One year ago we went to the Azores!

Exactly one year ago (Feb 12 -20, 2019), we were on vacation in the Portuguese Azores.  It was a last hurrah of my maternity leave with Dd and a choice informed by the surprising fact that traveling with a 5 month old is easier than with a toddler.  It's interesting to write this after so many months have passed. I realize that many of the details I'm sharing are a little negative however the trip really was fun and we are glad we did it when we did.  The stressful moments are seared into my mind, while the good, but less emotional moments are not quite so vivid.  Such is life.  It's a good thing we have photos.

Firstly, we decided to take a trip in February, during D's preschool break and the end of my leave.  Next, we decided on the Azores based on the intersection of travel time and comfort level (by which I mean getting around and not experiencing culture shock).  Many people would have opted for a sunny destination, but to us bringing a not-yet-swimming kid and a baby to the land of sunscreen, sand and bug spray just didn't sound that fun.  We first heard about the Azores as a great destination when we lived in Boston, from where it is a very easy 4-5 hour flight.

This was only our second international trip with kids.  When D was five months old we went to Montreal and it was a great, easy trip (to a city where I lived for several years) that inspired the idea of traveling when Dd was also five months old.  Both of our kids have been miserable car passengers as infants, perhaps picking up on Jack and my preference for other modes of transportation.  However, our research correctly informed us that the Azores would have been really tricky without a car, so we did rent one.  Almost all of the drives we took involved continuous hair-raising crying by Dd, interspersed with occasional naps, where we became militant about D being perfectly silent, which is contrary to his nature.  I'm sure Dd cried a little bit on one of the four flights but I don't remember it and it was nothing compared to the car rides. 

We took a red eye flight from Boston and stayed the first three nights on the west side of the island,  in Sete Cidades and then spent four nights in Nordeste.  AirBnB is the only way to go, with washing machines, kitchens and borrowed cribs.

We like walking trips and indeed the hikes and scenery were fantastic and D (at age 4.75) did an amazing job hiking two to four miles on very steep terrain.  We saw so many new types of landscapes.  I'm quite happy that Jack blogged our hikes with picture from his phone during the the trip since this post has taken me so long to publish.  The hikes were well marked and we were able to research some of them in advance.

• hike 1 Serra Devassa, windswept, scrubby hills with amazing views
• hike 2 Atalho dos Vermelhos, cliffs above the ocean
• hike 3 Cha Gorreana, the only tea plantation in Europe
• hike 4 Lagoa Furnas, Pico do Ferro, high walk above lake with a jungle vibe, abandoned manor
• hike 5 Lomba da Fazenda, down and up a canyon to the ocean
• hike 6 Lomba D'El Rei, another canyon

Sete Cidades, where we stayed and canoed

hike 1

these carved out, green channels were neat

hike 2

hike 3

hike 4

We hiked up from the lake, and back down again.

hike 5   This is a slightly protected swimming area that the waves wash in and out of.

wow

hike 6

D taking a break

There was light hail on our first hike, and other rainy and windy days but it wasn't too cold and I don't remember being too concerned about the weather during our walks.  On multiple nights the wind howled like nothing I have ever heard, reminding me that we were on small islands in the middle of the vast Atlantic Ocean.  It cut the internet connection at our second AirBnB for the whole stay.  We saw many rainbows.  There were wonderfully fragrant white flowering trees that we encountered often and hydrangeas growing, apparently wild, along the side of the roads.

surprise!

the tail end of the hydrangeas

our tiny car

The hardest part of the trip was the jet lag.  D had the worst of it.  The two night stopover in Boston at the beginning of the trip probably was a good thing, but the one night stop over on the way home was not at all helpful.  I thought it would ease the jet lag with a more gradual transition but it just extended the misery of sleep deprivation.  We would have been better off powering through to get home, though that would have been hard because of the risk of booking separate tickets without enough of a time buffer for delays.  In fact our flight from Ponta Delgada to Boston was delayed by something like 5 or 6 hours and we arrived at our hotel in Boston at about 10 pm, spent the night all together in one luxurious room crying and screaming and then finally made it home late the next night.  

