February 2023

School Days
Once you get started Doing Stuff (extracurriculars) at school, you’re constantly on the move. Brandi got the Los Alamitos band re-started pretty much all by herself, so we moms kind of made all our kids join; Lukas was convinced to try alto sax, and did not love the 7:20 a.m. start time 2x/wk but hey. Annika made the swim team (alongside all those cabana league kids who’d been doing it since toddlerhood), but a week of 2-hour practices every day after school in chlorine so harsh it ruined a $100 swimsuit in five sessions and made her skin red and rashy was enough — she decided to stick with the pre-comp class at AVAC just for fun, but not to join the school team, and planned to try badminton instead. She made that team, too (despite being out sick for tryouts — the coach took her on after the first practice), starting out in JV doubles; it was more fun, and had a much more reasonable practice and match schedule, so a win all around. 

Family Fare
This year, the Burns Supper — usually in January, to coincide with the poet’s birthday — was the first weekend of February due to the Grants’ scheduling conflicts. It was a packed house, with a lot of good food and some Scotch-fueled roaring at the trivia contest (which I won 2nd place in, heh). We hosted Super Bowl Sunday at our house with the Carneys, plowing through the usual assortment of delicious garbagey food. Valentine’s Day was low-key fun (I decorated the kids’ places at breakfast, they both got & gave valentines to their friends, we had Indian takeout for dinner). We had a bunch of movie nights, of course; one standout was Rear Window, which was a gamble (it’s old, lol) but ended up being a big hit — Lukas loved it so much he watched it again the next day when he got up! And finally, R. and Lukas started a puberty/sex-ed program offered online through Stanford Children’s Hospital (the same outfit that hosted the one I went to with Annika, in the Before Times, only this one was online and one hour a week for five weeks, whereas ours was in-person for two 2.5 hour sessions a week apart).

Seattle Trip
After all those planning sessions, “Ski Week” and our Seattle trip was finally happening! We flew out on Saturday and spent the day of arrival getting settled: renting the mega SUV, finding the house — the $4million house, as the VRBO listing described it, and which immediately became what we all called it and will call it forever — in the Magnolia neighborhood, and getting groceries and other provisions. We stopped for lunch at a great little neighborhood cafe and then combed through an independent bookstore before returning to the $4m house for an easy, potluck-hodgepodge dinner. Over the next week, we went all over the place: A visit to the ür-Starbucks (which served coffee-based cocktails, so you know we adults had to sample those), a walk through a sketchy neighborhood and eventually to the Pinball Museum (one of the highlights of the trip — your admission pays for unlimited plays on dozens of vintage pinball machines, and $4 bought you a beer — and the kids were all gifted pinballs by the owner when we finally left); a day at the Public Market, with fabulous food (Lowell’s!) and innumerable things to look at (including Marnin Saylor, where the kids got these felted stuffed animals in the shapes of various pastries, bookstores, and a magic shop that absolutely entranced Lukas and Manir); we cooked fish bought fresh from the market one night, went out for sushi another night, ordered in pizza and played poker on one particularly nasty-weather night, and had a truly amazing dinner at Mondello, a family-run Italian place in the $4m house neighborhood — so good, we had to go back the next day for takeout desserts for our 2nd? 3rd? market hodgepodge dinner. One morning, we went to the Underground Tour — which is literally underground, due to Seattle’s downtown having been raised up an entire story a hundred-some years ago; it was fascinating (more so for the adults than the kids, I guess, but we learned a lot and it was really cool). We took the ferry to Bainbridge Island, spending the day poking into shops and finding a standout fish-n-chips place for lunch. Ami and I got out one morning for a brisk, gorgeous early walk into and around Discovery Park (right near the $4m house). We took a whole day visiting the Space Needle (Amira did gymnastics out on the see-through, rotating platform, and the kids all dared each other to lean out over the edge (well-shielded by glass? plastic? of course, but we adults felt sick just looking at it!). When we broke for lunch, the families went different directions based mostly on kid restaurant preference; our family went to a seafood restaurant, where we had an amazing assortment of the area’s best stuff, including steamed mussels — and I will remember for the rest of my life the way Lukas’s eyes lit up when he tried his first one! (Got it on video, luckily — it was a revelation!). We all finished the afternoon at the Chihuly museum on another part of the property. We spent another day mostly at MoPop (the Museum of Pop Culture), which was running a very timely (for Annika especially) grunge/Seattle scene exhibit, plus its permanent film/tv/music collections and a Jimi Hendrix exhibit that R. loved. On our last afternoon, we took the short-line monorail back to the Public Market and bought a bunch of food to picnic on for dinner and to bring home. The weather throughout was exciting for us San Jose folk: often rainy, sometimes brilliantly sunny and cool, and even a dusting of grainy snow — twice! — that the kids had to go out in. It was a wonderful trip for all of us, and I, for one, would love to go back.