Anya accidentally attends her first fencing tournament. Jan takes Anya to her Saturday morning fencing class at the normal time, but it turns out that today there’s a small fencing tournament. (Anya’s missed the last two classes, so we didn’t know the tournament was happening.) Everyone assumes she’s come to participate, and so she’s added to the group of eight kids who are about to start.
For her first (unintentional) tournament, Anya does pretty well! There’s a round-robin phase, in which she has to fence a bout with four other students. She’s one of the one or two youngest and inexperienced fencers, but holds her own. (She’s on the left in the photo against an older student.) She wins one bout, and in the other three stills scores some points. Her best bout is with an older boy who’s probably #3 among the fencers participating, and shows very good form. Anya, not altogether sure of everything she’s doing, nonetheless manages to get two touches on him, and so for a brief time leads 2–1. He eventually wins 5–3, but it’s still impressive she could remain cool in the face of a more experience attacker. After each bout, she seems flush with adrenalin.
The first round is followed by a single-elimination round. The tournament brackets put Anya into a bout with Andrea, a girl who’s been practicing for 5 years, and competes in tournaments regularly, and ranks #2 among the participants. Andrea makes short work of Anya, but afterwards gives Anya some friendly encouragement to keep practicing and be more aggressive in her fencing.
Anya’s final standing is 7 out of 9. For the rest of the day, she keeps saying, “I’m so glad I was in the fencing tournament!” Given that she likely would have never come had she known about the tournament beforehand, this is an especially gratifying outcome.
Spring Concert. The school holds their annual concert at Town Hall downtown. Bree’s kindergarten class and the 8th grade class start the evening off with the song, “When I Grow Up” (from the musical, “Matilda”), made all the more poignant by seeing little 6 and 7 year-old children surrounded by 15 and 16 year-olds on their way to being young adults.
Angela teaches a class on covering boxes with colorful Japanese washi paper. She learned how to do this while we were in Japan, where it’s perhaps more of an expatriate craft than a genuine tradition — but the results are pretty nonetheless. She offered the class as a buy-in item for the school auction, and five girls were happy to join Anya and Liya in making boxes. At the end they all showed off their work.
For Mother’s Day, Sabriya and Liya cook brunch (with Jan’s overseeing things). The menu: dutch babies, bacon, and a fruit salad with almond jello that Anya made earlier. Jan’s mom joins us too. After lunch, Anya instigates the next part of the plan: a family bike ride. We try Bree out on the trail-a-bike (in preparation for the upcoming Bike to School day). We bike around Madison Park, then pump up some hills to get to the nearby Madrona neighborhood. We have ice cream at Molly Moon’s, then glide all the way back down hill to our house.
Jan finally completes his goal to memorize the first 1,000 Japanese kanji, in preparation for the Japanese proficiency test this coming December. He’s tried to reach this point several times before, but with the help of an iPad app, he finally makes it. (The photo shows his progress halfway through, with little kanji squares progressing from red to green on their way to being memorized.) There’s still a long way to go, and many more characters to learn, but this is a nice step.
Bree is highly distractible these days. When asked to pick up her room, she will bend down to pick up something, but if she can’t put it away in the first three seconds, she’ll begin playing it. When reminded that she’s supposed to be picking up her room, she’ll say, “Oh! Right!” She’ll put away the object she’s holding, then pick up another thing, and immediately become distracted by it.
Cleaning up in this way at bedtime takes forever.
As we get ready for bike season, most of the family has relatively new bikes — except for Jan, who last purchased a bike back when he was single. The girls decide a new bike would make a good early Father’s Day present. Angela surprises Jan by taking him on an unexpected afternoon outing that ends at Gregg’s Cycle in Greenlake. He finds a good, reasonably priced bike, but they don’t have the right model at the Greenlake location. They do have the right model at the Bellevue store, so it’s off to Bellevue. The catch is that Angela hasn’t allotted quite enough time for a trip to the east side of Lake Washington and back, so she may not have time to stick around while the purchase is completed and the bike’s made ready. They think. Hmm, if only there were some way to transport a bicycle from Bellevue to Seattle…
The fact that the weather is nice today makes the bike ride home even better.
Bike to School day. This year, Jan and Bree make the 6 mile morning trip to school. Bree rides on a trail-a-bike that lets her pedal while still letting Jan steer and do the bulk of the work. (Jan’s delighted to use his new bike for this purpose!) Liya elects not to bike in this year, and Anya decides she’d rather wait week or two and go with Jan on her own.
The girls have gotten into caring for houseplants. This started a few months ago, when we made them start taking care of a plant to prove they were responsible enough to care for a hamster. Since then they’ve asked to go to garden stores several times. Today Anya implores Jan to take them to Swanson’s Nursery in North Seattle. She likes the garden cafe they have there, where you can eat a simple lunch surrounded by plants. After lunch, the girls carefully shop for a houseplant they can afford with their spending money. To stretch their money further, some of the purchases are “shared” plants, jointly purchased and owned by two girls.
On the ride to school, Anya shares a story about the lamest piñata ever. When she was in the school’s K–3 division, the Spanish teacher wanted to have the kids see how much fun a traditional piñata is. However, the teacher was concerned about blindfolded kids swinging a stick around in the classroom. Her solution was to rig up a piñata with a bunch of ribbons hanging down from it. One of the ribbons connected to a flap that opened the bottom of the piñata; the other ribbons were simply taped to the piñata.