At the beginning of the trip we were going to bed at about 1 or 2 am and slowly working it earlier each night.  There was one magical night in the second AirBnB where Dd slept 10 hours straight in the same bedroom as D.  Then the was the less-than-magical moment on the red line train and at the Davis Square stop (our old home station) where both kids were crying and screaming so badly that people were checking that they were not being abused.  Just kidding, it was much longer than a moment.  

This was also inexpensive for a short European trip.  We visited friends in Boston on the way there and actually bought completely separate round trip tickets for SEA to BOS and BOS to PDL (Ponta Delgada).  The major expenses were:

• $1,515 for the Azores Airlines flights
• $769 for the Jetblue flights
• $768 for 7 nights total at two different AirBnBs in the Azores
• $227 for a downtown Boston hotel (a mistake, it turned out)
• $285 for a rental car on São Miguel Island

Total $3564   or $445 per day for 8 days 

One surprising thing was just how limited the grocery options and hours were outside of the primary city.  After we arrived at our second AirBnB (with no internet) Jack drove out to get groceries at 6 pm and the only thing he could find was ham and cheese sandwiches from a closing down cafe.   Ham and cheese appear to be a staple and it was a reminder to not take our access to wonderful produce at home for granted.  The one interesting meal we had was cooked slowly in these thermal pools near Furnas.

These stairs were really cool.  The houses were stone or cement with thick walls and no built in heat or AC.  We did appreciate the space heaters but most of the year I think it's quite comfortable.

our bedroom in the first AirBnB in Sete Cidades

second AirBnB in Nordeste

We did not go in the thermal pools or on a horseback ride and we didn't visit museums or do tours.  I think we ate two dinners in restaurants and the rest of the time cooked in our AirBnBs and picnicked for lunch.  We did check out a light house, a garden and some thermal vents you can walk around. Our first AirBnB was in Sete Cidades and we had a great time paddling a canoe around for an hour or two.  Dd fell asleep easily in my lap.   

D was really impressed by the old buildings (a few hundred years) we saw in both Boston and Nordeste.  He also enjoyed visiting the USS Constitution in Boston.  It was fun to see, over the course of just a few days, the difference in snow plowing between Seattle's snowmaggedon (which we escaped the second half of by going on this trip) and a regular small Boston snowstorm.   Our friends' house was on a small side street in Brookline and *three* plows came down the street in formation.

nostalgia at our home commuter train platform in West Medford

Copley Square

Wendy!

We packed pretty well, I think.

USS Constitution

happy valentine's day, Cari

2019 in review

Despite keeping notes for this post all year, it's January 11th 23rd 25th and I still haven't published this yet, so it's time to cut corners, skip pictures and accept all of the other posts I meant to write, but did not and therefore cannot link here.  2019, another year of the pig, was a good and busy year for us. 

Here are the kids at the beginning and end of the year.

Travel

We took one big international trip and went to Boston, but otherwise stayed in western WA this year.

• Feb: Azores, Portugul and Boston        
• I'm so happy Jack blogged about our hikes from his phone during the trip, because we have yet to write anything else about the trip: hike 1, hike 2, hike 3, hike 4, hike 5, hike 6
• Mar:  Boston again (just me and Dd) <link>
• May: Fort Worden cabin over Memorial Day with two other families
• July: Deception Pass camping, Dd's first camping trip at nine months
• Aug: camping for four nights at Newhalem in the North Cascades, our longest camping trip in quite a while.   Our friends joined us for one night and my sister for two. <link>
• Bainbridge (just me and Dd) with my sister <link>
• Poulsbo for two nights in a nice airbnb, while my parents were also there with friends
• Sep: Mt Rainier, Paradise Lodge (just me and J)
• Nov: Cama Beach cabin with Jack's mom and stepdad
• Dec: Cle Elum (just me and D) with my parents for some snowshoeing and sledding

Books, Music and Entertainment

• best solo read by J: Borne by Jeff VanderMeer
• best solo read by C: Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
• best book we read together: Spinning Silver by Naomi Novik
• best book we read to D: Owls in the Family by Farley Mowat (according to the grown ups)
• In January we were listening to Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on repeat with D and he knew almost all of the lyrics.  It was fun but now he's over it.  
• Dd and I took music together classes in the summer and fall.   In the first class he was happy in the social setting but overwhelmed as soon as we started singing, which was surprising.  By the third class he loved it and particularly enjoyed banging sticks.  The xylophone was one of his favorite toys earlier in the year.

