Round Two at the Dance Recital - Team Version

A year ago Thing 1 had just tried out for a competitive dance team. A year ago I was both excited and apprehensive to re-enter the competitive dance team circuit. I would have more in common with the older dancers' parents, who I knew from Eldest Daughter's team years, yet I would be hanging out with the younger dancers' parents.

As I type this, Thing 1 is performing her last recital number for the season and we're waiting to see which team(s) she will be on next year. I'm apprehensive this time but not dreading the email. This season has been fun for both of us. She made some new friends, studied under some incredibly talented teachers such as Momo Lebeau, performed at Disney's California Adventure, and learned that no matter how well your team performs, sometimes you just don't win. She also learned that even when you're tired and fighting a bug the show must go on. The picture above is in the team dressing room at the recital.

This child takes dance very seriously. We've spent lots of time discussing and then shopping for gifts for her elder dance buddy. Our extended family and friends have seen her at competitions and performances this year. She can even do her own hair and makeup.

Here we go again.

Meeting Fred's Relatives

On Mother's Day I dragged the kids into the city to the Asian Art Museum to see the Terracotta Warriors Exhibit. Dave did not have to be dragged. This outing will be forever remembered as Meeting Fred's Relatives. Fred is the life-sized replica Terracotta Warrior that greets guests in our foyer at home.

It was a beautiful day in the city and we spent an hour elbowing our way through the three very crowded exhibit spaces looking at the Warriors and their accompanying artifacts: spears, coins, helmets and suits of armor. For those of you looking for the Cliff Notes version, China's First Emperor, Qin Shihuang (259-210 BCE) built himself a vast underground tomb city guarded by a life-sized terracotta army of warriors, infantrymen, horses, chariots and all their weaponry. This tomb was accidentally discovered by Chinese farmers in 1974 and is estimated to include more than 7,000 figures and 10,000 weapons. It's fascinating. Really. It's a long trip not on my short list to get to the Chinese burial complex so I was happy to see the touring exhibit.

After the exhibit we spent a few hours eating our way through San Francisco. First stop: Civic Center Farmer's Market. Cherries are in season. Second stop: Ferry Plaza. We ate Mijito and a subset of us had Ciao Bella gelato. I just can't get excited about gelato until peaches and strawberries are in peak season. We browsed the people selling crafts in the Justin Herman Plaza outside the Hyatt Regency Embarcadero and Thing 2 played in the Vaillancourt Fountain, the very same fountain I played in as a child.

The book fair.

Here and now, at the end of my youngest children's 5th grade year, I did a major purge of The Pinks bookshelves.

I also ran a total of how much we supported our elementary school during our decade-long stay. Two book fairs a year. Times three children. Six years per child. Factor in books purchased for the individual classrooms and school library.

Niecelets: do you read your favorite auntie's blog? If so, head's up: there are some good reads coming your way.

Future grandchildren: I hope you like to read. Grandma Leslie will have the best collection of children's books for you. You show up and I will bake you chocolate chip cookies to eat with them.

The rest were just posted to freecycle.

Thing 2 is reading her way through my childhood set of Little House on the Prairie books now, ones that my mom saved. This makes me happy. We can't figure out why my brother's name is penned in them. In my mom's perfect script. Go figure.

I hate shopping.

Buying? Now that I'm great at.

Cars. Shoes. Gifts. I am a pretty savvy online shopper. Catalogs and Daily Candy are my friends. I've had my credit card number memorized for years. I can shop anywhere, anytime.

The only time and place I happily shop is while on vacation. I bought 17 pair of shoes on a trip to Italy. In my own defense, only 13 were for me. And six of those I still wear, almost a decade later.

I have so much respect for those of you who can spend all day shopping. I do a few hours here and there with Neeracha and my eyeballs are bruised. In fact, I'd rather she or Carolyn Rovner just pick out my clothes for me.

A few years ago I took Eldest Daughter and Thing 1 to THE MALL in search of spring and summer clothing for them. They love to shop: to browse the aisles, to try on pretty things, to accessorize, to debate the right shoes for the outfit, to try on more pretty things. I would rather have a Brazilian on sunburned skin.

But I went, because this is what Good Mothers do. I lasted three hours. They had a blast. We went to Abercrombie, where I said several times, "Even though you have beautiful legs, your father would kill me if I bought you shorts that short." We went to Pumpkin Patch, where each outfit was cuter than the next and where Eldest Daughter didn't even look at her size. We went to Claire's, where they both bought accessories with their own money. We went to Wet Seal, which has really cheap, trashy clothes that fortunately Eldest Daughter did not fit in. We went to Justice, which had some suitable things mixed in amongst the Britney-Spears-style-junk. And we went to Hollister.

I was exhausted when we came home. Fortunately our next door neighbors had invited us to dinner so I got a Baby Andrew fix and felt much better after that and a good burger.

This week spring has turned to summer. And shopping season is here. I'm bracing myself.

Cousin Love - LA Style

Although it was improbable given the physical miles between us, I grew up very close to my first cousins on my father's side of the family. There are three of them. Youngest Cousin is four years my senior and has a wicked sense of humor likely gained from years of being pushed around by her opinionated, strong-willed siblings. Oldest Cousin and I share a love of sewing. Middle Cousin was in law school in Chicago while I was doing my undergrad in Madison, thus he become my safety net when drama arose.

I looked up to my cousins, much the way The Pinks look up to their Calabasas cousins.

The summer of my 16th year was when my cousins dressed me up for my first New York City bar hopping experience. During Thanksgiving of my 20th year two friends and I stayed in Youngest Cousin's apartment (she left town and also left behind the car and keys) and shot the 1986 equivalent of Selfies all around Chicago. There may have been some wine coolers involved in that; why else would we pose on the outside viewing deck of the then-Sears Tower on a day too foggy to see anything?!

Middle Cousin and I visited the bears at Denali together, took a dunk at Chena Hot Springs and cruised around Prince William Sound in a Zodiak . He also cooked for me -- I had dreams about his linguine with clam sauce for years. He also took me to some Italian restaurant in Chicago and did a standing back flip right there in the dining room, for a reason that must have been a dare.

Eldest Cousin took me to the beach at Narragansett and also made me the Great Expectations quilt when I was pregnant with the Youngest Pinks.

Fast forward 20 years. Eldest Cousin practices law in Providence. Middle Cousin practices law in Chicago. And  Youngest Cousin is enjoying some time at home with her two sweet sons in LA after many grueling years in the the entertainment industry.

We met up with the whole entourage last weekend to celebrate the Bar Mitzvah of Youngest Cousin's Eldest Son. The years disappeared and the next generation of cousins picked up where our generation left off. Next Generation is pictured at right, ages 11 to 17.

The last time this same group was together was Youngest Cousin's wedding, 15 years ago. At that time Oldest Cousin's Youngest Child was two and very attached to his lovey, a cartoon character doll named Ben. Ben was intentionally excluded from the formal family picture and in that picture, Youngest Child is wailing hysterically in response. Today Youngest Child is a high school senior. Dave brilliantly found and procured a Ben doll so we could recreate this photo, to the merriment of all involved.

Thing 1 and Youngest Cousin's Youngest Son, also age 11, bonded over their shared diminutive stature. Look closely at the picture below; they could easily be mistaken as twins. For Eldest Daughter, the highlight of the weekend was realizing that her towering height of 5'2" made her (much!) taller than all the other women in our clan. In heels she was positively Amazonian. Sadly, it also meant her feet were larger than Youngest Cousin's. Youngest Cousin's shoe collection rivals my own.

The Pinks and I drove halfway down Thursday night. We spent the night at the Harris Ranch Inn, which Thing 1 aptly summed up by saying, "If cows had sensitive noses they'd be barfing right now." The property has gorgeous, manicured, flowering grounds, which are complete waste because the stench coming off of the surrounding cattle grazing land, is vile. (Sidebar: How come no one mentions the cow smell on The Pioneer Woman's Oklahoma Cattle Ranch?!)

Friday morning, after a call to the schools declaring that The Pinks were sick with Spring  fever, we met the cousins for an attack on Magic Mountain. There we broke into two groups: thrill seekers and non-thrill-seekers. Once again I held my own on the roller coasters.

After a quick dip in the hotel pool we joined up with the rest of the extended family for Friday night dinner. The Bar Mitzvah boy did a beautiful job Saturday morning and his interpretation of his portion brought us all to tears. After the service we ate and danced and ate more, as is traditional. My aunt and uncle, who I have been close to since we all lived in San Francisco during my post-college years, were in their element surrounded by their mischpucha. And then we went back to Youngest Cousin's house and ate more. The kids, led by the 26-year-old bassoonist who just married Oldest Cousin's Oldest Child, launched an aggressive Nerf gun war. And of course we ate more Sunday morning before hitting the road.

We're doing it.

I just pulled the trigger. There's no turning back now. We've decided to do the youngest Pinks B'nai Mitzvah in Israel.

There are so many reasons we wanted to do this. It will be an incredibly meaningful way to celebrate the Pinks arrival into Jewish adulthood. It will be a memorable extended family and friends trip, similar to the ones we've done to Italy, France and Spain. Our parents are still young and healthy enough to do it. Eldest Daughter will be a high school junior and it may be our last chance for a long, exotic vacation with her.

A sample custom itinerary was in my email this morning. It included a desert camel ride, a chocolate making class, a float in the Dead Sea and the tram ride up Masada. The countdown is on.

Three is the new two.

On the subject of children, it seems like we know an awful lot of people who have three or more children.

It could be because we have three, and people with more than two children gravitate toward other people with larger-than-the-national-average-number-of-children. We're less intimidated by the chaos.

Dave and I were anomalies in the neighborhood where we bought our first house. Most of our neighbors had children and one family seemed to have a lot of them. Now that we have kids of our own we realize that this particular family only had three. But it sure seemed like more when they were little!

Greg and Alice have triplets. Greg, who is one of the funniest people I know, calls grocery shopping "provisioning" and couples who have less than three children "slackers".

The Littlest Pinks went through a stage in preschool where their best friends were only children. What was that about?! Of course we never see those families now because they are too busy micromanaging one child and they mostly go to private school. That seems a little harsh to type but it's true.

Our Tahoe neighbor pointed out that her husband has four children by four different women. This is not as promiscuous as it sounds; one was from his first marriage, one is a biological product of their marriage and they adopted two children.

One of our Bay neighbors has two biological children and two step-children. A friend has two children with her husband and three step-children, happy bonuses of her husband's first marriage. Paige has four. Kathy has four. They seem sane. I skied this year with a friend with four children. Her adorable, teeny tiny six-year-old beat me down the hill more than once. I love that stage, the one where the kids are fearless.

While Dave and I never expected to have three children I'm glad we did, especially as Eldest Daughter pulls away from us. I find there are days where she and I speak very little outside of limited necessities we cover during the drive to school. And that makes me sad.