Vacation in California, part 2

Adelaida peruses an advertisement at the reunion breakfast

Friday morning of our California vacation marked a change in focus, from relaxing with close friends to reunion-related activities. We walked to campus for a reunion breakfast, where we happened to sit at a table with a Class of 1970 graduate who was both in Page House and from Loveland, CO! He and Dale talk for quite a while about Loveland and how it has changed in the past thirty years, and he had actually gone to high school with Dale's dad. Small world!

Caltech is a very dynamic campus, so one of the first things offered Friday morning was an architectural overview of the campus, with a focus on new buildings (several buildings were new to us, ten years removed from Caltech, while almost every building was new to the Techers who graduated in 1940 and 1945!). The session started with a talk about the different buildings, then dispersed into small groups for an architectural tour. Please remember that Adelaida was about ten hours behind on sleep at this point, so took a nice long nap on my shoulder during the talk! Our architectural tour group was small -- the tour guide, Dale, me, Adelaida, and our good friend from college Karen, who we hadn't seen in ten years but our friendship picked up right where we left it ten years ago!

Here are some of the things we saw on our campus tour and later that day.

The old oak tree in front of Parsons-Gates is not only protected by pillars and wires, but now also by a fence!


A beaver was designed into the tilework on the new Dabney Hall floors.


Adelaida tours the campus on Dale's shoulders. (Her shirt says "Daddy's Girl".)


Something that struck me when viewing these pictures was the lack of people in them. We toured the campus on a Friday mid-morning (11-12), and saw almost no one other than our small group. In fact, the only picture of the campus I took with another human being in it was the one below, with one person walking along the north edge of the reflecting pool.


One of the more disappointing things I saw on campus was this mural in Page. It was painted over Starry Night, one of my favorite wall paintings in Page House!


After that stroll down memory lane, we headed over to the athletic facilities to find trophies with Dale's name on them (yes, really!) and see Julie. On the way to the gym, we stopped at Throop Garden, which has become overrun with turtles since we left.

Lots of turtles! Adelaida touched one, but mostly just watched them.


This is the Caltech Athlete of the Year trophy, with Dale's name engraved for 1998-1999. Yes, I dated a collegiate athletic superstar!


We met up with Grant and Anara for a late lunch, and I took this cute picture of the men and the girls. Again, there are no signs of life on campus, except our group!


Karen and Ron joined us for lunch, after which we gathered at our hotel to chat and swim.

More about this trip later!

Vacation in California, part 1

Dale and I are old. How old, you ask? Well, we got an invitation a few months ago to return to Caltech for our TEN YEAR college reunion!!! I thought at first that there must have been some mistake -- our five year reunion I could accept, but to acknowledge that we've been out of college ten years is to acknowledge that we are getting old!

We thought about it for only a few minutes before deciding to go. After all, if we really were old, the best way to hang on to our youth would be to spend time with friends from our past, in the city of our past!

So, the second weekend of May we packed up and flew to California. (We checked four bags plus a carseat, for two adults and a baby for four days. Gone are the days of deciding Thursday night to go to Mexico, getting in the car and driving all night long, taking nothing more than bathing suits and toothbrushes for a long weekend trip!)

Anara and Adelaida meet over dinner

We arrived at LAX Wednesday afternoon, and our first stop was, of course, the Richmond Bar and Grill. We are fortunate enough to have friends who don't work, friends who work a couple of days a week, friends who work really odd hours, and friends you are much too young to work, all living in LA, so Grant, Jamie, Ron, and Anara all met us for a late lunch at the bar. It was good to sit at our old table again, catch up with Jeff, eat a killer burger, and talk and laugh with good friends. It could have been our same group eight years ago, except Liz, Matt, and Brian weren't there and we came in with two sets of bibs, baby spoons, and diaper bags. Well, things change, I guess!

walking through the Rose Bowl park

After lunch, we headed up to Pasadena to check into our hotel and put Adelaida down for a nap -- which sounds like a great plan, but backfired on us when we put Adelaida in the crib for her nap and didn't leave the room. Ever since she was two weeks old, Adelaida has slept in her own room; we learned this weekend that she is pretty insistent about that -- she wouldn't lay down to sleep while we were in the room with her. This was the first of many nap-time and bed-time struggles we had on this trip; I don't think she took a single nap the first two days we were in California, went to bed when we did, and still woke up by 6:30 every day. This resulted in Adelaida sleeping an average of nine hours a day instead of her usual fourteen. Needless to say, she was a bit cranky on this vacation.

