Life with a mask

 December 2, 2020

Kids are at camp again, this time for a day and a half each week. The rest of the time we're doing schoolwork at home and waiting for the schools to open again. Supposedly and hopefully, it will be mid-January. 

We took a week off (between camp sessions) to go to Big Sur where we camped for two nights. Then we stayed at a hotel for one night, in Monterey. On the drive home, we talked about our favorite parts of the trip. These were some:

dinner by the fire together

smores and roasted banana boats at the fire

playing in the tent, mostly as baby zombies

scooting around the parking lot of the hotel

sleeping in the tent, all snuggly 

picking mussels and eating them (after cooking them)

the making/building of the fires

instant oatmeal and hot chocolate

bridge across the river, photographed below, with stripes of cement

great hike up the mountain

purple sand at Pfeiffer Beach, where the sand was super-coarse and pretty

dunes and the sand, but Aviva didn't like the wind

the dust devil or tornados around Noah

played on the beach in Monterey with little tide pools

second beach with great tide pools with sea anemones and a sea star and lots of shells to look at

watching a good movie in the car on the way back

   

Something else the kids are busy with is dominoes. He likes to make long and complicated paths, and then he uses my phone to video the movement in slo-mo. She makes little houses for little figures. 

This is some of Aviva's work lately:

She has also been making nice hairdos for me:

Noah has been learning at camp how to make things with bamboo. He's made some instruments:

Lastly, we've been eating and de-seeding pomegranites and the kids are good at helping 

It's been like three 30's

 Covid 19's been hard on us all. But the blog is back. 

Aviva's reading really well and she likes to read aloud to people. So she's been calling up family members to read. And since we talk about time zones and how it's too late at 7:00 to call someone on the east coast, she's been asking what time it is for Bubbe several times a day. At first I would answer her when she asked, and now I ask her: "What time is it for Bubbe?" "Well, what time is it here? Add three hours!" So she's constantly telling us that Bubbe is probably eating lunch now, or Bubbe is going to bed now. I guess it's good that both kids understand time now; we can't trick them anymore by starting the bedtime routine at 4:00. (We only did that twice.) (Once was really funny. Noah was watching Star Wars for the first time. We had talked up how late it would be when he left but Noah got bored early so we left early. The only problem was that he had a night light that turns on at 7 pm. So I had to text Yona to reprogram it so he would not know.)

Aviva has a few funny word choices/pronounciation. 

concentrate = conchestrate

comfortable = comfort-al

permission = position 

binoculars = bino-cleers

comfortal = comfortable

es-kyu-me = excuse me

guzzausted = exhausted

annoy = ignore = annoy

hippopotamus = hippopamanos, like the spanish word vamanos

She is also now understanding the meaning of a week, a month, and a year, but it helps her sometimes to call them 7's, 30's, or 365's. How many 7's until school starts again? How many 30s ago were we in Solvang?

The kids have been biking a lot, and we've been going to different skate parks and bike parks. This one is called Dirt World. They're both really good!

So as far as life skills, swimming is checked off. Biking is checked off. Typing -- he's at about 13 words per minute. She can type just f's an j's really really well. 25 wpm! The rest of the keys -- she can peck pretty well. You can comment below if you have ideas about other life skills. 

Both kids are doing a forest camp 3 or 4 days/week, where they do archery, basket-making, hiking and tracking, and throwing axes and knives (really!). They often come home with a backpack full of sticks that they've carved. Before and after camp (and on days they don't go to camp) we do remote learning school. They have class meetings daily, before camp. There's also math, art, writing, music, and there are various assignments including work with a typing program. Noah has not really been enjoying camp recently. The camp has struggled to find their Covid groove and Noah is a tricky kid. 

The kids did an obstacle course in the kitchen that Josh made up. It was one of awful trifecta days (covid, hot and closed windows due to smoky air).  We don't have pictures of them climbing over the stood up mattress. 

Robot on the lake and a cow on the wall

7/4/20 We are in Solvang for a month, just north of Santa Barbara, at a house with a pool. Desperate times call for desperate measures. So we rented out our house and we're here for another few weeks. Then we'll go to another house with a pool, because this one isn't available any longer. The kids' camp was cancelled, as was our trip to Mexico, and the kids were very forlorn about everything. The pool here is great and we're there many hours every day. They're learning how to swim  and Noah can now go from one side of the pool to the other, much of it underwater. Aviva can also, with floaties and her head up. We're also picking fruit often and biking around the town.

Blueberries

Doing a puzzle, thanks to Aunt Shira

Ollaliberries

Puzzle #3 - we're doing a lot of puzzles

Funny bikes we rode through town - notice the Danish flag
The whole town is Danish, in food and shops and street names

The kids are singing a lot, particularly one song called "Griselda" which is only slightly inappropriate. It's just a song I like a lot and when the kids heard me playing it once, they liked it and wanted to learn the words. Some of the words are: Come won't you walk with me Griselda, wearing the dress that moonlight shines through, I am a sad and lonely boy since your mother said I couldn't see you... Do you recall last night Griselda learning the lesson as nature taught us, I've got a rowboat on the lake, stars are out and all the fish are jumping...  Well it's a nice song. Aviva has changed some of it so that it's a "robot on the lake." 

