Easter 2016

This Easter we got together with some friends from south of Seattle. I'd meant to invite other friends as well, but one of them was recovering from some health stuff and in the end I decided to keep it a bit simple for the first year these newish friends came up. The boys had a blast, Gareth was crying lots of tears when it was time to say goodbye, and hopefully we'll get together more in the future.

Saturday I had a concert. When I got home I spent the evening cleaning. Sunday was nice and relaxing, since ham makes for an easy dinner. Easter baskets were kept simple again this year. I had a few leftover things from stocking stuffers, so I used a couple of those things for the boys' baskets and they each got two small eggs with candy.

I put the baskets up high so Mal wouldn't binge on Gareth's before I got up

Our friends arrived in the afternoon. They came prepared with egg decorating equipment and an egg hunt. While I finished up some stuff for our meal, they decorated with the boys and hid eggs. We got a fortunate break in the rain, so were able to have our hunt outside. We gave Mal a head start and the boys both ended up with about half the eggs. Our yard was a bit overgrown still, which actually works out nicely for hiding eggs.

Ryan and one of our friends viewed the hunt from above

We enjoyed our dinner, got to meet our friends' dogs, and then just hung out and chatted. Gareth really, really wanted to tell them all about Minecraft, so after Mal was in bed we let him show them some Minecraft before he headed to bed.

Mal's 4th

The morning of his birthday, Mal came into the bathroom after my shower and we had the following exchange:

Mal: Is it not Mommy's birthday?

Me: Nope, not Mommy's birthday.

Mal: Is it not Daddy's birthday?

Me: Nope.

Mal: Is it not Gareth's birthday?

Me: Nope. Whose birthday is it?

Mal: Uhhhh, it's punkin's birthday!

This conversation was repeated frequently through the day in various forms. Mal is almost never Mal anymore. Most often he's a robot, but a few weeks ago he was a decoration, and on his birthday he was a "punkin". His preschool teachers and classmates all humored him and referred to him as a pumpkin all day. We took in blueberry muffins as the special treat for his class. That was all the celebrating done that day, as I had a final that morning and Ryan had a drum lesson and I had rehearsal in the evening. But we picked up a friend from our old neighborhood after school that afternoon and happened to run into Colin while there, so Mal got a birthday bike ride. He really misses getting to ride on Colin's bike. The boys had an impromptu playdate with Colin's daughter and another girl from our co-op days. Colin's daughter eagerly asked if I'd brought Gareth with me. Moments like that make me so sad that we moved. Gareth has some great friends at his new school, but we both miss his old school and our friends there a lot. Seeing them often just isn't the same as seeing them daily.

The next day Mal and I put together a creeper face cake. He was very, very excited about it. We have a cake supply store close by, so we headed there and found green and black paste coloring.

He helped taste-test the frosting

Not perfect, but good enough

Gareth had jiu jitsu that evening, but once we got home from that I started putting together a dinner of chicken and rice, one of Mal's favorites. He got to select some of the music we listened to that evening. His selections were Clap Hands, "Bedtime Song", and "Baymax Song" .

He was very excited to get to blow out the candles on his cake. I didn't even get a chance for a good picture of him doing so because as soon as Ryan set the cake down, he'd blown them out.

He's not a huge fan of forks. I've recently been able to get him to use one a little bit more, but most often he opts for his fingers as the most efficient way to eat.

Then we opened a few presents (thank you, everyone - he loves them all!). We were lame and didn't wrap the gifts that came in boxes. In our defense, it was a crazy stressful week. Lots of alphabet gifts because he needs to work on learning letters this year. And then it was off to bed.

 

This and That

Well, the cookie dough sale is done. I had a bit of a scare when I was re-counting the money before turning it over to the PTA because I kept coming up short. But I found it. Delivery went smoothly. I had a good group of parents helping me fulfill orders and deliver small orders to desks. We got them all portioned out before school finished. It was a bit hectic once school let out but not too bad. Thankfully those with very large orders had come to pick them up before school got out. I hung around until we'd sorted out where most of the orders needed to go (this kid is in play practice or aftercare or taking the bus and will come back with a parent), and then left with only a few orders still hanging around. The teacher in charge of all of this told me she'd call me if they were still there when she left later. She didn't call. And no one has contacted me with complaints about errors in their order, so I think it's safe to say we're done.

