Family Stuff

I feel the need to document the latest on my little Rigby.  I've mentioned before that he is a man of order.  He lines his cars up in straight lines.  Of all the kids, he most appreciates when the house is clean and everything is in its proper place.  Just yesterday, he asked me to hang a shirt for him on his closet rod, which he can't reach.  It was an orange shirt, and he specified to me that it should be hung with his other orange shirts.  Then he picked up a white shirt to hang and directed that it should be hung only on a white hanger.  I do like a clean house, but no one around here taught him to color code his wardrobe.  That's all him.

When he potty trained at Thanksgiving time, I kept telling him that he is "the man" and other phrases like "You're a man now!"  He has taken this to heart.  He goes through periods of time where he wants to be referred to as "Man."  If I call for "Rigby," he will ignore me for a bit and then say, "Call me 'Man.'"  This is more than just a name change for him.  He is applying what he believes that it means to be a man.  "Mans are tough," he will say, or he'll lift something big (although not heavy) and grunt and say, "Look at me, Mom!  I'm strong because I'm a man now!"

He also thinks that men like broccoli, a veggie he previously refused to eat.  I admit that this is working in my favor.  At the grocery store, he specifically asks for it, saying, "mmm... my favorite!"  When I am making dinner, he will ask if I am making broccoli for him.  Yesterday, I brought a chicken braid (dough braided around a chicken/veggie/dill/cheesish filling) to the table, and he asked if I had put broccoli in it for him.  Later when it was on his plate, he loudly thanked me for the broccoli, scooped it up, and put it in his mouth.  His expression was priceless.  The brave smile as he chewed could not hide the disgust.

Rigby has a bit of a history of whining and crying in an attempt to get his way.  Today he told Nick and I, separately, that he was never going to cry again, because he is a man.  I hope that works.  If he gives it the same effort as he gives broccoli, he will be cured.

A family is a wonderful thing.

What would a post be without a picture or two?  Here is our stroller after a trip to Costco.  Getting from our parking spot to our door always involves the stroller, as we go through several doors and two elevators on the journey.  All you moms out there, be grateful for your adjoining garage.  I cannot make multiple (or any at all) trips to the car without kids.  There would be no way to get our groceries home without this beauty:

Can you even see the stroller buried under all that?  Oh, do I get the looks as I take this parade to our one bedroom apartment.

Or maybe she gets the looks.  But she's used to it.


(PS - You'll never guess where our San Fran adventures are taking us tomorrow.  Go ahead; try.  You'll really never guess.)

A Veritable Smorgasbord

Today's adventure took us to the SF Exploratorium, a hands-on science museum for kids.  I've been looking forward to this one.

Once again, this was our view from our parking spot.

 What kind of over-abundance of perfect views does a city have to have for people to think that this is a good spot to put a parking lot?

This activity was done on free day.  I don't want to be cheap, but we want to see a lifetime's worth of this city in a few short months, so we have to cut where we can, right?  I figured there would be a lot of little kids there, but at least the older kids would be in school.  Wrong-o!  The older kids arrived by the bus load on field trips.

Enough about the crowds, I want to tell you about the exhibits!  This museum reminded me of the Louvre, if you'll believe that.  You just can't see it all in one day.  It kept going and going and each station was so worthy of pause and ponder.  I love my little guys, but I really would enjoy taking just Bethelle here and camping for a couple weeks.  With the young'uns in tow, I just couldn't explain everything thoroughly, but she did read some of the explanations when I was busy.

Loved the station pictured below.  Rotating the drum behind the guitar strings created a strobe-like effect without the flashing lights.  The waves of the strings were clearly visible.  Stepping on the pedal at the bottom tightened the strings and changed the waves.

 At the water drop photography station, you adjust the time between a drop falling and a camera taking a picture of the drop to catch it in midair or to see how the surface of the pool below moves with the impact.  There was a large monitor to view your image.  The kids really got into that one.

 Most of the stations were over their heads, especially Rigby's and Curie's, but they did have this child-friendly pattern making station.

 And check out the gravity-powered square root calculator!  It works!

 Bethelle built an arch and then lifted the surface ninety degrees to see it stand on its own.  Who needs tape?

 Did I mention that Holly and Charlotte (and their friends) came?  Here, Holly is "playing" a musical bench by touching a contact on one arm.  The little girl then touched the contact on the other arm, and music played when they held hands.  I'd like to have a bench like this in my home.  Seriously!

 This little beauty is a Theremin.  Moving your hand close to the rod on the right creates a pitch which gets higher as your hand gets closer.  Think slide trombone.  Moving your other hand closer and farther from the loop on the left changes the volume.  Now imagine me working out Mary Had a Little Lamb.  Good times.

