The Small Family     

Note: I had far too many pictures to include in one post, so I broke this post up into two--one for Oregon, and one for our post-Oregon activities. Be sure to click on the previous blog entry to see all our Oregon pix and hear Theo's scintillating description of our week there!

Hope you all enjoyed Theo’s write-up of our Oregon trip! Seems fitting to let him write our vacation stories, since he’s seeing almost everything through fresh eyes, right?

So here we are home in Roseville, and it’s actually been an eventful week home, too. There was lots of work catch-up, of course, but also some notable events. First and foremost, Chris and I celebrated our third wedding anniversary on Thursday. Grandma Diane came over to watch Theo for a few hours while we went to dinner and then browsed at the bookstore. This time we decided to go to Paul Martin Bistro, a Roseville restaurant that specializes in using organic and locally grown/raised produce and meats. The food was delicious, and the people-watching was…well, spectacular, to say the least. We decided the restaurant could also be called “Silicon Central” or “Trophy Wife Café.” Every time we turned around, there were “enhanced” women strutting around in very tight clothing and gray-haired men escorting impossibly young-looking women in expensive clothes, dripping with jewelry. It made for some interesting conversation between us, that’s for sure! We felt decidedly frumpy in our “unenhanced” states.

But back to the food…. I had oysters as an appetizer (any surprise there?!), and Chris had salmon carpaccio. For dinner, I had salmon grilled with shallots and bacon and served with fresh spinach, while Chris had “brick” chicken in some sort of herb jus with mashed potatoes. Dessert was strawberry shortcake (for Chris) and chocolate crème brulee (for me). Hard to believe three years have gone by already…but then, we look at our two-year-old and see how it’s flown by.

Other notable (and party-worthy!) news from this week is that Theo finally cut his last two molars! In fact, he cut one of the two while we were in Oregon, with the other one following just days later. So I’m surprised he was such an affable traveler, given that he was cutting molars. When he cut the previous two (over Christmas), he was a real beast. This time, we barely knew he was cutting them. He has been pretty clingy, but that’s the only real change. So I am throwing a party (in my mind, at least) to celebrate the long-awaited end of teething!

We had a busy weekend, too. On Saturday, we all went to Little Gym, which is always fun. Then we headed over to Rocklin to see the St. Jude Dream House. For a $100 donation to St. Jude, you are entered in a raffle to win a house worth $425,000. (It’s gorgeous and huge…I am drooling over the space! It’s more than twice the size of our house!) We donated because it’s a good cause, though of course we don’t think we have the proverbial snowball’s chance of winning. But our $100 was well spent. Aside from the good karma that hopefully comes with supporting a good cause, Chris won us a $600 gym membership! St. Jude was doing a Father’s Day obstacle course while we were there, but none of the men would participate. That is, none but Chris. He got out and did the course like a pro (it was pretty simple, but still…), let them take a few pictures of him for the local newspapers, and in return got his choice of prizes. We’ve been thinking of rejoining California Family Fitness lately, but it wasn’t in the budget. (It’s $100/month for a family membership, which is quite steep. But, the facilities are very nice, and they have childcare facilities for tots while the adults are working out. Plus, three beautiful swimming pools--one for tots--and a water play area for kids. So it’s very nice, and when we were members before Theo was born, I used the facilities all the time and really liked them, but $100/month just wasn’t in our budget right now.) And lo and behold, Chris goes and wins us six months of free membership there. Yahoo! Now if we can just get Theo to go to the childcare area…. It has lots of fun things for him to play with, but he has been rather clingy lately, so I’m not sure how quickly he’ll acclimate to it. We'll try it and see how it goes.

After the Dream Home donation, we went to Pet-a-Palooza, a free event held at a big park in Citrus Heights. The goal of the event was to get pets adopted, but there were all sorts of booths of pet-related products you could sample and pet demonstrations and such. We just walked around and looked at the animals and let Theo play, but it was fun.

Sunday was Father’s Day, of course, so I left the day’s activities entirely up to Chris. He decided he wanted to go to the San Francisco Zoo, so off we went. Theo had a great time roaming the zoo and playing, and after he wore himself out, we stopped at the Ferry Building for lunch. They were out of oysters by the time we got there (sniff!), but we had a tasty lunch of bacon cheeseburger (for Chris) and tuna melt with fresh tuna (for me).

So our return has been far from boring. Never a dull moment around here! Hope you’ve all been enjoying the last days of spring….