playing with blocks of wood at Kidscape

Despite the lack of sleep, we found time to do a lot of fun things. Our second day in California was Thursday; we called Grant and suggested a trip to Kidspace, the children's museum located at the Rose Bowl. Kidspace was only 2 1/2 miles from our hotel, so we decided to walk; Grant was going to leave in thirty minutes and lives ten minutes away from Kidspace, so we figured we'd arrive at about the same time. Three hours later, we called Grant to see where he was, and he assured us that he'd be leaving within ten minutes! Ah yes, going anywhere with a baby really does take three times as long as going anywhere without a baby! :)

Adelaida finds the slide at Kidspace

Kidspace has the potential to be awesome, but was very disappointing for us because there were so many school groups there. I counted at least ten different schools, most with thirty to fifty kids but a couple of school groups with a hundred kids each. There were preschools and elementary schools, and most of the kids there were quite a bit older (and bigger) than Adelaida, so it was hard to find space for Adelaida to play with anything. Kidspace has a great climbing area, but there were so many five-year-olds playing in it that they would have just run over Adelaida. So, we walked around a bit at Kidspace but didn't end up doing very much.

Adelaida takes her first nap of the trip in Dale's arms

After two hours at Kidspace, we confirmed with Grant that he wasn't anywhere close and suggested meeting for lunch and a swim in our hotel pool instead. Dale graciously offered to carry Adelaida as we walked back, and I let him, not realizing that he had an ulterior motive. Adelaida's lack of sleep up to that point meant there was a very good possibility she'd fall asleep in our arms as we walked back, and sure enough, she did! Dale had the privilege of carrying a sleeping baby on our walk back to Pasadena, and Adelaida took a reasonable nap. We met Grant and Anara for lunch at Saladang (one of our favorite Pasadena restaurants), then headed back to the hotel for an afternoon swim.



It had already been a fabulous vacation, and we had only been in California for twenty-four hours!

I'll post more about the vacation later.

Camping

Back in early April, some friends invited us to join them for a group camping trip over Memorial Day Weekend. The end of May seemed like a really long way off at the time, so we accepted, thinking that we had plenty of time to prepare Adelaida for camping before the trip. Before we knew it, of course, the weekend had arrived and neither Adelaida nor Dale and I were prepared!

We packed up some camping gear on Saturday morning and headed out to the campground, planning to stay one or two nights, depending on how the first night went.

The campground was HOT (actually, everything in New Mexico has been hot the past few weeks), but we had a great time camping. There were seven families total, all from our MOMS group, and the kids played together, families hiked together, groups went down to play in the creek together, and the entire campground ate and sat around the campfire together.

Here are some of my favorite pictures from the trip (thanks to Shannon for several of them!).

One family in our group brought their dog -- a very well-behaved lab named Max. Adelaida loved Max and often toddled off after him. Fortunately, he didn't stray far from the campground, and he was really good around kids.


Adelina, Duncan, and Adelaida play together on the blanket.



Another shot of Adelaida, Adelina, and Duncan.


Adelaida thought that the pavers edging the campsites were just her size and loved to sit on them! Here, she convinced her daddy to sit down with her ... aren't they cute!


Adelina and Kalli became great friends on this camping trip and spent almost an hour walking up and down the campsite lane, holding hands ...


... while their older brothers (Enzo and Kieran) ran up and down the campsite lane with their trucks!


Adelaida also found a friend on this camping trip. Ria is a calm two-and-a-half-year-old girl who we don't see much of at the MOMS events -- Ria goes to school three days a week while her mom works, and Adelaida has been going to school three, four, and now five days a week while I work. Between our two work schedules, we hadn't really gotten to know Ria and her family very well prior to this trip. But the two girls latched on to each other right away and were almost inseparable! This is a picture of Adelaida and Ria, sitting on the edge of one of the campsites. It was so much fun to watch them play together on this trip!


One of the families brought a soccer ball, which Dale was immediately drawn to. He played soccer with Adelaida for a bit, which she found hilarious. I just love to hear her laugh!


Ria decided to join Adelaida's team in soccer, which didn't really give the girls an advantage, but they had fun anyway.


We did go for one short hike, up the mountain next to our campground. Adelaida rode in the backpack, of course.


This is a view from our hiking destination, looking out over the campground (near the river).


Turning counter-clockwise 90 degrees showed us another beautiful view.


We made it through the trip with only two mildly scraped knees. Amazingly, Adelaida didn't cry at all when she fell!


