We did it!

We sold our car today. We're finally car-free, insurance-free, parking-space-fee-free, C02-free, freedom-free. Yay!

By the way...

They say the second child's triumphs are not nearly as celebrated as the first, and I guess that's true...but it's also true that most of them have come so late with Littler that we kind of stopped thinking about them for a while... For instance, although Littler has been able to sit since she was six months old, it was only if I sat her up myself. Her options until very recently were sit or lay down on her back (at least if she could talk and you asked her, I'm sure that's what she would tell you). Due to her lack of tummy time, she didn't start 'locomoting' until she was just shy of turning 1 year old, and when she did, it was not traditional crawling. We have a picture video we'll put up very soon showing what it looks like, but the way she moves is by sticking her legs out and then scooting her bum toward her legs, using her legs to propel her. It is very cute and silly looking, but it gets her from room to room and across the playground, so at least it works, even if it isn't as efficient as crawling. Her next big physical accomplishment happened today! Yay! As of today, Littler can officially sit herself up from lying on her back! This will be very useful for the several times a day that Little pushes her over flat on her back...

Gouda, Blackberries, Grammy, Grampy, Anacortes, and We

[more details later]

We all went to Anacortes, Washington last week to be with Daddy's parents, Grammy and Grampy. Our original plan, plan A, call it an audacious one, involved a week of camping by canoe. Plan B was to have a couple short canoe camping trips with camping in the wilderness. We ended up with plan Q, basically canoeing lakes and bays in Anacortes, eating yummy cheese, playing Vietnamese Boat, and taking it easy. Here's the typical voluminous volume of photos.

On the first day we explored Hart Lake by canoe. Little and Littler had never been canoeing, so we took it easy. Little had quite a bit of fun, but Littler didn't like her straightjacket--er, lifejacket.

Little loved the job of making sure the canoe didn't float off while we were getting ready. She also loved her lifejacket, and especially the "tail" it has [the strap that goes between her legs]. She was actually pretty proud of her tail.

Little had a lot of fun paddling.

Mommy caught a big one.

Littler is proud that she figured out how to sit up with her lifejacket on, and Grampy is just plain proud.

We picked somewhere between 896 and 934 quadrillion tons of blackberries, but only about 10 pounds made it home. How could that have happened?

We visited a little dairy and got some yummy gouda for fondue. They had a big daddy pig. Mommy had never seen such a big daddy pig. So Mommy wanted a picture of the pig. Daddy, blase and cool as he is, wasn't terribly impressed but worked the pig into the background of a much more attractive photograph.

Ok, so the pig was pretty big.

Our next canoe trip was on Whistle Lake. This was a much more secluded lake, and our explorations were top-notch. There are just lots of things you can't see from the shore! The weather was perfect [cold, drippy, damp] and the lake was completely idyllic. We spent most of the time drifting over submerged logs and navigating narrow gaps discovering lots of beautiful little inlets. Overall, it was a blast [the 1-mile portage was another issue].

We also all went canoeing in the ocean, at Bowman Bay, along with Mommy's sister Tick. It was fun, but Daddy doesn't think canoes and the ocean are great fits.

We went to the coast for sunset later and enjoyed the lighting.

Littler and Grampy.

Grammy and Grampy.

Our last canoe trip was in Little Cranberry lake. It was at dusk, and beautiful. The kids were not too happy but it was gorgeous.

Grammy and Grampy's house.

Getting the wiggles out.

A portrait of Grampy's brain.

We set the all-time single-day Transportation Diversity All-Universe Record by taking car, ferry, bus, plane, golf cart, train, foot power, and bikes to get home. And it was hot when we got home, so:

Little with Ack and Olivander on our bed

For the next couple days Little tried doing this wherever she was. She would get a grin on her face then fall face-first onto the ground. She could never quite figure out why it wasn't so much fun on the ground as it was on the bed...

