*Don't worry, she was pulled off of the table as soon as I had taken this photo. Priorities you know.

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Temperatures were in the high 80s today, which after so much cold and rain felt like stiflingly hot (this was not just my opinion, almost all of the ninety students I saw today seemed to share my thoughts, though they expressed it more like, "I can't do any work! I'm dying of heat stroke!") so when I got home I put matches under everyone's feet and managed to get my little crew out the door. I had to wake Az up, which is usually something to be avoided at all cost but I couldn't waste such a beautiful day waiting for her nap to end. Her crankiness ended as soon as I asked her if she wanted to go to the ocean. "Bye bye. Go water," was her response, which of course I found amazing because I hadn't even known she knew what the ocean was. Though I do admit it takes very little to amaze me when it comes to that girl.

I decided to stop along the way in the small town on Duncan's Mills. We often stop there to grab a coffee and a pastry on our way to the ocean, and I've camped just outside of town a few times now, but we never actually explore the town. It's a genuinely charming town so, enticed by radio commercials I'd been hearing lately for a "Trombley's Tea Shop," I decided today would be our day to finally explore. I found the tea shop immediately, and purchased a few ounces of loose leaf teas to try at home later for an amazingly low price. I think Miguel and I have found a new place to indulge.

We wandered through a few other stores before finding ourselves at the cafe we usually stop at to get goodies to go. In back of the cafe is a large patio area and every single time we stop in I remark that it would be really nice to get something to eat and take it out back some time, so today we did just that. All of the food is cooked in a giant wood-fueled brick oven, and every single thing I have ever tasted that has come out of there has been ridiculously delicious. We got to the cafe about an hour before closing, so to my delight everything was marked down to half price. The most expensive food item there is only four dollars anyhow, so everything was marked down to super cheap. I couldn't resist getting a few things wrapped up to go for the next day.

By the time we were done with our supper I was content to go home but of course neither of the children had forgotten my talk of the ocean. I had wanted to go to Salmon Creek but when we arrived we found it was closed. I suspect Salmon Creek has been another victim of the budget cuts. We found a place to park outside of the locked lot, along with a short(ish) cut in.  Our new route in influenced us to settle down on the creek side of the beach rather than the ocean side. In all my years of going there I haven't spent much time hanging out near the creek, which is silly considering the place is called Salmon Creek. 

I opted to leave my camera safely in the car, away from the water and sand. I regretted this decision a little once I saw the kids playing near the creek. I can't say I have many pictures of them with a beautiful oceanic creek/bay as the backdrop. At one point Z and Miguel decided to climb straight up the face of a giant sand dune, maybe 40 feet up. They looked like little geckos. I was missing out on so many lovely pictures and the lighting was just perfect! But I also enjoyed the fact that not having my camera on me released me from feeling obligated to record everything so that I could be an active participant in the day. Too often I find myself taking pictures and not being part of the action. Not worrying about my camera meant that I was able to roll up my pants and make moats in the sand with Z. It also meant that I was able to quickly dive in and grab Az out of the water when she inevitable fell in on her butt.

I stripped Az of her sopping wet dress and wrapped her in a towel because of course she wasn't going to let a little thing like hypothermia risk deter her from her day at the beach or influence her to put on the sweater I'd brought along. I also filled our bucket with the icy cold water so she could sit wrapped up in the towel and still play in the water. She seemed to enjoy this more than she had playing in the creek. I'll have to remember that next time and save myself from a soggy pair of jeans. Az managed to continue to have a good time playing with her bucket of water but I saw how hard she was fighting off shivering so I did call the day a little short.

One of the best things about spending time at the ocean is how wonderful the nice warm car feels afterwards. We headed home and made some of the new tea we'd bought in Duncan's Mills and settled down to watch Netflix as a family. It was not a bad way to end the day, not at all.

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As soon as Az woke up this morning she pulled off her thick sleeper and requested a dress. I was just relieved to finally get to put her in something besides a tutu. Here she is trying to put her brother's flip flops on so she could join me outside. It can get so dark under the redwoods, I've been trying to make sure Az gets out of the house at least twenty minutes every day, even if it's just to wander around our property. There are some weeks when Miguel and I each get our vitamin D from going to and being at work, we forget that Az has been stuck in the dark house that whole time. I know that personally not getting outside and seeing the sunlight can affect my mood, and I won't realize it until I've finally gotten outside and the funk I was in suddenly completely lifts. There's a reason why happy things are associated with drawings of the sun. The added bonus of getting outside with Az for those twenty minutes is that even on the days that I've gone to work and gotten some sunshine without her, I'm being forced to get just that little bit more.

