Dental work

Miss Carmela has been to the dentist a couple of times, and she actually really likes it!  It helps having a great kids' dentist in the neighborhood.  It also helps having a Mama with a mouth full of fillings to serve as a cautionary tale for brushing teeth.  Carmela wanted everyone to see how good she is at brushing. 

 

February 2014

February brought us Valentine's Day and the Olympics.  I'm not gonna lie to you, Valentine's Day itself was a little rough. Carmela was in a rotten mood for some reason, and got sent to bed without any of the homemade, heart-shaped pizza that Mama made. (She got a peanut butter sandwich, which she threw onto the floor of her bedroom. Yeah, it was that kind of evening.)  But we made some heart cookies, and Carmela was excited to get a few Valentine's cards at school. 

The Winter Olympics brought some great teachable moments for us. They included the usual moments of learning about teamwork, being a good sport, trying hard to become good at your sport, handling disappointment when you fall down or mess up, getting back up, and learning about other countries. They also included the very important lesson of sharing the TV, because Mama and Daddy want to watch something that was not intended for the 4-year-old set. Great learning was had all around.

Sometimes the last names of our Norwegian luge friends sound a little bit funny.

This is how Carmela looks when she watched ice dancing.

Cookies for Valentines Day!

Winter walk

This has been a pretty cold, rainy winter here, but thankfully not as cold as in other parts of the country.  We have been able to get out for some walks in the neighborhood.  One of our favorite walks is up to the donut shop.  We are pretty excited, though, for spring. Obviously, we need to get outside and play sometimes.

Carmela is engineering some kind of entertaining obstacle course on a rainy day. Then we went for a walk.

It's been a long time

It has been almost a year since we have updated this blog. What a shame! It turns out that things get crazier the older your child gets, and it can be hard to find time to squeeze in the extras.  Like writing for an uninterrupted 10 or 20 minutes.  Add to that a new laptop and moving all of the photos to a firewire drive, plus job changes and crazy schedules for Daddy, and life has been kind of nuts for the Doctors.

But all is well!  Carmela would like everyone to know that she's feeling great, she's playing, and she's running around.  She literally just asked me to write that so everyone would know.  This kid.  I tell ya.  She's going to be great in kindergarten, which brings us to a little announcement:  Miss Carmela June is registered for kindergarten!  We're not sure yet which elementary school she'll be attending, as the Seattle Public Schools has a complicated enrollment system, but it is exciting to know that she'll be starting this next milestone in the fall.  In the meantime, she's powering through preschool, learning to resolve conflict, engaging in a wonderful imaginative life of princesses, and singing the theme song from Frozen over and over and over again.  She's very close to learning to read, and enjoys doing her letter sounds "homework" at Kumon.  Miss Carmela loves playing at the park (tag and chase, mostly), and she also loves watching Pixar movies at home with Mama and Daddy.  She also loves playing board games, coloring, doing dot-to-dot and find-and-circle activities, and she's starting to figure out whether she enjoys working on puzzles.

Coming up, Carmela is very excited about Purim (she wants to be a mermaid ... again), and she and Mama are going to make hamentaschen cookies to snack on.  And, of course, there's the Purim carnival, which is always super fun, because cotton candy!! I mean, making a grogger is lots of fun, but the cotton candy is the big ticket. After Purim comes St. Patrick's Day, which is also lots of fun! Mama and Ela loves to go to Seattle Center for the St. Patrick's Day festival, with Irish dancers and crafts and music.  Hooray!

How about some pictures? Ok, coming up!

A few cute shots

Spring is quickly becoming summer here in the Pacific Northwest. Ela loves the change of seasons because it almost always means staying up a little bit later to play outside with our neighborhood friends and visiting with our neighbors. Meanwhile, the general busy-ness of summer means Mama does a poor job of keeping the blog updated. We finally downloaded pictures of our latest adventures. Enjoy!

Weekend getaway

After our exciting weekend seeing the tulips, Mama and Daddy and Miss Carmela went on a short weekend vacation to Lopez Island! One of Mama's law school professors retired there, and he invited the family to stay at the guest cabin. Miss Ela June was so excited about going on vacation to Lopez Island, and told her friends at preschool for that she was going!

On Friday, Daddy picked Ela up from preschool early. When Mama got home early from work, we all piled into the car and drove north. It was a really long drive, so Ela decided to go ahead and have her nap in the car. Miss Ela was awake by the time we got in the ferry line, and it was a good thing Daddy brought road trip snacks. We three had some snack and watched the ferry boats come and go until it was time to drive our car onto the ferry. After a really fun ferry ride, we drove off the boat onto the island and to the cabin. For the next two days, we ate, hiked, and visited with each other. It was cold, rainy, and windy, windy, windy, but we saw some really neat things and enjoyed our island visit. Ela was disappointed to leave, but we've started planning our trip back. After our second (or third) visit to the bakery (cinnamon rolls, Parmesan pesto croissants, almond butterhorns, coffee) and a swing through the bookstore (Dead Man's Clothes: The Bum Camp of Tolt, Washington), we headed out to one more park and then got into the ferry line for the ferry ride home. We had a road trip snack on the long road trip home and then a tuckered Miss Ela June fell fast asleep for the whole trip home. (That seems to happen a lot.)

On our first afternoon on Lopez Island, we walked down the road from the cabin to Agate Beach. It was very picturesque because of the incredible amount of wind coming off the ocean. We got to see a bald eagle soaring overhead, with a rainbow in the background. No kidding. It was pretty amazing. We also saw a few deer on our visit, and lots of sheep, cows, pigs, horses, and dogs.

Miss Ela June quietly looks at a story book at the cabin.

The lookout at Shark Reef. They're impossible to see in the picture, but there are sea lions sunning themselves on the fore-rocks. They barked and snorted at us, which Ela thought was hilarious. 

Ela and Daddy see a decommissioned cannon at Odlin State Park before getting in the ferry line home.

Playing in the sand at Odlin State Park.

Deer tracks in the sand at Odlin State Park.

Seaweed at Watmough Bight, a wonderfully secluded cove with smooth agate-y rocks and gentle lapping waves. We saw a weasel run across the beach!

More of Agate Beach. 

Tulip Festival 2013

We are very lucky to live in such a farm-y state. With strawberries in early summer (pretty soon!), all sorts of vegetables and farmers markets all summer, apples in late summer, and pumpkins in the fall, we are surrounded by good examples of where our food comes from and what farmers and farm equipment look like. For some reason, we just hadn't made it up to see the tulip festival, though. Mama's not sure why -- maybe because it can be very muddy, and fields and fields of flowers that you can't pick just seemed like a recipe for a meltdown. 

In any case, we finally went, and it was such fun! Oh sure, Carmela got muddy, muddy, muddy, but it was great fun, and she was an age that she understood not to pick the flowers in the fields. Even better, after the muddy fields, we got to go to the gardens, and they were beautiful! They were bursting with with colors and shapes, and there was even a windmill! Ela got to take a few pictures, and then we had a hot dog and some fudge. And, of course, we bought some cut tulips. It was so much fun that Miss Ela snoozed all the way home!

Beautiful gardens:

Muddy fields:

Muddy fields of tulips. Red, purple, red, and yellow.

Carmela shows how crazy the mud was!

So much mud.

Miss Carmela June. What a great kid!

Mama loves the way the light played on this row of tulips. Ela loved how there was one orange tulip in a row of purple.

Multi-colored orange and yellow.

The windmill on the garden side of the farm. Mama read somewhere that the family who owns and operates the farm is of Dutch origin, and used to grow and sell tulips in Holland in the 1700s. Today, the farm is owned and operated by the five Roozen brothers. They sell a bajillion tulips a year, and also have a bulb catalog a bajillion varieties of tulips, plus irises, daffodils, and hyacinths.

Fields of red tulips, with yellow in the background.

A beautiful mix of pinks and purple tulips and white daffodils, with some grape hyacinths in the back.

A gorgeous combination of parrot-colored apricot, lavender, and gray tulips with rock hyacinths.