I’m popping in super quick to share some pictures from last week. We went to an exhibit, Curious George Saves the Day: The Art of Margret and H. A. Rey, with our homeschool group. And I’m not going to write much because Nathan is super grumpy. His tummy has been upset for days.

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!

February has been on of those months, where it’s go, go, go. Yay for March! A new hopefully less busy month.

We ended February or started this week with a dentist appointment for Nathan. His first dentist appointment. The dentist repeated, “try not to nurse at night”. I didn’t feel like arguing with him. I just nodded my head.

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!!”

Yesterday, there was a Valentine’s celebration with our homeschool group. So, on Monday, I thought I’d attempt cake pops for a second time. My first attempt did not turn out so great. The cake part was fine. The dipping part was an abysmal failure.

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.

Isabelle has been asking to ride a train for a while now. I don’t know what brought it up. So, this afternoon, we walked down to ride the BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit) train. Alan doesn’t think of it as a proper train. It’s not like a Thomas the Train kind of train, a locomotive. But close enough. Isabelle was so excited. It was like a little adventure.

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?

The other day Isabelle was upset over something or other. I cannot remember what. But before she could get good and weepy, I asked her if she wanted to paint. That always puts a smile on her face. It’s like a stealthy ninja attack on tears. This time, we let Nathan paint too.

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?