In planning this camping trip, we knew that Adelaida doesn't sleep well in the same room with us, so thought we'd put her to sleep in the back of the car while we were in the tent. We'd leave the windows cracked so we could hear her, and we'd all sleep better. That great idea was foiled when we arrived at the campground and realized the car parking spots were really far away from the tents. So, we all slept in the tent together, and didn't have quite enough sleeping bags or blankets for all three of us. It got kind of cold at night, and we ended up with Adelaida sleeping on my chest, sharing the sleeping bag with me. Not ideal, but we did get some sleep. Unfortunately, we didn't get quite enough sleep that night, so left the next day, with plans to go camping again this summer.

An Easter Egg Hunt

We've done so many fun things with Adelaida recently that I want to share with you all. This post is about her first Easter Egg Hunt, back in March. The Easter Egg Hunt was for a playgroup that Adelaida has been involved with since she was about one month old, hosted by one of the moms in the playgroup. This is a fun playgroup of about fifteen kids very close to Adelaida's age -- the oldest is about 20 months old and the youngest are about 14 months old, and Adelaida is right in the middle at seventeen months old.

I put Adelaida in her most beautiful little Easter dress for this occasion, and the weather ended up cooperating -- neither too hot to be outside nor too cold for a dress!


We all congregated at Adelaida's friend Ann's house, hung out inside for a bit while the moms chatted and kids played, then headed outside for the hunt. Many of the moms brought some Easter Eggs for the hunt -- traditional plastic eggs (either empty or filled with a few "puffs" baby treats) as well as egg-shaped sidewalk chalk. The eggs were "hidden" in plain view on the grass in the back yard.


We first lined the kids up for a photo -- it turns out it is hard to get twelve young toddlers to sit still and look at the camera and smile. I think this is the best shot we got!


After the obligatory adorable baby photo shoot, the kids hunted their eggs to various degrees -- some kids were excited about picking up their eggs and placing them in the buckets, while other kids found the eggs and looked at them, but weren't really interested in picking them up. Adelaida found the first two eggs she came across, picked them both up, then walked around the rest of the hunt with those two eggs in her hands. No basket required and she was perfectly happy!

taking a little break from the hunt

one of Adelaida's friends emptied her basket in front of Adelaida, leaving Adelaida surrounded by Easter eggs!

back at home, Adelaida relived the joy of the hunt with legos!

A New Toy for Adelaida

Adelaida has had very few new toys. She has lots of toys, but almost all of them are used, either hand-me-downs or purchased at garage sales. Most toys designed for kids her age are very durable and kids grow out of them pretty quickly, so used toys have been perfectly fine.

Two weeks ago, we made a family outing to Toys R Us and purchased a brand-new toy for Adelaida. I wanted to buy something like this used, and looked for months on Craig's List for something similar, but they are in such high demand that the Craig's List postings were generally gone within a few hours. So, Dale and I did some research and found exactly what we wanted and bought Adelaida ... a playset!



It has two swings (one baby swing, and one older-kid swing), a platform with a steering wheel, steps leading up to the platform, and a slide. Adelaida loves it! She laughs and laughs when we put her in the swing (and likes to swing high!) and loves to go down the slide. She can't quite get up the steps by herself (she can get onto the first step by herself, needs help going from the first step to the second step, then can go from the second step to the platform by herself, skipping the third step all together), but she can go down the slide by herself! Like all children, Adelaida enjoys trying to walk up the slide. So far she hasn't fallen off it, but I'm sure it will happen before too long.

Update

It's been almost six weeks since I posted anything, but not because nothing blog-worthy has been happening! We've been very busy for the past six weeks, and I hope to post to the blog frequently to catch you all up on everything that's happened in our lives recently.

Two big events have occurred in the past six weeks that affect me directly, and are most of the reason that I haven't had time to post any new blogs. The first was an important meeting with my dissertation committee on May 10. I met with my committee (four UNM faculty members) for an annual meeting at which I updated them on the research I have completed and how I hope to finish the research for my degree. This necessitated a relatively formal research presentation, which took a long time to prepare. And of course, as I prepared the presentation, I found things that needed to be done and things that needed to be redone before giving the presentation, so I was very busy doing more research during that time as well. The meeting went well -- I learned about a lot of things that I need to be doing differently, but have a good plan for continuing my research. The best part of this meeting was that I finally feel like I know what I need to do to finish my degree and can complete it in the (relatively) near future!