• D started piano in a relatively low investment way, with a before school, group class on keyboards.  He has learned some and we will see if he is motivated to take more lessons.
• Beyond a Garfield High school jazz band concert, I don't think we made it to any concerts.
• I thoroughly enjoyed watching Blood, Water, Paint put on by www.machatheatreworks.com, where Jack's brother is a production manager.   D and J also like their production of The Flight Before Christmas.
• Along with my mom and sister, we formed our own small book club and read four books to discuss in 2019.   We read Becoming, Where the Crawdads Sing, Kafka on the Shore and 99 Nights in Logar, the last of which we haven't discussed yet.
• In June I joined a fledgling book club, which has been really fun.  We read Becoming, as almost all readers I know did, Let's Pretend This Never Happened, [part of] Freedom Climbers, The Library Book,  A Gentleman in Moscow, [sort of] Wild Swans.
• I paid for a New York Times digital subscription, for the first time.  I feel so honest and grown up.
• D moved up to legos and for several months we had a "lego jail" set up for him in the living room.  In the fall we got the duplos out again and both kids are pretty happy playing with them.
• The best thing I saw on social media was the Cloud Appreciation Society facebook group, which is just amazing pictures of the sky from all around the world.
• D's progress on reading was one of the most rewarding things about the year.  We've been through all of the BOB books and some other random early readers.  A few times we witnessed the magic of D reading an easy picture book to Dd.
• I discovered this great local musician called Brandi Carlile.  Maybe you've heard of her?
• D has an ever growing playlist and we're all happy on car trips when he sometimes listens to the old iPod he got from my dad.  It means Dd can sleep and J and I can converse with each other.
• We got to go to the exciting Sounders MLS cup championship game.

• For the second year, we enjoyed the Seattle Summer Teen Musical, which was a Willy Wonka story.

School, Work, camps, daycare

2019 saw lots of family and friends hunting for jobs, but not us.  I spent most of 2018 and at least the first half of 2019 obsessing about childcare planning and options.  From March through September, Dd attended a center on Capitol Hill on Tuesdays and Thursdays.   As soon as he was old enough, at 12 months, he moved to four days a week at the neighborhood daycare D attended for several years.  Finally, we arrived at a stable and much simpler plan.  Meanwhile D started kindergarten in September.  These two major simplifications have put us back in the position of not needing to drive on a regular basis.  We do drive to D's school sometimes, but the school bus, city bus, biking and walking are all viable options as well.

first day of school

• I came back to work at the very end of February and managed to arrange to work 80% time through Dd's first birthday, in the beginning of October.
• A few weeks after I returned to work, we pulled the plug on D's three-mornings-per-week attendance at a French immersion preschool in Hillman City.  The drive and 9 am drop off broke me.   
• In the spring, Jack worked on Saturdays and watched Dd on Fridays for a few months.
• We had our first non-family (non-daycare center) babysitter who helped us out a few times a week in June.
• D was five during the summer and had many more summer camp options available to him.  He did a Will Smith music camp, a reading camp at the UW (a study where he must have been in the control group and didn't actually learn much of anything), a bike camp, science center camp and kindergarten jump start.
• We are thrilled that his school offers before and after school activities organized by the PTA.  He did piano and a cooking class in the fall.   So far, his after school care has a been a mix of these classes, grandparent help and one day a week of entertaining himself at home while I work for an hour or so at the end of the day.  
• I was happily shunted to full-time remote status at work, along with many of my co-workers, which was really not much of a change since I rarely made it to the office.  Also I switched projects   <link>
• Jack's best college friend came to work at his small firm, in a slightly surprising alignment of circumstances.

