Snow!

We made it up to the snow today!  The camera battery died right after I got a couple of shots of Rosa seeing the snow for the first time, and the charger seems to have been a casualty of the move, so photos will have to wait.  I think I got some cute ones, though.

It took us some time to actually find snow for several reasons, the chief one being the huge traffic jam between us and Mt. Hood.  We had anticipated the traffic, though, and planned to just find a little side-road before we got to the mountain and do some sledding there.  However, it has been unseasonably warm and dry this year and the snow levels are higher than normal, so the location we had in mind was muddy and slushy with no snow in sight. 

We kept going up and up this little road and finally found a place with a couple of inches on the ground.  That turned out to be more than enough for the kiddos.  In fact, it might have been better than piles of snow, because they could easily walk around in it.  They did some tobogganing on a very small hill, threw snowballs at us and in the picturesque creek that ran by the road, and made the best snow angels they could. 

When our toes started freezing and we had played quite a bit, we piled back into the car and drove back to Portland.  Once we were back in the city, we had a spontaneous and fun playdate with friends in our old part of town.  Then, we drove back by our old house on the way to a New Year's Eve kids' music show. 

It looks like the buyer is really remodeling the kitchen and who knows what else, because there is a big dumpster outside and the toilet was sitting right next to it!  New bathroom, perhaps?  Anyway, the show was packed to the brim but Sacha found us a place to sit up front and the kids rocked out while we juggled the baby and all our stuff.  We took off at intermission and now Sacha's putting the kiddos to bed. 

I'm sure one of these years we'll be all caught up on sleep and actually stay up until midnight, but not this year :)  It will be an early New Year's Eve for us!  Happy New Year to everybody!

Photos from the holidays

Here are some photos from the holidays.  I took a number of them before presents started happening on Christmas, and then I got caught up in the swing of things and didn't pick up the camera until a few days after Christmas!  So, these are the bookends for the holiday.

Post-Christmas, here are the kids and my parents working on the gingerbread houses that we finally manged to make!

Also, on Wednesday, Sacha and I celebrated 11 years since we first met!  Our anniversary fell on Wednesday this year, which is our regular date night, and Apa helped us celebrate by coming over early and staying late!  We had time to have a lovely dinner at Andina, browse the shelves at Powell's Books, and then attend Cavalia, which is being staged downtown.  Apa and Mateo had gone to see it together on Christmas Eve and came home raving about it, so we gladly took the opportunity to see it for ourselves!  It was designed by one of the founders of Cirque de Soleil and had lots of amazing acrobatics combined with horsemanship.  We had a really good time and enjoyed having such a full evening together. 

Our vacation is beginning to wind down, but we're still enjoying ourselves.  We haven't made it up to the snow yet, but Sacha and the kids went to Zoo Lights last night in the rain!  And, we undertook a little project yesterday:  we painted our dining room and kitchen again!  We had originally picked a mustard yellow color for it, as you can see above, because we had a nice yellow kitchen in our old house, but the mustard just ended up not working for us.

We asked Apa to pick a different color, as he is very good at such things, and he suggested a creamy antique white.  A number of color samples later, we picked a nice cream color and then taped and painted yesterday.  I did most of the painting and Sacha did most of the kid-wrangling, which worked well for both of us.  We were pretty pleased with ourselves that we pulled off such a big project while the kids were awake!  Having white walls is a big change for us, but we really like the way it turned out.  It feels vastly more open and light in there.  Yay!

While I was at the store getting the paint, I noticed that they had rugs on sale and made an impulse purchase of one for the dining room area.  It's a long, narrow room that serves as both a dining room and a hangout area and we've been casually thinking about getting a rug, so now we have one.  We're still trying it on for size, but we think we're going to keep it.

The photos came out yellowish, but you can still get the idea.  You can also see evidence of our constant struggle against clutter!

Ukulele playing by Mateo and Natalia

"I like the Ukulele."

Here is a video of Mateo and Natalia playing one of their very first songs on the ukulele. They can play Old McDonald had a farm, and they can also play Row Row Row Your Boat.

I'm sure that with some time, they will learn even more songs.

