Yee-Haw

It was a cowboy birthday for Nigel's friend, Max today at the Bauer Ranch. Nigel sported his stud-duds and headed to the corral. Sheriff Bauer and his lil' lady threw a real nice party!

American Girl!

In this week of giving and receiving, one gift stood alone in the eyes of a certain 8 year-old girl named Lily. Over the past few years she has spent countless hours pouring over American Girl catalogues. We even went to the massive American Girl Place on Michigan Avenue in Chicago this year and walked out empty-handed. And just at the point when she truly believed that owning her own doll was only a dream, the UPS man arrived with a special package from Lily's great-grandmother Marylea. And......well.....the pictures tell the story better than words.......

Thank you Grandma.

1st Piano Recital

Lily performed in her first piano recital last week. She has only taken lessons for 4 weeks and managed to play 3 pieces beautifully. If she felt nervous, it didn't really show. I have the feeling that Isaac and I will be spending countless hours in auditoriums in the years to come, not warming benches at soccer games. See the video here:

Lily dances her first Nutcracker

Lily's dream of dancing the Nutcracker came true this month. She danced as a young boy in the party scene. She has quite a flare for dancing and theatre arts, so this was a thrill for her. Nigel sported his new holiday suit and went to the ballet too.

Nigel the jumper

Having fun with a Mac and a boy who's part rock star and part jellyfish.

Nails for the ladies

Girls in Chicago. We landed today at O'Hare and Vanessa picked us up. All set for a week of Thanksgiving in Chicago. Home of the Field Museum, the Bears, Mike Ditka, Ditka's Restaurant, The Apple Store, American Girl Place, Oprah Winfrey, Phil Donohue, Navy Pier, The Berghoff (?), Millennium Park, and Barack Obama.

Excellent dinner tonight reconnecting with Nessa and Paul -- painting toenails, being crazy. Tomorrow we go downtown for the city delights.

Boy lost his tooth!

Momentous occasion tonight! All day, Nigel has been on the verge of losing his first tooth. It's been bugging him that it won't come out, but he hasn't wanted to yank it, and we're cool with letting him wait. But tonight, Elissa was getting him ready for bed and they tried one more time with a tissue, and out it came. So he's quite happy, and heading to bed in anticipation of the tooth fairy.

Man. Not a baby any more.

Proud cabinet builder

Nigel and I spent a couple of hours at my office today, Saturday, while Lily and Elissa were at Lily's Nutcracker rehearsal. It was cold and frosty outside in Salem today, so we turned on the lights and the radio, and we put together the new cabinet. He's pretty good at lining up the holes for the pegs. He's also quite strong. He unboxed two chairs (one of them pictured at right) and screwed the legs on them while I fussed with (and cursed under my breath at) the glass door hinges. It's a pretty good cabinet, though, and now I have a place to put my junk that has been lying around on my office floor for the last couple of months.

See how proud he is. If you look closely, you can see the ruby-encrusted pirate ring the scoundrel sports on his hard-working finger. He likes to show off a little booty.

Just got into Ashland tonight, and loaded everyone into the La Quinta just off the freeway. Quiet room, halfway underground. The window looks out into the rhododendrons surrounding the parking lot. 

But the free wi-fi works GREAT, and it popped right up when I opened the computer. No cumbersome codes (like Red Lion's), or multi-step signup procedures. Everyone is asleep now. Tomorrow, on to Reno! (After we hit the free Continental breakfast).

Saburday morning...

Sunny bright Saturday morning here at the house... everyone woke up simultaneously at 8:00 sharp. It must be the habits we're all getting with this whole fall school schedule thing. We normally set the alarms for 7:30 -- but only at 8am does everyone really get moving like they mean it...

Lily had a spur to make omelettes this morning, so when I headed down the street to Roth's to get some half & half for the coffee, I picked up more eggs. She's such a little gourmet. Just loves to cook. Quite good at it, too. She makes prettier omelettes than either Elissa or I can. She also makes hand-written menus just before she starts cooking, so that even if she's already decided what to make, you can get a preview of what it will be.

Somehow, while I was at Roth's, a few fresh doh-dohs made it into the basket as well....OH NO!!!

First day of kindergarten for Boy

Well, gee. What is there to say? At times like these, a picture says it all. Here he is at his new desk in his room at Baker Charter, doing the first task of his school career: decorating his name tag with crayons. Such a sweet little guy he is. We don't want him to go, and at the same time, he's so ready for the next step: to learn, play and share with other kids his own age. He was totally cool with it. Went in without a shrug, and came out beaming every day of his first week. It's a little harder on Elissa and me....

