April Showers Bring May Flowers

"But what do May flowers bring?", asks Ella.
Pilgrims!
Think about it...

It's been a quiet week for a change.  As the weather warms, the kids and I are feeling the end-of-the-school-year drag.  Productivity is decreasing as the temperature outside is increasing.

We got out on Wednesday night for a Members Only program at the Natural History Museum.  Some astronomers were giving a talk for kids on the "Path of the Planets" under the dome of the planetarium.  Normally, all of the night programs we go to at the museum are targeted at adults, so the kids really enjoyed this first program just for them.

The kids and I took a whirlwind trip up to Woodstock and back on Thursday.  We hired a man with a van (actually two men, one van) to help us swap the couches and a bed between Harlem and Woodstock.  It was a long day of driving for us (two and a half hours of driving each way and school work up and back for the kids) and we spent a mere 20 minutes actually in Woodstock since I was paying the men by the hour.  But what we saw after only being away for just under two weeks really surprised us.

 

So many flowers and bushes and trees have come into bloom in these last couple weeks!  The garden just keeps getting more and more amazing.  Even the movers let out a, "Wow!" when they walked into the back yard.

Luckily, we're going right back up there tonight with Kevin who hasn't seen it since late April.

And since it was such a quiet week with not much to report, I'll throw in a couple random photos from the week.

Sunset from our living room window

Artists in residence

Guess who lost his hat?

Art and Adventure

You know I'm not going to complain about my Mother's Day.  I had a lovely day with my two lovebugs all to myself.  But it wasn't exactly one of those 'pampering' kinds of Mother's Days, shuffling the kids from game to game, being responsible for all the meals, driving, etc.  So on Tuesday while the kids were in classes all day, I treated myself to a Mother's Day, Take 2.

I made my way to the Museum of Modern Art an hour before they open to the general public, so that I could enjoy some quiet time in the museum before it got slammed with tourists (members get in early).  I enjoyed a couple peaceful hours wandering through the new Edgar Degas exhibit with my free audioguide (via the museum's app on my phone), learning so much about monotypes.  I know I've said this before, but even if a museum charges for its audioguide - get it!  It always turns out to be an amazing lesson on the artist and/or exhibit.  As usual, had I just wandered through this show on my own with no guide, I probably would have enjoyed the work much less and sped through the exhibit much faster.  However, hearing the curator discuss the behind-the-scenes stories, learning about how Degas was known for experimenting with many different mediums of art.  I already knew some of this about Degas because Ella's favorite room in the Met is the Degas room where you can find both his sculptures of ballet dancers as well as his paintings.  But his time spent playing with ink and monotypes, manipulating them after printing them with pastels and paint, were new for me.  It was also fun to hear that he was influenced by Rembrandt's work with printing, since we have a framed print that the kids got to do when we visited Rembrandt's house this summer in Amsterdam.

After the museum I treated myself to a nice lunch and was refreshed when I picked up the kids a few hours later.

Ella had a great adventure this week as well.  She joined a homeschool field trip to do a ropes course out in Queens.

 

She loved participating in team building activities, climbing over tall walls, joining in trust falls, flying down zip-lines, and balancing on moving platforms 40 feet in the air.

She is so much braver than her mama.

"The brave do not live forever but the cautious do not live at all."

Mothers X Machina

Last week the kids and I got to see a Members Only Preview of the brand new fashion exhibit at The Met, Manus X Machina.

 

The Met has an annual Met Gala to open this fashion exhibit.  It's one of their largest fundraisers and is attended by all the biggest celebrities.  They had just hosted the event the night before we got to see these insanely gorgeous dresses.  This year's theme was 'fashion in the age of technology' and we saw inventive dresses made from 3D printers, man-made fabrics, metals, feathers - even real coral.

And as usual, Ella sketched her way through each and every gallery.  I saw more than one person stop and take a photo of Ella sketching.



We are in full spring mode here on the East Coast, which means rain, rain, and more rain.  Holden especially loved playing his Wayfinders Experience game in Central Park in the pouring rain.

Kevin and I decided last minute that it would be fun for him to surprise his family in California for Mother's Day and our brother-in-law Sean's birthday.  It sounds like he had a fantastic weekend with his parents, sister, nieces, Sean, and Sean's parents.  And I'm sure they were all thrilled to see him.

Meanwhile, the kids and I headed up to Woodstock on Friday.  In just a few days the garden had changed to much!  There were many more blooms on trees, bushes, the ground.  Many of the tulips and daffodils that we saw last week were already gone.  It's a well-planned garden that seems to have a constant motion of blooms and fades.  All perfectly timed.

It rained all day Saturday while we were there.  I got about another 15 boxes unpacked which continues to take an emotional toll.  I spent time looking through photo albums and putting away things that I know we no longer need and will rarely look at, but can't throw away.  I'm finding it pretty weighing to keep holding onto these things - items such as old college sweatshirts, yearbooks, journals, letters - and to keep moving them from home to home, only to stash them away in a garage until the next time we move.  I saw my sister's handwriting. She died fifteen years ago. I found one box that I opened full of art and framed photos that I hadn't seen in years.  I was a little confused until I looked at the date on the newspapers that they were wrapped in and realized that the box had been packed exactly ten years ago next month when we moved from San Francisco to San Mateo.  We never even opened it when we lived in San Mateo.  It sat taped shut and unmissed in our garage for 7 years, then in storage for another 3 years, only to be opened in Woodstock a decade later.  And honestly, most of the things I found in there I wouldn't hang in Woodstock either.

