The next level

With the help of our friends, Katie and Cathy, we went to the next level of canning today.  Well, they were the ones who did most of it, but we learned a lot along the way.  They arrived with five recipes already prepped, including a chutney, green beans with dill, an incredible recipe involving grapes, and two more that I can't remember.  Even more amazingly, the whole thing, including cleanup, was done in five hours!  I missed a lot of it, because I took our squirrelly kids out to the park and then to a coffee shop after they got stir-crazy, but the results look amazing.  I can't wait to try each one out!

Here are two of the recipes being tended to:

The all-knowing pickling book!:

Prepped ingredients, ready to go:

The most important ingredient - our portable air conditioner!:

Katie, Mateo, and Cathy with the finished products:

So pretty!  

Summer, finally!

Summer is finally here, at least for this week! As the native Californian of the family, I am ecstatic about the heat and Sacha is wishing it was fall already. In fact, I just went out for a run and when I got back, realized it was 94 degrees outside. That must be why I felt so sluggish!

Anyway, we went to a free concert last night, in the same series we attended last year. It was our first time seeing this acrobatic dance troupe called Do Jump! and they were great. The kids were giggling and dancing and generally enjoying themselves for the whole time, which was pretty amazing. We actually just got to sit and enjoy it ourselves, instead of doing a lot of behavior management. We went with another family, with whose older son Mateo has been friends since birth. The boys had a period of hilarious dancing/wrestling that photos don't really do justice, but it was joyful and a pleasure to witness. Here are a few photos from the evening:

If this isn't pure joy, I don't know what is...

And here we are back at home a few nights ago, chilling before getting ready for bed. These guys are SO happy to have Mommy home for the summer!

Today, we had Megan and Galen over for waffles, and they brought us our Christmas present - a watermelon fresh from Hermiston, which is in eastern Oregon near Galen and is famous for its watermelons. YUM. Then, Mateo and Apa went out on a boy date and, according to both of them, had SO MUCH FUN! Here are our boys just after returning:

They went to the Gorge to hike and Mateo hiked almost all the way on his own. Then, they visited Grand Central Baking, our neighborhood venue of choice, on the way home. They got Mateo a blueberry macaroon after lunch "to match his blueberry eyes." I know I'm biased, but I think both our kids' eyes are quite stunning and this photo of Mateo from last night really shows them off.

This afternoon, we're planning to check out a new ice cream place within walking distance (although we'll probably drive because of the heat) and then tomorrow...a canning adventure! Friends are coming with ambitious canning recipes and we're going to try them together. We canned 18 quarts of peaches earlier this week, but we've never tried anything that involved an actual recipe (ie, green beans with a specific sauce), so that will be new. I'm sure I'll be back with photos on how that goes!

Floors

We love our new floors.  They give the house so much more character that it had before.  Well, at least, in half of it!  The other half had hardwood and tile to begin with.  It was amazing to come back from our trip(s) to see the old carpet stripped away and the gorgeous floors that had been hiding all along underneath.  Our contractor did a great job and found a talented and reasonably priced flooring person while we were gone.  What more could you want?  Also, I spent a lot of the day moving stuff around, so we're basically moved back in and it feels good.  I like order!

Here they are, in all their glory.

A quick peek into our bedroom:

This is the marmoleum in the front room, which will soon be covered with a new front closet, benches along the windows, and possibly some shelving in between:

Natalia's brand new floor:

And Mateo's!:

Slides

We had a big day here at my parents' house. We spent part of the morning shopping, because we had only light clothes for Mexico and nothing to keep the kids warm on cool Bay Area mornings. Of course, right as we got them both a couple of outfits, the sun came out! However, we went to Berkeley later today and it was nice and cool there, so we were happy they had new clothes.

We went to a park right across the street from my grandparents' old house. My dad played there as a little boy and my siblings and I played there as kids, too. It has this amazing old cement slide that my dad remembers being built when he was about 10. It could never be built today - much too dangerous! - but is is AWESOME! I remember that, when we were kids, we would visit our grandparents all the time but Grandma would never let us on this slide unless our parents were actually there. Anyway, I've been wanting to take the kids for a long time and we finally made it happen. They loved it!

Here's Tali saying "more slide! more slide!"

Here I am going down with both kids, which went well until we all lost balance at the very bottom!

It's really an amazing slide, and can get quite fast when people "grease" it by sliding down on waxed paper. Mostly, there's always an assortment of old cardboard at the bottom and you can just pick out a piece and slide down on that. Clearly, even though it was built in the 50s, it is wildly popular today and there was a line every time we went up those steep, rocky stairs to the top.

Leaving the park...

This is my grandparents' house, which has been very tastefully updated by its new owners.