Brunch a la Bainbridge

Having brunch this past weekend with our friends the Dunlaps on Bainbridge Island off the coast of Seattle. Isaac worked in Seattle for a couple of days this week, and Elissa drove up Friday with the kids after school. The kids ate crepes with jam, while we had a fancy baked dish with a French name made of ham, eggs and Gruyere, with plenty of mimosas and coffee to go with.... Gabe and Lily (below) didn't know what they missed.

Summer's last fling....

Nigel doing his best Ziggy Marley Sunsplash imitation as he jumps in the line through the mister overhead....

We stole the last hours of summer to hit the Oregon State Fair on Labor Day....walked a million miles with the kids, looking at animals, riding rides, chomping on funnel cake and mouthing cotton candy....

Auntie Nessa come to play

Vanessa came through for a day to play with the kids at our house in Salem this summer, before heading up to Seattle with Isaac, Lucien and India for their first annual siblings weekend. The kids adore their auntie, so here they are showing her how to play Blokus in our living room....

O-Olallie.....Oh-oh-oh....

Et cantare.......woh-oh-oh-oh....

The quintessential camping trip of the summer -- at pristine Olallie Lake up in the Mt. Hood wilderness area....no boats, no motors.....no toilets.

Still, lots of fun, if you can hold it or you don't mind using a leaf. We took a canoe from Elissa's folks, and toured around the lake when we weren't roasting things by the fire. Thompson had fun too, although the first night, he kept going out the tent to throw up in the bushes -- I think the 3-hour ride up backroads must have been too much for his tender disposition.

Chillin' at the Enchanted Forest

Here are cousins Spencer and Hayden Brown with Lily and Nigel at the ever-so-magical Enchanted Forest. Also got valuable celebrity sightings of the 16th president. How exciting. (Don't you think he looks a little like Carson Daly, though?)



Love the Hencanted Froste. Gotta go at least once a year....their gun-totin' grandma demands it....

Musika at the Tin Shed

Ah.....time to catch up a bit....Here we are in mid-summer at the Tin Shed, a lovely outdoor cafe in NE Portland on Alberta, where Isaac's group, the 12th Avenue Hot Club, played several times. Note the extra-cool lighting Elissa captured without the flash.

Summer Fun!

We're having a great time this summer. Plenty of relaxing going on here. Nigel got a new Adam's Trail-a-Bike, which he thinks is too cool. Isaac took him for a long ride yesterday (about 3 hours by my watch,) and they mysteriously came back with doughnuts for all! I got a new bike too (see photo.) It's a Townie, very comfy. All the charm of a beach cruiser, but you can make it back up the steep hills home again. The NW is the land of physically fit people, and you don't want to get caught having to walk your bike up a hill!

The other photo is of Isaac hard at work in his "office." Working from home ain't so bad.

Lily's Last Day of School

This is Lily, Telicia and Reede celebrating their last day of 2nd grade at Baker Charter School. This was her first year at this new international school in Salem, and it was quite a success! She is eager to return in September with little brother in tow. He'll be starting kindergarten there. I'm still trying to convince him this is a good thing. The tears shed his first day will likely be mine though.

New room for the boy

This Father's Day, Sunday, we spent time all working on redoing Nigel's room. It's time for him to have his own identity now that Lily's moved into her own room as of last September. We spent considerable time and energy getting her room ready, so now it's his turn.

The idea is to turn it into a jungle sort of thing, something like Max's room in Where The Wild Things Are. So this weekend we successfully tore out all the carpet, which was well worn and stained beyond repair.


This wasn't easy, because we had to lift the bunkbed back and forth over the roll of carpet to get it out. Then came my favorite job -- pulling hundreds of tiny staples and splintered tack strips out of the hardwoods. Kids were great help on this -- we all donned safety glasses and got to work with pliers, pulling.

Then came the fun -- actually slapping on the first coats of bright blue paint. They did a great job covering half of the first wall. Elissa did the edging and I did the ceiling. Check out the fashionable paint smocks, including my old Napster shirt.

A girl who was born to dance

Here's the class shot of Lily's troupe for the 2006 year at the Discovery School, in all their Irish-dancing-spritefulness. It's hard to explain how natural she is as a dancer. It's breathtaking.

(She's the best one, as you can see.) - Isaac

Bunk bed boy

Nigel's snoozing in the bunk bed, snuggled down with Pooh's lower half.

Life in Alaska

Last week in Anchorage, Isaac finished working and headed to the car to find this cute little guy grazing by the parking lot. He risked getting charged (as Moose are inclined to do,) and got some great photos. Ah, life on the last frontier.