Our first real family tradition

Mommy and I have been wanting for a long time to have some real, genuine family traditions. Making snowflakes doesn't count because that's something my family does. Water hiking doesn't cut it because the kids don't really participate in that. So we were excited when we realized today that we finally have a real family tradition.

Every week or two we all ride our bikes over to a shopping center. We shop for normal groceries and then shop at the Milk Pail market for veggies and CHEESE. Cheese. We all love cheese in epic degrees. CHEESE. Anyway, the Milk Pail has the best cheese selection we've ever seen. And the prices make it taste even better. So we go in, planning on getting just a small block of Wensleydale [<$5 a pound!], and end up with Havarti, French Emmenthaler, Edam, Jarlsberg, Fontina, Wensleydale, Parmesan, all genuine imported, almost all for substantially under $6 a pound. It's like an audiophile walking into a warehouse full of discount-priced professional audio gear. Except the gear is tasty, has lots of addictive opioids, and goes great on french bread. Anyway, we always end up with an armful of wonderful life-prolonging cheeses, a loaf of sweet or sour batard, or rosemary herb bread, and a few plums or nectarines or Asian pears. Sometimes we'll get a small block of some more expensive cheese just for the thrill of it, like the $3 block [at $13/pound] of Parmigiano-Reggiano that has lasted us a month and will last another even though we put it on everything [except, rarely in our breakfast cereal].

Then we ride our bikes to a nearby park and eat cheese, bread, and fruit. This is the fun part. [Cheese!] Today we had Jarlsberg on herb bread with plums. Mmmm! Everybody loves it, it's super cheap [we ate imported Jarlsberg like it was string cheese and went through $1.50 worth of it for dinner for 4], and, you know, it tastes good. The park is pretty and it's pretty much just a great little family tradition.

We're also going to be able to have the Thanksgiving meal we've always wanted. Neither of us enjoy turkey and potatoes [etc.] so this year we're going to have fontina, emmentaler, gruyere and oil fondues with great bread, real meat, cranberry sauce, and fruit. Maybe even some more exotic cheeses if we're feeling splurgy. The whole meal will probably cost $20 and we'll live at least a decade longer just from the latent joy from eating so much good stuff. Maybe even a super-dark chocolate fondue for desert [and pie, of course]. I can't wait!

Littler

Littler is a funny little monkey. Here are some things she loves to do:

If you set her down, she immediately starts pounding the floor with her heels. However you're picturing that, multiply it by at least a bajillion. It's extra violent. Once daddy though Mommy was jumping up and down upstairs trying to get his attention so he'd get Little to stop crying. Nope, it was Littler railing away on the floor. Sometimes the bike trailer bounces nearly off the ground from it. And the more excited she is, the more vigorously she abuses the floor.

And sometimes when she's extra excited she causes a seismic event.

The other thing she loves to do is spin on her bottom. She sits really straight and uses her heels [catching a trend here?] to spin herself around a vertical axis on her bum. She can make it 360 degrees in about 2 seconds. Or, if she's extra excited, an attosecond. Today she came perilously close to using this spining as a means of locomotion; to get from A to B she just spins really fast until somehow she ends up at B.

Forget crawling! Or walking, for that matter...

Just thought you'd like to know.

Little's Hobby Horse

Recently Little has taken to making hobby horses out of everyday objects [a hobby horse is one of those horse-head-on-a-stick [sounds like a cheap French county-fair snack, right?] toys that everybody used to play with back in the medieval era when our parents were alive, if old kids books are any indication]. Sometimes she uses a picture frame, sometimes a broom, sometimes Littler. She gallops around in a convincing cadence and waves her free hand above her head like she's working a lasso. It's ubercute.

The other day she was potty training and so, at that moment, she was 100% totally gloriously buck nekkid. She decided she wanted to play with a hobby horse, so she grabbed the nearest object, straddled it, and pranced around yelling "HObby horse! HObby horse!" What object did she grab to be her hobby horse?