The second big event in my life recently is that I was offered a summer internship at Sandia National Laboratories and started yesterday! I wasn't exactly looking for this job, but when I heard about it I knew it would be a great experience for me so decided to take it. I'll be working full-time, for approximately the next fourteen weeks, which means Adelaida will be in school full-time for the summer. That will be hard for her and hard on me, but we can do it for three months. I'm putting my research on hold during the internship (or almost on hold; I plan to continue working on it, but at a drastically reduced pace), which means it may take a bit longer for me to finish my degree, but it will be well worth the benefits of this internship.

It's time to wake Adelaida up, so I will leave you with a recent picture of her, and a promise to write more soon.

Spinning

Adelaida has a new favorite activity: spinning. She loves to spin (really just walk in a very tight circle). Sometimes she gets dizzy and falls, and sometimes she gets dizzy and walks less-than-straight after spinning. She has been doing this for over a week and Dale and I laugh every time she spins!

Dale took two videos of her spinning a few nights ago that I wanted to share here. (If you can't see the videos, visit our blog at http://parkesranch.blogspot.com/)

In the first video, Adelaida is holding two white clothespins. They are among her favorite toys, for some strange reason.


In the second video, she stops spinning at some point and looks up at me, so I do a twirl to get her going again. She also falls at the end, but doesn't hurt herself -- she got right back up and started spinning again!

The Danger of Having Teeth

I've been so excited that Adelaida now has teeth -- she can cut food with her front teeth and soon will be able to chew better with her back teeth. Until today, however, I didn't really consider all the implications of her having teeth.

Today, Adelaida and I went to a playgroup with some friends who have a really neat playset in their backyard. The playset has a slide, and after Adelaida played around the base of the playset for a while, I thought she might enjoy going down the slide. I sat her at the top of the slide and prepared to catch her (it wasn't a huge slide, but big enough that I wanted to catch her the first time she went down it). She was excited to go down the slide, but couldn't get started by herself. So, I reached up to gently pull her legs to start her. As I was pulling her legs, she twisted and ended up with her upper body sideways just as her lower body started going down the slide. This resulted in Adelaida's face smacking into the side of the slide.

I was right there with her and realized that she had hit the slide pretty hard, so immediately picked her up, and as I did, I saw blood on the side of the slide where she had hit her face. My little girl's first mouth wound! She cried for a few minutes and then just wanted me to hold her for a few minutes (fortunately I was wearing a dark brown shirt, so couldn't see all the blood that had transferred from Adelaida's mouth to my shoulder!). After a few minutes of being held and comforted, Adelaida was ready to get down and play again.

It wasn't until about an hour later, when I was putting her in the car to go home and she stuck out her tongue, that I realized where the wound was. She had a little sore on her tongue, where it looked like she had bitten her tongue when she hit the side of the slide. After bath this evening, we were able to get a picture of the injury (the red spot on the right side of Adelaida's tongue):


We also got the first picture ever (I think) of Adelaida's top front teeth:


She survived her first mouth wound well, and I think I survived it pretty well, too! I knew that mouth wounds bleed a lot, so wasn't worried when I saw a lot of blood, and sure enough she was fine within a few minutes!

First Teeth!

Two Four Five Teeth!
This is another post that I intended to write several months ago, but am somehow just now getting around to it.

When Adelaida was about two months old, she began to drool. A lot. I knew that drooling was a sign of teething, and that most kids get their first teeth between three and ten months, so when Adelaida started drooling in February 2009, I expected to see a tooth within a few weeks. (I wasn't worried that she was only two months old when most kids get teeth between three and ten months, because of course she is an amazing little girl and was probably just going to do everything a little earlier than her peers, including teething.)

three-month-old Adelaida shows off her gums

I waited quite patiently for that first tooth, as February ended (and still no tooth), and then March passed by without any signs of a tooth, and suddenly it was June and she still didn't have any teeth! Well, in June she was only six months old, and babies get teeth anywhere between three and ten months, so I wasn't worried -- she would cut teeth when she was ready, and certainly in the next four months.

nine-month-old Adelaida has a toothless grin

The summer came to a close with Adelaida still toothless, and at her nine-month well-baby checkup, I asked her pediatrician if I should be concerned that she still didn't have any teeth. She told me not to worry, that most kids get teeth by the time they are ten months old, but even a little later than that was not unheard of -- so she would probably get her first tooth in the next month or so, and Dr. Anderson wouldn't consider her development abnormal unless she still didn't have any teeth on her first birthday.

eleven-and-a-half-month-old Adelaida: I see a tongue, but still no teeth!

September ended, October passed by, November came and went -- and still no teeth! (At this point we realized that Adelaida hadn't gained any weight in five months, so were much more concerned about her weight gain than her lack of teeth. But that doesn't mean I wasn't looking for teeth at every opportunity!)