Easter

This Easter found us at home with family, friends, ham and great weather. We had lots of fun hiding and re-hiding eggs in the backyard, and played many games of Blokus and Landlock. (If you don't have these games, find them!) Nigel and Lily made some beautiful eggs for us. We'll now eat ham and eggs for every meal until it's gone. You may notice that Nigel's arm is lame, he fell playing soccer and had it in a partial cast for 10 days, but the ortho Dr. said it's the type of injury that's better off being used since there was no clear break, so he's now cast-free! This is great news since he's headed to Disneyland in two weeks with Grandma and Grandpa and his cousin Spencer.

Saturday afternoon in Middle Earth

One of those magical Northwest days where it might get cold and rain at any given moment -- but until then, the sky is filled with orange-blue-pink-and-gray light and strange things happen to the afternoon shadows and colors. Here we're waiting for Thompson to run his legs out at Minto-Brown park.

Speaking of which, I just learned that Google Earth is now available for the Mac platform! Very cool. If you've never seen it, it's something that you need to have. Download it free from Google for your computer, then type in your address and watch it zoom to your house using real photos from outer space.

Here, we have Nigel running as fast as his legs will carry him back to the car. There's a certain exhiliration, I'm convinced, that comes from running at top speed through a park filled with dogs, hoping you're not knocked to the ground by an over-exuberant Retreiver, Boxer, Setter, or, dare-I-say, Whip-a-dor?

Punky muggle

As you can see from this photo, Nini's feeling under the weather this weekend. She's lost her voice and had a tiny fever on Saturday, so we spent the day just hanging out as a family. She napped and watched some old Electric Company episodes in her room.

Actually, this is her sitting at the table while I read several chapters of Harry Potter and The Sorcerer's Stone Saturday morning. We've really been getting into it. Elissa's read this first one, but none of the rest of us had read any of the uber-saga. I sort of thought it would be too mainstream to follow the crowd and enjoy it with everyone else over the last 10 years of Harry Potter-mania. Reading it now, I'm just as amazed and hooked into the story as your average human. I have to admit, there's a little bit of selfish glee in relishing the delayed enchantment after everyone else has long gotten over it -- sort of like saving all your Halloween Candy until after Thanksgiving, and eating it in front of all the other kids.

Anyway....we hope her eyes soon return to normal, or we're going to have to enroll the lass in the house of Slytherin.....which, as you know....was also the house of Vol...sorry...I mean the One-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named.....

Drumming Duck

Somehow, in the last few weeks, Nigel has found his mojo and come out of his shell in many ways. One of these is his sudden affinity for playing the drums. We've had this set in the house for nearly a year now, and he's always complained when anyone played them. We always keep a couple sets of air-traffic-controller headphones nearby for that reason.

However, Elissa called me the other day while I was in Alaska to let me hear this: he's taken to drumming all of a sudden, getting the kick-and-hi-hats going with both legs working in opposite rhythm, and playing this clackety polyrhythm with the sticks on top. It's a pretty cool, sort of loose Meters-style funky beat.

I don't know where he gets this. I certainly can't play the drums to save my life. We think the independent limb coordination might come from his apparent left-handedness, which I've heard creates a more ambidextrous person than those of us who are so totally right-handed that the other hand really does little more than providing balance and aesthetic symmetry (like myself).

Snow day

Bundled up the brood and packed into the Element this weekend for a trip up to the snow. It's been snowing late at night in our neighborhood: fat, fluffy flakes falling fast....but they've melted pretty quickly and left no traces by morning, despite my hopeful alliterations.

So we got the sleds and snowboots, and drove about 90 minutes up into the Santiam Canyon east of Salem, past Detroit Lake and southeast toward HooDoo. This is from near the SkiBowl Sno-Park along that way. We pulled off and trudged up the trailhead about 25 feet from the parking lot, where we spent the afternoon sledding, hucking snowballs and lying in the powder.

It's amazing how quiet and pristine the woods were. The snow was easily 5 feet deep off the trail, and I sank in several times up to my waist and had to dig out. The kids both wore themselves out and ended up just sitting about 10 feet apart in the drifts, eating snow off their mittens and soaking up the moment. It was getting cold out, but they didn't want the day to end. - Isaac

kids love Sushi Town

Our new favorite family restaurant is in Beaverton, Oregon, called Sushi Town. We've been there twice now, and it has convinced the kids that they can really eat ANYTHING as long as it comes around on a little conveyor and colorful plates that they can pick up and eat themselves. Lots of fish, rice, veggies and seaweed. Amazing.

Who says you have to quit having fun with kids? Something for everyone to try. The world needs more sushi places with conveyors -- or -- the "train with the food," as Nigel calls it.

First post here

Here's a new experiment in family communication. I set this up to let all of our friends and family know and see what the Oregon Szymanczyks are up to. Feel free to comment, link, post and connect! Thanks!

Isaac