Ezra’s Sacramento Field Trip

At Fairmeadow, the entire fourth grade goes to Sacramento every year. I decided to chaperone the trip, and I have to say I was dreading it a bit. It was going to be a long day — we had to be at school at 6:00 am (!) and we wouldn’t return until after 5:00 pm. The drive alone is over two hours, usually longer on the way home. But, it turned out to be a pretty great day. I knew a few of the other moms who were chaperoning and the school rented very comfortable buses for us instead of school buses. Best of all, they allowed the kids to use screens on the drive, so it was pretty much the quietest field trip I’ve ever been on.

Ezra and I were grouped together with his best friend Henry (and Henry’s mom, Christina) along with four other kids. Here are the silly boys before we embarked on the trip — it was still dark outside.

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We had some nice views of the sunrise from the bus, and even though my photo doesn’t do it justice (I wasn’t near a window), I’ll share it here.

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Our first stop was the Capitol building.

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While we waited for our official tour to start, we spent some time looking around the rotunda and the offices they have set up showing what they looked like historically.

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Here are the kids in our group in front of Governor Brown’s office.

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When our tour started (unfortunately with the worst tour guide ever!) we visited the museum-like offices first and then went upstairs to the Senate and Assembly chambers.

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My favorite room was the office of the treasury, which included the coolest old safe.

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After the tour we had a little down time outside where there was a great climbing tree (until one of the other moms deemed it unsafe and made all the kids get down).

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Our next stop was Sutter’s Fort where we took a group shot of the whole class.

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And then after a quick lunch, we toured the fort.

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The last stop was the Railroad Museum where we saw lots of historic trains and railroad items.

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These two goofballs seemed to have a pretty good time.

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My favorite part was a recreation of the dining car on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe line.

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They had displays of all of the dishes they used on each line.

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The boys really liked the enormous model train display.

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And then we were done. One last shot of Ezra and Henry outside the museum before boarding the buses and heading home.

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Pi Day of the Century

March 14, 2015 was Pi Day of the Century (3.1415 …) and we had to celebrate properly. We’d seen a recipe for Deep Dish Apple Pie on America’s Test Kitchen and it was too good to pass up. It was a family affair — Ezra helped me with the filling and Bruce and Finn rolled out the dough.

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It’s a fairly fussy recipe, but worth the work. It was beautiful.

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And got thumbs up all around.

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Finn’s John Lennon

When I got to school for pickup one day a couple of weeks ago, Finn couldn’t wait to show me something in his classroom. They’d been working on projects about historical figures. They’d chosen someone they were interested in, read about them and then made a construction paper rendition. As I looked around the room, I saw many Helen Kellers and, if I remember correctly, at least one Abe Lincoln. My boy chose John Lennon. Complete with guitar and amp.

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Ezra’s 10th Birthday Party

Ezra wanted to build something for his party this year. After several ideas and a few prototypes (the mini-crossbows were cute, but a little difficult to make and not very robust), we decided on a woodworking project. We needed a fairly simple project since we assumed most of the boys didn’t have any woodworking experience, and we settled on making a chalkboard based on one of Rob’s successful woodworking classes last year.

In addition to the project, Ezra requested a homemade papier mache piñata, so Bruce got to work on that early in the week. Here are the boys getting ready to paint it — like a globe since it was round.

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And because Bruce is Bruce, we also had a second piñata, this one made of ice. Bruce used duct tape, rope and a wooden spoon to sink Hershey bars into our largest pot, and then added more water with our turkey baster.

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We weren’t really sure how either of these things was going to work out, but we hoped one would be successful for the party.

There were six guests, all boys from Ezra’s class, plus Ezra and Finn. Bruce set up the backyard with stations for each step of the project, and did one of his famous instructional posters.

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Bruce went through the project and showed them how to do each step, and then they were off and running with, not surprisingly, varying degrees of interest and accuracy.

This is Ezra’s best friend, Henry. He’s a very nice boy and Ezra adores him, so I allow him to come over despite the Sharks t-shirt he seems to be perpetually wearing.

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A few more pictures of the action:

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Once the chalkboards were built, their frames painted, and the boys had devoured some snacks, it was time for the ice piñata, which turned out to be a huge hit, I think both for the novelty of it and that they got to hit it with a hammer. And wear safety goggles. Oh, and the king size Hershey bars didn’t hurt either.

