Land of Enchantment

The stress of traveling long distances in confined spaces with two wiggly kids who need a new activity every 10 minutes and are prone to shrieking when they're unhappy is almost enough to prevent us from going anywhere. But not quite. And we're all happy we mustered up the will and the dough to make a trip to Santa Fe last week.

The sky was blue nonstop. The food was delicious. And we all were happy to relax by the fireplace at Noni and Mickey's house. The one exception is that Oliver was terrorized by Winnie the Pooch (aka Winnie the Poop). It didn't help that she lurked around his chair at every mealtime, having quickly learned who was most likely to drop food. Slowly he got used to her and learned to say, "Back off!"

We went on lots of fun excursions - to the Anasazi pueblo ruins and cave dwellings at Bandelier, to the other-worldly rock formations known as Tent Rocks, to the Children's Museum and to the mountains to go sledding. Sledding in particular was a blast - even Noni and Mickey took a couple of runs. Ezra and Katy's boyfriend David bonded catching some "sick air."

The kids had us in stitches telling knock knock jokes, mostly of the scatalogical variety. Most are some variation of this one:

"Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"Smell mop."
"Smell mop who?"
"Ew, I don't want to smell your poo!"

Oliver's punchlines to that joke never disappoint. Here's one that he told us:

"Knock knock."
"Who's there?"
"Smell mop."
"Smell mop who?"
"Ew, I don't want to taste your toilet!" (pronounced 'toy-wet')

Love to all from Ash, Gabe, Ezra & Oliver

freshly shorn

Just a quick post to show off the kids' new Supercuts hairdos. Not perfect, but what do you expect for $13 each?

Usually we take them to kiddie hair salons that cost twice that much and have little cars and trains the kids can sit in while they get their hair cut, plus videos to watch and toys to play with. But the place we go to was closed today and we were really overdue for a trim. 

The most Supercuts had for kids was a couple of balloons, but Ezra and Oliver surprised me with how well they complied with the ordeal. Oliver especially impressed me with his stoicism. I could tell he was freaked out, but he didn't cry and sat still the whole time. He's growing up! 

Also including a pic of Ezra at the birthday party for his friends Orin and Maggie - it was at a kids' art studio and including a "splatter room"! He came home covered in paint, including his shoes. 

Greetings, 2013!

Things we're looking forward to and hoping will happen this year: Ezra hearing better once he gets tubes in his ears (Feb. 13), Oliver not biting anyone anymore, Ezra developing even more interest in and tolerance of his brother, and Oliver learning to use the potty (Please? It's got to happen, right?). Oh, and both kids going to sleep with minimal stalling and crying - and Oliver sleeping till 6 am or dare we dream, even later...

Okay, enough griping about little things. All the emotional upheaval after Newtown has left me feeling a lot more tolerant and patient with these boys. It's such a precious thing to be able to squeeze them, feel the warmth of their skin, their squirming bodies constantly in motion except for rare moments when they relax and squeeze back, or better yet, actually initiate kisses. One of Oliver's latest bedtime stalling tactics is to kiss both my cheeks and eyes. That - as you can imagine - is a pretty effective stalling tactic.

I've deactivated my Facebook account because it was sucking up way too much time and occupying too much of my brain power with mostly inconsequential things. So I'm hoping to blog more often and post pictures here for our family and friends who still check this blog occasionally.

We had a very fun Hanukkah and the kids were inundated with gifts and chocolate. It's going to take a while for them to realize we've gone back to day-to-day life when presents and a constant stream of sugar are out of the ordinary. Gabe and I went to Ezra's class at day care and talked to them about Hanukkah and taught them the dreidel song, and then plied them with Hanukkah gelt. In gratitude, they all drew us pictures of menorahs and dreidels. Very cute! And Ezra started getting into the spirit of gift-giving by drawing us countless pictures of robots and then wrapping them up with toilet paper and scotch tape.

Aunt Lisa came to town (her first time in Seattle!) on Christmas Eve and stayed for five days. It was great. We drove an hour into the Cascades and went sledding and had so much fun. We sledded down tiny hills, but they were fast enough for all of us to have a lot of laughs. The snow was incredibly deep and powdery - but clumpy enough to make a terrific snowman. We tried to recreate the fun on New Year's Day, but it was 25 degrees and the snow was icier and we (especially Oliver) called it quits a lot sooner. But it definitely did our spirits good to get up into the mountains and remind ourselves of one of the main reasons why we moved here.

The rain let up and the sun came out and Lisa, Ezra, Oliver & I went to Bainbridge Island. Lisa was particularly impressed that the sun shone. :-) It is rare, but not unheard of! Lisa also graciously babysat for us while we went to see "This is Forty." Thanks, Lisa! After she left, Oliver said, "Where's Lisa? I want her to come back."

