Saturday was a fun SNOW day.

Simone takes the Treasure Trails Nordic ski class at Snoqualmie Pass while David and I alternate skate skiing the loop and watching Naomi. Our friends Eli and Karel turned us on to the kids program. To sign up or find out more you click here. In these particular pictures it was snowing, but much of the day was warm and sunny.
When we got back to Seattle, David noticed that there was a one man show "7Sins" at the Theatre off Jackson in our neighborhood. (It was our date night.) So we headed over to the Szechuan Noodle House (next to the Green Leaf on 8th) for delicious homemade noodles and dumplings (we watched the making of the dumplings at the table next to ours as we ate) and then we wandered down the street to for a fresh fruit bubble tea before the performance. The ID (International District) is having a Renaissance. New condos, restaurants, bubble tea stands, a creperie, a newly renovated Wing Luke museum and these recent additions are not replacing older businesses, just squeezing in making the neighborhood dense and lively.

James Judd, the performance artist, launched his monologue from the open air Santa Fe Opera house and then to took us 40 floors below Las Vegas to an alien employees-only lunch hall with a snoring air system and sticky floors covered in green disinfectant. We enjoyed it! Here is the Stranger's blurb:

"7 SINS is a collection of true, fast, and funny stories from the life of writer/comedian James Judd. It chronicles his early ambition to win his 5th Grade book report competition with My Search for Patty Hearst, and his first
job when his working mother paid him to watch The Young and the Restless and then reenact it for her. He relives his varied careers as a forgotten employee of AT&T, where he did nothing for a year, an even shorter-lived career as a dot.com journalist (which led to an insane night with five Chinese billionaires in a Chinese bordello), and as an under-prepared criminal defense attorney representing violent teenage girls, as well as many more strange and always funny stories. "

Kidspace and The Getty Museum

On Wednesday, Simone said, "I miss Tanner and Kendall." Tanner lives in Idaho and we haven't seen her in many months. Kendall lives in Los Angeles but we haven't seen her in over a year so I was surprised to hear these names come up. Amazing what is ticking inside Simone's 3 year old noggin! We decided we'd make them each a little movie and let them know how we were feeling. Here is the video for Tanner. Further down in this post ..."live from the blue room at The Getty," is the video for Kendall.


After a day of walking downtown LA, meandering through the dense Farmers Market with the stroller, visiting the Library's full scale puppet theater, running through the Frank Gehry Concert Hall and then finally... playing at the 9th street park, Simone made an announcement. "I need people to play with that are kids," she said. So on Thursday, we started the day at Kidspace in Pasadena. What a marvelously creative place! We found great kids there. Simone raced up Kal Banuska's 40 foot Raindrop tower (pictured above) and Tom Luckey's Wisteria Climber half a dozen times. Naomi cracked up as the earthquake demo shook the ground beneath her. The museum has a slew of presentations throughout the day and one we particularly liked demanded a bit of audience participation. I've included a video of Simone performing the mother mosquito in "Bugs that Suck Blood."
We finally said goodbye to our new found friends and somehow I got both girls out of Kidspace. (It was a struggle to depart, as the place is fascinating and we didn't come close to exploring all of it. ) As I was exiting the parking lot, I turned around to see how the girls were doing and discovered that both had fallen asleep. Hmm. Might as well head to The Getty and see if perhaps I can cover some of the sculpture garden during their afternoon naps. (Double click on the pictures to zoom in.)

The Getty was for me, what Kidspace was for Simone and Naomi. It was heaven. What grand spaces. What marvelous works. I get wound up by great art. Love the feeling of connection to one another, across centuries, across cultures, the realization that we are here on earth for a lifetime of wondering, struggling, problem solving, playing, caring, aching, creating...
Simone awoke from her nap in in the middle of Bill Viola's "Emergence" video and just as the skinny naked man rises from the fountain. "What happened to him?" she asked me? "Why are the women crying?" "The film doesn't tell us." I said. "Well the women look very sad and the man doesn't have any clothes on," she said. We headed to what the Getty calls, The Family Room. It is a small building with six interactive exhibits and plenty of space for baby Naomi to wander through on her own without breaking anything from the 1700's. In the photo below, we are tying ourselves up with the pretend ropes. These are black foam tubes that you can arrange into various holes in the wall to strap you into a spot. We tied ourselves up and then burst free triumphantly with foam zooming everywhere. Simone was still pretty groggy from her nap.


Naomi loved rolling around in the blue room. This is a bedroom done in cerulean brocade with soft silk walls and pillow rolls.
(Double click on the picture to see more detail.)

Simone and Naomi concerto

We're in Los Angeles for a couple days. Wednesday we happened upon Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall. We were aiming for MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) across the street but discovered it is closed on Wednesdays in the winter. After running around the shiny Concert Hall with Simone and Naomi, we picked up some lightweight kids instruments at the fun music store and pied piper-ed back to the hotel room.
On our way through downtown LA, we met a guitar teacher walking home from work. She was dragging a flatbed of colorful kids guitars and from her we added a $20 dollar blue guitar to the plastic sax and flute.
Here are the two young musicians fooling around with their new instruments in the hotel room. In the video, Naomi walks a little which is something she's been doing tentatively for about a month. She is 9 months old in this clip. Simone is three. They love making movies!