House, Car and Stuff

• We bought, and assembled huge new desks.  It's the first time we've had our own desks at home since we lived in Pittsburgh.
• Our leaky windows were fixed (thankfully under warranty) for either the third or fourth time.  It was the second time we had scaffolding set up on the west side of the house.  It was a multi-month production.  

scaffolding, behind us

• We turned a corner on the amount of baby stuff we have around the house and in the basement.  It was satisfying to ditch bulky things like the jumperoo, baby bath tub and second stroller.  Also Dd has grown so much that the differential in the kids' clothing sizes is much smaller, meaning we have way fewer in-between sized clothing stored.
• We hauled our loaner hot tub up on to the roof and got it hooked up this fall.
• Our darling cats flunked out of any kind of litter box convenience and refused to use wood pellet litter too, so we are back to the smelly drudgery of scooping the litter box.  Luna was actually good with alternatives but Toru just happily crapped on the floor when he didn't get his way.
• Within a block of our house, eleven new houses/units are being constructed, in place of three old single family homes.  We're grateful to have our little off street parking spot as the density will soon ratchet up.  I'm a bit tired of all the noise, since it's been going on for almost 18 months now, across the street.
• On the third floor we put up seven electric blinds (on just the west side) and another seven corded blinds in our bedroom.  It's a big upgrade for our bedroom from the various paper window coverings we've had up for the past several years.  

new blinds behind the borscht brothers

• We stepped our retirement savings up again, after slacking a bit during house construction and the aftermath.
• Somehow we managed to keep Dd sleeping in our bedroom until he was seven months old.  Then we moved him down to the first floor in the beginning of May.
• After months of preparing D's expectations we then had the kids switch bedrooms in December.   Our thinking was that it's good for them to not get too settled and inflexible and switching rooms has the added benefit of encouraging a deep clean and a reevaluation of all the detritus they, mostly D, have acquired.  Since we do not plan to move for many years, this kind of swapping is extra important.
• Lastly, I found the letter "H" from a nice alphabet puzzle that was complete at the time I packed it up in our apartment.  It only took three and a half years to get to the box that it had fallen into.
• We bought a snazzy new bike rack for our car and Jack got a new bike to replace the one that was stolen in 2018.  For D we also bought a "ride-along" thing that connects to a grown up's bike opening the door to more types of family bike rides.
• Our meyer lemon tree succumbed to pests :(
• Jack built an awesome permanent baby gate <link>

Recreation and Community

• Dd's first bike ride in our bike trailer was just before he turned six months old and we rode out to a park on Mercer Island.  In August our "Epic Family Bike Ride" took us twenty something miles, including some non-trail riding.

• While we didn't finish all of the trails on Cougar Mountain as we aspired to, we did hike there nine times.  <link>
• Jack got a new, much nicer, pitching machine which he enjoyed using in our boxy yard.
• Jack coached D's second season of T-ball and his throwing, catching and hitting are vastly improved.   His grandparents played a lot with him in our yard.  He's perfectly able to hit a slow-pitched ball. <link>
• In the fall D played soccer for the first time and had two practices a week and games on Saturdays.   Thankfully his grandma likes soccer and helped us out by taking him to practice once a week.
• Jack did the tunnel/viaduct 5k run with my sister and cousins, in February.  The rest of us walked through the tunnel a bit when it was opened.
• We snowshoed a few times as a family.
• Labor day weekend we celebrated Jack's 35th birthday with a kid-free game night <link>
• We ripped up most of the grass in our parking strip and planted a meadow mix, that did pretty well.  We really don't want to deal with cutting grass and flowers are nicer anyway.  Our japanese snowbell trees are still with us (and actually smelled good for the first time this year <link>) and our little Christmas tree that usually lives on the roof served us for a third Christmas.