We're going to Santa Fe in a week and a half - can't wait for some more sunshine and some good Mexican food and to take the boys on more hikes in the mountains - maybe even sledding again! Oh, and can't wait to see Noni, Mickey & Katy!

Love,
Ash (and Gabe, Ezra & Oliver)

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

A gift for Grandma

As has long been obvious, our dedication to this blog is no match for the demands of raising two children. So if you're unhappy about the infrequent updates, take it up with Ezra and Oliver. Since you seem to think they're so damn great.

I kid, of course. Mostly. The reason for today's rebirth of BlastOliver is the occasion of my (Gabe's) mother turning ... uh ... well ... having a birthday. Hooray! Happy birthday, Grandma! (I should mention that this thoughtful gesture was Ashley's idea).

As long as we're here, we might as well offer an update. Life is as frenetic as ever -- possibly more so, as Ash and I both have had especially demanding work schedules since late summer. The boys are doing great -- both healthy and often happy. Ezra still swings between being barely manageable and inducing aneurysms. But all along he is, of course, amazing. He still requires us to tell stories and role-play much of the day, but the subject matter has gotten a bit more sophisticated. He's into Star Wars at the moment (he's never seen the movies, but has picked up the plot through books and bedtime stories. Yes, we tell Star Wars bedtime stories). The interactions often focus on trying to convince Darth Vader and the Emperor that they should just be nice. I am heartened that, so far, this is generally his strategy with villains.

Oliver is positively blossoming right now. He's running around and has a couple dozen words. When I come home he tears across the apartment yelling "Hi Da Da! Hi Da! Hi Da!" It is the best homecoming I could imagine. He's also just started putting words together: principally, garbage truck. "Gaba ... cuck." He enjoys imitating our various guttural noises, and has begun to give kisses.

He loves to climb stuff and is alarmingly brave. Ezra was rambunctious at this age already, too, but unlike Ezra, Oliver will brazenly walk straight off a ledge without even looking down. We just removed our extra crib from the kids' rooms because Oliver was clearly using it to practice launching himself out. His sleep is still not perfect, but blessedly he is a great eater. That is a huge relief, and gives us hope that meals won't always be as stressful with Ollie as they were with his bro. He's also adopted a lovie -- a baby blanket, just like his old man. Of course he's cranky at times and is really starting to get into stuff, but mostly he's just brimming with exuberance and sweetness.

We managed to take a trip in September to California, seeing friends and attending the wedding of my old friend John (Ezra's godfather) and his vivacious bride, Angela. It was a whirlwind -- I think we stayed in five different places in just over a week. We were a fun-loving hobo family. This did allow us to, somehow, see most of the people we wanted to see, including friends from many different phases of our lives (Gabe's high school, Gabe's college, Ash's college, Ash's relatives, Ash's old work chums, etc.). A huge highlight for me was reuniting with four of my college roomates and their spouses, and meeting three of their offspring for the first time. We saw redwood trees (the boys swooned), rode cable cars (more swooning), ate really good Indian and Italian food, climbed hills, took in mountain vistas and generally made ourselves sick with nostalgia for the Bay Area.

Halloween was a success, though it was touch and go. Ash is ambitious in many of her endeavors, but it reaches epic proportions when it comes to homemade Halloween costumes (see last year's post re: construction crane). She is the Thomas Pynchon, the Christo, the Axl Rose of costumery. [Ed. (Ash): I have to interject here and say that nothing I've done comes close to the labor and creativity my mom put into our Halloween costumes, the best of which, I think, was a Miss Piggy head made out of papier mache, complete with fake eyelashes and blond wig.]

Anyway, we had big plans to build a robot costume for Ezra out of boxes, silver paint, dryer vent tubing and lots of buttons, dials and switches. We created a masterpiece, which Ezra was thrilled about until he put it on. We had engineered it with little thought given to comfort or ease of movement, and he immediately demanded it be removed. Crestfallen, we borrowed a store-bought dinosaur costume. On the evening of trick-or-treat, we desperately wanted him to wear it just long enough for a picture. He refused. So we did what any good parent would: we told him he could not have any candy unless he put it on. This proved effective. Then as soon as we showed him a picture of himself wearing the robot on our camera, he insisted on wearing it the rest of the night. He's still living off his candy haul.

Oliver was cute enough to pucker your heart in his borrowed, store-bought giraffe costume ... which leads me to question the energy expended on the robot project, rewarding though it was. We ate all of Ollie's candy within a day or so. Cut us some slack. He's one.

Anyway, way too much to report here, of course, but we are chugging along. We are trying to keep control of this insane family machine we are driving, and reminding ourselves to feel joy and wonder along the way. Here's to one more big happy birthday to Grandma from the Spitzer-Grosses -- we love you, Ma!

As ever,
Gabe, Ash, Ez and Ollie