Tiny Dancers

On Monday night I came down with food poisoning. Before that, I attended my daughter's low key, pre-school dance recital. The "stage" was a rug and some spare floor boards to tap upon. The backdrop was the gym door and a fire extinguisher. As only a parent would, I found it to be the best dance performance I've ever seen. Well, close to the best. In the top three for sure. 

This is the little one wearing a tutu to be like her big sister. I didn't mean to crop her head out of the photo. I think she was doing her version of "Jazz Hands!"

Palms Provide No Shade

Tonight, as I blow dried my daughters' hair, my mind started to wander to this blog. What should I write about tonight? The felled tree, the cardboard bakery or the tea party attended by naked Ariel? I hesitate to write about any of these topics because I don't have particularly compelling photos to go with them. Nevertheless, the photos were taken today so at least I can claim they're current.

First, the felled tree. I don't actually have any photos to illustrate this subject, but two days ago the condo association that borders our back yard cut down a large pine tree. I was the one who requested that they do so, but I didn't actually think that they would. The tree was tilting over our property at approximately a forty-five degree angle, dropping needles and making lots of shade.

I feel a little guilt about this tree, but not a lot. I will plant another, better-suited one to make up for it, but one can't help feel sadness when a tree is cut down. Before we bought this house, I felt that no tree should be cut down. I remember talking to a co-worker about the large tree in her yard. The roots were damaging her foundation and the tree was going to have to go. I naively thought this was a tragedy. That a mature tree should be saved at all cost.

Now I see that sometimes trees that weren't appropriately planted become dangerous or silly. (I'm going to seem like I'm tree-cutting happy, but we also had two palms trees removed from our front lawn a couple months ago. These are the silly trees that I'm referring to: two fifty foot palms sticking up in the middle of a lawn, not providing shade, not close enough to hang a hammock between and tall enough that all you could see of them was two brown trunks. This is silly tree planting if you ask me. I don't live in Hawaii or Los Angeles. I don't need palm trees next to the pine tree and azalea bushes also planted-by someone else-in my yard. Out of all the beautiful trees available, why plant palms that you know are going to grow three stories or higher?) I don't generally rant on here, but the palms get me going.

Back to newly felled tree in the back. Now that it's gone, a once very shady corner of my garden is very sunny. Everything I've planted there is no longer well-placed. While my shade plants are probably not too happy, the sun shining down on my yard is a happy thing.

Now I've spent a lot more time that I had planned going on my tirade about trees. So I will be briefer about the rest. The cardboard bakery we made today does not look anything like the example in the book I brought home from the library. It's an awesome book by designer Todd Oldham, entitled Kid Made Modern. This book is full of kids' crafts inspired by Mid-Century Modern artists and designers. (I pretend that I check out these kids' crafts books for my daughter but really they're for me.) My daughter also likes this book and she picked out a "modernist fort made from cardboard boxes" based on the mid-century case study houses that she wanted to make (and has been bugging me to make for four days now.)

She decided that she did not want a house, but a bakery. This is what I came up with: (I don't know what makes it a bakery though.)

 Here is the bakery-inspired tea party that naked Ariel attended:

The flowers that graced the "tables" of the bakery/cafe.

The cafe "chairs." Each one decorated by freshly picked flowers. (I have to fight the urge to prohibit any flower picking from my garden. I blame my flower-greediness on being an only child. Sharing, even with one's daughters, is not easy.)

A Wedding-Like Event

We recently attended a wedding-like event in Seattle. It was "wedding-like" because the couple was not getting married that day, just celebrating their love, their friends and family and their baby, due in two months. The bride-like mom-to-be looked all glowy in a teal dress and an ostrich feathered boa. The groom-like father-to-be played the trumpet to announce the start of the party. The as-yet-to-arrive baby looked big in her mom's belly. It was an unusual, hilarious, relaxed affair held in a funky yet enchanted ballroom somewhere near the freeway. It was a personality-filled party, true to the couple we were celebrating.

I have always been enamored with Seattle. The first time I visited I was five. I don't remember that trip much, but I've had a version of Seattle in my head that I've loved ever since. I have been lucky with weather there too. I seem to always catch the city in at least part sun. Seattle on a sunny day is a good place to be, I think.

I'm just including a few photos for it was a short trip. 



The requisite Pike's Place Market shot.



Lanterns aglow at the wedding-like event.



Outside the ballroom was a courtyard filled with potted maples, strung lights and ashtrays. (It is the Northwest after all, where smoking, apparently helps some folks make it through the gray.)



The BEST mac n' cheese in the world! (Actually it's called The World's Best Mac n' Cheese.) It comes from Beecher's Handmade Cheese right near Pike's Place Market. I waited in line for this and it was awesome.

