Life is Good

Tessie found yet another way to endear herself to me tonight when she announced, "I want to get Daddy a beer!" and proceeded to do just that.



This is what fatherhood is all about, isn't it?

Holiday Extravaganza!

Before Christmas, Tessie's day care held a "Holiday Extravaganza" pageant featuring all of the children, split up into their various age groups. Tessie and her cohort of two-year-olds, the Ducklings, were in fine form as they kicked off the evening's entertainment in front of a restless audience of parents, grandparents and electronic recording devices:

Wardrobe Malfunction

Tessie has been trying to be helpful around the house by doing small tasks. Today, she emptied the garbage for us.



I have no explanation for the pants. Tessie is normally quite good at dressing herself. Not today.

Flower Child

Here's a bit of video from our recent trip. This was taken atop the Petřín hill in Prague on the day described in this earlier post. The sneezing gag is something she picked up from her cousin Andrejka; as you'll see, Tessie thinks it's hilarious. We think it's pretty darn cute.

Famous Chairs & Anonymous Tables

Tessie finds ways to amuse herself that, in turn, amuse us. Here she is playing in a forest of 'Swan chairs,' the iconic Scandinavian design by the iconic Scandinavian architect Arne Jacobsen. The tables may also be famous, but somehow, not knowing their design pedigree makes me feel less guilty about what happens at the end of the video...

Baseball Tessie

The Red Sox beat the Tigers tonight, 6-3, and hit three home runs in the process. After the game, Tessie and I watched highlights on MLB.com. (I think Big Papi is her favorite player.)

Citius, Altius, Fortius, Chaoticus

Tessie's day care held a fund raising event on Friday and modeled it after the Olympics. Tessie and her cohort (the "Pooh Bears") "competed" in a total of three events, and the whole thing took about twenty minutes, which is a significant improvement over the usual two weeks the real Olympics consumes. While there was no specific "cat herding" event, the staff certainly had Olympic potential; the children were as entropic as one might imagine.

The events seemed to me to be more in the spirit of training the little ones for the working world than for athletic competition. The first event, a crawl through a series of tunnels, teaches the kids that the seeing the light at the end of the tunnel only means they haven't entered the next tunnel yet, the obstacle course is set up to make them jump through arbitrary hoops without explaining why, and the scooter race just gets them ready for the madness of commuting.

Or maybe that's just my cynical interpretation. Judge for yourselves:

Tessie at Bedtime

Tessie was even more delightful than usual at bedtime tonight. She seemed to really enjoy playing peek-a-boo with Mommy.

Time Capsule

Over fifty years ago, the Barstow family of Wetherfield, Connecticut, won a trip to Disneyland in a contest sponsored by, of all things, Scotch tape. Proto-blogger Robbins Barstow shot some Super-8 footage, then added narration about 40 years later, and as all such things do, it ended up on the internet. This movie runs over 34 minutes, but every bit of it captures a quaint vision of Eisenhower-era America, including, of course The Magic Kingdom, but also Idyllwild Airport, Knott's Berry Farm, Universal Studios and even Davy Crockett-style fringed jackets and coonskin caps. The Barstow family even stayed in Pasadena, at the Huntington Sheraton Hotel, which later became the Ritz-Carleton and is now the Langham Huntington Resort.

Follow this link to get to the website hosting the video.

It is my hope that, fifty or more years from now, future readers of this site and its content (and yes, I do expect it will be archived by someone, somewhere) will find it just a little bit as charming and entertaining as Mr. Barstow's film. Enjoy!

(h/t Curbed LA)

Chavez Ravine

The Red Sox are in town this weekend for three exhibition games against the Dodgers, so we took Tessie to see the 2007 World Champions. She's been to two other baseball games already (and one in utero), but this was her first time seeing the team in whose honor she was named.

I certainly hope they'll do better next time: the Dodgers beat them, 3-1.

