Day +972: Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year!

We had a very Merry Christmas here in San Francisco. It was a beautiful, sunny day. It was a bit on the cold side, but we had the windows open in the house because of the sun shining in our bay windows and the heat from the oven and the stove. It's been kind of chilly this year, in the 40s and low 50s even during the day. Or maybe I'm just getting thin-skinned after living in California for six years. But there's a storm on the way that they are saying will dump some snow in the hills around here.

But I digress. This was the second Christmas we've had in this house, and Keri and I went a bit overboard. It's a bit embarrassing how many presents were under our tree for the kids. But we were excited and they were excited, and they really are great kids, so it felt right. As Christmas drew near and the idea of actually opening presents began to get more real, Isaac finally switched from asking for a banjo to asking for drums. "With lots of CYM-bals." He was so excited about the prospect that he could barely hold still when he talked about it. Even Mina said "We should get some more drums. Isaac really likes drums." For her part, Mina never wavered in wanting a new baby, a puppy and a kitten. Keri finally did get her to agree that if she couldn't have a baby, some fairies would be nice instead. We didn't get her the baby. We wanted to, but didn't find the right one after looking around a lot. I was really worried that Mina was going to be disappointed on Christmas day, so we told her first thing so she wouldn't think every present was going to be a baby. She took it very well, and seemed to forget all about the baby when the first present she opened was the fairy and the second present was a (stuffed) black kitten with white paws just like she had asked for.

Isaac got a harmonica and a glockenspiel, which is kind of like a fancy xylophone with two full octaves of whole and half notes. Actually the glockenspiel is for both kids, and Mina got an orange ukelele. Her first reaction was "Why didn't you get me a pink one?" She picked it up and tried to play it a bit, but obviously didn't have the first idea of even how to hold it. Once Isaac and I showed her, and she was able to strum it a little and get a decent sound out of it, she got kind of a smile on her face. It just made me wonder whether Mina is unusual in not being able to mimic Isaac's guitar-playing right away, or whether most kids would need to be shown how to do it and Isaac is just unusual in knowing immediately how to do it. We'll see how much interest she shows in it. She's pretty focused on her "baby "play these days.

Isaac loves the baby game too, and in fact the kids got so engrossed in it on Christmas morning that we practically had to drag them away to get them to open presents. Mina loves being the Momma and Isaac loves being the baby, so they are a good match. They opened their stockings when they got up around 6:00, and were waiting until after breakfast to open the presents. But they got engrossed in baby play while we were cleaning up and shut themselves up in the bedroom, so Keri and I just started in preparing the dinner. After an hour and a half, they finally came out and we opened a few presents before the guests started arriving. They've opened a couple more since Christmas, but they still have quite a few left.

We did get Isaac a little drum kit, but he hasn't opened it yet and we're still debating whether we should hold onto it for later. We were asking about cymbals at the music store, the salesman pointed us to the drum kit, and in a moment of weakness we both agreed to get it. Now we're not so sure -- we live in a relatively small flat, the kit would be noisy, and we really like the way he pretends to have a drum kit now. He sets all his drums in a row, and sets a tambourine or a metal tray on top of a basket by way of a cymbal. Then he starts pounding away. I have some videos I will post when I get a chance. It requires more imagination not to have the drum kit, so that's one consideration. We would also rather encourage his interest in other instruments. But he does love the drums. I suspect we'll break down and give it to him before long. He does love his harmonica. He picked it up and within a few minutes was making all kinds of interesting sounds with it. He's not really playing tunes yet, but he definitely experiments with every instrument he gets in his hands.

We had a nice Christmas dinner with Blair, Walt and Devon and Rich, Olgica, Nikola and Lenka. We spent parts of two days cooking and had a delicious dinner of salmon-stuffed mushroom caps, oyster mushroom soup, beef tenderloin, mashed turnips, sauteed greens and Blair brought a pecan pie for dessert. It's nice to be able to reciprocate after all the nice meals those guys have served us over the years. But it's never exactly a relaxing dinner with so many little ones around. The kids were up until nearly 10:00 and are still recovering several days later. It's amazing how much more able they were to stay up late a couple years ago when they were babies. Now they really need to be in bed by 7:00 at the latest or things are rough the next day.

Lots of other fun Christmas stories. Mina really wanted to read the abbreviated version of "The Christmas Story" that we have. I abbreviated it even more, but she got this gist of the story. She's not too afraid of the ghosts yet because she knows they're not real. She of course like the part about Tiny Tim and made me read it over again. The closing line of the book repeats Tiny Tim's catchphrase "God bless us every one!" Mina asked what that meant, and I said it was a wish that God would take care of us and keep us safe and healthy. Mina's reaction was "Aaaww, that's nice!"

