The Small Family     

Yahoo--our blog site is now working again! And it's powered by Yahoo, so it really IS appropriate for me to say yahoo about it!! Without further ado...

First and foremost, let me say that our little Miss Zoe turned two on Saturday!! And I turned a decidedly less exciting 37…. I’m actually not sure when Zoe’s birthday is, but I know she was born sometime in January 2009, so I decided we’d share the 8th as our common birthday. So Zoe is now a toddler! Or is she a teenager? I suppose it depends on whether you count human years or dog years. She certainly acts like a toddler, so we’ll go with that! As for me, I guess I’m officially now “late 30s.” Ouch…

To celebrate my birthday, Chris, Theo, and I went to San Francisco. It almost always rains on my birthday, but this year it didn’t, so I was determined to get outside! Alas, it was bitterly cold in Sacramento--we’d been fogged in for several days, and it was very damp and cold. So we went to San Francisco, where it was 12 degrees warmer and not nearly as foggy. It was still too cold to spend a LOT of time outside, but it was certainly better than Sacramento!

I decided I wanted to do something different than usual, so we skipped the Ferry Building and zoo and instead went to Yerba Buena Gardens. What a find! It’s a park in the city, right near the Moscone Center and not far from Union Square. It’s not overly big, but it’s very pretty. There’s a big lawn, a neat waterfall, a few sculptures, a big carousel, a neat playground, an indoor ice rink, and a children’s museum. We spent some time at the playground and then opted for the children’s museum. (I love to ice skate, but obviously Theo’s not quite there yet. And Chris is a phenomenally bad ice skater. I say that with honesty and great affection, as he once went ice skating with me in Tahoe because he knew it would make me happy, and I have to say I have never laughed so hard in my life. He was lurching around the ice like some sort of Frankenstein on blades, and there were actually people telling their kids, “Honey, stay out of the man’s way!” because he was careening around like a drunk! After that, he swore he’d never go again. But oh, I laughed so hard I cried!!)

Turns out we got into the museum (called Zeum) for free due to a reciprocal membership we have with a museum in Sacramento, which was good thing because we only stayed about 45 minutes before Theo was just too crabby to continue. To be honest, Theo was pretty much a tyrant all day. But it being my birthday, Chris was a super nice guy and handled all the tantrums so I could just relax. Ah, bliss! Anyway, we will definitely be going back to Zeum, as it was very cool, and had he been in a better mood, Theo would’ve undoubtedly loved it.

We decided some lunch might cheer up the Tiny Tyrant, so we walked over to a nearby mall that we remembered as having a much better than average food court. I had originally envisioned a yummy seafood lunch, but when you have a cranky kid on your hands, you tend to opt for easy. And actually, the upscale food court was indeed much tastier than most--my salad was delicious, as was Chris’s tri-tip sandwich. And we got tasty desserts from Bristol Farms (very ritzy supermarket) afterward, which made up for my decidedly lackluster dessert the night before (more on that later).

After our semi-late lunch, we decided to try the Exploratorium. We get free admission there, too, so even though there was only an hour left before closing, it was worth the trip. And how neat!! Theo was nuts over all the hands-on exhibits! He’s too young to really understand much about them yet, but he just likes being able to turn the knobs, push the buttons, and so on. Alas, his mood hadn’t improved much after eating…but we still had a nice time, and we’ll definitely go back.

In case anyone is wondering, I suspect his bad mood was the result of two main factors. First, he didn’t get to sleep until after 10:00 on Friday night. (He normally goes to bed at 8 and talks to himself until about 9, and then falls asleep.) Second, because it was a special day with a long car trip, we let him have a piece of Starbucks pumpkin bread on the way down. And he had part of a cupcake after lunch. We’ve recently cut way back on his intake of refined sugar, as we’re curious what effect that has on his behavior. He didn’t eat a lot of sugar anyway, but we really didn’t monitor it because it was never an issue--he ate a lot of healthy foods too, so some sugary foods didn’t bother us. But then Chris and Theo went to get donuts a couple weekends, and we found that Theo was an absolute tyrant after eating donut holes, so we got to wondering about the sugar thing. So for the past month or two, we haven’t allowed him to have much in the way of sweet foods, other than naturally occurring sugars such as that in fruit. And his behavior has been really good--though obviously it’s impossible to say whether that has much or anything to do with cutting back on sugar. But yesterday he was a bear…and he had two sugary things. Makes you wonder, eh? We’re of the “everything in moderation” mindset, so we’re not going to ban all sugary items…but it’s enough to make us dole them out only on occasion and in small quantities.

Anyway, Mr. Crabby slept the entire 2-1/2-hour drive home, so that was nice and peaceful. And I think the nap did him good--he was much more cheery when we got home. By then it was late, so we picked up some yummy sushi takeout, fed Theo dinner, and put him to bed. All in all, an excellent birthday!