The house we're staying in is nice enough with lots of space and it's 100 feet to the pool and funny art about wine, because we're in wine country and I'm guessing a lot of visitors here are here for the wine. There's also a huge painting of a cow on the wall and three big screen tv's. We brought lots of toys and maybe because of that, Noah would rather not leave the house. He does, with some bribing, and Josh has made a whole system of points and rewards: 

But this is better than it was in Berkeley when he didn't want to get out of bed in the morning. And he loves the pool. And when we go to the beach or bike around town, he has fun despite his not wanting to.

Emu and Ostrich Farm 

     



     

Picking plums near our house

Got yeast?

There are various things that are difficult to buy lately: toilet paper, hand sanitizer, sometimes eggs, yeast, and other random things. Josh has been making bread and likes to cook, and did not like the idea of being without yeast. So we bought a pound's worth on Amazon. He asked on Next Door if anyone else wanted some, and we got such a response that we bought two more pounds' worth. Noah helped measure out ziploc bags with 3 tablespoons of yeast, and he helped deliver the first batch by bicycle to 15 or 20 people. Then we started hanging them on a board outside the house, with sidewalk chalk arrows and labels, and happy people have been coming to pick up bags of yeast. Aviva is helping make signs and we're all upkeeping the board, keeping it taped up with bags of yeast that keep disappearing with grateful neighbors and Berkeley residents.

  

Noah's 8th birthday - Thank you to many people for calls and gifts and cards! He got some really nice presents and he's slowly deciding what he's willing to share with Aviva. The goal is for everything to be eventually shared; he has a couple more days of sole proprietorship. What he told us he wanted was to choose the food we had for the day. This is what he chose. Pastries for breakfast. Whatever for lunch. For dinner, Nana and Papa came over, and we had garlic bread for the first course. It was homemade of course (Josh made everything basically, and Yona helped a little as a soux chef). Second course was rice pudding, muffins (delivered by someone to thank us for the yeast), chips, and fresh halibut with fresh mango salsa.  Then we had crepes with bananas and chocolate sauce with strawberries. Luckily he didn't want dessert. It was all really really good.

We flew kites last week and we've been hiking and walking and picnicking in a lot of pretty places:

  

Pizelle cookies we made

Cool pizelle iron we used

You can see Noah's new bike

          


We got a new swing for the porch; thank you Grandpa:

  

Aviva's been doing a ton of writing, and also reading

Aviva's little cardboard house

Notice the shingles

kids playing airhockey on the floor

   

                   

We made pretzels:
     
  

Bikes - we got bikes. Been biking around everywhere, around campus and bike trails and the neighborhood. We got new bikes for both kids. Aviva's has sparkles, and Noah did not want her to get it because he doesn't like to look at sparkles, and it's not fair that he has to look at it. And also it has a basket and that's not fair, because he doesn't have a basket, though he does have a kickstand and a bell, which she doesn't have.

Other info/details about life:
Aviva pretends all kinds of things and wants us to go along with her. Some popular scenarios are:

• the house is burning down and someone needs to call 911, and someone else is the operator
• someone is about to give birth and needs to call a rollercoaster ambulance
• I'm looking for a puppy or kitten to buy but I can't find the storekeeper and can't find the puppy or kitten I want
• One of us is the mother of a baby or kitten who fell in the water and died just a little bit, and the other is the 911 operator. The baby or kitten always comes back to life
• There are a lot of puppies who are sick, or maybe it's me who's sick, and we need to have trashcans next to us in case we throw up (but if we throw up, it has to be without any sound) and we go to the hospital but can't get the attention of any doctors or nurses
• I'm walking around looking for a shopkeeper or a friend or someone, but they don't see me and I have to tap them on the shoulder after saying "excuse me," and they don't hear me.

When we read books to her, she doesn't want any inflection or intonation whatsoever. She wants us to read "regular," a.k.a. deadpan. Whenever there's a character who is upset or confused or mad, or feels any emotion, it comes naturally to be expressive with my voice, but she does not like that at all. It's better if I read like a robot. She calls me on it every single time.

They were both scooting and skating around the kitchen floor last week, wearing 10 pairs of socks each. Their idea. 

Noah came out of the bathroom the other night really giddy and laughing and laughing. He could hardly make out the words: "I did mischief in the bathroom!" I should have taken a picture -- towel on toilet seat with tissue box holding a balanced cup with a soap dish and shampoo and toothbrushes and floss. 

She talks about conflection sites and things she has to conchestrate on.

Noah says "what the..." without knowing there's anything that comes next.

Igloo thanks to Aunt Shira

  

Doing schoolwork

More schoolwork