Even though the Red Sox have already begun their regular season with two games in Tokyo, these three games in L.A. are exhibition games, so it's a good thing this one didn't count. Nor will tomorrow's game, a throwback extravaganza to be held in the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum in front of 115,000 fans.

We decided to skip that one because, like so many other things in Los Angeles, the traffic and parking hassles are likely to more than cancel out any enjoyment of the actual event.

So we went tonight to Dodger Stadium, in Chavez Ravine, just north of downtown Los Angeles. A much sparser crowd of only 34,404 was in attendance, making the experience more pleasurable and giving Tessie plenty of room to roam and make new friends.

We left after the seventh inning stretch, which is normally something we would never do, but the game was late and we wanted to get Tessie home before it got too far past her bed time. Besides, the Red Sox left the game long before we did - all of the starters had been replaced by the seventh inning by what one of the Dodger announcers called the "Witness Protection Lineup."

Since it wasn't the same team, we broke with tradition and left before the final out. We actually even arrived home before the final out, which we saw on TV.

Tessie didn't get to see the Sox win, but she did make it to the seventh inning stretch:

The Long-Awaited San Diego Video

At last, I've finally got the promised video from our trip to San Diego earlier this month. This was all shot at the Reuben H. Fleet Science Center in Balboa Park, as we explored our way through the exhibits.

Tessie and Raisins

Tessie loves raisins, but she is willing to share:

Tessie & the Alphabet

One of Tessie's favorite toys is this alphabet board. Each letter has a picture under it, which is visible when the letter is removed. Most of the pictures are of animals, and Tessie has impressed us by learning it quite well. As the video shows, she's become quite adept at knowing which letter goes where. Sometimes it's hard for us to remember she's only 18 months old!

Guests of Big Oil

Using his enormous profits from the petroleum industry, Mr. J. Paul Getty seems to have purchased every available piece of art and made it part of his collection. He then, magnanimously, allowed the world to come and see it at no charge. (As befits a Los Angeles attraction, though, it's free for people, but cars need a reservation and $8 for parking.)


The Getty Villa, which is not to be confused with the Getty Center, is a recreation of the Villa dei Papiri, a private home in Herculaneum buried by the Vesuvius eruption. As such, it is a fitting site for the Getty Trust's collection of ancient art and artifacts. It formerly housed the Trust's entire art collection, but in 1997 all of the western art was moved to the Getty Center, leaving the ancient Greek, Roman, Etruscan, Minoan, Cycladic, etc. behind in Malibu.

One questions the wisdom in building a replica of a house destroyed by a natural disaster in Malibu. Isn't that just tempting fate?

Regardless of the risks, because, frankly, they hadn't occurred to me until now, we took Tessie to view Mr. Getty's ancient art collection. Our first stop on arrival was the "Family Forum," a children's play area with dress-up foam shield and helmets, vases to scribble on with dry-erase markers, and crayons to make rubbings.

We walked the galleries and gardens, saw the current Piranesi exhibit, ate in the cafe, and stood idly by while Tessie entertained the other visitors by splashing around in the fountain. She needed a change of clothes after that, but she seemed to have lots of fun.

More Video Jiggery-Pokery

I'm still working out the kinks in this video blogging stuff, so here's another try: still working through YouTube, now I use Windows Movie Maker (which I didn't even know I had until today - thank you, Mr. Gates) to convert the file to .wmv format, which YouTube prefers. Early results are promising, and this software lets me do a few things more than just post raw video. Before too long, I expect I'll have these videos so chock-full of dissolves, fades, wipes and silliness that you'll barely be able to see Tessie. I'll try to restrain myself.

So, here we go with a revised version of Tessie at Eaton Canyon. Let's call it the "Director's Cut":

Eaton Canyon

Last weekend's rainy weather is nowhere in sight; this weekend was sunny with temperatures pushing 80. Winter is over here in southern California. (Make that "winter.")