Tweezers.

Daddy is almost entirely convinced that this was the cutest single moment in all of human history.

Little Goes Potty

Today is day 9 of our latest attempt to potty train Little, and I must say that even though it's not going miraculously, we're pretty happy with the way things are going this time around. So far today she has had ZERO accidents, with both pee and poop. Or as her little potty movie calls it, "wee wee" and "poo poo". She still wets a diaper major time at night, and most days wakes up from her nap wet, but as of today we are officially not putting her to nap in diapers (but ARE using thick training pants with those plastic cover pants over them [and today a cloth diaper doubler]).

Littler has been alternating between the rest of our disposable supply, the rest of our g-diapers left over from trying them on Little (they didn't work as well on her for some reason), and cloth diaper doublers inserted into the g-diaper covers. We make the official cloth diaper plunge when her new all in one cloth diapers arrive next week. So far though, I think the cloth thing is working out great, thanks to our washer and dryer. I LOOOOOOOOVE them! They are seriously changing my life for the better!

Back to Little...wish us luck on her future success. We're going to start a sticker chart very soon because she's so good at going that she's earning too many otter pops and movies...

Biking the Bay with Babies, Basically

Our friends invited us to go with them on a bike ride on saturday, nominally to a store, but by such a circuitous route that we knew we'd never get there. We planned on riding out to the bay, riding the trails there up to Redwood City, and doing the same thing back. Here's how it really went:

We [A-Ron, Boni, Olivander, Lize-Ahhh, Pester, MDester, BChester, Squeaker] packed everything we'd need [sans tire repair kit; more on that later] and rode off. Palo Alto has a lot of great bike paths, so [despite some terrible directions from 511.org; more on that later] we had a rather easy route through residential neighborhoods, up and over the freeway, and right out to the Palo Alto Golf Course and its surrounding trails.

Our route, following the aforementioned 511.org directions, had us following a network of trails around the periphery of the bay for several miles. One of the trails purported to cross train tracks. It didn't. So we had to backtrack several miles of narrow dirt trails [we all had road bikes; whoops] to bypass the tracks. According to Google Earth we had gone 15 miles by the time we reached Bayfront Park in Redwood City [4.44 miles as the tern flies]. Lize-Ahhh was ready for this thing to end, so we sat down on some blankets and ate lunch. We had French Emmenthaler on crackers, plums, and, of course, string cheese. All these pictures were taken there. We know that Olivander has other female friends, but none worship him as much as BChester. Observe.

We walked to the top of a low hill at the park and played around for a while. BChester and Olivander were having a total blast. This is a rock they were using as a slide.

Not sure what she was doing here. She probably wasn't either.

Squeaker's face is covered in lots of things. Lize-Ahhh's graham cracker. Pre-chewed stale rosemary herb bread. Her own spit. Ground squirrel dung. You know, that stuff. [seriously, she partially slipped into a squirrel hole]

Speaking of ground-squirrel holes... Lize-Ahhh is keeping her feet cool in the very same one that tried to swallow Squeaker. There were probably 73.5 quadrillion squirrels there, by a conservative estimate.

We eventually started back. About 1.5 miles into the return trip, A-Ron got a flat. Remember now that we had no tire patching kit. So he started walking [way out in East Palo Alto] and everyone else rode home, with Boni now pulling Olivander and Lize-Ahhh. We took a more direct route [and avoided all the backtracking involved in the trip out] and got home in about 9.5 miles. Boni drove off and saved A-Ron who was about 4 miles closer to home than he was when we left him. Nice of him to save gas like that.

It was a lot of fun! We definitely got a taste of what we're in for when we sell our car [more on that later; much later. Like, tomorrow maybe.]. None of our trips with the kids previously had passed 8 miles round-trip. So the fact that 25 rough, windy, dirty miles turned out ok seems to indicate that we'll be fine. But we'll need a patching kit.