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Z was showing the pictures he'd taken with his camera to Az until he noticed me taking pictures of the two of them and decided to give me a taste of my own medicine. By the way, it's funny that I've managed to post photos from the few minutes out of the past few days that Az hasn't been wearing a tutu. She even sleeps in the things now, cramming them over her thick snow suit sleepers. When we are home, it is a rare occasion that Az is not wearing a tutu. Miguel totally jinxed us with all of his talk during my pregnancy about how he wasn't going to have a "princessy" type of little girl. Az, it seems, was born a princess.

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While looking at herself in the mirror today Az remarked, "Who's that baby? See that baby?" This was particularly amusing to me because I said those exact words to her many times when she was a little younger and I was trying to get her to take notice of her reflection. It's so neat to know that even before she could easily communicate, she was taking everything in. Of course, that means she was also taking in a few choice words and phrases I'd rather her not repeat...

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Waiting for Z's tae kwon do class to get out. She had left the house with all of her hair pulled into a single bun on the top of her head (which she seemed quite pleased with once I pointed out that I also had my hair in a bun) but by the time we arrived at Z's school to pick him up she had torn the bun out. Which is why she ended up with a quick and simple Telletubbies 'do today.

Watching her brother work on his routines in class.

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I bought the PlayDoh for Az for Easter, but Z got much more play out of the dough than his sister. Whereas Az sat with the dough for about twenty minutes, Z continued playing long after the two of us had wandered away for at least another hour. The best part was that Z cleaned up everything himself when he was done. I'm sure I'll have to go ahead and put the final steps on the cleaning up, I haven't bothered to actually check his work yet, but the fact that he thought to clean up was a nice surprise.

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Az's first time playing with PlayDoh. I'd put four containers of PlayDoh into Az's Easter basket. She liked them without even knowing what they were, so I figured I should show her just how cool the contents are. The PlayDoh was a hit, and held her complete attention for about twenty minutes, but it was Z that got the most use out of it. Az and I eventually went out front, and then inside, leaving Z to create on his own. The most exciting part of Az's PlayDoh adventures for me was realizing that she knows some of her colors. While playing she held up a blue monster and told Z, "blue." Z exclaimed that Az knew the color blue but I brushed it off to coincidence. Z then tested Az with some yellow PlayDoh, asking her what color he was holding. She promptly replied, "Lello." A few minutes later she brought the orange container of dough to me to open, with the request, "Ohhnge." I think she might have picked up on some of color talk while we were dying eggs (we had twelve different colors, which was at least eight too many.) I guess I should start actually working on teaching her colors now.

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While the four of us were sitting outside today I looked out the big front windows and realized what a nice, sunshiny April morning it was. So I dragged everyone outside on a mission to plant some seeds. Z was given maybe fifteen types of seeds from his dad for Christmas and then for Easter his grandma gave him more packets of vegetables plus seed starter, so it seemed like it was time to get out and plant some of them. We planted some of the live forever Z's dad had given him; all of the seeds from him came in brown paper bags with very little information, often not even the name of the plant the seeds will eventually become, so it's taken some research and guessing to plan everything out. For the time being it seems like we'll only be able to plant the live forever because the few things I have recognized, such as the oak tree and Chinese redwood, leave a bit more of a footprint than I'm prepared for at the moment. The smallest thing Z's dad mailed to him grows to a ten-foot tall plant.

My mom had given Z a few vegetable seeds, in packets that actually had information on them. I was hoping to get some of those planted but our area of very little sun is going to require a special type of garden. I would love to plant a vegetable garden this summer, and actually I think I just might, but I also have to figure out how to contend with the raccoons that run rampant through these parts at night. I already have too much hostility towards them and their garbage can tipping ways to grow veggies for them. I suppose I'll have to cover everything with chicken wire, but that seems to me to be not much of an upgrade when it comes to trying to make an attractive area to spend time.

Since moving in to the house I've definitely neglected the outside. There wasn't much of a garden to speak of by the time my dad passed but I haven't even been keeping up with the few things he was able to maintain while sick. This weekend I started cleaning things up and at least reclaiming the house from all of the ivy. Hoping for a garden by the end of summer might be a little too high of a goal this year, but I think that between the three of us we can at least uncover the pathways and plants that are hiding under all of the weeds. I don't think Az is going to be of much help yet this summer though, whenever I filled up her watering can she turned it over and dumped out all of the water on the cement. And then demanded more water.

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Az in her very favorite place to spend time these days. I swear she knows I was about to dismantle the thing.

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Az spends exactly 0% of the time sleeping in her crib these days. Now that I'm working more often and getting up before 5AM I've been opting to go to bed with her, and even on the nights that I don't end up passing out with her it's just easier to leave her sleeping in bed. I was thinking of getting rid of the crib the morning I took this photo, to make more floor space or else clear up space for something else. I hadn't mentioned my thoughts out loud but Az must have sensed the impending threat on her crib, as she has suddenly taken a large interest in climbing into it to lay down and rest. Z and her have also suddenly begun throwing blankets over it to make a fort, something they've never thought to do. I guess the pack 'n play stays for now.

