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 ?

Kindergarten schedule

It's official - Katrina is assigned to AM kindergarten. Even though it's 2 months away, I'm already worried about switching our night owl schedules. Even though we got what we asked for (we did sign up for AM), I did at times secretly hope she'd get assigned to PM (due to high AM demand) and we'd be "forced" to do the strange PM schedule. PM'ers need to finish lunch by ~11:20am and still need to follow the AM schedule every Wed - so it really isn't a great option, but at least we'd be on time.....

On a typical day, all 4 members of our household are usually still sleeping at 8:10am (which is when school will start). I'm not sure if it's easier to move our terribly late schedule up 5-10 minutes at a time or to go cold turkey. I'm inclined to enforce an mock daylight saving time change by adjusting all the clocks up an hour - think that'd work ?

Katrina's Blog

One day Katrina ran out of things to play with so I drew a box with some lines below and asked her to draw a picture and describe it with words. She attempted drawing and writing but she rambled on about unrelated topics - so I thought she could use some practice with focused narration. Remembering how she loved holding up books and pretending to storytell to an imaginary audience, I thought she might enjoy starting her own blog and talk about little anecdotes in her life.

I showed her some choices for her blog layout and she actually was very specific about the exact colors and patterns she wanted. She does author 99% of it (I don't have the patience to wait for her to type so she dictates and I type). I do provide suggestions for topics and also help with diction - like correcting 'graduationing' or suggesting replacing '2 covers on top and bottom' with the word envelope. She seems to catch on fairly quickly so maybe one day soon she'll be blogging all on her own ?

www.katrinawlee.blogspot.com

Wind, Produce, and Livestock Farms

Although we didn't actually "enter" a wind farm - this was the closest we've been to these familiar wind turbines as some were just yards from the road. The kids were of course fascinated and loved having windmills adorn the long road to our true destination - a fruit-picking expedition.

Although most cherries were all picked by this time of the year (some farms are already closed unti 2010), a couple of farms off the beaten path were still open with treefuls of these yummy fruits. Pease Ranch also has shaded picnic tables and low branches for kids. Folks were SO NICE too, a worker saw petite me carrying a heavyset 3 yr old and offered to take us all (4 adults, 5 kids + a stroller) back to the entrance on his cart. It really helped as Nathan was exhausted and carrying him all the way back would have been a bit much.

After getting some stonefruits from a neighboring farm, we headed to an Alpaca farm to meet the most ADORABLE animals. The owners were also very nice and brought out treats for us to feed these endearing llama-look-alikes. Their coats were amazingly soft. The owners knew each of their 52 huggable cuties by name ! Katrina kept asking about one of them who had a very pretty name: Moonbeam.

On our way back, we stopped by some more farm stands to grab some strawberries and super sweet corn. Nothing like fresh-picked produce for dinner !