Champ & Nanos

Thursday, November 6, 2014

Happy Birthday 4 year-old Sam!

We celebrated Sam's birthday a week early with a little party at our house. Sam was allowed to invite just a few of his friends from school and our neighborhood. It turned out to be just a relaxed and pleasant for the adults as it was fun and silly for the kids. We played, did a craft, had a snack and cake, and did a book trade. It was a fun, sunny afternoon!

The next morning, we (actually I mean, Kyle) constructed Sam's new pedal bike. He was able to hop on this and ride it without ever using training wheels (thanks to a year using the Styrder balance bike)

At Sam's Montessori classroom, they have a special ceremony for birthdays. The birthday person stands in the middle of the class and holds the earth. For each year of life, we showed a picture of Sam and told a brief story about what he was like at that age. After telling the story, he walked around "the sun" (a lit candle) while holding the globe as the class sang "The Earth goes round the sun, -sha-la-, the earth goes round the sun sha-la-, Sam turns 1." The picture, story, and song is repeated for each year of life.

It was a very sweet ceremony and I was impressed how all the children were very attentive. I think the candles and the ceremonial nature makes it a really special moment for everyone.

Sam with friend Jack

Saturday, November 1, 2014

Halloween '14

I didn't get a lot of Halloween pictures this year (have I ever?), but here are a token few. Sam was a train engineer. As we recently learned from The Locomotive, a totally amazing and beautiful book, the engineer drives the train and the conductor collects tickets and manages the crew. Maybe that was obvious, but it was news to me. Anyway, I was happy with the practicality of the outfit (perhaps all costumes should be career-themed?) Sam already uses his engineer hat when building with Brio trains, but the overalls were new and novel to him. Kyle took Sam out along with our next-door neighbors.

I had what seemed like a great last-minute idea for Elsa: Parisian Artist, but the major set back was having too many props for a 16-month old. She was not stoked about wearing a hat in the house, or a necklace around her neck, nor holding both a paint palate and a paint brush.

Don't worry, though, I will definitely try this one again. Because, seriously, how great would it be to have a little Mary Cassatt for Halloween?

If you happened to notice the jar of bouillon and the bottle of agave on the step next to Elsa, you should know that these are objects that are part of her daily routine. She enjoys opening the spice drawers in the kitchen. There are two, packed with a variety of food products and these are among her favorite. She likes to walk them over to the step and collect them there. Occasionally, she pretends to take a big swig of the agave, and who can blame her?

Anyway, the Parisian Artist costume quickly dissolved and instead, Sam picked up the palate and brush and decided to "paint" things. In this picture, he is "painting Elsa's shirt black."

In hindsight, she did ditch the palate for the camera.

So, maybe she's just more Leibovitz than Cassatt.

We walked around the neighboring houses pre-Trick-or-treating to see the decorations. It was really tricky trying to explain to a 4 year old why this particular one was supposed to be amusing. Discussing the disposal of dead bodies, cemeteries, grave stones, and how, "no bodies don't come back up out of the ground, that's why this is so funny" was surprisingly something I had not anticipated.

Though as Kyle mentioned, that's a little bit why we have Halloween in the first place, right, to honor and discuss the dead. Hmm, maybe we'll have to take a walk over to the cemetary soon...