Up the Creek

Yesterday it was painfully hot here. Today it is too. 100 or something, with no air conditioning. Katie was out of commission with overheating/sleepiness/terrible cold. Finn and I decided to head for the beach, so we left for Santa Cruz after his nap. The road was packed, because it was a popular destination. We came to standstill about 7 miles from the beach, and I guessed we had another hour ahead of us. Finn was already yelling "ou-side! ou-side!" so I had to think quickly to avoid a disaster. We made a quick exit out to the redwooded hills of Felton, just off of Hwy 17. I hadn't yet figured out what we were going to do, but there is a state park there. Maybe we could hike? As luck would have it, we noticed a little stream where others were playing, and we made our way down.
Activities included:
--walking in the water
--playing in the wet sand with our new beach toys
--throwing rocks
--sitting on logs
--more throwing of rocks
It was a good time, and we nearly had the river to ourselves. Some dogs and owners came by to catch and throw sticks. I don't think that Finn knew that dogs could swim, so that was cool. I didn't take many pictures, because I was in the water most of the time. At first he really liked just watching water ripples.

Some other hi/low-lights:
--Getting hit in arm with a rock. This 12-year-old who showed up was a BAD rock skipper. Ouch!
--After 2 hours down in the river, it was time to go home. I carried Finn and 3 bags up 40 feet of river bank, up to the bridge, to walk back to the car. I put Finn down to let him walk on the bridge. He peered between the bars to look down at the river. He then took off his Twins hat and sent it down into the water below. That boy! Sigh.... After thinking for a bit, I put down all of the bags, grabbed him again, and we made our way back down to fish out the hat. Ah, toddlers. The whole way down he repeated "hat" and "naughty."

Here he is on his new Rody. This is about 5 minutes after he got it. Note the strange monkey shrieks. He's taken to calling it his "gonkey."

A Rody for Finn! from Jonathan Fortney on Vimeo.

We're the best parents ever

Zoo, zoo, zoo
Lest you worry that Finn gets all his fun from chores and unsupervised swimming, we should also mention that we took him to the zoo last weekend. He loved it. I think it was at least 50% "running around! outside! and Caitlin and Liam are here!" but he also liked the animals. The monkeys and flamingos were particular favorites. Here he is acting like a monkey with Caitlin, though not near any actual monkeys. There are more on Flickr, including one with some giraffes, and more pool party shots from Saturday.Fun with Grandma
We also host special extra-entertaining guests, like my mom. She visited for four days last week, and it was wonderful. It's hard to say who had the most fun: us, her, or Finn. Grandma, he discovered, will read you as many stories as you want, and doesn't ignore you to do boring things like work on dinner or check her e-mail. Alas, she is no more likely to give you her laptop than Mama or Daddy. We got him a pony
Well, not really. It's an inflatable horse that he's been loving at our local toy store. We were going to wait until his birthday, but that's in NOVEMBER, and then I found a good deal on a secondhand one on Craigslist. When I brought it home he spent 10 or 20 minutes just patting it and screaming at it like a rabid monkey, and then carried it around until we had to take it away because he was just too worked up - couldn't stop crying. Then we brought it out a day or two later with a little less air in it so he could carry it around better, and he told us it was in fact a donkey ("gah-key. gah-key gah-key gah-key!") and played with it without melting down at all. It seems to be here to stay now, meltdown free.

Always a good time

Finn really seems to enjoy putting things where they belong (when we ask him to do so). And he likes to help clean around the house, when he sees us doing it. In preparation for Katie's mom coming to town last week swept and swiffered the floors. Gotta make ourselves look like reasonable parents. Finn loved the swiffer and Katie noticed that one can rather easily take out the middle portion of the handle to make it Finn-sized. Action photo!

Now he uses it every day. Note that there is no swiffer towel on it. He totally flipped out into hysterics when we put the swiffer towel on. Screams, shrieks, the whole deal. It is unclear why. I'm sure we'll never know.
Just wait buddy, in anther year you'll also be on dishes, trash duty, bathrooms, you name it... Katie tells me that guys take up too much space by sitting with their legs far apart. It's true. I try to not do this on my vanpool to work every day. But it is just Finn in the back seat, so he is free to, ah, spread out.

Saturday was the 3rd birthday, observed, of Caitlin, and Jessica and Daren had another pool party. Finn was the life of the pool, as expected. Of the two hours we were there, I bet he was in the pool for 1:45. I was only in the pool for 1:44:55. How can that be? Shouldn't an adult be with Finn for every second, since he can't swim? Yeah, you'd think so. But a certain someone likes the pool so much that he climbed into the deep end by himself when I'd turned around to talk to Katie near the snack table!! He was actually fine. He was smiling at me, holding himself up with the pool ledge (doing a little pullup, of sorts), waiting for me to get back in. As near as we can figure, he must have got on all fours and moved his legs over the side while holding on. That kid! Here he is, Baywatch style, before getting in for the first time. Look out ladies!

We Dig It!

Some people keep important articles of clothing for a long time. I am one of those people. Like my totally awesome, "6th grade, we dig it" shirt from 1989. When I was 12. We all signed it. Island Lake Elementary! How on Earth can I still fit into a shirt that I bought when I was 12? I'm not really sure, but I really liked baggy shirts at the time. So apparently I got a large. I can only assume it is an adult large, which is what I wear now. I wore it a few times in high school and college, for fun, and have kept it ever since.

I wore it Wednesday, the day of final exam of the first undergrad class that I taught. The students were pretty weirded out. Firstly, they couldn't fathom that I could still wear the shirt, AND that I had kept it. Also, apparently a few of them didn't realize that I am "only" 32. I am younger than one of my students. I told them my age on the first day, but maybe it didn't sink in. I don't think I look old and decrepit, but I do have some bags under my eyes, thank to Finn, I guess. And my hair is, oh, rather thin. I think it will be a fun tradition to wear it to finals from now until I retire in 35-40 years. I'll have to keep it in mint condition, though.

