Tonight we went to dinner at my favorite gourmet food court: San Pedro Square Market. One time during a semi-meltdown, the guy at the Vietnamese spot actually got Jake to smile, via chicken on a toothpick. Of course he remembered us the next time we came back and now Jacob…
It’s May. Wouldn’t you know, I’ve been meaning to write about Halloween? Last October marked our third Shasta Halloween. We got about 450 trick-or-treaters, which was way down from 2010. I think the problem, or perhaps the financial upside, was that it fell on a Monday. Jake was a lion,…
Recently Jake and James discovered free books on the iPad. I’m not sure exactly how they chose the two stories they downloaded, but most nights we now listen to strange versions of Goldilocks and The Princess and the Pea. I say “strange” because they seem to have changed the stories…
It was approximately a year ago when Jake’s previous classroom devolved, as James describes it, into Lord of the Flies. Ultimately the problem seemed to be too many kids, a disproportionate age spread, and perhaps a tad too much “free play.” Every day I would encourage Jake to keep his…
We’ve suddenly noticed Nate talks. I mean, we’ve known he says things, but now all of a sudden, I think he’s saying lots of things. Here’s a little cheat sheet, in case you find yourself in a deep discussion with our littlest conversationalist: Mama = Mama Dada = Dada Mo…
I think I’ve mentioned something about Nate and climbing… If my kids were goats, Jakey is a farm goat and Natesy is a mountain goat. Every time we turn around, Nate has figured out how to climb up something we’d previously considered “safe.” We find him standing on the coffee…
At one point Jakey was trilingual. At least in the case of one word: mo. He could express the word “more” in English, Spanish, and his own version of American Sign Language. I wonder what the odds are for two babies, born two years apart, to have the same first…
Jacob has kind of an interesting accent… and its origins are fairly murky. I have a hard time replicating it in writing, but I always notice it when he’s talking. It comes out not only in his pronunciation, but also in his use of the various parts of speech. It’s…
Tonight at the dinner table, Jakey told me his very first joke: Mama, what do cats say when they get hurt? Meeeoooooouch. It was hilarious. Guess you had to be there.
Admittedly, I’ve always been unsympathetic to what I’ll call Mom Frump. Jeans with white Reeboks. Scrunchies. Headbands. You’ve seen their pictures in Glamour magazine— unsuspecting moms sporting fashion faux pas and black bars over their eyes. Just because you have kids doesn’t mean you grab your appliqued sweatshirt, slip-on your…