The teacher had all the kids line up for a turn pulling a ribbon. This was not particularly exciting to begin with. One of the first kids in line began to reach for a particular ribbon, but the teacher saw that was the ribbon that would open the piñata and told the child to pick a different ribbon. Many of the remaining ribbons were taped together. When a child pulled one of those, several other ribbons would often get pulled off too. The teacher would stick those back on so that each child would have a ribbon to pull.
Finally, one student pulled the ribbon that opened the piñata. Instead of a cascade of candy pieces, what came out instead were little ziploc bags containing exactly equal amounts of candy. Not all the bags fell out, so the teacher had to reach inside and pull out many of the bags. Each baggie was labeled with a child’s name. Everyone had to sort through the bags to find the one with their name on it so they could get their designated few pieces of candy. Finally, much of the candy turned out to be candy Anya didn’t actually like.
Looking back, Anya feels that this whole arrangement pretty much squished all potential fun out of the piñata experience.
Bree’s kindergarten class visits Tillicum Village on Blake Island. Jan chaperones Bree and three of her classmates as they take a ferry over to the island, then spend a few hours watching Native American dances, listening to folk stories, and eating a lunch of traditionally-prepared salmon. (Bree’s not so interested in the latter.) The storyteller’s the most engaging part of the day, and shares a number of stories about Raven, the trickster spirit.
We make a short afternoon ferry trip to Bainbridge Island. On the trip there, the girls have fun playing Uno with A-kon. (He and Bree work together as a single player. For some reason, he wears his sun hat indoors.) A-kon’s a pretty competitive player at any game, and is disappointed to lose to Anya.
We walk off the ferry into some light drizzle, but it’s still a pleasant walk into the town of Winslow. We shop for a bit, browse at the bookstore, have dinner at Cafe Nola, and finish up with ice cream at Mora Creamery.
On the ride back, A-kon finally triumphs in an Uno rematch.
We celebrate Memorial Day with Angela’s parents and family friends Truman, Audrey, Simon, and Zelia. The weather’s nice, so we break out the charcoal grill to cook up some Copper River salmon. Jan observes that it’s fortunate the salmon wait to give up their lives until the the start of grilling season.
Liya’s grade puts on a performance of the musical, “Honk!”, by Stiles and Drewe. Liya and four other “Snow Ladies” sing a song called “The Blizzard”, during which the lost cygnet hero of the story is covered by snow. The photo shows her and her friend, Zelia.
Anya rigs up a swing of sorts by hanging ropes through the light well between the first and second floors. Because earlier swing designs left marks on the walls, the girls aren’t allowed to actually swing much, but they still enjoy hanging in the air. We’re mulling over how we can protect the walls a bit better and permit a normal swing.
Jan picks Anya up from school a bit early so they can head up to Friday Harbor on San Juan Island. Since Anya’s fond of orca whales (orca pictures on the walls, orca stuffies, etc.), Jan’s gift to Anya last Christmas was a father-daughter trip to go see real orcas in the San Juan Islands.
As it turns out, a substantial number of other people are also interested in getting away to the San Juans for the weekend, and the ferry line goes on for miles. They miss the 4:30 ferry, and finally make it onto the 6:00 ferry, which doesn’t actually leave until 6:40. Still, it’s a nice ride, and Friday Harbor’s a nice town to stay in.
Jan and Anya have a nice morning walking around the town of Friday Harbor. We stop in at the Whale Museum, and at the used book store, where Anya picks up a few books. We have lunch at a sweet little restaurant and cheese shop called San Juan Island Cheese. They have a sun-lit patio and herb garden in back. While we’re waiting for our food, Anya dives into the first of her books. (The table makes a good headrest?)
Orca whales! Jan and Anya drive to Snug Harbor, in the northwest corner of San Juan Island. We find our boat captain, Jim Maya, and his assistant, Andy, who will be taking the two of us and four other guests out for an afternoon of whale-watching.
After a brief stop to get gas in Roche Harbor, the boat heads to Saturna Island (just across the Canadian border), where the J Pod orcas have recently been seen. Several other boats are gathered in a semicircle when we arrive, and in the middle are glimpses of tall, black orca fins. There seem to be about 7 or 8 orcas, generally heading east towards entrance of the Frasier River and its salmon.
The whale’s path bends to intersect with ours, and before the captain can move the boat, one of the orcas swims towards us and then goes right under the boat. It’s pretty neat to see the patches of white flash 10 or 15 feet directly below us as the whale scoots past.
The whales make their way along the southern coast of Saturna. Groups of people have gathered on the shore to watch them go by. The group of orcas, which includes two big males, stop from time to time to slap their flukes on the water, swim upside down, or poke their heads out of the water in spy hop. [This photo was taken by the boat captain, who has a much bigger zoom lens than we do.]
The whales make their way past the tip of the island, then past a small rocky outcrop covered in harbor seals and Steller sea lions. (Some transient orcas eat these mammals, but the resident orcas in J Pod only eat fish.)
We follow the orcas out in the strait separating the islands from Vancouver and the mainland. At one point we cross a roiling line of water where the silty brown water from the Frasier River mixes with the darker Puget Sound. A short while later, the boat assistant, Andy, puts a hydrophone into the water so we can listen to the orcas talking to each other with chirps and squeaks. We motor further into the straight, with one small group of orcas on the left, and another pair far off to the right. Finally, we have to stop to head back. Before we go, we get one last show: one of the males plows around just under the surface of the water as he tries to catch some fish. A juvenile swims around nearby. Then it’s time to head back. On the way, we spot one more sight: a harbor porpoise swimming along.