Happy Birthday, Alexa!

This is the year that I (and most of my friends) will be turning the big 3-0. A few months back in anticipation of her May birthday, Alexa's husband Brian (you all remember Brian and Alexa, of course) told me that he wanted a celebration that was part dinner party, part cooking lesson. He read a magazine article that talked about organizations that would bring party guests into the kitchen, instruct them in preparing a set menu of recipes, and then serve everyone up a wonderful meal that would taste all the better having been prepared by our own hardworking hands. A birthday party with a lesson to be learned, I like it! He had started trawling the Internet in search such a place in Seattle, and I joined in his efforts to seek out the perfect spot for Alexa's 30th birthday. After forty-odd emails between Brian and the proprietor of At the Table in Seattle, a date was selected (last Saturday night) along with a menu (Indian!).
Knowing that the dinner would likely run late at night and there would be knives brandished, Andy and I decided that Alton should probably not be one of the party attendees, so we hatched our plan to visit B&A as a family a few weekends ago, then dispatch me on a solo mission to the Emerald City to party it up with my best bud birthday girl these past few days. Father-Son Weekend at home! (Details forthcoming.)

I drove up to Seattle on Friday afternoon amidst rain and traffic, but not even sluggish, wet roads could get me down. I carefully hoarded my Weight Watchers points and squeezed in a workout Friday morning in anticipation of some weekend treats on my plate. I spent a nice low-key evening over pizza, wine and movie with Brian and Alexa, catching up and chatting and making fun of John Cusack's attempts to save the human race. Saturday morning dawned sunny, warm and clear and I cruised over to Seattle's Queen Anne neighborhood to meet up with my friend Chris Walker for breakfast! (With a quick detour into the toy store Once Upon a Time on Queen Anne to get a "Mommy is gone for the weekend" gift for Alton--I couldn't return home to the kid empty handed, after all.) Chris is all settled in to his new hometown and has already finished up a community volleyball league season and moved on to softball. He also bought a pimpin' cruising boat and we drove down the hill to Lake Union to tour his craft. Looks like it's time to get a life vest for Alton!
Back at Alexa's, we primped for our evening of chef lessons and then drove to the home of one of the owners of the business, finding ourselves in her gorgeous, spacious great room overlooking Lake Washington.



We all donned aprons

and equipped ourselves with drinks,

before starting in on preparing the appetizers.

The first course was samosas, Indian dumplings that we created by stuffing packaged wonton wrappers with a mixture of potatoes, peas, and onion. They were then deep-fried...

and enjoyed hot with a sweet cilantro sauce made by other members of the group, which promptly became glued to the crevices in our teeth and gums and gave all of us green-flecked smiles for the rest of the evening. But we were a busy group! Cucumber and tomatoes were chopped and mixed with yogurt for a cold salad,

marinade was poured over chicken breasts headed for the oven,

and Alexa smiles with happiness at the frangipane pear tart being created for dessert.

Below we enjoy the fruits of our labors. (Note that all the heads are down, tucking into the meal!)

We were there for more than four hours and ate so much food! I'll be working out extra hard to make up for that this week. I belted home on Sunday afternoon to squeeze my little man and kiss my husband, but it was definitely a unique birthday party that we will not soon forget. Alexa had a wonderful time...

and so did I!

Housekeeping

Enough of the excuses; it's time for me to step it up in the blog department. You all send us such great compliments and comments about how the blog is a fun little window into our lives (keep those coming, by the way--we are total slaves to the "Comments" feature on the blog and run from all over the house to crowd around the computer and read them when one comes in) and our number of visitors is certainly ticking upward day by day, so how about some new content? The weight loss goals that we've taken on really eat into our time (why are all my metaphors ones about food?), and sometimes it feels like a second job to be planning healthy dishes, measuring, counting, calculating, timing snacks and meals, and squeezing in exercise. I know it gets easier with time: you get more adept at eyeballing proper portions without measuring, exercise becomes such a part of your regular schedule that you include it without thinking, and carrots and water are no longer a snack, they are dessert. But for now, we are challenged and help one another with breaking previous patterns (you know what goes really well with blogging at the end of the night? a glass of WINE) and setting up healthy, successful behaviors (mmm, herbal tea!).
(What is Alton doing this whole time? Eating string cheese and waving at us to rub it in.)