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On the way home from town I decided to stop off at a park that was on our way home if I varied my route a little. The park houses the field that most of the local little leagues use for practice and games so when we pulled up the playground was full of boys around Z's age, which can be a dangerous element to enter into. At first I was tempted to just pull out and go home but Z swore that he could play on the equipment without engaging with them. I was a little skeptical because Z often swears he will stick to himself and then immediately forgets and starts chatting away with the exact person I just warned him away from seconds before. It feels odd sometimes discouraging my son from being social and friendly, but I have a pretty good sense by now of kids he is just better off not getting to know. Sometimes I'm proved completely wrong and the kid that I was wary of turns out to be extremely friendly and it's a nice surprise but a gaggle of eleven-year-old boys is very rarely welcoming to a lone quirky boy,  no matter how nice each individual boy may be. Packs of boys waiting for their softball game to start want to impress each other, which rarely fares well for Z.

Immediately upon approaching the play structure there was a boy that got my hackles up a little. He was probably a little younger than Z and loudly repeated over and over to Az "konichiwa!" as if it were the funniest thing in the world. When that had grown a little old he switched to, "Hola!" Z stuck to his word and didn't engage with any of the boys except to say, "Excuse" (which I guess was his faster, lazier way of saying, "excuse me") so I followed Az over to the smaller kid's playground. After a few minutes I heard the group of boys yelling at Z to move. He was sitting at the top of a tube slide, not going up or down. I decided to bring Az over to the slide and put her in at the bottom because I doubted the boys would continue to yell at him with me there. It's true that Z should have been sharing the tube but since there were other slides and the boys had claimed the entire play structure I felt okay defending his right to be on the slide.

Z went up and down the slide and played on the structure in the usual way, without engaging the boys in any way. At one point it looked like one of the boys spit on the back of Z's head and then laughed with the boy he was standing next to but I couldn't be sure and it didn't happen again. There were no big scenes or confrontations that day but still and all I was pretty relieved when it suddenly started pouring rain and we had to depart quickly. Oddly enough I left feeling like we had had a positive experience; Z was able to play and have fun without talking to any of the kids I had warned him away from him. It required me hovering nearby, but at least I know Z can do it.

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Broccoli continues to be one of her favorite foods. And if I hide asparagus in the bowl I can sometimes get her to eat some of that too.

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Logistically and economically it made more sense for me to drop off Z at school and M at work and pick both of them up in the afternoon today. When I picked Miguel up we had a few hours to kill until Z's tae kwon do started and some empty bellies so we decided to get something to eat. Miguel suggested Chevy's, or I half-jokingly suggested it and Miguel agreed to it, I can't recall which. Even though the bill for all four of our meals only totaled a little over twenty dollars it still felt like a very decadent thing to do. We very rarely eat out these days, and certainly never without having a special occasion to do it for. Honestly, the food itself really wasn't very good at all but I enjoyed getting to eat out for no good reason at all. It made the day feel like it was a special occasion indeed.

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My very favorite photo from the day of our trip to Bodega Bay; Zae trying to avoid having a photo taken. We had taken a spontaneous trip to the ocean to see the tall ships that were in town for the week. We didn't manage to get tickets to ride, or even get close to the ships at all, but neither of the kids seemed to mind once the sand toys were brought out.

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Today was Easter. We spent the beginning part of it tearing through Easter baskets and hunting for eggs indoors and in the afternoon we headed to my uncle Miguel's. Last year Az did amazingly well at the egg hunt, considering the fact that she couldn't even walk yet. Once we showed her the eggs held yogurt drops, something she rarely got, she crawled and climbed all over the living room to find every last one. I anticipated this year being even better, but of course my little girl had to prove Mom wrong. She quickly picked up and opened the first egg, but couldn't be bothered with the rest. She was excited by the Easter baskets, though of course Z's and Daddy's were much more interesting than her own. (Theirs did contain candy after all.) I had placed the Ariel version of the plastic dolls she loves so much in her basket and she snatched that up immediately but the other things didn't interest her as much as what was in her brother's basket. I thought surely the Caillou book would get more attention.

I failed to get any cute pictures of the kids together in their Easter best so the picture below will have to suffice. It was a chilly Easter Sunday and Az kept her coat on all day, so I was glad I had opted to not buy her a new dress for the occasion. She wore the dress she had worn to my friends' wedding last June and no surprise, it fit remarkably the same as it did back then. Our baby is growing in other ways though. On Easter morning Miguel and Az were dancing in the kitchen. My kitchen has become a discotheque these days. Miguel instructed Az to "Dance baby," to which Az replied, "I no baby!" Miguel told her that she was indeed a baby, but Az just laughed and said, "Noooo..." Az will always be our baby, but these freaking sentences she's pulling out of nowhere are making that fantasy harder and harder every day.