Here are the kids waving from my parents' front yard. So cute!

We head back to Portland tomorrow. Our floors should be all refinished, but we'll still need to spend a couple of nights out of the house while everything dries. Then, we can move everything back mid-week. Should be quite an adventure! Sacha flies home tonight and we're all looking forward to seeing her tomorrow!

Mawwiage

We're still in California, probably through the weekend, and I just had a long discussion with my mom about the movie "The Kids Are All Right," which I (and everyone I went to see it with) thought was terrible and just plain bad. I could go into it in further detail, but the gist is that a lesbian couple has kids with an anonymous sperm donor, meet him when their daughter turns 18, and then one of the lesbians starts sleeping with the donor, starting the slow motion disintegration of their family. It could have been a great movie, but instead it just reinforced all those stereotypes that don't help anyone - that lesbians just need a man to satisfy them, that meeting the donor will destroy the family and cause the lesbian moms to lose control, etc.

But, I have to admit that, for some reason, and probably combined with the Prop 8 ruling from California, that the whole thing made me think about marriage. (Or, mawwiage, like that hilarious scene from the Princess Bride!) I keep hearing about gay families in which the kids ask their parents at some point if they really love each other, because if they did then wouldn't they be married?

Well, we tell our kids that we are married. We have photos of our wedding up in our house and we've talked about how we got married because we love each other and wanted to make a life and a family together. They're way too young to understand that our wedding took place outside the law, or to even understand what laws are, really.

I just can't stand the idea of telling them that we're not married, because, in our minds, we ARE. I don't know how we're going to explain it to them when the truth has to come out. That's something I want to protect them from for as long as possible, but, at the same time, I'd rather they hear it from us than from some kid at school.

I wish Oregon and the feds would get their acts together soon, so that I don't have to explain to our kids that Mommy and Mama aren't really married after all because it's not allowed. And then to have to answer their questions about why. Really, it makes me feel sick to think about. Our family seems so normal to all of us and it's hard to think about breaking that bubble for the kids at some point in the relatively near future. Bleck.

At least they'll never have to ask if we really love each other because we're not married, because we obviously had a wedding and are married in our hearts and in the eyes of our community. It's just those pesky laws that are keeping us from finishing the process!

Ugh.

Sacha's trip to Detroit yesterday went very smoothly.   She made her connection in Mexico City with plenty of time to spare and got to Detroit on time.  In fact, she got to Detroit before we had even left the Guadalajara airport. 

Yes, we had the opposite of her experience - it was a nearly unmitigated disaster, made better only by the fact that we finally got on a plane to the States after 7 hours of waiting in the airport.  That included boarding one plane only to discover that it was broken, and then getting off it again. 

We ended up getting routed so San Francisco, so we decided to cut our losses and just stay here.  My dad picked us up and we're staying at their house for the weekend.  Then, we'll go back to PDX, meet Sacha, and spend a few days in my aunt and uncle's house (thanks, guys!) while they're on vacation and our floors are drying.  The kids and I are planning a mellow day hanging out with my dad and recovering from yesterday.  Then, I suppose we'll figure out our plans from there. 

It's unexpected to see you, Bay Area, but hello! 

Mexico, part 4

So, we changed our minds this morning during a visit to the town market.

And so now Sacha will be flying to Detroit tomorrow, and the kids and I will be flying back to Portland. We decided to bypass the whole travelocity phone system and just book new tickets for ourselves online, and that worked fine. Then, we had to get a document notarized saying that Sacha gives her permission for me to take the kids out of the country by myself, and now we just have to pack up and get ready to go. We're sad to see our trip come to an early end, but, in the end, it seemed more important for Sacha to be with her family and pay her last respects to her grandfather.

We've had a wonderful time here and couldn't be more grateful to Sacha's parents' friends for hosting us. We hope to come back sooner rather than later!

Here are a few more photos of the last couple of days.

My favorite girls...

These next ones are from the amazing mural inside the centro cultural...

Meanwhile, after the mural got boring after about two minutes, our children entertained themselves by running wildly back and forth through this curtain, shrieking in glee. One of the things I love most about this age is that they can find fun in anything (and the flip side, can get into trouble with just about anything, too!)

Goodbye, Mexico! We hope to see you again sooner rather than later.

PS: Did I mention that we're having our floors refinished starting tomorrow? The whole floor project, which had self-destructed right before we left, suddenly came back to life and got scheduled to start tomorrow. We had tried to schedule it for these two weeks because we would have had to be out of the house anyway, but obviously things have changed a bit at this point. We're still going ahead with the floors, so will have to find somewhere to stay until the middle of next week, when the floors will be ready to walk on again. We'll be at Apa's through the weekend and then will figure out something from there. It's going to be quite a week!