"No, I don't need any string cheese, Alton; I will feast on your cuteness."

We combined exercise time and family time last weekend with a long bike ride through town for some park play and shopping. We hopped on our bicycles, with Alton riding shotgun on Andy's bike, and pedaled 7.5 miles to Noah's Bagels for a mid-morning brunch, took our snack over to Magnolia Park...and Alton jumped into the water feature and got soaked. This necessitated a detour from our original destination (REI, for Mommy to try on shoes) over to the 30% off sale at Gymboree, where we procured a clearance rack pair of seersucker Easter slacks for Alton to replace his sodden pants. After another 7.5 miles home I was beat, and sooo sore! I had to take several days off of working out to let the bike seat imprint fade from my body, then was able to hit the gym in full force this morning--grrr.
Besides counting food points and working out, the other major thing we've been working on is housekeeping. Not the bathroom-cleaning, counter-scrubbing, vacuuming kind of housekeeping (we wish--we manage to stay away from dog hair tumbleweeds in the house, but just barely sometimes), but the kind where we are prepping bit by bit for our projects in the yard. Of course you remember last year's patio transformation, and can't have already forgotten the mini-me side yard patio completed just weeks ago, but all of this has been gearing up for the big, massive, backbreaking plans for the dirt wasteland in between these two: the "grass." And grass is in quotation marks, because our soon-to-be executed backyard is going to be carpeted in synthetic grass. I had planned on waiting to describe this big project until it was already done, so that you all didn't feel like you could snark about it to us since it was already installed, but I had to let you know where all of our nights and weekends (i.e., blog time) have been going to!
I'd like to say that we are doing the synthetic grass purely for "living green" purposes, and admittedly the prospect of not having to water this grass, like, EVER is very appealing. But the low-maintenance factor is even more attractive! Andy plans to take the weekdays after Memorial Day off of work, recruit his father (a Grammy/Grandpa visit coming soon, brought to you by Southwest Airlines) and brother to pitch in, and a few days later we are done for years to come! No fertilizing, re-seeding, winterizing, mowing, trimming, or weeding required! The crowning glory will be a play structure in the middle of the grass, built by Andy to dimensions specific to our yard and allowing a safe play perimeter, including room for a sandbox below and Alton's favorite water table, of course.
(Water table picture break)

So the backyard has been getting into shape for these upcoming additions. We pulled the patio furniture out of storage, cleaned it, cleaned and filled the water table (about 5 times already), planted more plants in pots, swept up the winter months' supply of dead leaves and spider webs, pulled weeds (Andy gets all the credit for this--we had so many that the barren dirt patch was almost a lawn. A ghetto, Jeff Foxworthy redneck lawn, but an unbroken expanse of greens nonetheless.), and even brought the canvas umbrella out of retirement. We were also required by our HOA to read the CC&Rs, confirm that our playset would conform to their outdoor structure guidelines, fill out forms and submit building plans, obtain abutting neighbor signatures, and mail it all back to the Architectural Review Commitee. Whew!
But we are incredibly excited that by mid-June we could have a really awesome backyard and place to play for the summer months. We had a little pre-project get together this past weekend by inviting the Rhynes and the Groeners over for a Sunday barbecue dinner (which is what the water table picture above depicts). Since Andy's brother Zach, Auntie Karen and Cousin *P had not yet had the opportunity to meet my local Groener cousins (Seth lives in Vancouver, WA, while his older brother Matt, wife Di, and their two boys live in the same town as we do), we organized a casual evening for grilling chicken, munching chips, and splashing in the water table, of course.
The only divergence in all the aquatic masterminding was that *E and *O wanted to pour water from one receptacle to another without spilling any of it, while Team Toddler, represented by Alton and *P, wanted to bail out the water table like a leaking dinghy.