Although Alayna would not let us video tape this, she sang a song with two chords in it today! Go Alayna. Before you know it, she will have caught the ukulele bug too!

The holidays

Wow, it has been awhile since I last blogged!

We have had a wonderful holiday season with just a few bumps in the road.  Sacha's first week off work was filled with lots of family time, some house projects, and a big old-house clean-out followed by the closing of the sale.  Yes, we sold it!!  We are so excited and relieved to have that behind us, and to know that the house is in good hands with its new owner.  Apparently, they will be redoing the kitchen, so we wish them all the best.

Of course, the holidays wouldn't be the same without a little excitement, and this year it came in the form of a stomach virus that flattened Sacha and me a few days before Christmas.  Luckily, oh so luckily, we got over it in the nick of time to welcome family to town and celebrate the Christmas and Hanukkah holidays.

Christmas itself was full of presents and amazing food.  Apa cooked Christmas dinner for all of us and it was sublime.  Prime rib, glazed vegetables, incredible mac and cheese, gravy, and Yorkshire pudding were all on the menu.  It was so good that I wanted more even after dinner was over and I was stuffed to the gills.  YUM.  Thanks, Apa!!

We also had fun earlier in the day with opening presents, starting with a very excited Mateo waking us up at the crack of dawn and concluding with a major ocean of wrapping paper in our living room.  It was a great first Christmas in our new home.  Many thanks to Sacha's parents, my parents, and Auntie E for traveling to us during a very busy time of year. 

Today is Sacha's birthday and I want to send a big happy birthday out to her!  We had another wonderful day with lots of family time and lots of chocolate to boot, so I think she felt well celebrated.  Happy, happy birthday, Sacha!

I feel lucky to be married to a teacher, because this is just the start of our second week of vacation.  We're going to spend some more time with my parents in the next couple of days and then have some days to fill after that. We're thinking of heading up to the snow for a day and are also planning our very first family sleepover for the end of the week.  Fun stuff!

I think it will be a good week to round out the end of the year, and hopefully I will start blogging more regularly again.  I've been feeling a little uninspired for awhile, which I attribute mainly to having three small children!  I'm often really spent by the end of the day and it's just easier not to blog, but then I miss out on both writing and recording how we've spent our days.  I'm hoping to start both blogging more and taking more photos again in the new year. Until then, happy end of 2011 to all!

New do

Well, we took the plunge today.  What do I mean?  Ever since we had a daughter, and practically since we had the ultrasound when Sacha was pregnant, I have sworn that she would never have bangs.  I know, it's silly and rather inconsequential, but when I think of bangs, I think of the headache and awkwardness of growing them out, and so I just wanted to avoid them from the get-go. 

So, when Tali finally got hair, we let it grow and grow until she had beautiful curls coming from everywhere.  There was just one (predictable) problem:  she couldn't see!  It was always in her face.  This was exacerbated by the fact that she rarely wanted it pulled back.  I held my ground on the bangs thing for quite awhile, but recently, I began to rethink things. 

It was seeing her up onstage at her winter celebration that sealed the deal for me, because she had hair in her face even when it was up in a ponytail and I just wanted her to be able to see out!  So, this is a long way of saying that we took her to get her hair cut today.  We all go to this great alternative barbershop in northeast Portland, so we went there and asked them to give her bangs.  They turned out really cute, and, as much as I've read that you shouldn't comment on little girls' appearances, I couldn't help telling her a zillion times how cute she looks. 

Here's the girl of the hour with her new haircut:

And, her brother, with his own cute do:

Baby photos to come, as we are way overdue for a photoshoot with Rosie.

Winter break

We have been having a truly lovely time with Sacha home on winter break.  It's so nice to have her home and to be able to just spend time as a family.  This weekend, we spent most of Saturday in north and northeast Portland, finishing Christmas shopping, having burgers, an even attending a Christmas party (at which someone complimented us on how well-behaved our kids were.  So nice!).  It was a beautiful sunny day and not even too cold outside. 

