Family

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.

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

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

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.

A couple of week ago, we spent a Sunday afternoon hiking through Wunderlich County Park in Woodside. I continue to be amazed at how close we are to such beautiful open space. In addition to a great network of trails, this site includes the Folger estate (originally owned by the Folger family, of coffee fame). The museum is only open on Saturdays, but we did see the stables.

After a quick look around we consulted the map …

… and started off on our hike.

The boys went a little off-trail at times.

Ezra had to go down into the [hopefully not poison oak] wilderness to retrieve his favorite stick after he accidentally through it off the cliff. Well, cliff may be a bit strong but it was steeper than it appears here.

He put on Bruce’s jacket to protect himself against the possible poison oak, he found the stick, and no one ended up having an itchy rash so all’s well.

They also clambered down to check out this wreckage of some sort.

We continued on, letting Finn, our burgeoning map-reader, lead the way.

Here are a few more pictures, including one of the old out-buildings on the edge of the property.

We’ve been watching a lot of America’s Test Kitchen lately, mostly at the boys’ request. They love to watch the cooking, but I think their favorite segments are the gadget reviews and the tastings. The other day, Ezra was talking about how good Hershey chocolate is (he’d gotten some at school for Valentine’s Day). He said it was “the best chocolate in the world.” And, you know, I couldn’t really let that statement stand, so I told him there were lots and lots of different chocolates and many were better. Of course, he immediately said, “We should do a tasting!”

So, yesterday morning he and I walked over to the fancy grocery story in our neighborhood (Piazza’s Fine Foods) and picked up a selection of chocolate for our first Moision Family Chocolate Tasting. (I anticipate many more.)

We chose basic chocolate with similar cacao levels and without any accoutrements (except for the one with sea salt). Obviously the Hershey bar was an outlier but we thought it was a good baseline. We did blind taste testing.

And everyone filled out Ezra’s pre-made index cards.

The results:

We had a clear winner: the Lindt dark chocolate with sea salt (so delicious — smooth with the bonus little salty bits), and a clear loser: Endangered Species natural dark chocolate (too chalky a texture and a little bitter). The Sharffen Berger, Ghirardelli and Hershey were in the middle but we didn’t agree on the order. So, we had to go back for a second try. The jury is still out.

This week I found out about this place called Hidden Villa in Los Altos, about 15 minutes from our house. It’s a large property with a farm and hiking trails, and I thought it sounded like a good fit for a weekend outing. I was right!

When we looked into it further, we found they do farm tours on Saturdays so we signed up for one yesterday. Finn has a recent obsession with pigs (I think thanks to his reading Charlotte’s Web) and, of course, Ezra loves all animals, so off we went. They were in heaven.

First up, we walked through one of the chicken areas (Ezra was already trying to catch one) …

… to get to the pigs. There were piglets!

They seemed pretty big to me, until we saw the adults. They are enormous! This is the smallest of the three grown ups.

Once we’d had enough of the pig pen, we moved on to the chickens.

And then the goats, where Bruce relived his childhood.

Finn wasn’t too sure about them, especially when they started jumping up to try to get the food.

We also saw some cows.

And sheep.

At the end we visited their garden and had a little snack — rhubarb, dried persimmons and a few seeds — to try out some of the things they grow there. The guide said it’s their slow time and we should come back in the spring or summer.

It’s a beautiful place; I hope we go back for another visit and a hike.

At some point last year Ezra discovered parkour; I think it was through Minecraft. He started talking about it more and more, trying to explain it, and making up moves on the play structures at school. I would describe it as urban gymnastics, and if you search for it on YouTube you’ll find a bunch of videos that are pretty amazing.

Unfortunately, I’ve had some trouble finding a class for them to take. There’s a group that does free classes in parks for beginners each month and we did one of those a couple of months ago. The boys had a blast learning how to jump over fences and safely roll around. A couple of weekends ago we tried another class at a gym in San Jose. I thought there wasn’t enough instruction on how to do the moves correctly and I think parkour is really meant to be done outside, but the boys loved it. I didn’t take many pictures but I got a few of them doing wall jumps.

We’re still on the lookout for a better class, but it was a fun morning!

We added a feature to our backyard last month — a swing for the boys. And by “we” I mean Bruce did all the design and construction and the rest of us held things up while he assembled it. Here are some photos of the process.

At first we set it up as a test in an easy spot, to see how it went together and how hard it would be to assemble it.

It went pretty well. We took it back down and Bruce made some adjustments. When we installed it in the corner spot we’d picked out, it was tricky because of the bushes and trees. I don’t have many pictures because I was one of the lackeys holding up part of the structure. But I did manage to get one of the boys — they’re wearing their bike helmets for safety.

Finally, it was done! Here’s a blurry picture of Finn trying it out.

And a few days later I surreptitiously took this picture of Ezra after school enjoying a quiet moment.

I sent it to Bruce so he would know all his hard work had paid off.

We’d heard about a great family biking opportunity just north of us called Bicycle Sunday. They close a portion of Canada Road to cars from 9:00 am to 3:00 pm. It sounded perfect — safe, scenic and family friendly — so we drove north a bit and checked it out on January 4th. You can see from this picture that the enthusiasm level was high.

Finn, very excited to ride his new bike, bounced back from the mini-nap and had a great time. However, we soon realized we had two problems: 1) Ezra didn’t want to be there, didn’t want to ride his bike, and had every intention of complaining the entire time, and 2) the road wasn’t actually closed to cars.

It was scenic though!

And it wasn’t that crowded with cars, but it’s still nerve-wracking to ride on a big road like that with the kids. We rode along for about 3.5 miles and once we looped back, we figured out the reason for problem #2.

Oops. It was January.

But Finn had a fabulous time on his sleek new bike!

We’ll definitely try it again on another Sunday. Especially if we can find something else for Ezra to do instead. (In Ezra’s defense, he turned up sick the next day, so we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and say he probably wasn’t feeling up to par that day either.)

I’m out of order here, but I pulled a couple of photos off my phone today and realized, despite their poor quality, I should have a post about New Year’s Eve since we did actually have plans and it was a lovely evening. We went for dinner and an early kid-friendly 2015 countdown at my friend Tiffany’s house. Here’s most of the party, minus Bruce and Tiffany’s husband Olivier. The other adults are Tiffany’s parents, who were visiting from Calgary.

I tried to fix the red eye problem so everyone didn’t look like a zombie, but it didn’t work. (Admittedly, I gave up pretty quickly.)

Here’s the only other shot I took on the last day of 2014, the boys lounging on the couch.

Yes, that is a proper pluralization of terrarium. (I looked it up.) Terraria works, too, but seems a bit pretentious. Okay, enough with the grammar lesson and on to the subject matter.

The boys made terrariums today with Bruce. They were quick about it; the whole thing happened while I was out on a walk. Here’s Ezra’s.

He’s got a little Star Wars thing going on in there, and there’s a hidden blue lizard as well.

Finn didn’t want to do one initially, but then he saw this vessel and changed his mind.

He went with a Minecraft figure, a couple of dinosaurs, and one very well-hidden ninja.

Definitely not your grandmother’s terrariums.