Vitamin D

Slithering or Rhoads' End or Ahoy Mateys! or Sunset Boggie

Arriving at Linden's place, Rhoad's End, on Orcas feels so good. Simone (3) plays with Celeste (4) and Rhoads (6) while Naomi (5 weeks old) sleeps most of the time.  

"Look what I caught!" -Rhoads

Our ship!

Had to stop and feed the horses apples.

Blaise blows our minds

Wait till you see Blaise Aguera y Arcas talk at TED (below) about the gorgeous power of Seadragon and Photosync.

Blaise's talk gave me a sweeping tummy-flipping sensation.  Similar to the first time I faxed a picture, received a voice mail or sailed on the open sea.  Simply marvelous.   Enjoy!





Blaise and Adrienne (Fairhall) have two wonderful kids, Anselm and Eliot, who are about the same ages as Simone and Naomi.  Adrienne's Wall is the name of their family blog.

Adrienne also has delivered masterly contributions to the world.  Both in physics and neuroscience.  She has created tools we can use to decode the language of the brain and see into what a person is experiencing.  Her elegant mathematical operations actually track a neuron's electrical activity and may one day allow us to stimulate an experience for example, give a person the sensation of a prosthetic limb.  Wild no?

Another Adrienne discovery about how we experience is the revelation that what we see and feel  depends upon what we saw and felt previously.  She recently helped teach a visual processing medical class about this, where she showed that-the details a person would notice when looking at a painting, for  instance-depends at a fundamental, microscopic level on what their eyes were focused on previously.  The idea is rather complex, Adrienne said, because it implies that perception is always changing: "What one experiences influences how one experiences it."  More here.

Margit and Naomi meet

Nice

Welcome Naomi!

Proud Papa sings Naomi her first lullaby.

"I'm a big sister!" -Simone

It was 8:46pm on May 16th, 2007.  Naomi arrived weighing an ounce less than 7 pounds and stretched to 19 1⁄4 inches.  Basking in the special day when our family grew to four.  

Somehow when newborn Naomi is getting her first bath, she lifted her body up onto her elbows and knees.  Dr. Sarah de la Torre said this was highly unusual.  

I find myself enamored with the little foot prints.

What a little mouth you have. 

"I can help you take care of Naomi!  Look Mama. " -Simone

Simone sings a lullaby to Naomi.

Sonya meets Naomi.

Theresa meets Naomi.

Yahoo Naomi is here! We were so excited we whipped up a birth announcement and sent it to our friends and family. 

Terminal socializing

Here are some snaps of Simone at the airport terminal making friends.

Did you just go on a trip?  Where did you go? - Simone

"That's funny." - Simone (David is on the left.)

Jessica, Blaine, Lucinda and Arno come over for dinner

A Citizen of the United States!

After five long years of rigamarole. Santino Luan becomes a Citizen.  What a Day!  From left to right, Petra (5 months pregnant), Santino and Meseret.

Santino started life as a Dinka tribe cattle herder, fled war, wandered over 1,000 miles across the desert (crocodiles, carrying babies, no food, no water) thinking he was one of the last boys alive on Earth, then refugee camps and now he is working at the Smith Tower.  He studied for his GED in night school and kept a group of 18 other Dinka Lost Boys together by having them meet to do tribal dances.  


He went home to marry and eventually was able to bring his wife over (that also took a number of years) and now they have a wonderful little boy and another little boy on the way.

Wilfred and Elinor visit us in Sun Valley

Simone sounds out

Simone seemed to enjoy crowds from the day she was born.  She also liked Barrack Obama.  She joined me at the WWFC Pac events and managed to get a few sounds out with each guest.  There is a bit more about the Political Action Committee on this page.

Knocked up and low on carabiners or Enjoying Zion

Missed the cool hikes.  Totally forgot to pack my spiderman climbing shoes and couldn't get the pretty blue Petzl Adjama harness higher than my knees.  To get into the Zion spirit, I used a giant carabiner to hold up my shorts.

Susan, our resident horticulturalist, often hung with me (thought she surely would have rather done the  wild cliff hanging treks with Molly, Sonya and Patty).  We struck off into the beautiful old riverbed (below) on the first day.  We collected a few high altitude mosses to seed into the cracks outside the gothic windows back at on the 40th floor of the Smith Tower.  There is a chance they will take there.

These inner canyons belong in the Louve. 

The striations of red remind me of an ancient city in Jordan.  

Susan taught me a cool way to identify a Douglas Fir from the cones.   

See the little mouse tails and feet sticking out from under little tables.  

If you see those you know you have a  Pseudotsuga menziesii (Douglass Fir).

My wonderful friends, Susan Holmes Lipsky, Sonya Stoklosa, me (one month to go), Molly Kingston and Patty Ryan making our way through Zion.

The water must have rushed through here on a mission!

wedding