February 2016

Tahoe!
We went to Tahoe with the Carneys again on Annika’s spring break, and this time there was a big nasty storm forecast for the Thursday we’d been planning on driving up. So we went up on Wednesday instead, and got a hotel room for the night. The kids handled it well, and woke up to a couple of feet of fresh snow! Woooooo!! We got to the cabin, moved in, got groceries, and the other family arrived late that afternoon while we were out at a snow play area (with sledding, snow tubing, and a big field in which we built forts and furniture). The first full day, we put all the kids in a 3-hour ski lesson and we adults made a couple of runs … just a couple, because nothing was groomed, and we were all afraid of breaking a leg, but it did feel good to do it again after a 10-year hiatus (the last time R. and I went was … 2006?). The kids didn’t love their lesson, but it was still worth doing. The next day we all just hung out in the cabin and played for hours in the backyard — epic snowball fight, making a sled run, flopping down and making snow angels, etc. Then we had to pack up and head home on Sunday, another surprisingly easy drive home after a great trip. Excellent vacation with friends!

Annika’s busy life
—Girl Scout cookie sales: OK, now this is real. We had to get inventory, make the pitch to customers, get Daddy to take boxes to work (he ended up being the real hero of sales, selling out his inventory nearly every day till the end), and take our turn at booth sales (one outside of the Lucky near us, one at the Safeway farther away). Annika loved booth sales, and I tried to stay out of it, only being the responsible adult presence and letting the girls manage themselves — it worked surprisingly well, and we sold quite a few cookies; the girls did very well against their troop goals.
—Orca ribbon: Annika got her Orca ribbon at last — the shiny black one — and there are now only three levels to go until she, in her own words, “graduates” AVAC’s program. Go, little mermaid!!
—Grace’s birthday: Annika was of course invited to Grace’s birthday party, at Rockin’ Jump, which is just a warehouse with a mess o’ trampolines. She LOVED it, of course, and now wants to go there all the time.
—The Journey of Orthodonture begins: Three appointments this month, the first two for measuring and insertion of spacers, and the final one for the insertion of the expanders (upper and lower), which she’ll wear for four months. Annika took it all like a champ, even though some parts of it were clearly painful. Each time, I took her for ice cream after school to make up for it. I have to turn the key to expand the expanders a little bit every evening for two weeks, which is just … ugh. It makes me feel so bad to do a thing that hurts her, even though it’s for the long-term good. Poor kid — and a little tiny bit poor me! Next appointment is six weeks away. 

Just bein’ social
—Super Bowl Sunday: We had the Carneys over again, cause last year was a good time — and so was this one! The game was fun, the kids got along, we ate a bunch of crappy food and drank a lot of beer. Murica.
—Lukas’s trio: The Girl Scout troop went ice skating, so I had three little brothers over to our house while the girls were away: Lukas, Eleni’s little brother Theo, and Brianna’s little brother Brandon. Within about three minutes, they were all playing Star Wars, and the afternoon included a ton of popcorn, an hour of dot-painting art, and numerous high-speed laps around the pool. They all had a blast, but by the end I wanted to have a large Scotch and go straight to bed … 

Quotable Kids:
—Powerful Blue Panthers: The name of Annika’s basketball team at recess. They like to wear blue headbands.
—bazombies: Lukas’s take on the undead
—play Star Wars with me: What he wants everyone to do, all the time.
—windmills = wing fighters: He saw some windmills, and called them “wing fighters,” aka X-Wing Fighters. Heh.
—“What is this world called? Truckee? I think that's because there are lots of trucks there. Little trucks, like Crusher's trucky that he loves.” Lukas making sense of the name of the town we were in on the way to the Tahoe cabin, incorporating Minecraft, observation, and Blaze & The Monster Machines.
—robot dinosaurs: AT-ATs (Star Wars)
—“Why does every single superhero have to stop a train from a broken track?” Keen observation in re: world-saving tasks performed by the superheroes in his picture books.