• On the roof some of my favorite plants were the kale and lettuce and a jasmine plant that did pretty well.   We put in a north country blueberry bush but failed to plant more than one so only got about six blueberries.  The raspberries also failed to produce.  We've got a lot to learn about gardening still.  
• D and I volunteered planting trees at an Earthcorps site on the Duwamish river that my sister helps run.
• Of course 2019 was also an exceptional snow year.  I was the 3rd coldest February on record and Seatac airport got a total of 20 inches of Snow.  On the night of February 9th, Seattle got about 8 inches of snow.  We were happy to trudge to the bus stop in the snow to escape to the rain and wind of the Azores and to witness cleanup of a similar amount of snow in Boston.
• Jack hit two home runs!

Food and Health

• Our salad innovation was fresh mint in spinach salad with crunchy, spiced (packaged) chic peas and often cucumbers.
• I read a great New York Times article that convinced me to start steaming eggs in stead of hard boiling them.
• I sampled Oregon Grape berries from our little yard for the first time.  They are not poisonous but they are also not good.
• At the beginning of the year I was continuing the post-partum physical therapy I probably should have done after D was born.   Then I went back to work and I didn't prioritize it any more.  I did learn a lot from it that I am now applying to the MuTu system post-partum exercise program I started in early December, which I am optimistic about.
• Dd came down with a mild case of hand, foot and mouth disease over winter break. <link>

Friends and Family

Our parents had more health issues than usual in 2019.  My dad had a small surgery in January that was a follow up to his previous cancer surgery.  In June my mom passed out and broke her collar bone badly.  She then had surgery and a few months later bent the metal plate that had been put in.  Just before Christmas, Jack's step dad had an urgent surgery that had some complications and led to him being hospitalized much longer than expected.

Our visitors were:

• my aunt and uncle from Houston
• Jess and Adam visited from Ann Arbor/Chicago
• Meredith and Nathaniel from D.C.
• my cousin Jacob, after his college graduation

Other pivotal happenings were:

• My brother-in-law got an attending position in Seattle, which will keep them here for at least several more years, if not longer.   The job search process was harrowing and stressful, even to witness.  Just before the end of the year my sister also found a job that is off to a good start.
• Our good friends Read and Anne moved back to Seattle, from Portland.
• My uncle passed away after battling brain cancer
• A family we were becoming good friends with moved up to Alaska.  In doing so, the one existing friend D had who would have been at his elementary school, skipped town.
• My other brother-in-law, Jack's brother, moved out to his own place.
• Our good friends, who we normally see frequently, lived in China for several months, followed by some amazing travels in other parts of Asia.

parents know best?

Currently D resists direct guidance on many things.  Time will tell whether this is a phase or not, but he has his own opinions, even if often that opinion is something like "I'll watch any movie other than the one you both think I would really like" or "I don't like chapter books."

At the beginning of winter break I finally cajoled him in to letting me read aloud five minutes of this book, promising that I'd stop if he didn't like it.   Unsurprisingly he was hooked, but so were Jack and I.  Last night we finished about an hour after D's bed time.  Like so many books, it was a fairly random find.  My sister picked up the second book from this series in a little free library and gave it to us, which prompted me to buy the first book, Space Case, as a Christmas present.  Its vocabulary is way too advanced and it's a murder mystery, but hey, that's how you learn new vocabulary ... and um... other stuff, right?  The end was so suspenseful, that D insisted we both be present and stopped often to discuss and predict things.  Jack and I both love reading, read a lot as kids and are just ecstatic to have D excited about a book that is good enough that I found myself thinking about the plot even outside of bedtime.

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17571237-space-case

Dd meanwhile is quite excited about books and often asks for them, but quickly loses interest in most books that don't have a tactile element to them.  We love our little bibliophiles.

a little hand, foot and mouth

December 21st we were informed that Dd was exposed to hand, foot and mouth disease at daycare and on the 24th we realized that he had come down with it.  It is quite contagious. 

He had a very slight fever on Christmas eve, a terrible night on the 25th to 26th and a few days with trouble napping, but otherwise was normal.  His appetite was almost unaffected and as far as I can tell he didn't have sores in his mouth, on his hands or on his feet, but rather on his cheeks, his wrists, his elbows and his knees.  I was already taking a lot of time of work for D's school break so the main impact  was going a bit stir crazy as we avoided places with other kids and not getting to have time adventure with just D, without worrying about Dd's naps.