Then, on December 14, just six days before her first birthday, Adelaida was eating tomatoes and had the tomato skin still in her mouth (remember, it's hard to eat when you don't have teeth!). I put my finger in her mouth to remove the tomato skin and felt something hard and bumpy on her lower gum. Her first tooth! After waiting nine-and-three-quarters months for this tooth to appear, I was completely unprepared for it! I thought back over the previous few weeks, and didn't remember seeing any of the teething signs -- she wasn't drooling more than normal, she wasn't chewing on things, she wasn't cranky, her gums didn't seem swollen. It was like the tooth just appeared out of nowhere. A few days later the second one came in, and Adelaida had two adorable little front bottom teeth -- just days before her first birthday!

February 2010 started, and again Adelaida started drooling a lot. Thinking we had just missed the drooling with the first two teeth, we were now prepared for her to cut another tooth or two. We waited, and waited, and waited, and finally, at the beginning of April, she got two more teeth -- her top front ones. Gone was the adorable little toothless grin, and here to stay was a big-girl, growing-up-so-fast Adelaida with four front teeth.

Now that I know she can cut teeth, I'm not so worried about her growing up to be a teenager without any teeth. We haven't really seen any signs of teething since the first of April, so didn't think she would be getting more teeth any time soon. Then, today, Adelaida was running in the bonus room and tripped, fell, and hit her face on a toy. She wasn't badly injured, but started to cry ... and as I looked down at her to see if she was hurt, I saw another tooth! This one is on the top, on her left side, pretty far back in her mouth, like it is a molar. I only saw (and felt) two points, so I'm not sure if it is a two-pointed tooth or a four-pointed tooth that hasn't come in all the way yet, but Adelaida now has five teeth.

Adelaida generally keeps her mouth closed, so it has been hard to get a picture of her teeth. In fact, I don't think we have any pictures showing her top teeth at all. But I did find this one of Adelaida's bottom teeth:

can't see the teeth? look closer ...

... and closer still: there they are!

Garden preparations

Last summer, Dale and I planted a modest garden. We had lots of vegetables, most of which produced a good amount of crop. We had so much fun with it last year that we decided to quintuple our garden this year!

The garden preparations have been ongoing for several months now, beginning with planting some seeds inside to get them a head start on our short growing season. We started the plants back in February, in a peat pellet tray. Within days, several of the plants had started growing!


Soon, we had a pellet tray full of green plants. We had planned on some of the seeds not germinating, so had planted three seeds in each pellet, and several pellets of each kind of plant. Surprisingly, every seed germinated, so we trimmed away the two weaker plants in each peat pellet, leaving only the strongest plant. The tomatoes, peppers, and broccoli were particularly strong, and we transferred them to larger pots after just two weeks in the pellet tray.

(A month after we started our plants inside, we got over a foot of snow! Those tiny little plants wouldn't have survived outside during this storm!)






The plants continued to thrive inside, and we began acclimating them to the outside by placing them outside in the shade for a few hours every day. The peppers always looked better after being outside, while the tomatoes started to look a little weaker.


This weekend, we rented a tiller and Dale tilled up our garden plot. After loosening the soil (and removing quite a bit of grass), Dale laid out bags of gypsum (to keep the clay-like soil loose), composted steer manure, and composted mulch, which he worked into the soil by running the tiller over it a few more times.

When he was finished, we had a nice, smooth garden plot full of rich organic matter and good loose soil.







The next step was to plant. You might not be able to see it in this picture, but the garden plot has several white plant markers that indicate what we planted in each area. We didn't plant everything yet -- some of the plants won't be planted until May or even June, and we are going to let the plants that we started inside grow a little longer inside before we transplant them -- but we laid out the garden and planted several seeds.

This year, we're planning on the following vegetables in our garden:
corn
sugar snap peas
green beans
spinach
carrots (multi-colored!)
radishes
green onions
tomatoes (four different kinds)
green bell peppers
red bell peppers
serrano chili peppers
sweet banana peppers
broccoli
adirondack blue potatoes
yukon gold potatoes
zucchini
yellow crookneck squash
pumpkin pie pumpkins
jack-o-lantern carving pumpkins
watermelon
honeydew
butternut squash
green hubbard squash
cucumbers
lemon cucumbers

We also planted some other edible plants outside the garden:
blueberries
blackberries
raspberries
strawberries
asparagus
hops (for brewing, of course!)

We are looking forward to a good harvest this year and can't wait to eat home-grown veggies from our garden all summer!