You can see how hard they are concentrating to keep the water inside the table!

Alton wants the water to be free, free!

Luckily the opposing goals were reconciled when the two little ones discovered the bowl of tortillas chips at juuust their height, and abandoned the water table.



Better rehydrate after that.

Even more fun times were to be had inside after everyone was in dry clothes; bibliophile *E let Alton and *P cozy up to him on the couch while he read aloud.


And don't forget puzzle time!

Seth treated us to a delicious bakery banana cake for dessert and we all went home full, happy, and ready to welcome summer! Expect many more sunlit posts, especially as our landscaping and play equipment projects unfold.

Do the Shuffle! (by Andy)

Really, though. Could he get any cuter? This is AJ on his way back to the car after a long fun trip to a local park. His little arm-swingin' shuffle run is way too cute!

Excuses, Excuses

Wow, what have we been doing for the past week? I will admit that I'm not always on the ball about posting to the blog, but it's a big difference to go from last month's record number of posts to letting the past week go by with nada. One of the things that we've been doing lately is working hard to slim down! Andy and I finally decided to put our money where our mouths were (we put money there now instead of food--it's quite low in calories) and go on a diet in hopes of losing weight and creating tone for the upcoming summer months. We have a nice beach vacation planned for July, and I am personally hoping for some positive results to ready me for those days on the sand in a swimsuit. But as you might know from personal experience...it's hard to eat right! It involves all that planning and counting and cooking and trying to muster up some enthusiasm for an afternoon snack of carrot sticks when a bowl of ice cream would do nicely. The easiest part, actually, is that we are doing this together. I have a friend in California (Hi, Jen!) who started a blog experiment to chronicle her journey of losing 40 pounds by her 40th birthday, and she has (besides her husband and toddler daughter) a pre-teen son in the house who plays sports--I can't imagine how many calories he has to eat while she sits next to him at the dinner table. If I had to carefully portion out my ounces of whole-wheat pasta with tomato sauce while Alton energetically wolfed down lasagna with extra cheese, using a steak as his fork and flour tortillas as his napkins, I think that I would start to lose my willpower! But with Andy counting out forkfuls of ground turkey meat onto the food scale alongside me, we are managing to look on the bright side of our new eating habits (the getting skinnier part) instead of salivating over Alton's leftover Easter candy (I will be so glad when those chocolate bunnies are gone).
Like my blogger friend Jen, Andy and I are doing Weight Watchers, which is actually a sensible eating plan despite my whining above, and like Jen we are incorporating exercise into our routine to help us feel energetic and fit. Instead of guiltily averting my eyes from the exercise equipment at the gym while I usher Alton into the family pool, I have been lacing up my sneakers and hitting the machines or one of the many classes our athletic club offers. After hearing good things about a salsa-dance-based exercise class called Zumba, I decided to show up on a Monday afternoon and boogie myself sweaty. Well, it kicked my ass. After 45 minutes of stepping, swiveling, kicking, jumping, shimmying, and sashaying, I had to starting modifying the routines that our instructor was demonstrating because I feared that I would misstep and sprain an ankle! My limbs Jello-fied, I headed home and stumbled around the kitchen like a klutz trying to make dinner while Alton begged Andy to read book after book. I was all thumbs and after I cut my finger trying to slice a tomato, Andy took over the cutting board and gently suggested that I go sit down while he finished things up.
I passed out exhausted in bed that night, but was surprised that I wasn't too sore when I woke up the next morning. Two days after my Zumba class, I worked out again, then again two days after that, and slowly but surely I can feel the exercise getting easier! I went to Zumba again a week after my original class and was surprised that afterward I was tired and sweaty, but not the gooey mess I was the last time. Hooray for muscles!
I was also trying to keep up the workout regimen in anticipation of Mother's Day. I knew that Andy had some meals out up his sleeve, and I was surprised on Saturday night when we went out to one of my favorite restaurants in the area, an Italian place called Mingo West. We wined and dined (the restaurant has one open-air side that overlooks a station for our Max light rail train--Alton was in heaven throughout the meal) and amazingly, after two weeks of clean livin' Andy and I were unable to finish our desserts. What?! We were weighed down with delicious but rich food and it was a good thing that we didn't have a big Mother's Day breakfast planned, because water and coffee was about all we could manage in our poor overloaded systems (we were still able to go out again to dinner again that night, however). But we loved our celebratory weekend and I felt very pampered and showered with lovely gifts from my two great guys.
(Alton and me at dinner on Mother's Day--picture with Andy's camera phone.)

