Connected

The most expensive project we've ever done on our property is finished. Thanks to the city's vigilance about requiring people to update shared sewer lines, we have a new sewer. What will the impact on our daily lives be, you ask? Nada. Everything is exactly the same as it was before, at least on the surface. We literally took several thousand dollars and flushed them straight down the toilet.

However, we can eventually sell this place without having to worry about the sewer issue rearing its ugly head, and we've fulfilled our obligations to the city a month prior to the deadline. And, we got to see some extremely cool construction stuff. The excavators bored straight under our neighbor's lot and installed the new sewer line and our neighbor said there were only tiny cracks in the dirt on the surface, but no other evidence of any work being done. Amazing!

The same neighbor is planning to do a lot of work on his house in the next year or so, including jacking up the house to replace the foundation underneath, so there may be a lot of jackhammering in our near future. This will happen, of course, now that the new home on the other side of us is finally finished (and now has a sale pending sign outside). I think 2010 may be officially dubbed the Year of Construction on our block!

Catching up

We've had some different events and lots of photos happen since I last blogged. First, while I was in California briefly for some meetings last week, Sacha's parents came to visit for a work conference. They brought with them a big present for Mateo - a balance bike! A balance bike is a bike without pedals. Kids as young as two, apparently, can learn to balance on them by just using their feet for forward motion, and then can easily transition to a pedal bike when they're ready.

I think Sacha and I both secretly covet the balance bike and wish we had one in an adult size, but, alas, this one is for the kids. We both also think that Natalia is going to be a dynamo on wheels when she gets a little bigger, after seeing her zoom her trike around and around the house. However, the bike is all Mateo's for now. Thanks, Bubby and Poppa!! Here's a video of him when he first got it, followed by a photo of his bike-envious younger sister.




(Sacha turned the seat sideways so she'd have room to stand up.)

After I got home and Sacha's parents left for home themselves, we spent most of the weekend hanging out with just the four of us. Saturday featured a trip to our favorite coffee shop, where I took this photo of the kids. I thought it was sort of cool to be looking in at them through the window.



Then, after a trip to the park, a quick visit from Uncle Galen and Megan, and nap time, I took the kids out for a run. It was my first time attempting this by myself, and it went fine. In fact, I wasn't the only one who ran. Mateo wanted to lace up his running shoes, too, and actually ran with me for about a mile. It happened in thirty-second chunks: he'd run for 30 seconds, then take a rest to examine his surroundings, and then start up again. It was a bit different than I had envisioned, but the three of us had a great time. I was very impressed by how far he ran! It was sunny and beautiful outside and I couldn't have asked for a better first solo run with the munchkins.

Then we did some paper reading (this was not staged, by the way)....


...and some practicing of smiling for the camera. Pictured are both kids' polished camera smiles. Tali seems to have gotten the concept down quite well and suddenly will bust out this smile anytime a camera is near. Mateo, on the other hand, is still working to perfect his camera grimace!


On Sunday, we had a family brunch at a local hotel and Apa was nice enough to join us. We got to see my cousin off to sixth-grade outdoor school and, of course, enjoyed being with family and eating lots of food. Mateo, as usual, ate about his body's weight in bacon. And, someone took this photo of us. Pretty cute, eh?


In other news, the time has finally come for our new sewer to be put in, after months of wrangling with our neighbor over the legal details of the whole thing. The excavators came today to dig up our yard and the street, and will be (cross your fingers) boring underneath our neighbor's yard tomorrow, and then connecting the whole thing. It's a complicated sewer situation, which is why it's taken so long to negotiate, but let's hope it will all be completed and done with tomorrow. I took this photo of them digging up our street for posterity. It was pretty cool to see them working with their boring machine in our yard earlier, although I didn't photograph that part.


Finally, I will end this extremely long post with a final photo. Mateo was reading to Tali earlier today and they both wanted her to sit on his lap. They have been really sweet with each other lately and it is just adorable to witness.

Three things

1. Mateo has been feeling fashionable this week, sporting both his special wedding clothes from Rachel and Joaquin's wedding and this totally fabulous dress-up gown that we got at a consignment store awhile back. At different times, of course. Tali hasn't been quite so excited about dressing up, but she is very excited about holding "Yarn," which is what she's named the stuffed cat she got from Auntie Edlyn, as well as every other cat that she sees anywhere. For us, Yarn is literally everywhere. Here they are with their respective prized possessions/outfits:



2. Mateo came home from preschool today with a board game that he made with his class. Somehow it's much more difficult to explain than to play, so I'll skip the explanation and just say that we played it twice after naptime and then again after Sacha got home. It was the first board game he's played and it was very fun for both of us.