My presentation went well. In my opinion ours was one of the better ones. Far too many people word vomited on their slides which is a huge turn off. We were careful to have pictures predominate, with just a phrase or two per slide and then elaborate verbally. It helped a lot that our topic wasn't one that got too technical. We talked briefly about the history of the "Mediterranean" diet and how it was popularized, touched on the statement from the book Big Fat Surprise that we were evaluating and what the author's intent was with the chapter our statement came from (her intent was to show that the diet has been over-hyped and that claims about it exceeded the evidence), then we talked about the study she cited as evidence of this, which turned out was a pretty good study to use to show her point. We also found a more recent summary of studies on this particular olive oil component, which only further supported her point - a lot of the research done thus far on this phytochemical is preliminary and we need to do a lot more research, especially in vivo research, to determine if this compound can be significantly beneficial. And that's how we concluded - talking about our evaluation of her use of the study and agreeing that we don't yet have evidence that olive oil will cure us of all our ails.

So that's a couple things done at any rate. It's been a fairly relaxing couple of weeks, but now I need to remind myself that I do still have a final to take and that I need to study for that. That's boring though. Here's some of what we've been up to:

I've used some of the lower-stress time to go through the kids' clothes. Got rid of a bunch of 3T stuff and pulled out some 4T (except that he still fits some 2T shorts and 3T shirts). Anyway, we found these pjs in the 4T box. They're a bit big, but Mal fell in love and decided to have a pajama day after that:

This past Monday my friend and I rode on a tandem to Green Lake. We meant to go to Costco, but it was really cold and windy, so we went for coffee instead. We pushed our Costco ride to Wednesday, by which point the weather was much nicer. But it did mean taking singles and two trailers since we then had Mal with us. Mal had been so sad when he realized I was going for a ride on Monday without him, so he was excited to get to see our friend and be included on Wednesday. I just about died when the first thing our friend grabbed at Costco was the bag of potting soil. But he does Costco runs on his bike all the time. This was his haul:

I stuck to lighter weight items. Cheese, vanilla, pirate booty, and a couple boxes of snacks for Gareth's classroom. As it was I struggled getting up the hills going back home (I had Mal in the trailer as well, so maybe 60 lbs). My friend weighed his trailer before unpacking when he got home. 173 lbs. And he had to ride back to his house after leaving mine, another few miles. I don't think that will ever be me. But when I went to help Gareth's PE class with their biking unit the next day, the teacher used this ride as an example for the kids of how practical biking can be and talked about how when practicing on the safe playground they need to be in the mindset of being on the road (having to watch for traffic, yield, follow rules of the road, etc) so that one day they can get groceries or haul kids on their bike.

Mal's car seat had expired a while ago, and I finally got around to the daunting task of getting a new one. I eventually asked for suggestions in a mom's group I'm in and a car seat tech chimed in with very helpful information about the two I happened to be looking at. The new seat arrived yesterday (despite my attempts to get it to not arrive until today) and Mal is very excited about it and it's redness. He fell asleep in it this afternoon after we visited a friend:

It's got a "click-tight" system, which allows you to easily harness the seat with just the seatbelt. It took about 3 seconds to have the seat in the car and it's in there tight. No climbing in the seat to knee it back or push it down or whatever. Just thread the seatbelt through, click the seat bottom back in place, and good to go. It's awesome. And he'll be able to be in the 5-point harness forever (Gareth is still a good 30 lbs below the harness limit for this seat!), but it can transition to the high back booster as well, fitting up to 120 lbs, which is forever for my kids. Gareth is actually a bit jealous and was trying to tell me he needs a new seat as well. Sorry, kid, the one you have is perfectly suitable until you're ready to sit without it.

Swamped

So I've been rather swamped lately. At the end of January I had a Phil. concert, which I played 1st on because our principal was playing the Mozart Clarinet Concerto. Shortly before the concert happened I managed to volunteer to run the 3rd grade cookie dough fundraiser. I swear, I'd already told them I suck at fundraising but would help in a background/supportive position. Somehow that got read as "I'd love to run a fundraiser!!," because during our Sequim trip I got an email from a teacher asking if I'd made a plan for the fundraiser dates and all that yet. I could have said no to doing it, but decided I'd go ahead and just delegate as much as I could and maybe it'd be something that'd help me get to know some other parents (it's not really helpful for that, but it does give other parents something to help place me if we happen to meet). And then there was the water in the basement, also right before the concert. And of course I have class still, so I'm doing stuff for that. Mal and I went in to Gareth's class on the 12th to help make smoothies for the class "Friendship and Heart-Healthy Celebration". We've been going early a couple Fridays per month to pack food in bags for kids who may not have much to eat over the weekend. Mal brings home every illness from preschool, so I get colds on top of colds. In fact, Mal is home today because he's had a fever and cough for a couple days now.