I brought Finn into work today, which was fun. One of my students that works with me, Megan, graduated today, and there was a ceremony for the physics undergrads. Congrats! Also, apparently this blog has a small following amongst the UCSC astro grads, so, ah, hi there. Some of you met Finn today. Sorry he wasn't very chatty. It takes him awhile to warm up to new people.

Happy Birthday To Me

I turned 31 yesterday. Woo.
Finn and I celebrated by going over to Jessica's to see Caitlin and Liam and eat cake, and by just generally taking it easy. Taking it easy meant that I arranged it so I didn't have to cook, wash dishes, or do laundry while Jonathan was out of town. It did not mean Finn was any less of a maniac. I didn't take any pictures there (part of "taking it easy," maybe), but here's one Jessica took last week of Finn telling Liam... something very important.


Here's one of our walk yesterday. Finn decided to walk half of the way to downtown instead of riding in the stroller. He looks kind of like a muppet when he runs - arms extended and bobbing randomly. But with more wandering. See where the sidewalk disappears in the background? He covered all that ground and then some.


And I don't have any of him eating cake yesterday, but here's a video from a week or two ago where Finn demonstrates his newly discovered love of rhubarb cake. He wouldn't even try the rhubarb custard pie I made, possibly because I was eating it for breakfast and I usually eat things like oatmeal for breakfast, which he won't touch. He did yell "cakaaaay" again yesterday in pretty much the same voice.

Cake from Katie on Vimeo.

Completing the video backlog (you can probably stop reading now if you're not a grandparent), here's a couple of Finn reading his favorite books. Normally everything else gets ignored when these come out, but apparently not even Head to Toe is a match for the video camera. As you can see, though, even with that on, he cannot resist the compulsion to do the required actions or animal noises. Eric Carle rocks his world.

Head to Toe from Katie on Vimeo.

The Very Busy Spider from Katie on Vimeo.

And the sweetest thing ever, from Mother's Day last month.

Happy. Mama. Day. from Katie on Vimeo.
Thanks boys!

Just your average Sunday. Really.

We had our "standard" Sunday, of sorts. We hit the Los Gatos farmer's market early, at 9, and loaded up on strawberries, blackberries, and raspberries, or the holy trinity, as I call them. Mmmm....raspberries. We always had TONS of raspberries in our backyard every summer. Somehow my dad has managed to ruin the whole patch now though. Or maybe they just got old after 30+ years. That seems more likely--sorry Dad!

After food-buying Finn ran around like a silly maniac and talked to and petted about 10 dogs. If they bark at him he growls back. I wish I was joking. He also likes to squat down really low so that he can look at the dogs eye to eye. Petting them is often unnecessary, but he will occasionally follow my lead.

Finn and Katie decided to rest on the bed a bit and catch up on their reading while I started packing for my 2-day trip to Pasadena for an astronomy conference. A standard Sunday night, right?

Ah, that's a great one. It's the pic that keeps on giving. He likes to act grown up. My flight is delayed, which is why I'm blogging now--I should be at the airport. The car service wasn't too happy when I told them to come back in 90 minutes. I'll give them a big tip.

AND...we hadn't seen Mona in 48 hours, since we'd left to go out to dinner with Rolo and Brittany Friday night, and we were starting to get pretty upset. I rode around on my bike for 45 minutes yesterday calling her name. Tonight I decided to walk around the neighbor's giant yard (where she likes to explore) for a few minutes and do the same. No luck. But then a few minutes later, Miss Frisky showed up on the front porch! So it worked. Who knows where she was---maybe she found a good spot in their yard and ignored all my previous calls. I think she'll be an indoor cat again for awhile. Mona!

Fun times at home and up in San Francisco

Finn's favorite word these days is "again." As in, yes, we've read this book 11 times in a row, but I want you to read it "gin! gin!"

He also likes to say it about his favorite website, CuteBreak, which we discovered the day he got his black eye. Its adorable animal videos are good for emergencies, like when I need 2 minutes to finish my breakfast, or to get Skype working.

He still loves animals of all kinds. So Saturday, when we had dinner plans with Alex & Laura up in San Francisco, we went up early and spent the afternoon at the new California Academy of Sciences. It was a BIG hit.

Here he is marveling at some kind of crazy 3-foot-long rainforest catfish.

Fish! from Katie on Vimeo.

And here he is aboard a (bronze) tortoise.
There are more pictures of our adventures from Saturday - penguins! More fish! Chameleon! - on Flickr. There were also stuffed giraffes, lions, and zebras, and real live butterflies, all of which were a big hit with Finn, and a 0-5 zone hidden away in the back where Jonathan and I could sit on our butts for a while as Finn ran rampant, which was a big hit with us.

In other news, I'm still enjoying my summer vacation. Baby Jr., as we're still apparently calling him, is at least as active as Finn was at this age, kicking up a storm. I think I've read seven books since I finished my last final. I'm still putting off most of the responsible homework-type tasks I've assigned myself for the summer, but I have baked 2 cakes, a batch of cookies, and 2 pies. I think I have a new go-to pie crust recipe. My old one tastes marginally better (according to me; Jonathan refuses to weigh in), but the texture on this one is great and it's SO MUCH EASIER to work with that the old recipe may be relegated to extra-special occasion pies. I went from 0 to rhubarb-custard-pie-in-the-oven in under 45 minutes the other day. Fun times here in CA!

And last but certainly not least, a big congratulations to the Byrne family, which added a member today. Welcome, little Nora!