Cute Street Name

Pretend play

You know your 3 yr-old is ready for preschool when his most exciting weekly entertainment is the gardening team who comes by to service our neighborhood. He's obsessed with mimicking the many 剪草師傅 (gardeners) whenever he gets a chance....

Made a backpack leaf blower out of balloon art from a clown :

But then he thought the balloon 唔夠似 (doesn't totally resemble the blower) because it's not "open", so off came the grip of his putter which has a hollow shaft and makes a much more believable blower:

Well, there's always one guy on the gardening team who trims the edges of the lawn, so his golf iron takes the role of an edger:

He'd make the leaf blowing sound and pretend he's gardening with whatever is around - even when he's in his PJs and ready for bed:

Jazz, Art, Clay, Glass, Taiko

It's quite a lot to cram all into one day, but they were all in the vicinity and all free, so we went for it all :)

First, we arrived Stanford for a Jazz concert for kids. We got to see and hear the soprano, baritone, and bass saxophones which are much less common than their tenor and alto counterparts (although EVERYTHING is new to the kids). I chose this activity to show them different instruments and hoped they could tell me if they've a preference in woodwinds or strings but it seems it'll take more exposure before they'll know. All the musicians gave short intros to their instruments along with cool tricks and fun sounds. The incredibly talented violinist demo'd Pizzicato and col legno - big words that the kids may not remember, but many impressively sat through most of the concert attentively.

Our next stop is the Cantor Arts Center - although admission is always free and we could've gone on another day, we needed to eat anyway and we're already on campus so why not. After noshing on delicious organic/free-range/grass-fed soup, salad and sandwich in the café overlooking a perfectly manicured lawn and the Rodin Sculpture garden, we headed into the museum. While most automatically assume kids won't like art museums, I wanted to give them a chance to prove their sophisticated tastes. Afterall, they love gourmet 'adult' food in restaurants and often get compliments from other diners about their etiquette. But of course they're still kids and there's some running around and noise but they did enjoy it quite a bit.

Next we headed to the Clay and Glass Festival a few minutes away. Although we missed the Ikebana demo, we got to see pottery wheel throwing and tried making ceramic pieces. There were hundreds of artists but Nathan was getting too heavy to carry around so we only made a quick round before heading back to the car.

The last stop is San Jose J-town to check out the Obon festival. Before the Taiko performance, we briefly checked out a Japanese garden and was later very pleasantly surprised to have spotted a back alley that led to an art studio featuring live glass blowing. It was perfect as we were just commenting on the absence of a glass demo at the previous event in Palo Alto.

All in all, it was a great day of music, art, and culture. Enjoy the album:

View album

Deductive reasoning....

Katrina: What does double mean ?
Mommy: It means multiply by 2 (adding 4 small objects to the 4 in front of her)
Katrina: (remembering what three in Spanish sounds like) Oh, so if you multiply by 3, you would call it trouble?
Mommy: ha ha, it's triple, silly ....

狼來了Nathan版 [The Boy Who Cried Wolf - alternate ending]

Both kids have heard the story of "The Boy Who Cried Wolf" a few times from grandparents and other sources. Yesterday, when Nathan heard the story again, he decided to give it an alternate ending:

咁狼話唔好味𦧲翻出嚟, 咁咪得囉? [If the boy tasted bad, then the wolf will spit him out and it'll be ok, right ?]

Twins

This photo was snapped very casually, no posing or pre-planning whatsoever - notice how both boys had the same gait, lip-smacking expressions, and were attracted to the same thing in the same direction ?