The kids had fun all day with Kevin's paint set and his old sketch books.  They worked in their Nature Journals and did some watercolors.  We all read a lot and found a nearby grocery store and stocked up the kitchen a bit.  The grocery clerk told us about an area with lots of waterfalls and great hiking that we're looking forward to exploring.



On Sunday morning we had to leave early to get back to the city for soccer and baseball games.  I heard Ella working in the kitchen and assumed (correctly) that she was making me toast for Mother's Day.  All of a sudden she screamed, "DEER!!"  Holden and I shot straight up in bed and looked out the window to the backyard.  Right there were two deer just a few feet away from us.

I imagined him saying, "You don't mind if I have your garden for breakfast, do you?"



The morning rain stopped in time for their soccer and baseball games to not be called off.  The kids and I had a really nice Mother's Day outside in the sunshine, watching sports, and ended with a dinner at our favorite local restaurant - a beer garden where the waiter knows us well, wished me a happy Mother's Day, and asked where Kevin was.  It was a nice way to end a weekend with the kids all to myself.

Holden's baseball diamond overlooks the Hudson River

Soooooo Much Stuff

We returned home from our spring break week completely exhausted, both physically and mentally.  In the last month since we bought our house up in Woodstock, we've spent ten days painting six rooms, sanded and painted two floors, and cleaned both inside the house and outside in the garden.  We had a few days before our storage unit arrived this week to finish up the painting and preparing for the arrival of a four-bedroom house worth of stuff.

After painting the walls and floor here, we decided to rip out that window seat.

Covered up lots of pink and peach paint around the house.

Proud of ourselves for figuring out how to put in that wall light above.

We took evening walks over to Lake Cooper across the street.  Unfortunately, it's a reservoir and not a recreation lake, but it's still beautiful to stroll around.

While Kevin and I worked hard, the kids kept themselves entertained by working in the garden, building fairy houses, and writing and producing a musical.

Watching a robin build her nest right in front of our window

Kevin in his happy place.

I was so excited the night before the truck was to arrive that I couldn't sleep.  I couldn't wait to see our furniture and kitchen toys and artwork that we've missed so much these last three and a half years.

I swear I didn't pose them like this - this is how they were standing

But almost as soon as the truck pulled up (and the above truck had to make TWO trips - our stuff was actually in an 80 foot trailer/rig that was too long to pull near our house), my stomach started to tighten.  As I watched our furniture and boxes being pulled off the truck and put in the house, I knew the stuff didn't belong here.  This was our California furniture.  These paintings belonged on our walls in San Mateo.  Each and every box was filled with memories of parties thrown in our backyard in the suburbs.  I was only partway through unpacking the second box when I had to stop and hide in the backyard so that the kids wouldn't see me bawling.

I was feeling so far from home.

The kids didn't even wait to get the boxes inside before tearing them open on the lawn.

Throughout the night I cried off and on, feeling conflicted because I know how happy we are here in New York.  And our life in California wasn't better or worse than our life out here, just different.  I had to keep reminding myself that this is just the current chapter of our lives.

I also was feeling really ashamed as I continued to unpack boxes.  Our life in California involved a lot more entertaining than it does out here and the contents of our boxes proved it.  I wondered why in the world we needed separate dishes for "everyday" and "formal" meals.  Both my china and everyday dishes are white.  And then I have an entire extra set of plastic dishes for when we're eating outside.  I unpacked about ten different pitchers, 4 coffee thermoses, dozens of platters, 7 or 8 cutting boards, and so many vases that even the movers were laughing when they carried in yet another box labeled "Vases".  We have glassware for BBQs, for everyday wine, and crystal for formal meals.  I had so many boxes labeled table linens that I didn't even bother opening most of them.  I had about a dozen different loaf pans in varying sizes in glass, metal, and ceramic.

Over the last three and a half years we've gotten by with just a single set of cheap dishes from IKEA, two pots, two pans, and two wine glasses.  And you know what?  It was plenty.  I think we all just fill the space that we have and in New York, since I don't have much space, I'm much more conscious of how much stuff we have.  It's been nice to live simply.  But when we lived in a four-bedroom house with a garage, it didn't really matter if I brought home yet another cute serving dish for a BBQ we were throwing that weekend.  I knew I could just throw it in the garage when I was done with it.

I was seriously shedding tears over this.

So at the end of our first night of unpacking, Kevin and I decided to open up a very nice, old bottle of wine that was given to us by our good friends Doug and Valerie on our wedding day.  Even though we hadn't showered that day and were still covered in paint, we unwrapped two fine crystal wine glasses and shared this delicious bottle of red wine, surrounded by bubble wrap and cardboard boxes.

 

The kids were less emotional than I was and really loved opening boxes of toys and books that they had forgotten all about.  Unfortunately, there were a few items that they hadn't forgotten about that didn't make the cut when we were packing up the house and were carted off to Goodwill.

Ella slept the first night surrounded by a dozen dolls she hasn't seen in years.

We spent the next few days unpacking as much as we could and after storing all of this stuff for several years and paying to have it shipped all the way across the country, I'm embarrassed at how big the pile to donate has become.

We raced home on Saturday, back to the city, to see the Giants play the Mets at Citifield in Queens.  It was a nice way to cheer us up after a very long week.

 

And on Sunday, even though there was quite a bit of rain, the kids played on their soccer and baseball teams.

Kevin and the kids on their way to soccer

Holden's urban baseball field

I was happy to stay at home and unpack and do laundry, in our dry apartment and feel grateful for it all.