All the Colors of Unreal

  

I am a worry-er with a guilty conscience. This applies to all aspects of my life and covers all actions I take. But I'm not writing tonight about all my life, just this past Easter weekend and more specifically, about coloring things.

Guilt and Worry cause me to generally be quite careful about the quality of food my kids eat. I try to limit the amount of processed things they consume and read labels before I buy packaged foods. (Sometimes I even put the package back on the shelf after I read their labels.)  But, I am not perfect. (If I was, there would, of course, be no need to worry or feel guilt!)

This past weekend I went a little color crazy and bought both regular and neon boxes of food coloring. Now, I earnestly try to limit foods containing fake coloring. I really hesitated before buying the two boxes of dyes. But I was no match against the endless shade possibilities afforded by eight different mini bottles of fake food color. (On the package they give you the drop ratios to make such alluring hues as apricot, deep purple, orange sunset, teal, dusty rose, stormy blue and green apple. Who could resist?!)

When it came time to dye eggs, I realized that I am not a seasoned egg dye-er. I only hard boiled eight eggs to start. I am not sure how I came to the conclusion that eight eggs was the right number to dye. The girls and I went a little Mad Scientist with the different color possibilities, wanting to create them all. Very quickly we had way more dye colors than eggs to dye. In the middle of dying those eight eggs, I realized I better boil some more. That's when I cooked another six. (Why am I so stingy with my eggs?)

The next day it was time to make cupcakes for my husband's family's Easter picnic. This is where I failed as a Really Good Provider by making cupcakes from the box (and not the trans-fat-free mix from the natural food section. Target had the classics on major sale and that won out over good nutrition.) And then, we topped those processed delights with some nearly neon food-colored frosting in "Princess" shades, as my daughter described them. (Ironically though, I made the frosting itself from scratch. I realized that this wasn't the best idea as I watched the cupcakes oxidize in the sun, turning yet more shades of unreal.)

What do I take away from this weekend? Use less dye. When it comes to food you're coloring yourself, less is probably more.

Easter Bunnies

I have learned that in the Land of Preschool, holidays mean treat bags. I'm not particularly proud of my participation in this tradition. The kids exchange lots of treats, lots of sweets and lots of stuff to throw away. I don't want to be too negative though or take it all too seriously. My daughter quite enjoys helping put together the bags for her classmates, carefully selecting colors or treats based on her peers' preferences.

For the Easter edition of the goodie bag, we copied. They celebrated an early Easter party last week and made cute bags very similar to the ones pictured above. When we were discussing what she should bring this week, we both thought it would be fun to make more of the bags. The best part was watching her draw the bunny faces.

Happy Easter!

Building Things

My husband has been building this planter for most of the day. The evening light is gone now, but he remains out there in the back yard. When it's nice out and your outside, I've noticed, it's hard to come back in. He has gotten as far as he can on the planter without making a third trip to Home Depot today, so he has found other things to do out there. Organizing, cleaning, general puttering.

The girls think the planter is for them. They asked if it was going to be their stage or their play house. At this moment in the photo, it's their dance studio.

Some of these plants will find a new home in the planter. It's hard to get over the wondrous potential of a new plant.

Building things is really good, but it comes at a price. We all spent most of the day outside, which is good. But, the dishes from dinner have yet to be done, the laundry is sitting in its mountainous piles, the curtains I was working on two days ago remain on the ironing board, pins perilously poking out. It's hard  to look around, once you do finally come inside, and not feel overwhelmed. This is an emotion that I must work hard to suppress. There really is only so much that one can do in a day. It's either build something or clean something. It's hard to do both. I'm working on putting the blinders on and focusing on the task at hand, whatever it may be, and not allow myself to notice the mess here and there and in the other room I just passed.

Still, I'm feeling a bit out of control on the homemaking front. Probably means it's time to go to bed and get some sleep. Maybe in the morning I'll feel like tackling the house. (More likely though, I'll feel like planting some of the plants in that photo up above.)

Really, Officially

I took these photos this afternoon of the girls picking snow peas. I hesitated to post them. In fact, I had another draft started with completely different photos about a completely different subject, but I just couldn't help myself. I had to post the photos with my garden as the subject.

I continue to be overly interested in my garden. The other day I took a video of what was supposed to be the kids playing outside as they splashed around with a bucket of water. I was trying to capture their play and the impractical way they had chosen to wash some paint brushes. (They were supposed to be painting, but they ended up being much more interested in washing the brushes than painting with them.) Before I knew it, I had turned the camera away from my children and began filming my back yard. There truly isn't a lot to film back there. It's still full of rocks and dirt and very young plants, but I thought it would be good to have a record of the garden in its nascent stage. When I showed the video to my husband, he enjoyed the small part the kids were in, but pretended to snore through the long garden shot.

I know I should wait a little longer to post any photos of things growing or things harvested. We have many months ahead for photos like these above, but it's really officially spring now and, well, I just couldn't help myself.