Grand Adventure: family, house building and travel, Pacific Northwest style
Actually we are beyond ready.
D was quite curious and engaged with many of our voting decisions and the whole political process, listening in on the politics podcast Jack frequently listens to.
It’s interesting to watch much of the rest of the country start working from home and voting by mail/drop box. Just as I am totally accustomed to working from home already it’s hard to remember when we had to vote in person.
No, not the world series .... books!
The Seattle Public Library finally opened up a few weeks ago for curbside pickup. I've been going once a week to pick up holds and D's rate of reading and the fact that there's no browsing has been keeping me on my toes. My mom has also brought us lots of new books for the last few months since the King County Libraries opened earlier.
For better or worse, children's chapter books seem to be all in series so I've had to get organized about tracking which books he's already read. To celebrate D's reading and to keep track of future books for Dd, here are the series we've been reading. He reads a lot of these in about an hour, so finding age appropriate stories that can keep him busy for longer periods of time is getting tougher.
Series We Have Read Several of:
Series We Have Just Started:
Books We Want to Read:
This is the first month in our parenting career where one of our kids is enrolled in full time childcare.
I’ve been through quite an evolution in my thoughts on daycare. Initially it made me a little sad to send D, and I do still think there are some dismal childcare situations out there. Now, however, I feel bad for the kids (over age one) who are missing out on the consistent, group experience. In the time before preschool age there is so much to be gained!
That said, the social benefits of childcare definitely don’t depend on full time attendance, so that part is about families making it work, like us, right now.
We have been so lucky for so many years to have regular help from our parents. Having grandparents help 1-2 days a week balanced routine social time with other kids with one-on-one attention and flexibility. Together our parents and the kids (hardly ever both kids, due to timing) read lots of books, went on adventures, napped according to our kid’s needs and gave us the chance to go to mid day music classes or the library. They also did loads of dishes and laundry :)
It’s sad that this is over, at least for a while longer. Dd knows his grandparents well, but I hope they gets the bond that D has, from regular time together without the interference of me and Jack (well, mostly).
However, in a time where childcare centers, which already struggled (being simultaneously expensive for many families and not being able to pay workers well enough), are closing left and right because of COVID-19 challenges, we feel so extremely fortunate to be part of a center that is well-run, convenient, cheerful and reliable. It is not only shielding us from some unknown upheaval of our careers and finances, but it is providing Dd with developmentally key normalcy in this bizarre reality.
Speaking of reality, this full time thing is still theoretical. The last week of August was the center's annual closure week for cleaning, organizing and planning. Since Labor Day the kids have been kept inside because of the air quality and perhaps this lack of outside time is the cause of the longest nap mutiny I’ve heard of in any of the classrooms. Dd has skipped napping altogether a few days and had several days with 30 minute naps instead of his typical 1.5 hour school nap. Then Monday's air quality was so bad that we kept him home because the center didn’t yet have air filters. Today he is home, and currently in the bath, with a runny nose that would not prevented him from attending school during normal times.
But hey, I already took some time off this week in anticipation of another little vacation that is delayed (or cancelled?) because..... it's 2020.
Since we no longer go inside the center for drop off or pick up they've been good about sending us pictures more often. Here are a few recent ones.
Lastly, D, who was originally signed up for seven weeks of camp this summer, got to go to five weeks of summer camp. Two were at the science center and the rest were at or near the arboretum. There were a few covid scares that turned out to be nothing, but we were so extremely grateful he got to go out and do things away from us before diving back into another at-home school year.
I get a good laugh when I remember worrying in February about the one week of summer we hadn't yet filled with a camp for D.
I’m grateful we have our house, our air filters from previous wildfire smoke years and our elliptical so we can be active. Even with the filters we have experienced some headaches and sore throats, which is nothing relative to the lot of many others in the PNW.
We gave Jack some nice boots (Bogs!) and a French press, completing his evolution into a level four coffee drinker, capable of making coffee in every way I’m aware of: cold brew, pour over, drip and press.
His birthday fell exactly on Labor Day so we spent the morning at Grayland Beach State Park, where we spent two nights in a yurt, and gave him a half hour alone in a hammock with a good book!
We had a backyard dinner with Jack’s family and came home to the first forest fire smoke of the season.
D went to His first day of school today without going... to school. 2020 is something else. He is in a 1st/2nd split class and his morale was good for the 2 hour social MS teams meeting and his independent reading afterwards. I’m still impressed by his reading progress during the last 6 months - he is reading Calvin and Hobbes!
In the month of August, in the infamous year 2020, we washed allllll the windows in our house.
We have 75 window panes in our house. Jack reminds me that technically the window is the manufactured unit, which in our house as 1-3 different panes of glass, but when you're washing that distinction doesn't feel important. So, we have 75 windows. Don't forget to double that to get 150 surfaces, inside and out!
This is the first time we've made an effort to actually do all of them, although we've been in the house for four years now. At first, life was too crazy, then the windows leaked and over the course of the four stints of repair work, the window guys cleaned them at the end of their work. The saga of the leaky windows is one I haven't had the heart to detail here yet. Other excuses for not washing them, include being pregnant and having 18 months of construction followed by 3-4 months of road paving and repaving happening across the street or mere inches from our house, which resulted in a discouraging amount of dust, and caused us to delay cleaning the outside of the windows.
Lastly there is the question of how to go about washing windows in our tall house. We designed the house with a lot of operable windows, to allow for washing, and for many windows it works well, but there are still a lot of awkward angles and obstacles. We've acquired quite a bit of equipment now, including two 16' poles, a reverse squeegee that we had to piece together ourselves and even a window washing bucket, which was well worth the money compared to using a glass baking dish.
The "reverse squeegee" or "push squeegee" is a product I am surprised doesn't exist. Jack used it to squeegee the third floor windows while standing on the roof. It worked reasonably well.
Someday I am going to actually get an estimate for paying someone to clean these windows, so we can feel really, really good about the effort it takes. Also, as I knew when we designed the house, even if you pay to have them cleaned, there is no guarantee a bird won't poop on them the very next day.
The last obstacle, beyond the right gear and technique, is the timing. We use hot water and vinegar and avoid direct light on the windows. Of course you also don't want it to be raining when you swing the windows open wide. Also, we don't really want Dd around because a lot of the windows are a bit scary and we don't normally open them for ventilation. All this means that we cleaned the windows over the course of 6-7 sessions this month, and I washed some of the inside windows in the dark.
In conclusion, I'm glad we did all of them relatively close together so that we know they've been done. I think most of the time, we'll just wash the ones that are bothering us. There's one more type of squeegee and pole I'd like to buy to make certain types of windows easier. I'm curious to see how much better and faster we will get at this, as we go.
Our cats get plenty of attention and Dd, at 1 year 10 months is mostly able to pet them in an acceptable way and he shares his interests with them, such as food and trucks. I know the internet is lacking in cat pictures, so here are a few from this summer.
Also here's a helpful size comparison and a search-and-find activity.
Cari has been cutting my hair for the past... 14 years. I have not been to a barber since 2006
Even though I have been asking to cut her hair the whole time, she never took me seriously until this week.
As an early birthday present Jack found and modified the perfect sized bar cart for the gap we intentionally left in the kitchen cabinets when we planned out the kitchen over four years ago. The idea is to bring it up to the roof when we eat up there, though I can see lots of uses for it, even on the third floor. It’s got nice butcher block and a compost compartment.