We went to the Christmas pageant at St. Mark's Lutheran Church on Christmas Eve. It was really nicely done, very tasteful and yet fairly elaborate for an amateur pageant featuring church members. Mina has a thing about Baby Jesus, and she was very exicted to see the baby and was paying close attention the whole time. Whenever Mary and Joseph would take the baby off the "stage", Mina and Isaac would both ask why Baby Jesus was going away and when he was going to come back. Baby Jesus was a real 3-month old baby girl, and we got to meet her outside in front of the church afterwards. Mina is in a stage now where she projects herself into every scene. In every book she pictures a character and says "I'm so-and-so," at which point Isaac pipes in and claims a character for his own. At the pageant Mina said "I'm Baby Jesus!" I was just trying to figure out how to tell her that it probably wasn't such a good idea to claim to be the son of God, when Isaac piped up loudly "And I'm Bob!" So I had Baby Jesus and Bob the rest of the night.

I mentioned Isaac loves the drums. He knows the names of all the drums in the drum kit: snare, tom, bass, crash cymbal, hi-hat cymbal (the one with two cymbals that crash together with a foot pedal). For a while he was asking for a hi-hat cymbal for Christmas, and now he's marching around the house banging together two little sticks saying "Hi-hat cymbal! Hi-hat cymbal!" over and over again. Lately for some reason he's been calling it the "Scary hi-hat cymbal".

Keri made Christmas cookies that are peanut butter cookies with a chocolate Hershey's kiss in the middle. One day I noticed that Isaac had eaten the chocolate kiss first and was working on the cookie part. I looked over at Mina and she was carefully eating the cookie part and not touching the chocolate kiss. So I asked them about it, and Isaac said he likes the chocolate kiss the best, and that's why he eats it first, and Mina said she likes the chocolate kiss part the best too, and that's why she saves it for last. I thought that was kind of interesting. Mina is definitely a saver, I'd noticed that before. I don't know if Isaac is just too little to save the best part for last, or if this is a major difference in their personalities.

On Christmas Eve I took the kids on a walk up to Tank Hill in the morning to get them some exercise. They always complain on the way up there because it's a bit of a long walk and kind of steep in places. But they have a great time there. They climbed on the rocks at the top for half an hour or so, playing "motorcyle" and "car" and "restaurant". Isaac served me five or six coffees and several full meals as well. Then we moved over to where the tank used to be. It's been filled in with cement, and now it's a place where puddles form. I had them wear their rubber boots and they had a ball splashing around in the puddle. Isaac right away grabbed a stick and started "fishing", and Mina dragged some big sticks into a square pattern to make a "house". After a while Isaac said "This is a cool ocean. The leaves are fishes." The bottom of the puddle was covered with eucalyptus leaves, which did look a bit like fishes. Then Mina was collecting mermaids (rocks) from the puddles, and Isaac was helping her. Some of them were wet on one side but not on the other, so Isaac was getting them wet on the other side and saying he was "cooking" them. I said I wasn't sure it was such a good idea to cook mermaids, but Mina said that's OK, she could just "uncook" them. The best part about it was that I didn't have to do anything. It was just like I wound them up and turned them loose, and they didn't start to wind down for at least an hour and half, even though they didn't bring anything with them to play with. All their games were with stuff that they found at the top of the hill.

We went to see the Nutcracker at the San Francisco Ballet yesterday with a group of preschoolers. It was really a wonderful performance -- Keri and I both really enjoyed it. I was a bit worried about how the kids would do, so I had bought a little book with the Nutcracker story and had read it several times to them. They love the story, and it helped so much that they knew what was going on at the performance. They both knew exactly who Godfather Drosselmaier was as soon as he came on stage, and they were on the edge of their seats during the fight scene between the toys and the rats. Or I should say, Isaac was on the edge of my lap, because that's where he sat for the whole performance. When the intermission came, they were both upset because they didn't want it to be over yet. The second half was a little harder for them because it was just Clara and Godfather Drosselmaier watching all of the dances. But they had a great time and Isaac said he wants to go back and see it again "tomorrow and the next day and all the days."

The kids and I are heading to Seattle next weekend. We're leaving Thursday morning and coming back on Sunday. I have a business meeting, and it worked out that I could bring the kids. We'll stay at Kari and Steve's, and Grandma and Grandpa will come over from Wenatchee for the weekend. Should be a lot of fun, and great to see my family since we didn't get to see them at Christmas this year, and didn't get much time with Kari, Steve and Carmen last summer. Keri is looking forward to spending a relaxing weekend cleaning and reorganizing the house.

Happy New Year!

