfiets are quite hard to maneuver, so biking through crowds is somewhat nerve-straining.
We bike all the way to the north end of Jordaan and back. We stop at a place called Pancake House for dinner. Everyone ends up with enormous crepes, some savory, some sweet. Bree orders an “Animal Pancake”, which turns out to come with a little stuffed leopard gift. Bree loves it, and names it, “Spot-It”, after a playing card game of the same name. Afterwards we pick up some more groceries, then head back to the apartment.
Amsterdam, Day 3. We ride our tandem bike and bakfiets to Centraal Station to catch the bus to Zaanse Schans, an open-air Dutch historical museum. We get there with some time to spare until the bus leaves, so we decide to get some coffee and hot chocolate at Smits again. As soon as we hand the incredibly hot cups of cocoa to Bree and Liya, the two girls bump into each other, and Liya ends up with scalding liquid down her pant leg. By the time everything settles down, we’ve missed the bus. Angela bikes back to the house to get new pants for Liya, and comes back just in time to miss the next bus. We wait for another half hour for the bus after that, finally getting to Zaanse Schans far later than we’d planned. Everyone’s already hungry again, so we eat lunch in the museum cafe.
We walk around Zaanse Schans, which feels a bit like Mystic Seaport. The highlight is probably the klompenmakerij (clog factory) where we see a demonstration of how they make wooden clogs. We also clamber up inside a working old-style windmill, enjoy a great apple turnover at the bakery museum, and wander through a garden.
Back in Amsterdam, we bike past the Nemo science museum, and park at the Bibliotheek public library. The inside of the building turns out to be as interesting as the outside. Anya sees a piano in the library’s atrium, which is open to playing by the public. Anya plays a few pieces, and a couple of people stop to listen. We eat dinner across the way at Sea Garden, a floating Chinese restaurant. Anya’s unhappy we didn’t order any ma-po tofu, and we promise her that if we eat most of the food we’ve already ordered, we’ll order the tofu for her. We end up ordering it, and it’s quite good; she gorges herself on it.
The evening comes with yet another shopping expedition, this time for some sundries missing from the apartment. Anya’s reward from accompanying Jan on the tandem bike is that she gets to pick a snack: pickles, of course. She almost accidentally buys sweet pickles (which she doesn’t like), but we finally decode the labels and get the right kind (“zuur” for “sour”). We have some similar excitement puzzling over shampoo and conditioner until a Dutch man helpfully translates them for us so we avoid getting shampoo designed for people with colored hair.
Amsterdam, Day 4. Squabbling among the girls leads to a late start to the day. We bike to the Rijksmuseum to see the Rembrandt and Vermeer galleries; with the girls in tow, we’re only counting on about an hour’s worth of museum time before they lose interest. That guess works out just about right. The girls like the fact that Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch” includes a young girl with a chicken hanging from her belt. They also like a small gallery featuring the work of Dick Bruna, the creator of Miffy Bunny.
We leave the museum to eat lunch at the nearby Cobra Cafe on the Museumplein. It’s a wonderfully sunny day, and we can look out over a beautiful scene from the cafe patio: kids playing in the playground, a huge grassy lawn, and lots of people walking around. The girls have great fun playing on a sculpture of giant letters that spell the slogan, “I Am Amsterdam”. After lunch, Angela goes back to the museum to browse a bit longer in peace, while Jan and girls wade in a giant pool. Bree of course gets soaking wet, but we’ve got a spare outfit for her with us.
In our time in Amsterdam, Jan’s discovered that wearing a collared shirt and slacks is likely to get him taken for a local guy. Wear a t-shirt, people say, “Good morning!” Wear a collared shirt: “Goedemorgen!” When Jan pedals the girls around in the bakfiets bike, t-shirt-wearing tourists snap photos of them.
We bike to the Vondelpark, the largest park in Amsterdam. It seems like half the city is out to enjoy the perfect weather. We’re drawn to the Melkhaus (creamery?), where we snack on ice cream bars. The girls spend a good hour and a half playing in a sandy playground. At one point we’re alarmed to realize that we can’t see Bree, and there’s a bit of rising panic before we find her a short distance away. She’d gotten a bit turned around, and had herself started to get worried about finding us. Whew.