So with a beautiful sunny day on our hands and nothing else to do, we decided to visit the Eaton Canyon Natural Area. The canyon has nature trails and lots of animals; on our short walk today we saw a rabbit, woodpeckers and several other birds. There are normally lizards out and about, but they seem to rely more upon their calendars than the weather and are apparently still hibernating. As the sign indicates, rattlesnakes can be found here as well, but they also seemed to be in hiding. Our greatest worry was poison oak, which (we believe) we managed to avoid.

A hike of just a few hundred yards from the parking area brought us to the arroyo, or wash, where melted snow comes through the canyon. There was a lot more water than we were expecting, and it was really cold, but that didn't seem to interfere with Tessie's enjoyment of it one bit:

Christmas, part 2

Our Christmas visit to Santa Rosa continues:

Tessie found lots of new things to play with at her cousins' house, including her cousins. She enjoyed basketball:

the piano:

and trimming the Christmas tree:

...but the most fun of all was knocking over Adam and John's Lego creations:

But of course the highlight of the visit was opening gifts on Christmas Eve. (Yes, on Christmas Eve. I was raised in an open-gifts-on-Christmas-morning family, Hannah's is a open-gifts-on-Christmas-Eve family. This is probably the greatest challenge in our relationship.)

Last Christmas, Tessie was only 4 1/2 months old, so she didn't really 'get it,' and slept through most of it as well. This year was different. She seems to really like all the decorations, especially the colored lights. And of course she loves the gifts. Here she is reading a new book and wearing a new hat:
She's still a bit too young to fully understand the holiday; we haven't yet introduced the concept of Santa Claus, and have not taken her to a mall to visit him. Maybe next year.

Christmas, part 1

This Christmas we travelled again to Santa Rosa, California, to spend the holiday in the home of Hannah's brother Martin, his wife Sunjae and their two sons, Adam (age 8) and John (6).

It's a long drive to Santa Rosa. We left Pasadena on Friday afternoon and spent the night in Westley, which is near the I-5/I-580 interchange east of San Francisco. Tessie had spent an awful lot of time strapped into a car seat by the time we checked in to her hotel, and thus had oodles of energy to expend before finally falling asleep around midnight.

The next morning we completed the drive, stopping for lunch in downtown Santa Rosa at the Third Street Alehouse. (Recipe for their Parmesan Garlic fries: 1 part potatoes, 1 part Parmesan cheese, 2 parts diced raw garlic. Yikes.)

One of the highlights of our visit was a trip to the Lawrence Hall of Science, on the UC Berkeley campus. The octagonal building looks like a Star Trek set (and may once have been one), with a large plaza in front that offers stunning views of San Francisco Bay.


Inside are exhibits, including Tessie's favorite interactive toy, the Gravity Well. As soon as we saw it we knew she'd love to play, and in fact she delighted in retrieving the balls and throwing them directly into the center of the well - no mucking around those circuitous elliptical paths for Tessie; no, no, no, the sooner it goes in, the sooner it falls out and she gets to throw it in again!
That's Uncle Martin beside Tessie:

Other exhibits included live animals and a "Wild Music" special exhibition. The two boys are (l-r) cousins Adam and John:

What she says in the video is "All done, all done." This sems to mean a variety of things; frequently it indicates that she's no longer interested in whatever is being offered, be it food, an activity, or nap. It also seems to have many other meanings which we have thus far been unable to decipher. In this case, it probably meant "Please stop pretending you have any musical ability at all, Dad. You're embarrassing me."

Coming soon: Christmas, part 2!

Christmas Party

Tessie's day care had a "Winter Formal," with all the little ones dressed in their finery. Tessie remained unencumbered by any semblance of Christmas spirit:

She did like the alligator rocker, though:

Tessie + Yoghurt = Mess

Tonight's menu: diced pork, cous-cous, peas and squash, followed by yoghurt with strawberries for dessert. The pork was a hit, the peas and squash were tolerated, and the cous-cous was a flop. Dessert was a hit:

At some point, after I put the video camera away and before I got out the still camera, she got yoghurt in her hair: