Fun With Friends

And now for the rest of the Hamilton's visit!

I am glad have we so many friends with charming little girls. It's nice to have a girl fix when I am feeling overwhelmed by all the rough-and-tumble that boys entail.

For instance, who could resist this little munchkin?

This girl can eat Honey Nut Cheerios like nobody's business (the most likely explanation being that she's usually fed something more healthy at home.) She had two bowls herself and then found and finished Willem's own abandoned bowl at some point in the morning. I have really been falling down on hostess duty, allowing guests to eat cold cereal for breakfast.

The boys and an iPhone: like moths to a flame.

While Hamilton visits often entail fine dining, we're not always fancy. Here we are enjoying an Ikea meatball lunch.

Willem can put away the fifteen meatballs on the plate all by himself.

After we put the kids to bed on Friday night, Shaun made potato chips.

I just can't leave well enough alone.

On Saturday we tried out the Pearl District's buzzy new Little Big Burger.

It's cool, but I'm not a fan of places where you have to lurk about waiting to pounce on an available seat.

On Saturday night, there was no pouncing. We lined up our babysitter extraordinaire and set off for Laurelhurst Market, a restaurant I have been reading about in my food magazines since it opened.

They don't take reservations for small parties, so we got there early. At 5:30 there was an hour and a half wait. They took our phone number and we went and had a beer at the cozy Horse Brass Pub, a worthy destination in its own right.

Then it was back to the restaurant and its adjoining butcher shop.

My quick review: I didn't really care for the steaks, but everything else we ordered was delicious (including the cocktails.) The salt cured foie gras torchon with blood orange, grapefruit, and brioche bread salad with saba and cress (I know, how pretentious does that sound!) was the dish of the evening. Shaun pointed out that it had obviously been made with pure evil, which was what made it taste so good.

After dinner it was still fairly early, so we headed downtown...

had a nightcap at Clyde Common...

and still made it home before 10:30!

It may seem like all we did was eat, but it was a short visit, so that is what we did most of. We also spent some time at Powell's and then tracked down a new iPad for Amanda, which everyone (including the babysitter) had fun playing with.

Fun. With friends.

Yippee Ki Yay

"Mom, I can hula hoop with my arms crossed."

Nels had been telling me this for weeks. The Helen Baller spring program was coming up. The theme was "cowboy," and Nels's class had learned to hula hoop for the occasion.

Once the big day finally arrived, we had to leave the visiting Hamiltons at our house for a few hours while we went to the high school to watch the program. Every class in the entire school participates, so it's not the sort of thing one wants to subject out-of-town visitors to.

We didn't get there early enough to get ready parking, so Shaun dropped me and Nels off. Nels grasped my hand firmly as we joined the stream of fellow almost-late families heading for the doors of the school.

"Look at that boy's hat," said a mom walking behind us. She was referring to Nels, who was wearing a cowboy hat that was a gift from my mom. I think she bought it in Sisters, Oregon. Wherever it came from, it was the jen-yoo-wine article.

"He has the best hat in the whole school." Nels didn't look at me, but he stood up straighter and his step grew bouncier.

"He sure is lucky." Her children, a boy and a girl, voiced their assent. When I dropped Nels off with his classmates, his eyes were shining.

Here are the spectators occupying one side of the Camas High School gym. The entire student body (and teachers) took up the other side.

Here's Nels and some of his classmates waiting for the show to begin. The red-kerchiefed kiddos are Kindergartners.

Ready, set...

spin!

Here's where he really hit his stride and I cried just a little. It was fabulous.

When his group finished, all the kids took a hurried bow and ran off. Nels, on the other hand, bowed low and slow, with a flourish and a wave to each section of the bleachers.

A job well done.

After the show, we came home to find that Amanda and Andrew had cleaned up the dinner mess I'd left behind, and they'd washed the dishes. And Amanda had scrubbed my kitchen sink cleaner than it's been since we first moved in. Yippee ki yay.

Springy Spring Spring

We've done lots of great things lately, but a round-up of springtime photos is in order before I launch into that.

After the boys got those amazing shields and books about knights, Willem was hankering for some armor. Shaun crafted these out of cardboard. Once Willem added the hat, they looked more like robot cowboy chaps.

It always takes me about five times longer to get dinner on the table than I expect it to. These boys are ready to dig into the St. Patrick's Day soda bread.

I made a sort of theme-y dinner because we had to eat anyways, and it seemed like a good excuse to drink a Guinness, which I hadn't had in a while. I waited until three hours before dinner to decide on what I was fixing, and when I ran to the neighborhood Safeway, they were sold out of cabbage. I improvised with a bag of coleslaw mix.

Here we are on a Sunday at Willem's favorite restaurant, the Lakeside Chalet. I'm not sure if he loves it because of the breakfast they serve all day or because of the extensive collection of dinosaurs with huge open mouths that they have available to play with. Probably a little of both.

He was inspired to draw a toothy dinosaur of his own.

One afternoon the boys watched a show that featured the world-record holder for building the tallest house of cards. As soon as the program ended, the boys shut off the TV and raced upstairs to get out our cards. Nels in particular worked for hours over several days trying to build a two-level house. I love it when they do that. It makes me feel much less guilty about the TV-watching.

We watched a documentary on origami, and Willem abandoned it midway to go work with paper at the craft table. Nels watched to the end and then spent the next week littering the house with accordion-pleated papers of various colors and sizes.

While I was at a writing conference last Saturday (more on that weekend later), Shaun was the parent designated to take the boys to a birthday party. I love how methodical and tidy Nels was in wrapping up his brother like a mummy. And Willem's expression of resignation is priceless.

Here is Willem after a typical Sunday morning of racing around the church hallways. He has doused his head in the drinking fountain. We are so happy to go to a church where our kids have other kids to run around with and grow up with. Good people there.

This week has been spring break, and the very grand Martins took the boys for three nights. We're going to pick them up tonight. While they were gone, we had this hail storm:

Also while they were gone, I had this. Because sometimes a girl just needs a giant day-glo margarita. (Oh, in this picture you can see the ring that I mentioned in a previous post.)

Three nights is the longest we've ever been home without the boys. I am greatly relieved to find that I miss them!

Wrapping it Up

After the rally at the library (the measure passed, by the way), we took the long way back to Kim and Cory's house. We got off the freeway at Beverly Boulevard and showed the boys our old stomping grounds in uptown Whittier. They were exactly as impressed as I expected them to be. Which was not at all.

For me, though, it was surreal to drive by our little white cottage on Greenleaf. There was a "For Rent" sign stuck in the lawn, and our old neighbors Mark and Sandy were out front, as they always had been on a sunny day. Mark had the same bird dogs that he'd spent most of his time yelling at and whistling for, and his perpetual girlfriend Sandy (they maintained separate residences but were always together) appeared to be wearing the exact same black velour warm-up suit that was her uniform eight years ago.

We wondered if we should stop; we decided to. But they were talking to the driver of a delivery truck who had stopped in the street, blocking the parking at the curb. When the truck moved on, so did they. Chasing them down would have been too weird, so we drove on. It made me a little sad, which was of a piece with how I felt about the whole afternoon.

We continued down Greenleaf, which looked more vital than it had on our last visit. I wish we had stopped and walked and taken a chance on a place to eat, but the boys were beyond exhausted by that point, and I was feeling a little shell-shocked myself. It was strange to pass through a place that had been such an important part of our lives.

Shaun leaned across me and took a picture out the window of what had been such an important part of his life:

We pointed out the landmarks to our impassive sightseers. Look, mommy used to live there. -There's daddy's old apartment. Well, you can't really see it from here, but it's back there. -That's where mommy used to be in plays. -Do you remember Eric? Dietrich's daddy? He used to work there.

Even the El Pollo Loco on Whittier Boulevard, where we finally stopped for lunch, was not spared: I used to stop here a lot on my way home from work and pick us up some dinner, Shaun told the kids. But memories, schmemories. Two weeks later, it's the churros that the boys are still talking about.