3. After his nap, Mateo really wanted to bake cookies, and since his sister was still sleeping, it was an easy project for us to do. He's been wanting to use our cookie cutters for quite some time, so we decided to give it a shot with the chocolate chip cookie dough. Chocolate chip cookies weren't exactly meant to be cut into shapes, but we gave it our best shot anyway.

I'm sure my dad's mom was smiling down on us from somewhere, because she loved a good baking project as well as cookie cutters of all kinds. She and the kids would have really gotten a kick out of each other, and I know she and Mateo would have bonded over their shared love of making cookies in cute little shapes.

I realized, during this project, that I had told the kids stories about her (and, obviously, they are very lucky to see my mom's mom, Grandmommy, quite frequently!), but had never given them her name, because I wasn't quite sure what they would have called her if she was still with us. So, I decided on Great-Grandma Morgia and I think that's how we'll be referring to her from now on. The cookies did come out rather bloblike in the end, but we still had a great time.

Like father, like son?

Mateo and Apa had a big adventure today. They have special boy outings periodically and today they went to a waterfall out in the Gorge. Apa reported that Mateo hiked up to the very top, which was about a mile!

All of the kids' time with Apa lately has made me grateful, for the thousandth time, for our unique family situation. Apa was our one and only choice for a donor, and, while we would have gone happily along to the sperm bank if he hadn't been in our lives, we couldn't be happier with the arrangement we have with him. As things have evolved, and as he has lived here for awhile now and sees us and the kids a couple of times a week, we've become more and more comfortable using the word "Dad" to describe his relationship with the kids. This would have sent us running for the hills when we first started this whole process, but now it feels right.

I was reading Mateo the book Molly's Family the other day, which is all about a girl with a mama and a mommy, and had a moment of gratitude that, unlike Molly in the book, Mateo and Natalia (#1) know families of all kinds, including those with gay and straight parents, and (#2) that they know their dad. For us to be able to have this situation, in which we are legally (and in every other way) secure as their parents, and in which we all also get to have a wonderful and mutually satisfying relationship with their dad... well, it's just worked out really well, and I know that's not common, and I'm very grateful on many levels.

So, before Mateo and Apa's boy outing, we went to this pancake breakfast fundraiser thing for our local farmer's market. When we got home, stuffed to the gills, we found some cut flowers on our porch! They must have been left there by a neighborhood friend, or maybe just a nice person? Either way, Mateo was very excited about the flowers and the first thing he wanted to do when we got inside was to arrange them in a little cup.

This was cute in and of itself, but it was especially cute because floral arranging and event design is one of the things Apa does professionally. Apa has an amazing touch with design and with flowers especially and always knocks our socks off with the various events and shindigs he puts together. It was fun to see Mateo trying it out in his own way, and to wonder if genetics might have played a role.

Here's our intrepid, naked little florist showing off his first bouquet:

Ah, Natalia

We did something new tonight and went to a family concert at a local non-profit. This group does amazing things with music and kids, including lessons and classes and family stuff and music in the schools. They did a workshop at Sacha's school and, hence, she found out about this concert tonight. It featured a group called Fandango sin Fronteras and it was awesome!

The headliner was from Veracruz, Mexico, and the other musicians had come together from around this area to back her up. In addition to being fun to listen to, the music turned out to have a personal connection. The second song they did was about the singer's youngest daughter, whose name is Natalia! It was all about being a mother and about this girl specifically. I admit I only got the gist of some of it because it was all in Spanish, but I did get the chorus completely: it was "ah, Natalia!"

It was pretty fun to have our Talia there and for her (I imagine, at least, not being able to read the mind of a 22-month-old) to feel like the song was all about her!

And, I have to say, it was validating to hear this amazing Mexican singer talk about her daughter being named Natalia. Whenever people ask about our Natalia's name, they invariably think that it is a Russian name and that we must have picked it because of Sacha's Lithuanian/Jewish heritage. And, while that is an aspect of Tali's ancestry that we wanted to honor, we largely picked her name because of the Mexican side of her geneology. So, it was validating, at least for me, to hear this powerful Latina woman talk about picking the same name for her daughter!