Now I've got another concert coming up and have been tallying cookie dough orders, which I have to turn into the company tomorrow. And at some point I need to put together a presentation on a paper about phytochemicals in olive oil for my biochemistry class (which means I should probably read the paper). And I heard back from UW (got accepted into the MS, but wait listed for the RD program, so that was disappointing and I'll probably be reapplying this coming December). I've signed up to volunteer for a Cooking Matters class again, which means I need to find someone to watch Mal for those six weeks. And the food science class I was thinking I'd take in summer is actually being offered in spring, so I'm now signed up for that and microbiology for spring quarter. UW starts a week before NSC for spring, so I won't get much of a spring break (which is when we are planning to do taxes; I'll have about 3 days off).

Anyway, here are some things I've learned thus far while doing this fundraiser.

1. Don't assume people will know who to write the checks to. I really didn't want to write who to make the check to on 450 forms (nor did I have time to do so, as forms went home right between our basement water discovery and my concert) and thought this was obvious. We made announcements through the school newsletter and the 3rd grade newsletter, but still had people make the check to the cookie company or leave the check blank (by far the easier issue of the two to solve).
2. Definitely have someone help with the tallying. Having two sets of eyes counting the money and orders is helpful. And makes the process go quickly.
3. I really like when people are able to just write a single check for the order, whether it's because they're the only ones who ordered or because they collected money from others and then wrote a check. They're the fastest orders to tally and verify.
4. Don't let little kids fill out the order form themselves. This inevitably ends up difficult to decipher at best, with lots of mistakes at worst.
5. In the same vein, don't let a little kid do the entire process all alone. If this happens and things don't quite match up, it's impossible to verify what's going on if the parent hasn't been involved in any way.
6. Basic "chocolate chunk" is by far the most popular cookie dough flavor of our sale, selling 3x as many tubs as the next highest-selling dough.
7. While this seems to be a successful fundraiser, I'm not a huge fan of selling something perishable. I'm already mentally stressing about the people who are going to forget to pick up their order, meaning we have to find a freezer to store it in until they get it.

I'm sure between submitting the order tomorrow and delivery of the orders in early March I'll find more to add to this list. Apparently getting the check from the PTA to pay the company can be a bit of a pain, but I'll find out if that's true or not in the coming weeks. I'll be happy once it's over, but overall it hasn't been all that time-consumptive. A couple hours to staple brochures to order forms (another parent helped with this as well and got them delivered to the teachers for distribution), a couple hours on tallying, and it'll be a few hours filling orders once they come in.

Children's

Yesterday morning was Gareth's appointment with the tic specialist at Children's. I got his lunch made the night before (he was supposed to do it, but we forgot and then I just wanted him in bed since we had to be up early the next morning) and got up early and everything was going smoothly. We were set to leave the house by 7:15 so we'd have plenty of time to get to the appointment.

And then we got in the car and I realized I'd forgot to ask Ryan about the gas status and of course we needed gas. So now we were running late and I was stressed that traffic would be bad and we'd end up with our appointment cancelled. And of course the gas station was crowded and then the pump I ended up at I had to go swipe my card inside because it didn't work outside. So I was pretty grumpy by the time we were actually on our way.

But the traffic getting there wasn't too horrible, and we managed to get there just five minutes past our check-in time. You can enter pretty much anywhere and they have a desk where they'll take your license and use it to create a badge for you that gives you permission to be in the hospital. Then they tell you which elevator to take to get to where you're going, where you find another desk and your kid gets a wrist id thing and you fill out some paperwork. Mal really liked all the ocean decor - fish and whales.

The specialist was nice. I wonder how often she gets interesting cases, or if it's mostly people like us. Anyway, she chatted with us about what we've observed. Then she chatted with Gareth a bit. Then she did a neurological exam, mostly having him point back and forth at things and walking, but also using a tool to check for pressure on his eyes. All that was normal, so we got exactly what we were expecting - mild Tourette's. Which is what we were hoping to get from the appointment - rule out any serious things we hadn't considered and start a conversation in case the tics ever get really disruptive of his life. 80% of kids will outgrow their tics, and since there isn't a big family history of them chances are good that Gareth will be in that 80%. No medication or other treatment necessary at the moment. But if we're ever worried about something we can video it and email it to them, which is pretty cool.

