Early Spring 2017

Spring! Helen truly loves daycare now, and walks all over playing with toys and the other kids. Pop-pop and Grandma still watch her on Tuesday evenings when I teach my grad seminar. Meanwhile, Marcus and Samantha are both becoming really accomplished musicians--Samantha was allowed to bring her cello home over spring break to practice, and she was so proud. Marcus genuinely has a lovely tone on the cello, and he likes playing toddler songs by ear to delight Helen. Samantha graduated to a two-wheeled scooter and rides her pedal bike with ease. Helen almost never crawls anymore--that's so last month--and her favorite word is "Ish!" (This!)

It snowed the first weekend in April. That Saturday, Helen and Robert went with Samantha to piano lessons and then to Jackie and Cece's birthday party at an art studio in Watertown. Marcus went to a BU kids' cooking class, noodles of Asia, where he made udon from scratch, kneading the dough with his feet (in a plastic bag!). That same morning I was presenting at a conference at UMass Boston--and yes, it snowed for hours!

The next day, it was much warmer, and a lot of the snow had melted. We went straight from church to dim sum with Sarah and Sean, then out for little cakes from the woman with the cart, and then to an Appalachian Mountain Club event in Beacon Hill, where the kids did a scavenger hunt out on the Boston Common, with a nice catered Italian dinner and a reptile show (sort of a random combination of things, but everything was a big hit).

By the next week, it was opening day at Fenway (view from my office) and warm, warm, warm out!

The following weekend, we went to a family concert at Symphony Hall and then out for Cuban food.

We also got some gardening in--Samantha and the neighbors' two-year-old helped weed, as we prepared our backyard for wood chips/mulch and a small play structure, and Marcus helped prepare the front for a raised bed for tomatoes.

Robert test-drove a Yuba Mundo long-tailed bike, and we all got lots of outdoor play time in.

Sister power. We have it.

Samantha is now officially a reader! She has excellent sight-word recognition and also good phonics strategies, and she is steadily making her way through the shelves of "I Can Read" books, including Splat the Cat, Frog and Toad, and many others. She even got her own library card this month, which is a huge help since with three readers in the family I am perpetually at my limit of books.

She's done with the pottery afterschool and now doing improv and drama, which she also really enjoys. These are some of the pieces that came home from the final pottery class.

Marcus wrote the following poem in school, when they had "Japan day" and learned about Japanese poetry forms. He also had his first baseball practice of the season (pictured above) with the same team and coach as last year--the Mariners, and Coach Nando.

Helen is learning to climb stairs. She prefers walking rather than crawling, and she hasn't really figured out a way down yet, but she's getting good at up, at least.

On Palm Sunday the kids went to the JP Easter Egg Hunt. The limit was two eggs per child, but neither kid knew that ahead of time. Marcus got around 20 and shrugged when informed of the limit, after the fact. Samantha got five, and ran off to give her eggs to some younger kids. She managed to find a pack of one-year-olds, all born within two weeks of Helen, whose mothers asked her to please keep the chocolate but were happy to let their babies "find" the now-empty plastic eggs. Helen slept through it all.

Later that day and throughout the week, then, Robert and the kids put together some furniture for our screened-in porch.

On Tax Day, Sarah, Samantha, Helen, and I went to the Boston Tax March on the Cambridge Common, in Harvard Square, to help pressure Trump to release his taxes. It was unfortunately very poorly attended, but at least we could hear all the speeches and talks.

Then it was Easter--a beautiful day, over 80 degrees. We had friends over, and Marcus and Juan Carlos tore around and around outside, playing happily, even running over to the park together. Samantha and Helen wore matching dresses, and Helen had an Easter bunny hat from Sarah, while Samantha had a superheroes hat which "perfectly" (her word) matched her dress.