 I've detailed very, very few of the hands-on exhibits there.  What a wonderful place.  Oh, and I discovered my dream job.  From the displays, there are windows looking in on the design labs and shops where they create new exhibits.  Playing all day and getting paid for it!?  Isn't that what all workers are looking for?

The Exploratorium is adjacent to a venue called the Palace of Fine Arts.  I heard it was built as a tear-down for a world fair, but the town just couldn't part with it.

What part of this says tear-down to you?

 The sprawling columns wrap around one long side of a large pond and gardens.

Today was the third birthday of my visiting niece, Charlotte.  I was looking forward to talking everyone to Beard Papa's, a local cream puff kitchen.  The timing didn't work out and they headed home, but Nick decided that today being Wednesday was a good enough excuse for cream puffs.

We're living the good life here in San Francisco!

SFMOMA

If you can't pronounce my title, don't worry about it.

Today was free day at a few locations around the city.  I took the kids to the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.  We saw mains d'oeuvres like this:

I've seen art like that before at a little museum I like to call The Home Depot.  I'm glad to have gone, but I admit to not having as fine an appreciation for modern art as may be preferred.

I did like one exhibit.  I believe it was called Sonic Shadows.  It was on the fifth floor and is a truss bridge that goes over the whole inside of the museum with open space all around.  Somehow, your footsteps translate into sounds like birds in a jungle as you cross the bridge and white, square paddles undulate slowly on each side, reflecting (creating, maybe?) the sound and giving the impression that the birds are flying around you.  It is living art.

This is the window above the bridge.  That art was scientific.  It was acoustic.  It resonated.  Loved it.  Typical.

After a lunch break and Curie's nap, we headed out to the Cartoon Museum.  I didn't really think that it would be as entertaining for kids as it could sound, but it was pretty much drudgery for them.  I hadn't considered that it would be mostly political cartoon originals.  If you know me, you know that I enjoyed them, but the kids kept me moving quickly through the frames.  There were a few original Looney Toons, but my kids are mostly Disney-philes.

All in all, I'm glad we went to these while here, but I am even more grateful that I did not spend the usual general admission price to see them.

Our Cousin the Astronaut

Nick has a couple of cousins who live less than an hour from us here in the bay area.  Gracie is twelve years old and is practically a full-time gymnast.  Yesterday, I took the kids to meet up with her and her dad at a gymnastics meet while Nick did homework.  Bethelle, my little dancer, practiced the moves as she watched the girls compete.  Rigby kept telling me that he was going to be an astronaut just like them when he grows up.

So here she is, Gracie the astronaut.  I'm no expert, but that looks like Olympics material to me.

Back in our part of town, we wandered looking for food inspiration, and found it at Sear's Fine Food.

Did I say that Mel's was good last week?  It was terrible compared to this!  Oooh, so good!  Their sign out front says that they specialize in "little pancakes," so that is just what the kids had for dinner.  The adults had more grown-up fare, but secretly we all kind of wanted the pancakes, too.

Bethelle insisted on topping it all off with ice cream.

The kids really took to Gracie.  Especially Curie, who tends to be a Momma's girl.  Come back soon!

A Word About Kindergarten

Bethelle's favorite aspect of life before we left Bainbridge Island was kindergarten.  When we discussed the move and our options before coming to California, I told Bethelle that the schools were different here and that she would not be enrolled until we came back home to Washington.  She concluded that she would still rather be with her daddy than stay in school.

Why no school in San Francisco?  For one thing they are very poor performing.  Bethelle was not getting much academically out of even her "good" school so what would be the point at a bad one?  In SF, the enrolled children are part of a lottery.  They are expected to attend whatever school around the city that they are assigned to in order to prevent the segregation of neighborhoods to penetrate the schools.  I would not consider putting her on a bus in any downtown and sending her across the city to a terrible school.  What would she learn on that ride?  Those lessons can wait a decade or two.

It is a commonly accepted truth here, regardless of political preference, that the schools are terrible.  The moms talk about it at church, at parks, in grocery lines, everywhere.  The wisdom is that you enter your child in the school lottery while keeping a private school or a home school plan in your back pocket.  If you are lucky enough to get an acceptable school, you dump plan b.  This approach means that those without means for private school or for an at-home parent end up with no options and an unfortunate education.  This is a sad commentary on the area and one of the worst strikes against San Francisco that I have encountered.

And so Bethelle does not go to school.

She can read, write, add, and subtract.  These things have come as a fairly natural result of who she is and who I am and not any formal stretch.  She makes friends easily and I make sure she gets interactions with other children.  She loves to craft and wants to be either a scientist or an artist.  At her age, I wanted to be a bus driver.  Recently, we sat at home for a couple days straight and I began investigating formal homeschooling options.  Then we started getting out of the house and exploring the city more.  I believe that this is a sufficient education for her for now.  I am no longer looking at formal programs.