After lunch we drove the surface streets from Whittier to Placentia. Everything was familiar. But because I lived in six different places during my time in LA/Orange County, and because it's been eight years now since I lived there, I wasn't able to put everything into context. I remember this drive. But where would I have been going? Of course I remembered the big destinations, but the mundane details of day-to-day life were lost to time. It was very unsettling. As a person with a natural tendency to see things as black and white (as unrealistic and misguided as that may be), I feel very uncomfortable when confronted with the erosion of my memory.

I felt a sense of loss, but with it a sense of gratitude. I realized that I've lived in a lot of places, all completely different from each other, and I've enjoyed every one. All in all, it was a bittersweet afternoon.

The evening, however, was nothing but sweet. Auntie Nancy and Great Grandma Martin joined us for dinner at the Macks', and we finally enjoyed the In 'N Out burgers I'd been looking forward to since we bought our plane tickets.

Nancy brought late Christmas presents: leather-covered shields with a version of the Clan Ross crest and Sir Nels and Sir Willem embossed on the front. Brass nameplates mark the shields as belonging to Nels the Valiant and Willem the Lionhearted, which I think are very apt monikers indeed. Accompanying the shields were some excellent coloring books on swords and jousts and tournaments. They came in handy on the trip home.

Can you tell that all the kids were a little fried by the end of our visit?

Here's cousin Henry in normal mode. His drawings of any manner of conveyance (train, monster truck) are all particularly good. Sweet cousin Heidi is in the background.

Early to bed and not so early to rise, and before we knew it it was Monday afternoon and we were headed home.

It's a proven fact that drinks taste better when sipped through dual cocktail straws. Ask any kid.

Goodbye, California. Let's not be strangers.

Sunday Morning With Miss Hillary

Can you believe I still haven't made it through our California trip? Nels got a terrible cold the day after we got home. Then Willem got it. Then I got it. We're all getting better now, but our entire household was running in slow motion there for a while.

You know how when you travel to foreign countries, it's always really different if you stay with people who actually live there and see what life is really like? That's kind of what it was like to hang out with my sister on Sunday. She is a children's librarian, and she was working at a rally (which she'd mostly organized herself) in support of a library funding measure.

There's no way on earth we would have gone to that event otherwise, and it turned out to be a lot of fun, and a perfect snapshot of life in LA.

Hillary is a librarian at the Memorial Branch of the Los Angeles Public Library. It's so lovely! And there's a playground! And no machete fights! (That would be at the dangerous old branch she was transfered from a month ago. A week before the machete fight.)

This girl can read a story like nobody's business. It was noisy and crowded and crazy, and she had the full attention of a huge group of kids.

And then she whipped out her ukulele! I have to admit, I got a little teary-eyed watching her in action. It is so gratifying to see someone do something that they are good at, that they are suited for, and that they are enjoying. The kids adore Miss Hillary.

Free books were passed out--quite a boon, since we hadn't brought a lick of entertainment with us apart from Angry Birds on Shaun's phone. The books were easy enough that both boys could read them to themselves in the car and on the plane. Perfect!

A magic show was part of the program, and the magician was exactly right for kids. Nels just about died of happiness when he was the first volunteer to be called. He was totally up for a little public teasing. I couldn't pick just one of these pictures, because I love his body language in all of them.

This guy killed it. I have never seen a happier, more engaged audience than this.

I saw one little girl ask to have her picture taken with Hillary, just like a princess at Disneyland. In the picture below, Hillary is telling me that the man with the impressive hair behind her made the same request, and she had to tell him she would take photos with children only. Perhaps he'd noticed the street style blogger who'd taken her picture earlier.

Do you remember Susan from Seinfeld? George's fiancée who died from licking cheap wedding invitation envelopes? When Hillary met Heidi Swedberg at the library, she only knew her as a ukulele player with a children's album she liked.

Ms. Swedberg closed out the program with a rather wordy song about Proposition L. Take a minor celebrity, a manifesto, and a ukulele, and what you get is a perfectly Seinfeld-ian moment.

Hillary had another event to run to after the rally, so we stayed for a bit and let the boys play on the playground. "Isn't Auntie Hillary good at reading stories?" I asked Willem. He nodded.

"And she's beautiful," he said reverently.