We actually had a lovely dinner, just the two of us, on Friday night. My Mom had gotten us a gift certificate for one of our favorite upscale restaurants some time ago, so we used it the night before my birthday--which also happened to be the six-year anniversary of our first date. And oh my, the dinner was excellent! We each had a drink (Texas margarita for me, mojito for Chris) and an appetizer (duck confit spring rolls for me, salmon carpaccio for Chris). We shared the appetizers, and then Chris had his usual chicken dish for dinner (it’s chicken with pancetta and artichoke hearts), while I had pistachio-crusted sea bass in a leek sauce with wild mushrooms. For dessert, Chris had sorbet and I had lemon pound cake with berries. Now, I normally love chocolate, but their chocolate offerings were minimal. And I happen to love pound cake, so I opted for that. But they toasted the pound cake!! Sounds good, you say? Not so. Because in my humble opinion, the best thing about pound cake is that dense, moist texture…and toasting the pound cake took that away. It was more like a dry French toast. Ah well, it had a nice scoop of homemade gelato and a few berries on top, so I ate those. And made up for it was a luscious piece of chocolate cake with cheesecake filling in San Francisco the next day. ;-)

My birthday treat to myself was a haircut, which I got on Friday. I’ve been growing my hair out for some months as a money-saving strategy. Truth is, I like my hair short--it’s very easy to care for. But Chris and I had to choose areas to cut back in to make up for that ghastly pay cut I had, and one area I chose was haircuts. (The logical area to cut back would be travel, but we love traveling, so we cut back in other areas instead.) So, I haven’t had a cut in about five months, and I was looking very shaggy. In fact, my beloved hairdresser informed me that I had a mullet. Oh dear…. Anyway, he evened it all out and reshaped it, so it looks much better now.

Other fun news for the week: Theo has a new favorite shirt. He’s really never paid much attention to what he wears, though he does like to wear shirts with sayings on them. But really, he doesn’t usually much care. But recently, he wanted to wear his Mickey Mouse shirt. Only said shirt was too small, so I told him we’d try to buy him a new one soon. We went to Target on Monday, and lo and behold, they had Mickey Mouse T-shirts for $7, so I picked one up and told him we’d buy it. You’d think I had given him the moon on a string or something. He proudly held that Mickey shirt all the way through Target, relinquishing it only when we had to pay for it, and he insisted on changing into it when we got home. And then he wanted to wear it the next day, too. He just loves that shirt! Funny to see him so excited about something--I found it very endearing.

The other thing I find quite amusing and endearing is Theo’s decisiveness. Chris and I are both not terribly decisive people, but our son is very decisive. Lately, he has definite ideas about what he wants, and he’ll state them very firmly and politely. Luckily, they’re usually very doable. When my Mom came over a week or so ago to babysit him for an hour while I went to the chiropractor, he announced, “Feo want go Whole Foods with Grandma and eat lunch.” Well, easy enough--we do often go to lunch when my Mom babysits, and Whole Foods is somewhere we often go because there are lots of choices and a play area for Theo.

This past week, Theo and I were going to do an errand, and he announced, “Feo want go mall.” I said, “No, we’re not going to the mall--there’s nothing there for you.” He replied, “Play area!” so I had to tell him that there isn’t a play area there anymore, thanks to our fire some months back. (Though actually, I just found out they’re rebuilding it--yahoo!) He thought for a moment and said, “Go check.” Well, a reasonable request--though I denied it on the grounds that I had been there the previous week and knew for certain that there currently isn’t a play area. But I was amused that he was quite firm about the fact that we ought to at least go check to see whether there was one!

He also told me one day this week, “Feo need French fries and ketchup for lunch, like Auntie Lynnie’s house!” We didn’t have any fries on hand, but chicken nuggets and ketchup were apparently a good enough substitute.

Perhaps this amuses me so much because Theo was a slightly late talker, so for a long time we would have to wonder, “What does he want? What is he trying to tell us?” The fact that he can now communicate quite well and is so sure of himself is both refreshing and quite entertaining!

And now that we’ve talked about food, how about a smooth segue into…colonoscopies?! Ha ha, couldn’t resist! Seriously, though--for those of you wondering how my Mom is, I wanted to say that her colonoscopy on Monday went well. The diverticulitis is gone, and now she’s left with what they call “painful diverticulosis,” according to the GI doctor. Diverticulosis is a condition that is always present once you have it--but it normally only because problematic when it gets inflamed/infected and turns into diverticulitis. In my Mom’s case, the inflammation/infection is now gone, but the pain is still there because she had such an extensive flare-up that the tissue around the colon is still painful. The GI doc gave her the green light for surgery and said she should get it done, because this will flare up again, and at some point she’ll run into complications, such as a rupture or an abscess, and those can be life-threatening. So, we meet with the surgeon on Tuesday, and presumably they’ll schedule surgery as soon as possible after that. And my Mom, who swore after her last surgery that she’d never have surgery again, is elated and looking forward to surgery! Can’t say I blame her--she’s been in a great deal of pain since August, and that’s just not fun.

Stay tuned next week for more Colon Tales!!