Best of all, D managed to not come down with it, although he has never had it.  Getting the two of them to not be in close contact while they play was impossible, although we tried.

Between this and other family illnesses, a few holiday gatherings were rescheduled in to January so this is the year where Christmas lasts a whole month!

Dd's 15 month vocabulary

We are having so much talking with Dd.  He produces new words almost every day.  Even with the best of intentions, families operate as comparison machines, so feel free to compare to what D was saying at this age: https://aglie.blogspot.com/2015/08/ds-15-month-vocabulary-update.html   There is quite a bit of overlap, as is not surprising, given that we have a similar day to day routine, including many of the same books.   Five months ago Dd was just getting started at talking: https://aglie.blogspot.com/2019/07/talking-in-3-2-1.html.

It's really rewarding to see signing pay off again and I love how excited he seems to communicate.  He never fails to speak or sign about the birds flying past our windows or the airplanes or sirens we can hear in the distance.

Our definition of a word is the same as it was for D.  These are words that have been observed by attentive observers, with a lot of context, but we are confident of his intent.  All of the words on this list have been observed multiple times.  Right now all of these words are one syllable (and even then not always complete) versions of the words.

spinoff

I've been at the same company for a decade now (!!!) minus seven months for our Grand Adventure in 2011-2012.  From 2014 through the summer of 2019 I worked almost exclusively on speech recognition for use in cars.

Nuance is famously acquisitive (Nuance_acquisitions_after_merger), buying up almost every speech competitor smaller than the big names like Apple/Microsoft/Google.   However this last year things went the other direction and they spun off our automotive work in to a new publicly traded company called Cerence.  While I was on leave I checked in with a coworker and learned of the impending split, but the catch was that we spent three or four months not knowing which people would go with the automotive work to the new company.  In the end, my project went but I stayed, so now I'm doing similar work on other speech domains.  From the time I came back to work in March until the middle of the summer, most of my times was spent training new Cerence people.  It was a massive undertaking to divvy up knowledge, tools, people and responsibilities.

Here's a slightly futuristic video promoting the new company.   Spoiler: it concludes with a flying car.

Last year we got a new CEO after 13 years of the same leadership, so in addition to the spinoff, a lot of other things have changed at work. We have better benefits, and new perks like charity matching and volunteer time.  The leadership is working hard to change the company culture as well and most of it has actually impressed me, though it would be easy to write it off as corporate mumbo jumbo.  

Oh, and since August I've been full time remote, which means I go in to the office one or two times a month when there's a good reason to go in, and I no longer have my own cubicle.  Fine by me!

cougar mountain hiking and google map fun

We set a family goal to hike all of the trails of Cougar Mountain in 2019.  After another good hike yesterday (about 5 miles since we wanted to go down a couple missed spur trails for efficiency's sake), here are our completed trails:

Ok, we have quite a lot still to do in the last two months of the year, but it will be fun to see how far we get.  We got D motivated to finish yesterday with promises of a night hike with flashlights to come... pretty easy since with daylight savings time over, darkness will be coming early.

In addition to plotting out a big map of the park we can mark up at home, I am having fun curating a google map of the hikes, complete with the color auto-gradient above, based on date.  This also lets me do fun things like export the lines into google earth to get the 3D view.

Custom google maps have become my go-to trip planning tool, as well.  For our Azores trip, I found hike GPS files and pulled them into a map of Sao Miguel, giving us lots of options depending on what we felt we could handle, and the weather, on any given day.

Conversely, our trip to Scotland was planned down to exactly the bus stop and routes we would use in a google map (Cari had a spreadsheet, too, but I say ppppppbbbbfff to spreadsheets).  Adults only, and we were prepared for weather :)

Even for the Azores, it was pretty easy to find path files on the internet to load into the map.  For Scotland (and Washtington state- WTA maintains a database), it is very easy and fun (for me, clearly).