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After the ice piñata came the final round of painting, the boards themselves. Everyone was surprised — and some were dismayed — that there was no regular black chalkboard paint. Oh well.

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And then we did the world piñata. The boys enjoyed calling out where on the earth they were going to hit.

And they made quite a few dents and finally Bruce took over to bust it wide open. I don’t have video of the mad rush because I was consoling Finn who was too scared to join the craziness and thought he would totally miss out on candy. We managed to get him a few pieces.

At last there were cupcakes.

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And singing. Ten year old boy style.

The boys spent the remaining time running around like crazies and trading the candy and gum from the piñata. I think it was a pretty successful, if stressful, party. Bruce and I capped it off with a pitcher of margaritas.

(More pictures here.)

Ezra’s 10th Birthday

Ezra’s birthday celebration got started very early … for me at least. He wanted to bring donuts to school so I was at Krispy Kreme at the crack of dawn buying them. Of course, I brought home some extras so we could start the day off right with the breakfast of champions. Thankfully, Bruce also made them eggs so they wouldn’t be hungry and cranky five minutes after getting to school.

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Jamma called to wish Ezra a happy birthday, so we all got to have a chat.

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Then it was off to school. I stopped Ezra on the way out for a proper 10th Birthday Photo.

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School seemed to go well; I’m pretty sure Ezra ate the three or so extra donuts I’d bought so he was happy. When we got home he had a Skype date with his friend Jack, who turned ten two days before Ezra. Here’s Ezra showing Jack a website he likes.

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After that the boys had much needed and long overdue dentist appointments. I think I earned the Mother of the Year award for booking a dentist appointment on his birthday, but he didn’t really seem to mind.

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For his birthday dinner, he chose his favorite burger joint, Five Guys. We picked up Bruce from the offices of Skybox where he was doing a meet and greet since Google recently acquired the company. Across the street we spied a robot (!) and went over to check it out.

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And there was a whole slew of them inside!

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After dinner he opened presents — lots of LEGO, exactly what he wanted.

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And, of course, there were cupcakes.

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His party was planned for the coming weekend, so I did a little test of the kind of cupcakes he wanted, namely, chocolate cake with a chunk of chocolate in the middle. I wasn’t sure how that was going to turn out, so I did some with and some without. I also tried two kinds of frosting — vanilla buttercream and chocolate ganache. Oh, and of course, chocolate mini figures on top.

He lit his own candle, we sang, and four cupcakes were history in about a minute.

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Happy Birthday, Ezra!

Windy Hill Hike

A few weeks ago I finally made it to another one of my friend Sonya’s hikes. This one was to Windy Hill Open Space Preserve in Portola Valley. It looked like the weather wasn’t going to cooperate as the skies opened up with pouring rain as we got out of the car at the trail head. Luckily it only lasted about ten minutes, and the rest of the time, although it was foggy, we got away with no more rain.

It’s a beautiful hike and a pretty good workout at 7.6 miles according to my Nike+ App. Everything is very green and mossy right now. We saw five newts crossing the trail at different points, a little bit of water in a stream, and several different kinds of wildflowers emerging for Spring.

And windy is right! It was gusty and cold at the top but the view was spectacular. Here’s a slideshow of my photos.

Arastradero Preserve

On Sunday we took a lovely afternoon stroll through Arastradero Preserve. There are several trails, and we’ve been there before for biking, but this time we just wanted an easy loop to minimize complaining from smallest Moisions.

I’m still marveling at how close and easily accessible such spectacular open space is. It’s still “crowded” insofar as there are always other people on the trails, but being out in the open is good for the soul. Here are some pictures from our afternoon.

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I took a ton of photos; there are more here.

Pajama Day

In January, I saw this flier at the boys school:

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I thought it was awesome, especially the “Crazy Hair Optional” part. Apparently there were several options for the next spirit day, Fort Day being one of them. What eventually won the vote was Pajama Day and it happened last week. Neither boy wanted to fully participate — Finn only rarely wears pajamas and Ezra wore his underneath his regular clothes. However, the second part of Pajama Day was that students could bring a stuffed animal to school if they wanted, and that is right up the boys’ alley. Ezra brought Grumpy Cat and Finn brought his polar bear, Poley. The best part, for me, was seeing how they choose to carry them to school — sticking out of their backpacks.

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