Bethelle has always been very involved in whatever I am doing.  She has never really been overly interested in spending time with her toys.  Weird, I know.  She seems to prefer doing laundry with me.  The point is that she learns and asks questions and does.  Tonight as I began to blog, she asked if she could type for me.  I don't have anything impressive to say about her words per minute, but I let her type.  I spoke the words one at a time.  Bethelle typed and Rigby hit the space bar between each word.  Here are some of the words she typed, as she typed them without help:
   impressiv   (impressive)
   thouhgt      (thought)
   stockt         (stocked)
   quite
   flair
   become
   despite
   half
   walk
   easier
When I said the words, "which" and "to," she asked me clarifying questions so that she would spell the correct form of the word.  What?!  What kindergartner knows that stuff?

Well, I meant this to be about kindergarten, but it sounds like bragging about Bethelle.  I just wanted to pen my thoughts and reasonings on this stage and decision.  And to document how impressed I was with her spelling tonight.  I am so thankful for my special little girl and I feel that even without school, her progression continues.

Salted Pig Parts

Tuesday brought our cousin Charlotte!  Accompanied by my brother and sis-in-law, of course.  Holly wanted to meet up at the farmer's market at the ferry building.  Packed up and ready to go, I saw that the market was only a little over a mile away.  I could walk straight to it or navigate my car through the one way streets, find a (parallel) parking spot, pay for it, and end up still walking a quarter mile.  We walked.  Or rather, I walked, pushing a stroller laden with three kids.  This seems to be a comical sight to most city dwellers. 

The farmers' booths impress.  Had I thought to bring cash, we would now have a well stocked fridge.  The stands were quite like Seattle's Pike Place Market, but with a California flair, which is still exotic to me.  They sold persimmons and mandarin oranges, not to mention that they had anything at all for sale in the middle of winter!  I know the selection will just get better as the weather improves.

Improves?  It's 69 and sunny out there!  I would be scared of a scalding summer, but San Francisco stays temperate year round; a little cooler in the winter, a little warmer in the summer.  Beautiful all year, if you can handle some fog.  Not that we've seen much of that yet.

I think this will become a weekly excursion for us.  Despite the two and a half mile walk, this trip is easier than taking the kids to Safeway.  With its skinny aisles, crowded commotion, and urban shoppers who have never before seen children, Safeway is asking for trouble.  The open air and ample space of the market suits us much better.

Inside the ferry building are the higher class, deeply rooted stores/booths, like the one below.  Be sure to read the smaller words under the store name.  Yes, this is an entire store dedicated to the sale of tasty salted pig parts, complete with a bar counter for those of you who must consume those tasty products on the spot.

And a whole store of mushrooms in all their varieties and preparations.

The ferry building (with market) is behind Charlotte and Bethelle in this picture.  Yes, that is a homeless man right by my lovely daughter.  He was actually a little farther than he looks.  There are a LOT of homeless people in San Francisco.  The temperate weather breeds them.  I find them to be pretty polite and to mostly keep to themselves.  There is a certain harmonious coexistence here.

Street signs can be so helpful.  This one was spotted as we walked from the ferry market to Pier 39, one of the more touristy spots in the city.

Seeing the sea lions was on my checklist.  We pulled out our PB&Js here and just stared for a while.  Curie was particularly enthralled.

Speaking of enthralled, Bethelle really wants to go to Alcatraz and always spots it first.  Should I be worried?

When lunch was over, we chewed on salt water taffy and watched a pirate street performer.  The jokes were corny and I couldn't see the connection between the magic tricks and the pirate theme, but the kids enjoyed it and the moms got to sit for a few minutes.

After an adventurous morning, the crew headed back to our apartment by way of our closest park.  We started with Yerba Buena Gardens, which we had not been to yet.  It is a delightful place to bask and relax, but since kids don't really let parents do that, we continued to the play circle.  Bethelle and I had recently seen a garden maze behind our park while on Google maps, so we went on a successful maze hunt, followed by running through the maze itself several times.

We ended the night with a few strokes of bad luck including some terrible restaurant service, but at least the poor performance resulted in a sit-down dinner and dessert for eight for under 40 bucks.  Sometimes bad luck is good luck, I guess.

Escape from Alcatraz!

Chrissy Field, Chrissy Field.  Another great San Francisco location.  It is a fantastic beach somewhere between the bay and the ocean, and just under the Golden Gate Bridge.

We spent a beautiful Saturday with Jeff, Allison, Vivian, and Eleanor, our friends from Nick's program.  It was January and we were on the beach in the sunshine.  I am still happy to be going home in May, but I can see how California can grow on a person.  Everything is just a few minutes from our apartment, including this:

 While there, a prisoner seemed to have emerged out of the ground (pictured below), presumably escaping from Alcatraz, just across the water.

She was relieved that her calculations were correct and her tunnel was just the right length.  She is cute, so we took her home with us.