When bliss happens, take note

 

Life hasn't been easy lately. Our kids scream, bite, hit and generally act in loathsome ways way more than we'd like. We go from the grind of work to the grind of child care to housework to sleep and back again. So I really feel compelled to write when we have an amazing day like today, so we can remember it on less-than-amazing days.

First amazing thing is that Katy is here visiting. Hooray! We had a leisurely breakfast and then headed out to a stunningly, quintessentially Seattle place... Gasworks Park. It's an old decommissioned gas plant that's been turned into a city park, and the old gasworks equipment has been painted bright colors and left for kids to climb on. It's right by Lake Union, where all the houseboats are (where Tom Hanks supposedly lived in Sleepless in Seattle), so we could watch houseboats and sailboats and kayaks on the water,with the Space Needle and downtown skyline in the background. The sky was Santa Fe blue. Incredible! Then we treated ourselves to lunch at a burger place and went to check out the giant troll sculpture under a bridge in the Fremont neighborhood. The kids loved it so much they cried when we left.

After nap time and dinner time, we headed to Alki beach with watermelon, even though it's almost pitch dark out at 7 pm now. But it was such a lovely night... The kids had fun looking at stars and chasing each other, and we watched the ferries gliding across the sound, all lit up, with the silhouette of the Olympics in the distance. And here's the craziest thing. On the way back, as we walked up our alley, Katy spotted a flying farolito! It's basically a paper lantern with a candle inside that somehow lifts up into the air and floats until it burns itself up. Then we saw another and another! Someone must have been setting them off from the beach, but we were all enthralled, especially the kids. Ezra had just recently been talking about the flying farolito he saw in Santa Fe on Christmas Eve of 2010, when he was only 2 years, 5 months old.

It was a really magical end to a great day.

Sleepless in Seattle

In the pouring rain on April 30, Team Spitzer-Gross packed up the Subaru Outback to the gills (we literally left a baby carrier in the garage because we didn't have any more space) and said goodbye to Chicago to begin our excellent adventure west.

Trip highlights included visiting the Briscoes ("Do you like Transformers, Arthur and David?" "Do you have more Transformers, Arthur? Or wait, are you David?"), visiting our friends Melissa, Lars, Mai-Evy and baby Sella in Minneapolis in their beautiful new house, climbing all over ancient rock formations at the Badlands of South Dakota, spending a couple of days chillin' in Bozeman with Uncle Josh, Sarah and Wyatt, drinking in the mountain views and fresh air and feeling lighthearted about moving west, and playing in a park and eating Thai food in Coeur d'Alene (that also seems like a fabulous town! Who knew?).

The lowlights weren't too terrible, after all. We gave goodie bags every 100 miles or so and stuffed their faces with graham crackers, pretzels, and granola bars, lubricated with juice boxes, and that seemed to do the trick.

Monday, May 7th, we pulled down our new street in West Seattle just as the sun was starting to set behind the Olympic Mountains across Puget Sound. Yes, the apartment is small, but we felt so thrilled to be here. Our apartment is 100 feet or so from the beach!

Now we've been here a month and are starting to believe that we actually live here. It hasn't been the easiest transition. Oliver's sleep has been rocky ever since the trip, with multiple wakings per night. I was nursing him in the belief that it would help make all the transitions easier, until I just got completely fed up with his entitled attitude (he'd shout at 4:00 am "I WANT MY MUH-MUH!", muh-muh being his name for breastmilk), like I was his little dairymaid. But the lame thing is that he's STILL waking up at 4:00 am, shouting and shouting, now for a graham cracker. He doesn't fall back asleep - no, that's when he begins his day, and consequently when I begin my day.

And to complicate matters, Ezra and Oliver are sharing a room. So we've had some nights that truly felt like a three-ring circus with kids shouting at 3:00 am, mom and dad rushing here and there, trying to shut them up, and our neighbors probably punching their pillows in fury.

We're still not unpacked, more than a month after arriving. It's tough when bedtime for the kids can go till 9:00 pm and then we have to clean up the dishes, and sometimes cook dinner for the following night. Hard to force ourselves to unpack the rest of these boxes. But on the weekends we've been trying to chip away at it.

We miss a lot of people in Chicago and miss that feeling of being surrounded by friends. But we've hung out with some friends here and we're just so happy to be in a place with old-growth forests, mountain views and amazingly hilly streets that we haven't doubted our decision (or at least, I haven't. I don't think Gabe has.) Ezra told Gabe last night that he's grateful for our new life here. I'm grateful that we moved with the kids before it got too hard to uproot them and before we just got too dang tired to make the move.

