all about math

So - yesterday evening at bath time (after I gave Son a haircut) Daughter said - "Mom, what's 5x2"?

Son lifted his head and proudly said "10"!

Hi 5s all around.

He then tried to tell her that 1x1 is 2. Oh well.........

Dinosaurs!

The Portland Zoo has an (extra cost!) walk-through exhibit of animatronic dinosaurs. We tried it last summer and the kids got scared and we had to bail out early (no refunds, sorry!). This year they had a lot of fun, especially with the ones that "spit" (water, I'm assuming).

(catchup) Wildlife Safari

We went to the Wildlife Safari in Wilsonville, Ore. I was expecting something pretty cheesy, but it was actually very fun and interesting and the kids loved it. There's nothing but a car door between Daughter and this giraffe. Second picture: they were not nearly this charming throughout the day but I couldn't resist this image. Third: we were pretty confidant that Daughter wouldn't have anything to do with the camels, but Son enthousiatically called our bluff ... and once he was going to go, Daughter had to also! They had fun. Fourth: not much else to do in the area, but there were a couple nice parks in Canyonville. Son pretends to be asleep. There is a great burger place, though.

(catchup) Backsplash for the Kitchen (100th Post!)

This goes back a few weeks, into the depths of my Google-imposed exile from blogging. After much painful consideration of thousands of different tile patterns (okay, I exaggerate) we finally settled on this nice number from Lowe's. We did it ourselves over a couple weekends, and Daughter even got into it for a while. She fit under the counters nicely.

As for the "100th Post!" bit, I think this is actually the 101st, but I had been looking forward to marking this milestone so here goes: we made it to 100 posts! I've really enjoyed doing this, sharing these pictures and this tiny small part of what it means to raise these two wonderful, annoying kids.

Dance! And back on the air.

Daughter and Son at their recent Dance Recital. Daughter is farthest left in the front row, son is in the orange shirt, toward the right. They both had a great time and did very well.

Sorry it's been so long since the last post: I was knocked "off the air" by a still-unresolved bug between (Google's) Picasa and (also Google's --- something wrong here!) blogger.com. I finally got fed up and banged together some scripts on my own to get back on the air.

Reviews: The Trolls; and An Occasional Cow

Two books today, both by Polly Horvath.

First up, the one I read second: An Occasional Cow. This was a delightful and quick read, about the young New Yorker Imogene who goes to spend a summer with her relatives on a farm in Iowa. Here is Josephine, describing Iowa to Imogene over the phone: "Well, out of this living-room window I see the Taj Mahal, but out of my bedroom window there's nothing to be seen for miles around but fields of corn and an occasional cow." This will illustrates the fun tone of the dialog and the imagination of the characters. Nothing magical happens, or even implausible, yet several of the main characters come across as incurable romantics. Imogene, regarding her send-off breakfast of pancakes, thinks of a prisoner's last meal; later, she introduces herself as "the president of a large corporation left ot me by my great-grandfather twice removed." This is imagination and in-story storytelling in spades! The narrator gets into the act from time to time: speaking of a frolick in the local lake, she says only "all was whales and dolphins for a time." Dialog is crisp and funny; characters and situations are fun and believable. All in all an excellent book. I will point out one instance of the word "crap" which stands out as the only profanity, the more odd because the dialog in genernal employs very few exclamations at all.

Let us now turn to The Trolls, which I read before Cow. Herein, Aunt Sally comes to stay with three syblings while their parents are on vacation (I don't believe there is any connection with the characters in the earlier book); she exhibits interesting parenting techniques; and tells amazing tales of her family life in Canada. The drama in the story is the slow revealing of what Aunt Sally's life and family are like --- the proximate children enter into things hardly at all. I enjoyed the parenting bits, such as encouraging the children to eat their green beans by, well, playing with her food; and a bit where she uses the boy's given name, Frank, in defiance of the sisters' pet name Pee Wee (oddly, this dynamic is abandoned after a few chapters).

Much of the same tone as Cow infuses the first part of the book, which is a good thing --- a nice, irreverent, playful approach to life and relationships. The latter half of the book, however, treads into some heavier subjects, delving into the relationship between Aunt Sally and her brother. I think this may be interesting on its own but is not what I'm looking for in a children's book. There is also a recurring theme of death, both in apocryphal (and frankly folkloric) stories by Sally; and in the strictly personal stories she tells. I found it a bit of a downer, if all too realistic.

letter home "catch up"

I've fallen behind on posting letters to the kids at home, so here's a catch-up: