But then around 9pm while Alan was watering the plants (to cool them off from the heat) Isabelle heard fireworks going off. She wanted to see them. And at this point she was up and in the backyard.

So we hopped into the car and on the drive down I checked the times. According to the website it looked like the fireworks had already started and there was a good chance we would miss them. But we kept driving and luckily we caught the tail end.

We didn’t have the best view. Everywhere was crowded. There were trees in the way but we could see the fireworks.

It was Nathan’s first time. He was quite fascinated. And yes he’s just in a diaper. We were in a rush as we left and didn’t even bother grabbing his shoes. So yep that was our fourth. And today Isabelle is still not feeling well.

To sleep in, IN HER OWN ROOM. BY HERSELF!

She was quite excited. We let her choose her own sheets, pink of course. We got her some wall stickers. We got her a special little mushroom night light. And she actually went to sleep in it! Unlike her first move from our bed to her toddler bed.

And yes getting her to sleep involved me laying down next to her until she fell asleep. Then I crept away and went to my bed to co-sleep with Nathan. And, yes, Alan did spend the night on the floor in her room. We just wanted to be sure she’d be ok and didn’t wake through the night wanting us.

As I said, she did sleep through the night just fine. However she woke up in the morning a little sad and on the verge of crying looking for me. Oh yeah…woke up at freaking 7 a.m., which she NEVER or rarely ever does.

So, yep. Slept on her own. Is that the end of the story? Nope. More for another time.

This year I didn’t have anything planned. Well, I did have an idea but Alan was home all the time and I couldn’t really surprise him with anything. Isabelle wanted to get him flowers and make him a little book.

But when Alan woke up with us we couldn’t really just take off without him. So, we made the decision to go somewhere fun for Isabelle. And what would a five year old like on her half birthday? (Because, yes, it was her half birthday, she’s now five and a half.) Traintown!

We’ve never been to Traintown before. Thanks for the suggestion Wendy! Isabelle had a blast.

She enjoyed the train ride and the cute tiny little town that was a stop off along the route.

I only wish we could have stayed in the tiny little town longer. I only got to take pictures of a few of the buildings on one side. I didn’t get to explore the other side at all before the train conductor hollered, “all aboard!!”.

I guess we could have bought tickets and rode again but…but we didn’t.

We didn’t ride again because Isabelle was too eager to explore the rest of the park. Very eager. So eager that she bypassed the carousel and opted for the ferris wheel instead. She was fearless while I was fearful. I held on for dear life. Well, with one hand. The other needed to take a picture.

And, yes, there was a lot of “aaaack don’t rock” thrown about up there by me. When we got off Isabelle said to Alan, “mama was scared! But I wasn’t.”

But were we done then? Nope. We decided to go for a boat ride. It could have been a plane ride. We were driving through Sonoma when we saw a sign for plane rides. I told Alan to pull over to check it out. But that would have been crazy. They were biplanes. Open cockpits and little kids do not go together.

So, we continued onto Vallejo for a boat ride across the bay. But being a commuter boat they had a limited schedule. We had just missed the boat. We could have waited around for an hour but instead we opted to drive into San Francisco. Whoo we were all over the place that day. And it worked out perfectly. We napped on the way there. Well everyone except Alan of course, he was driving. I fell asleep and it was the quickest drive down to Pier 39 ever, well from a sleeper’s point of view, that is. I didn’t even know there was traffic. And when we arrived we were right on time to ride one of the Bay cruises on the Blue and Gold fleet.

It was the kids’ first boat ride. It was new and fascinating for Isabelle.

Nathan just took it in stride. For him it was probably just a strange, windy, rocking outing. He didn’t know it was his first time on a boat.

It was pretty cool. I cannot remember if I’ve done it before. They had something playing in the background, a recording. Some narration thing that I’m sure I would have enjoyed immensely, because I’m nerdy that way, if only I could have heard it. The gabby people on the boat were too loud and I only heard snatches of it.

After our little adventure we headed home for CAKE! I can’t ever seem to make a pretty cake.

But it was yummy.

And that was our day of trains, planes, and automobiles. I mean trains, boats, and automobiles.

I wish I could have taken pictures of their work. It was lovely. I particularly liked seeing some of their handmade greeting cards. But since we couldn’t take pictures this was the only shot I got of the exhibit, around the corner and outside. Can you see the house in there?

If you are interested, you can find out more about the Reys in this little interactive doodad. I can’t think of the word to call it. They had it at the museum.

And that was basically it at the museum. Really, when you can’t take pictures there are no pictures to share. So, here we are outside the museum.

And then at a playground by the museum.

And riding a carousel also in the general vicinity of the museum.

It was Nathan’s first time!

He did recommend that if I am going to continue nursing him to brush his teeth afterwards in his sleep. And I will try. Maybe then I will have more luck brushing them since Nathan absolutely hates it.

The dentist had tips to help. Like if the two of us are home we can hold him down and jam a toothbrush in his mouth to keep his mouth open while we brush with another toothbrush. Or if it’s just one of us, to put him in a headlock to brush his teeth. I wasn’t going to write that. I wanted to leave that out. It sounds so harsh. But Alan said “why?” Gotta have clean baby teeth right?

But did the excitement of the day end there? Nope. We also brought Isabelle to a swimming class.

We were originally going to have my friend’s daughter teach Isabelle. But we never got together, she’s a busy teenager. So, when one of the homeschool moms recommended a place, we thought we’d check it out.

It’s an indoor pool. Heated pool. No slathering on sunblock. Nice! So, checking it out became signing her up for a month trial.

And Isabelle was sooooooooo excited. She practically ran into the building on the day of her class. More like ran in, almost frantically grappling for the door handle with another woman in her haste.

She’s starting with how to dip her head under water, float on her back, and kicking and maneuvering with flippers.

She had so much fun. Right now just out of the blue, she said to Alan, “I love my swimming class!!”

This second attempt was even worse though. Why? I didn’t have all the proper equipment, namely the lollipop sticks. I didn’t buy more because we had some or so I thought. Turns out we only had eight left.

So, I thought I’d made cake balls and cake hearts instead. Not too big of a change. Except the dipping part did not work, again. I used Wilton’s candy melts and they are just too thick. I thought I’d retry with what I scrounged around for in my refrigerator, which was half of a Ghirardelli dark chocolate bar. It melted a little better but half a candy bar is not enough to cover twenty five little cake hearts and I don’t know how many cake balls.

Oh well. One of these days I’ll make cake balls work. Isabelle liked them though. She enthusiastically ate one when suddenly she said, there’s something hard in this one mommy. Just great, I thought. What else could go wrong?

I was having a devil of the time in the kitchen that day. My food processor, which I’ve mentioned before is on it’s last legs, would not grate my carrots for the carrot cupcakes I planned to make. After multiple tries I finally clicked the cracked bowl on just right and it worked. And when I was cleaning it out, I freaked out for a moment. I noticed a metal piece was missing. I was worried that maybe it had fallen into the carrots, which had gone into the batter, which would mean I would have to dump all 24+ cupcakes. Happily I found it.

But something hard in the cake balls? I didn’t use the food processor for that. There shouldn’t have been anything hard in it. I went over to Isabelle and told her to spit the thing out into a bowl. And the thing turned out to be HER TOOTH, her front bottom tooth, that has been loose for a couple of weeks. My baby’s first tooth, that fell out on it’s own and not being pulled by a dentist.

I set it aside on the counter in the bowl so that we could do something special on the weekend. I should have just had her put it under her pillow that night. Because on Tuesday, Alan accidentally threw it away.

I didn’t realize until right as I was putting the kids down for the night. It was later than usual and I was tired. Then the dreadful thought creeps into my head that I don’t know where Isabelle’s tooth is. I am so upset and the emotion fills me up completely that I cannot think. I shoo the kids into the other room and call Alan on the phone and rage at him.

After I hang up I am still mad and upset. I call Olinda crying about how Isabelle’s tooth is gone. Gone! Gone down the sink. I don’t feel better but I hang up because the kids should be asleep. After the kids fall asleep, I lay there and the anger bleeds away. Isabelle has a mouth full of teeth. We’ll save the next one.

Ok how about something happy now. I told Isabelle to draw a monster for the Valentine cards for the homeschool group. Maybe because she had just lost a tooth she drew such a toothy little monster.

I took her drawing and scanned it into photoshop, changed up the color a little for purple and green and light blue monsters, and removed the eyes so we could add googly eyes.

I’ve ridden BART before but not with kids. So, when I went up to the ticket machine, I was a little confused. Where was the button for kids’ tickets? I went to ask the agent when I saw a sign that said children BART tickets are sold at specific retail locations, not through the machines. Ahhh…I had forgotten that’s how kid tickets worked.

The very nice agent, I think that’s what they’re called, must have seen the confusion on my face and chased us down to help us. He asked how old Isabelle was. When I replied, five, he said, well today she’s four.

Kids four and under ride free. That’s why. I did not argue with him. I got my ticket and Isabelle put it through the fare gate and down we went to wait by the train tracks.

She excitedly looked at the tracks while we we waited for our train. “Not too close Isabelle, just hold my hand while you look.” I don’t know how people can comfortably stand so close to the edge.

When the train arrived, we were one of the first on. I told her to choose our seats but then led us to some forward facing seats. Me and backward facing seats would not have been a good idea. We sat down and impatiently waited to go. Yes, even Nathan was impatient, impatient to be out of his stroller that is.

I pulled him out and kept him occupied with the train map while Isabelle asked for the camera. The three shots below were taken by her before my camera battery started blinking red. Ooops. But that was ok because soon after that the train left the station.

When we got onto the train, Nathan must have thought we were in a big room with seats or something. I say this because he had the most startled look on his face when we started moving. He wasn’t expecting it at all.

And Isabelle? “THIS IS SOOOO AWESOME!” she loudly proclaimed as we took off. Then she spent the next twenty minutes happily looking out the window.

When we got to our stop Alan was waiting for us outside with the car. Is it weird that we took a little “train” trip to nowhere in particular?

Then after a little painting, Isabelle moved onto thumbprints.

And when we were done, I had little pieces of their work.

By Nathan:

By me and Isabelle:

This is just one of the pages Isabelle did. We had lots of watercolors and thumbprint pages. My favorite was a Santa and four reindeers but Alan took it to work so I didn’t get a picture. I really should have taken a picture of them all. Then I could keep them “forever”. What do you do with all your kid’s art?

And why am I tired? This cutey.

The past week, Nathan has been waking up whimpering and crying once or twice through the night. It’s not too bad. I’d give him some milk. We’d go back to sleep.

Also, he seemed to be sleeping better on his left side. Alan saw a tooth coming in on his right side. So, two nights ago I switched us around so Nathan would be laying on his left. We all slept with our heads where our feet usually are. That didn’t really seem to help. He still woke and I got a back ache.

Last night I changed us back to having our heads by the headboard. But last night was the worst! Nathan kept waking up over and over. And he just wouldn’t sleep for very long. At one point I was thrilled he slept for 45 minutes straight.

I think it’s because on top of his tooth, he caught a cold. His nose started to run last night. I think his runny/stuffed up nose was frustrating him. He’d wake and want milk but couldn’t drink and breath at the same time so he’d start to cry. Which made him want some comfort of milk, which meant he couldn’t breath and on and on it went. I can see how that would be irritating.

So, that meant at 5 am, this morning, I had barely any sleep and wasn’t up to bringing Isabelle to her homeschool meetup group. Bummer. Today’s meetup was at a recycling plant. I really wanted to go. I don’t think I’ve ever been. Isabelle woke up late and didn’t ask about it. I thought, YAY she forgot, she won’t be upset only to have her ask about it in the afternoon. When I said we missed it she started to cry.

Ok…so rough days too. How is everyone else doing? Better than us I hope.

*Oh and these photos, nothing to do with this post. I just wanted to share some photos from a few weekends ago at Alan’s cousin’s baby shower. We were blowing bubbles for Isabelle and Nathan loved it. I don’t think we’ve ever done that with him. He was fascinated. *