We also got a little bit of outdoor work done that weekend, in preparation for our major yard overhaul! Expect more to come about this in the future. Until then, I am your lazy blogger and vow to take more pictures (or at least ask Andy to do it) and share them with you. Off to go enjoy gorgeous sunny weather!

Sleepful, Then Seattle

Last weekend we paid a visit to the Evergreen State (Washington) by spending a day and night with our good friends Brian and Alexa. It's about a three-hour drive from our house to their house, and so we always debate about when to leave. Early afternoon Friday and risk rush-hour traffic out of Tacoma? Late Friday and have to rouse Alton from his warm cozy car seat upon our arrival in Seattle? Or Saturday morning, cutting our visit a little shorter? This time we opted for Saturday morning, because Alton's habitual weekday preference of awakening at 6:45, 6:30, 6:15a.m. had us assuming that we'd be on the road with travelmug in hand by seven o'clock at the latest. Nuh-uh. Of course, last Saturday morning became the one morning out of the week when Alton decided to sleep in, 'til past eight! Where were these luxurious mornings when I stayed up way too late reading (or blogging)? Of course I wasn't taking advantage of Alton's lie-in, I was up early brewing the coffee, looking at my watch and wondering why he wasn't up yet!
At any rate, we got on the road and left the little guy in his comfy monkey pajamas for the trip. Andy sat in the backseat with him for reading purposes, and you can see in the picture below Alton's customary car seat pose: ankles crossed, water bottle clenched between the knees, book open in hands.

We arrived in Seattle just shy of noon, needing to burn off some energy for Mr Sleepyhead before lunch and nap! We scurried around the corner from Brian and Alexa's house to a local elementary school for some playground time. It was dry but crisply cool outside, but we kept our blood flowing with fun and chatting on the playsets.
Alton and Brian, both happily crossing the bridge.

Brian took Alton in hand for much of the time at the playground, demonstrating for us why, when we go to stay at their house, the first words out of Alton's mouth in the morning are "Bee? Bee?" Fun on the slide, below.

Alton loves steering wheels on jungle gyms.

Brian showed him Oregon on the U.S. map painted on the blacktop.

Climbing a treacherous cliffside...

crossing the vast prairie...

conquering volatile mountaintops.

Andy took about 25 pictures of Alton with this stick. And yes, he stuck it in his mouth. Mmm, dirt.

Our little garden gnome with his pointy hood.

Heading back for food and sleeeep. (Note that gnome hood is beginning to droop.)

Post-nap, much of the day was spent reading...

(reading...)

but B & A had a few tricks up their sleeves. They babysat for some other children one day since our last visit, and had purchased a few toys for entertaining their charges (although I'm told the charges preferred a video). Alton was wide-eyed over the Etch-a-sketch.

He also enjoyed a little coloring time, although

his favorite thing to do with crayons is to take them out of the box, then put 'em back in. Out of the box, then put....

Next morning saw more reading, of course. Here is your typical manly morning: Bob the Builder, monster trucks at stage left, and a Diet Coke for breakfast. Yummy.

Artful monster trucks against a wet windowpane.

We squeezed in a quick outdoor trip, to a different park this time. We actually turned the lens around on Andy for once.

Hangin' out with Mommy.

The trip ended too soon! But I am glad to get to see Alexa later this month for her birthday. Until then, we'll gaze pensively out of the window with our long-lashed eyes and adorable chubby cheeks. Or maybe that will just be Alton.