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We took the kids to an Easter egg hunt at a neighboring town. It was my first time going to a public egg hunt with the kids. I volunteered at one in high school but for some reason had never taken Z to one. For some reason they decided to have the big kids' hunt at the exact same time as the toddler hunt so I wasn't able to watch both of the kids on their quests for eggs. I went with Z, since there was some potential for disaster there, and Miguel went with Az. Both of the kids seemed to do well with their haul, Az and Miguel came back with a basket full of plastic eggs; Miguel reported that some of the toddlers didn't get any eggs at all. This might have been an opportune time to teach Az about sharing, but one of the good things about sending Az off with her dad is that occasionally I escape having to do the right thing. After the hunt there was an egg drop off of the bridge that spans the river. Z and his mental encyclopedia of engineering will have to enter next year, but this year it was fun to watch. By then Az was ready to go home so after a nap (by both her and me) we painted eggs and I shuffled the kids off to bed. Az seemed more interested in dying eggs last year, this year she was more interested in dying her fingers.

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Z had an especially early dentist appointment this morning, which got the two of us out of the house nice and early. The appointment was out earlier than expected so we fetched Miguel and Az and brought them to Bodega Bay. I was hoping to see the tall ships, replicas of the ones that brought the Russians to the area 200 years ago, but tickets were sold out and the ships were too far out on the water to make imposing figures anyhow. The kids had a blast playing in the sand anyhow (though Miguel was disgruntled because he had imagined us roaming on boats and docks, not rolling around in sand so he wasn't dressed for the occasion) and once again Az managed to get sopping wet on a breezy April afternoon. Miguel had to get to work in the late afternoon so our visit was brief, but the kids packed in every ounce of fun they could in to the time.

Here are a couple of bonus photos:

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Today after an errand at the nearby elementary school I took Az to the local park. I really enjoy the park in the mornings and early afternoons, before the older kids get out of school and the younger kids have free reign of the place. I ran into an acquaintance from elementary school and we ended up chatting and letting the kids run around for a few hours. I think in all we were there for four hours, until it was time to go meet Z's bus. Az of course got sopping wet playing in the water feature once again. I guess I'm going to have to accept that trips to this park require a full change of clothes. Of course she was the only child there to stomp around in the water, the others were content to just splash their hands. She was having too much of a blast to stop her though, and home and fresh clothes were too nearby to really worry.

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I'd gotten a little behind on uploading photos and when I went to edit a photo for April 4 there wasn't one. I have no idea what happened, I wasn't aware of having missed a photo so I don't know if I just got so busy that day that I forgot to take a photo for the day or if it got deleted somehow, but in any case there was nothing from the day to upload. I don't like bringing my camera to work with me, I don't feel safe leaving it in the classroom or the car, so I'm often left to take a photo either with my phone while we're out and about since Miguel often meets me in SR with the kids or else I'm left to take a quick picture or two with my camera once we get home. Neither option has been leaving me with the best photos. Here is one from April 1; Az playing in her brother's messy room while wearing her gnome hat.

Edited to say:
Well, I found the picture I took on April 4. I took it with my phone while we were waiting for Miguel to get his oil changed. I like the one I posted above more though, so I'm going to go ahead and take the liberty of posting both.

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Drawing together before bedtime.

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Reading one of Z's old books. By the time Z was given this book at a birthday party he was a little too old for it, so it's nice to see it getting some use. Z took it off of the bookshelf in my bedroom for her and it hasn't made it back on in the weeks since because Az insists it live next to the bed now.

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6AM, snuggled up before Z headed to school. Sometimes it's awfully hard to leave these two for work in the mornings.

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I've decided to incorporate Z into our nightly reading of stories since I was having so much difficulty fitting in story time with each of the kids separately. This means Z and I don't get as much time to read the more mature books we were reading together, but we're trading it for more opportunity for Z to read to Az and for the three of us to snuggle up. Since Z has been reading chapter books independently since he was four years old it's been a long time since he's seen most of his old books that were deemed "babyish" long ago, so it's been fun getting him reaquainted with some of his old library. I'm finding that a lot of the books have morals and messages I'm glad to retouch on with him. And by the way, while Z was reading Az this book, which happens to be from when I was a kid, Az suddenly sat up and said, "I see a girl!" The next night while at the store she would pulled another sentence seemingly out of nowhere: "I have a doll!" Since then she's been peppering conversation with actual sentences. It's so much fun getting more of a peek into what interests her (girls and dolls mostly of course.)