Not that it's all sunshine and roses. We've had record rain so far in June (and we've added a new phrase to our lexicon: "June gloom."). There's been a lot of very disturbing and saddening violence here. But same in Chicago.

Anyway, friends - even though our place is small, we welcome visitors!

Love, Ashley, Gabe, Ezra & Oliver

 

I wuv you

So many times I've wanted to sit down and write lately because Oliver is changing almost by the nanosecond, and I don't want to forget what he's like right now. He's learning words so fast that if we don't stop now to write his baby-isms down, they'll just be gone like "sand through an hourglass." (Ha ha, anyone else ever waste time watching Days of Our Lives? I did, during high school summer vacation.)

For example, just a couple of weeks ago I jotted down that he was saying "buh-WAH-nuh" for banana. But now he enunciates it perfectly. Ba-NA-na. He still says wa-guh for water and ba-ba for blanket. Also muh-muh for breastmilk. A common refrain from him: "I WANT MUH-MUH! I WANT MUH-MUH!" Weaning that kid is not going to be easy. I weaned Ezra before he knew how to ask for it. It's so much harder now that Ollie can express exactly what he wants!

But here's an example of how fast he's learning stuff. Just a couple of weeks ago he started saying, "nine, ten!" for any quantity of anything. One day he said, "Nine, ten animal crack!" It wasn't hard to figure out what he meant as he grabbed huge fistfuls of animal crackers and stuffed them in his face. Now, he can count to ten. Not that he necessarily can sit and point to ten objects and count them up, but he knows the words one to ten in the correct order. His vocabulary is also greatly influenced by Ezra. He knows Buzz (Lightyear), Batman, Superman, robot, and can gurgle in the back of his throat, a la Chewbacca. (That last one he learned courtesy of Gabe.)
And here's the absolute best - the acme, pinnacle, zenith of cuteness. Ollie just learned to say, "I love you" unprompted. It sounds like "I wuv you." And he goes around saying, "I wuv you, Mommy. I wuv you, Daddy. I wuv you, Ez-wuh." Seriously, could there possibly be anything cuter?

Ezra also cracks us up. (When he's not bringing us almost to tears because of some terrible fight we're having over him not eating his dinner or some such.) I mean, doesn't everyone think the following joke is hysterical?

Ezra: "Do you know about the guy who didn't have any syrup? He just ate chickens!" (hysterical laughter - at least, from the joke teller) (Where does the kid get this material?)


And here's one that probably would find a more receptive audience... at PopPop and Grandma Spitzer's house over Thanksgiving, we had a nice Shabbos dinner with tablecloth, nice plates, etc. Gabe says something about us having a fancy dinner. Ezra retorts, "We're not fancy, we're Jewish!" Big laughs ensue.

We had a pretty rotten January, honestly. Oliver got a stomach bug that lasted a week, and managed to combine it with a cold/cough/fever that developed into an ear infection. I wound up taking him to the ER at 1 am one night, worried that he was dehydrated from diarrhea and throwing up. He was borderline, but that's when they found the ear infection (just the latest in a long string of ear infections). The medicine only made him throw up and poop more, so we had to hold off till he could keep stuff in his tummy. He went a whole week with no solids and looked really emaciated by the end of it. :-( Luckily he's now back to his old self, just in time to get hand, foot and mouth disease from his big brother! Everything they say about preschools being one big germ factory is true.

Took Ezra to see his very first movie on the big screen today - Beauty & the Beast 3D. ("I'm just going to sit in your lap and close my eyes for the scary parts, okay, Mommy?" "Sure, Ezra.") Turns out he only had to close his eyes for one part in the beginning and then realized it wasn't as scary as he thought. He was absolutely transfixed. Especially enjoyed the buttered popcorn and also climbing into the race car video games in the arcade afterward.

We just had lovely visits from Grandma & PopPop and then from Lisa. (And over New Year's, we had Mickey, Noni and Katy visit! we've loved having so much family here.) Hit the Nature Museum with Grandma & PopPop. Gabe, Grandma and I were enthralled watching a butterfly try to kick its way out of its chrysalis. We watched and watched, but kids operate on a different pace than a butterfly, so we didn't get to see him actually spread his wings. With Lisa, we enjoyed particularly balmy weather for Chicago in February and walked around Lincoln Square and went to the Field Museum... don't want to get too cocky or complacent about this weather yet, but just a few months ago, they were predicting this. Enough said - I will try not to jinx us by saying anymore!

Anyway, that's it for now... I am posting quite a few great pics that Katy took. How nice to have our own professional photographer in the family who does free shoots for us!

Love,
Ash, Gabe, Ezra & Oliver