Sunday, we had a lazy but project-y day around the house.  We had been unhappy with a lot of the house's lighting ever since we moved in, and decided that yesterday was a good day to do something about it.  We got some new fixtures from Ikea and Apa wired them all in for us!  He is also working on all our windows, putting up curtains and generally making the place look beautiful, so he put in some more curtains while he was at it.  Thank you, Apa!!  We love how our kitchen and eating area look now.  I'll have to post some photos.

Today, we did some exploring and some organizing.  We all walked down to the rec center at the corner, which is about a five minute walk from our house.  We checked out the preschool there, which we are thinking about for Tali for next year, and we also saw some gymnastics classes going on.  Both kids are signed up for gymnastics there, starting in January, so it was nice for them to see a bit of what they'll be doing.  After lunch, Sacha cut me loose to go to a cafe and address holiday cards.  My hand got really tired, but I had a good time!  I finally found a good cafe that is both relatively close by, independent, and yummy!  The closest place to us is Starbucks, which I admit to having a weakness for, but I'd rather spend my money somewhere local. 

Also, I had to laugh because, as I was addressing cards, I realized that our holiday cards have two little birds on them that I hadn't noticed before.   That made me think of the Portlandia line about putting a bird on it, and I thought that was pretty funny, because we had put a bird on our cards without even realizing it. 

After I got home, we did some purging of the zillion toys we have around the house.  The kids were actually really great about it and Mateo picked out quite a few toys to give away.  Sacha explained to them that we were going to be getting a lot of new toys for Christmas and that we needed to give toys away, in return, to kids who might not be getting so many.  This is the first year that he has seemed to get the concept of that, which was nice to see.

Finally, Sacha took the kids to the store for provisions and came back to make a delicious, delicious salmon hash.  We had made teriyaki salmon last night and left it marinating just a little too long, so it was too intense to eat by itself.  We had the idea of making hash and it turned out perfectly.  Sacha even made poached eggs, for the first time, to go on top.  Even the kids gobbled up their portions, which is saying something, because they're normally suspicious of new foods.  Poor Mateo is working on another loose tooth and is mostly into soft foods, so this fit the bill.  And, poor Rosa has a nasty cold and has hardly nursed or drunk much of anything today.  Let's hope she sleeps tonight, although I'm not betting on it.  I guess we should go to bed early!

Traffic

We just got back from Mateo and Tali's preschool winter celebration.  We almost didn't make it to the school in time for them to perform!  The traffic was awful, awful, awful.  It took the kids and I an hour and fifteen minutes to get there, leaving us fifteen minutes late and very grateful that they were running behind.  We walked in about a minute before Talia's group went up to sing their songs.  Whew!  I had already explained to both kids that we weren't going to make it in time, including how sorry I was, so it was a very welcome surprise to find out that they were going to get to perform after all.

They both did great, although it was obvious that Tali was way outside her comfort zone.  She did go up on stage and stand with her group, although singing along was not in her plan!  We were very proud of her for getting up there at all, given how shy she is.  Mateo seemed very much in his comfort zone and hammed it up along with the rest of his friends.  It was fun to watch him with his group and see how much they have all grown in the three years that they have all attended the school. 

We just made it back, and all I can say is that I am glad we don't have to keep up this routine for longer than the rest of this school year!  I'm not a big fan of all the driving back and forth, and I don't think the kids are, either. 

As part of our mammoth journey to get to school tonight, we got off the freeway and cut through our old neighborhood for the last leg of the trip.  Mateo said wistfully that he liked coming back to the old neighborhood again, and, when asked why in particular, he said "because we didn't have to drive so far to preschool when we lived here!" 

I do feel bad about dragging them through the commute... but, I have to say, I have been having some guilt about uprooting the kids and taking them to a whole new place/house/suburb, so I have to admit that having him only be able to come up with one thing he missed about the old neighborhood kind of made me feel better about the whole thing! 

Anyway, in the end, we made it in time and we all had a very nice time.  And now, we are all on winter break!  Wahoo!  For Sacha in particular, it has been a long road to make it to Christmas, because her class has been so crazy, so I send big congrats to her and wishes for all of us to have a nice holiday season.