Jiu Jitsu

Gareth has started jiu jitsu. A while ago he had expressed interest in trying out something new. We'd watched several jiu jitsu and several break dancing videos with him (Massive Monkees are based in Seattle and teach kids classes), so we proposed those options. It was a tough choice and in the end he chose jiu jitsu. Took me a while to get in contact with this place, but so far the instructor seems good. We did a trial class last week and he liked it, so we were planning to go back on Thursday. But then water happened, so he didn't get to go. Which worked out okay because his gi wasn't going to arrive until Friday. So today he got to go back for the second time. Both weeks he's been one of two kids there (though different kids each time). There was actually a third kid there, but she told me she had a cold and so couldn't do class. She was there because her dad was starting jiu jitsu (and her mom already does jiu jitsu), so she was just hanging out while they practiced (she also told me all about the food at the brewery next door and how her favorite soda to get there is the blue one - very sociable kid). Anyway. Gareth enjoys it a lot so far and all the kids seem to have a great time in class. I'm interested to see how he progresses over time. Here he is trying to do a move with his leg to knock over the other kid. Last week he learned some arm bend thing. Hopefully he'll eventually remember some of these moves for more than a day or two.

Water

We knew when we bought our house that the basement might have problems. The people we bought it from had just finished the basement, everything looked really nice. But it was obvious it hadn't been through a Seattle winter yet. And because it was newly finished the things you'd typically look for (signs of previous water damage) were either covered over or no longer visible. For all we knew the basement would turn into a lake the first time it rained.

Shortly after moving in we had a couple big storms - lots of rain and wind, power out, that kind of thing. And we've had a very typical winter this year, with rain more days than not. So far there'd been no signs of water in the basement, so I'd figured we were good to go. Lucky us.

Thursday I got the kids off to school and sat downstairs to eat my breakfast. Headed off to school and picked Mal up afterward. I went to get some work done at the computer and thought, "hm, my socks must've got a bit wet while walking to my car/picking up Mal" (not surprising because my boots are old and have developed a couple leaks). But a few minutes later I realized that there's no way my thick socks got that wet, pushed back the chair, and saw that the carpet under the desk was wet.

I initially assumed it might be water coming up through the floor, because the carpet near the wall was still totally dry. But once Ryan got home and moved the desk I realized that where the feet of the desk had been - much closer to the wall - was also wet. We figured out how to remove the baseboard (which our contractor neighbor later told us may not have been necessary - oh well, new thing learned anyway!) and pulled back the carpet. In removing the baseboard we discovered a small bit of sheetrock with mold on it.

Our neighbor came over and since all the water was located almost directly under a window, told us he guessed it had something to do with the window - either the window was installed improperly and so water was getting in, or maybe the dirt making a bowl around the window was the culprit (almost certainly not helping the problem at any rate). After he left we got the padding pulled up and tossed it out, and propped up the carpet and set up some fans so it could dry a little faster.

So now we get to decide how much money we want to throw at this problem. Do we get the land regraded and install a pipe/drain thing or do we guess that perhaps a foundation drain has failed or needs to be installed and pay for that and the regrading? If we do option 1 then realize the problem isn't fixed, some of it will have to be dug up to do option 2. If neither of those solve the problem then we'd maybe have to dig stuff up yet again to determine what the actual problem is, wasting even more money. Argh.

Anyway, we had a landscape/drainage person come out and give us an estimate. We'll have another drainage company come on Thursday and see what they say. Our neighbor seemed to think we shouldn't worry about the possible mold inside the walls and just clean what we can see off with bleach. But I really don't want to go that route (we dealt with mildew/mold in our Indiana place, really don't want to again), so no matter what we'll at some point rip out that wall so we can replace any wet insulation and deal with any mold.

Our neighbor told us that they've had a river of water flowing through their basement a couple times, so apparently if this is the worst it gets we're pretty lucky. (And I can say from experience that this is better than 5 feet of water in the basement.) I'm starting to wonder if we'll ever get to do the projects we want to do on the house rather than just dealing with the unexpected problems that crop up. Home ownership is so much fun.