Day +958: Parent-Teacher Conference

We had another parent-teacher conference on Monday. They are always fun, because Teacher Julie loves our kids and it's fun to hear her stories about them. We started off talking about Isaac, and about how he's getting to the point where the other kids are sort of flocking to him. Julie says she doesn't get what exactly it is, but somehow she thinks Isaac has "kid charisma". The other kids jostle to sit by him, and when Julie plays the name game they always call out "ISAAC!" with real enthusiasm. Very fun for a parent to hear, of course. She says both of our kids are really good at imaginative play, and she told the story about how Isaac was asking her all kinds of details about her rug: the flower pattern, what it was made of, how it was made, etc. It was the first time any kid had ever spoken to her about the rug. Later on she saw Isaac take a piece of fabric outside to the straw and pretend he was making a rug, and when the kids came back in he got some of the other kids to make rugs with him by laying out fabrics on the floor.

Mina is doing good with school too, although she really only wants to play with the older girls and Riley and Anika are the only other 4-year-olds left now. When neither of the girls are there she mostly plays by herself. We've tried to encourage her to play with the boys or with the younger girls, but I guess it's tough to have high standards for your playmates. She says Mina is really advancing in her math abilities these days, which is kind of a relief because she thought Mina might be a little behind in that area during our last conference. Mina made a cognitive leap the other day by recognizing that three groups of blocks could go into the three boats that were there. Julie said Mina was quivering with excitement and was thinking about all the ways she could use this new concept of object grouping. Another story she told is about the "magna-blocks" -- little magnetic blocks that come in all different shapes. Julie always calls the shapes by name, including the right triangles and the isosceles triangles (all sides of equal length). Mina recognizes which are which, but she was worried that Julie was hurting the other triangles' feelings. Julie didn't get it at first, so Mina explained that Julie was calling some triangles the "right" triangles, and the other triangles were not the right triangles.

Julie really thinks we should send Mina to the Waldorf school for kindergarten next year. She thinks Mina of all the kids would really benefit from the structure and rhythm of the Waldorf system. I can see exactly what she means, and we'll apply for her. We probably won't be able to afford it, but Isaac will be able to go to NPG for free next year due to San Francisco's new universal pre-K program, so it may not end up costing us that much more than we are paying this year. We'll see.

We're in the process of doing our Christmas shopping for the kids. They've both been very specific. Isaac has been asking for a banjo for Christmas ever since the "Heart of Cole" Street Fair back in October, and Mina always asks for a baby. I'd like to get Mina interested in the musical instruments, but when I asked her if she didn't want an instrument for Christmas, she said "No. I'm not very good at instruments. Isaac is good at instruments. I'm good at taking care of babies." It was pretty hard to argue with that, so that's where we left it. We're still deciding on the banjo. He already has the guitar, so the banjo wouldn't really give him anything new to do. He also sometimes asks for a tuba, but that's not much help. I'd kind of like to get him a quarter violin. We have to figure something out PDQ.

Isaac is still fascinated by the garbage man, and last week he asked to go down and talk to him. He's a very nice man, and we found out a lot about him. His name is Placido, and he has three daughters named Raquel, Anjelica, and Christina Maria who are 16, 14 and 10. His father also worked for the company, and Placido has a picture of himself when he was a little boy sitting in his father's truck. He offered Isaac to sit in the driver's seat for a minute, but Isaac was too shy. But when we got upstairs Isaac cried and cried because he really wanted to go and sit in the garbage truck. We'll have to find another time to go out and say hello to Placido again. Placido looks forward to seeing Isaac and waves at him every week.

We went back to the Velveteen Rabbit again this year. Or rather, the rest of the family went "back" -- for me it was the first time. It was very cute. Mina and Isaac paid close attention, and Isaac kept asking questions. Julie had been reading the story at school, so Mina understood exactly what was going on. Last year she was so enraptured by it, that when it was over she cried and cried and kept saying "I want the Velveteen Waaah-biiit!" This year she enjoyed it, but her focus these days is mostly on playing with her friends and she doesn't have quite the same level of enthusiasm for things like this as. We're going to another Christmas play on Saturday, and to the Nutcracker on the 27th. Should be interesting to see how the kids enjoy those.

Grandma Lyn has been here visiting for over a week now, which has been really nice. Mina was so excited the day Grandma arrived that she didn't leave her side all day, and she's been sleeping with Grandma on the aerobed. We went and got our Christmas tree on Sunday. We followed our tradition by walking down to Cole Street and picking out our tree at Cole Hardware, and putting it on my shoulder to hike back to the house. Very quick and easy compared to hiking through the snowy woods looking for the perfect tree, but it's pretty nice to all walk down and back together. We have lights on it, but Keri and Lyn have been so busy with baking Christmas cookies and shopping all week that they haven't gotten to decorating it yet. Grandma leaves Sunday, and then we'll spend Christmas with friends here in San Francisco rather than flying up to Washington. It will be nice to have it at our own house, although we'll really miss seeing our families.