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In other news, Mateo has learned how to snap! He can actually do it and make a sound, too. He did it the other day and, of course, we assumed he had learned in preschool. Nope. He insisted that he had not. Did someone else teach you?, we asked. No, he said. Then, he said something like this: "I just thought about snapping all night long and then I thought about it and thought about it and now I can do it!" I guess visualization really does work! It is very cool to watch him do it, and he is extremely proud of himself for learning all on his own.

Also, this might explain why he was in our room last night at 12:30 am, wide awake and ready to party. Let's hope night-long ruminations aren't the only way he can learn new skills, or high school might be challenging for all of us!

Quack quack

Unlike her brother, Talia has never been the least bit interested in animal sounds. I'm always amazed at how kids have their own interests at the youngest of ages, and this is another example. At this age, Mateo had a huge repertoire of animals sounds. He also couldn't count up to 5 to save his life. Talia, on the other hand, counts to 10 on a regular basis and even hit 11 or 12 the other day, but thinks all animals say "quack, quack!"

Today, I was giving the kids a bath after dinner and they had been splashing around for quite awhile. Casting around for a conversation topic, I said "Tali, what does a dog say?" On cue, as if she knew it was absolutely the right answer, she said, "quack, quack!" Then, I said something like "Silly girl, it's woof woof!" Then, I said "What does a dog say?" again, thinking that surely she'd remember this time. Instead, she said, with a huge smile on her face, "Meow, meow!" And then, upon being asked again, while belly laughing, "Moo, moo!" At that point, Sacha had come in and we realized she was totally messing with us. She laughed and laughed and laughed and so did we.

Later, at bedtime, I was doing something with Mateo and brought him into his room. There, we found Sacha and Talia curled up on the bed with a stuffed kitty. Tali was cuddling the kitty and cooing "meow, meow, meow, meow" to it over and over (way too cute, by the way). However, when asked what the kitty was saying, she grinned gleefully and said, "quack, quack!"

That, in a nutshell, is our daughter. Her sense of humor is clearly developing right on schedule!

Musings: No S plan, Spanish, Should we pay kids for grades?

I haven't written for a while, which is my norm. So here are some things that are going on with me right now:


No S Plan
I was able to lose all of my pregnancy weight and then some, thanks to my horrible anxiety I had this fall. Who knew that barely being able to eat at all for close to two months could have such an effect? Anyway, the silver lining of my anxiety is that I did indeed lose a lot of weight. Once the anxiety went away, and I had a student teacher, I started creeping.

So, I am trying something new, called the No S Plan. While it can be used to lose weight, I am just using it to maintain my weight. On weekdays, the No S stands for no Sweets, no Snacks and no Seconds. On the S days (Sat. and Sun.), you can do whatever you want. I have changed the S days to be Saturday and our date night, Wednesday.

So far, I feel less guilty having snacks and sweets on my S days, and do not feel deprived on my No S days. And, I have stopped creeping.

Spanish in the mornings
I keep on trying different things for consistently speaking Spanish with the kids. I guess the idea is that I would like to find a routine that works consistently. The star chart worked, for a few months, and then I stopped using it so much. Talking after school worked for a while, but then I would be too tired or would fall off the bandwagon. My new plan is talking Spanish in the mornings, before I go to work, Monday through Friday.

My idea is that this way I am fresh, and have energy. The start time is when we wake up and the end time is when I leave for work. Once I get back, and I am a bit tired. I am not trying to expend more energy.Generally, I want to be talking in English to Alayna about my day and hear about her day in English while talking in Spanish to the kids. This was not working very well!

We continue to read in Spanish every day. And. . . as it turns out . . . research says that the amount of time spent reading or being read too in the second language has more of an impact on vocabulary and language skills than the amount of time talking!

Should be pay kids to do well in school?
There was this interesting article in Times magazine that talked about paying kids to do well in school. They looked at the impact of paying kids for effort (doing homework, reading books outside of school, showing up to school on time, not getting in trouble) vs. paying kids for results (getting good grades, passing the state test.)

The results: paying for effort works. In terms of reading, it works phenomenally (better than reducing the class size to 16, having a Teach For America Teacher or a great teacher) well and in particular for the hardest to reach children.

How well does it work to pay for results? It had no impact or the students test scores slightly decreased.

My learning from the article: reward effort, not results!