The Holiday Extravaganza!

Tessie's pre-school held its annual holiday pageant this week. In case you have trouble finding her, Tessie is in the back row on the right. We're pretty sure she's in the back row because of her height, not her level of talent. Yeah. Height. That's it.



(Actually, Tessie's performance lacked much of the gusto we saw in rehearsal. We believe she dialed it back a bit for the actual performance so as not to upstage her classmates.)

The view from the fifth row:

Museum Piece

Our Thanksgiving trip to Boston continued with a visit to Boston's second-best-loved tourist attraction, the Museum of Science. (Any guesses what #1 is? Answer below.)

So to Cambridge we drove. Yes, it's the Boston Museum of Science, but it straddles the Charles River, and the parking garage is in Cambridge. We found the parking to be quite a bit more crowded than we expected, but the museum itself wasn't too bad.

Luckily, our membership to one of our local science museums has reciprocal benefits here, and we were even able to get Aunt Leslie in. Upon entering, we headed straight for this kinetic sculpture, which Tessie watched with fascination while we figured out what to do next.

Nearby was a gallery devoted to understanding taxonomy. Tessie tried her hand at classifying animal skulls,

sorted various minerals according to her own scheme,

and got to see a tiger (her favorite animal) up close!

We even took Tessie to her first movie. The museum has an Omnimax theater, and was showing some kid-friendly features. We gave her the choice between a film about a tropical reef and one about Antarctica. She chose the one with the penguins. Unfortunately, this particular film was about 15 years older than Tessie, but still she enjoyed the scenes of the penguins frolicking, and the filmmakers spared us from having to see any of them becoming leopard seal lunches. Tessie endured her first move theater experience quite well. She sat without fidgeting, kept her voice down, and behaved properly. Her only complaint was that the soundtrack was too loud, and I have to agree with her on that. She may not be ready for a full-length feature yet, but it's nice to know she can sit still for 40 minutes.

After the film, we went back into the museum galleries. Tessie got to operate a bank of mechanical devices,

and rest a bit with Mommy,

before becoming a bee,

and learning a new musical instrument.

We stayed almost until closing time. Tessie loves museums!

[Boston's most loved tourist attraction? Fenway Park, of course!]

Turkey Time

Not having been back east in almost a year, we decided to take Tessie to visit her American grandparents at Thanksgiving.

We had a very pleasant visit, but before long we had eaten all the turkey we could handle,

had solved the world's problems in conversation with Aunt Leslie,

and even invented new rules for dominoes.

What else could we do? Well, Boston is one of the world's great cities and has several outstanding museums, so we decided to take advantage of the opportunity and see two of them. Our first visit would be to the Boston Children's Museum. Bostonians of my vintage may recall this museum's predecessor, which was located in the Jamaica Plain neighborhood. This newer incarnation of the Children's Museum, I was surprised to learn, has been in its current location since 1979. As happy as I would have been to revisit the old museum, this new one would exceed my expectations by far.

But first we had to get there. Somewhat surprisingly for a southern California native, Tessie loves trains. With both parents and Aunt Leslie in tow, she boarded the MBTA's Green Line for a brisk ride into downtown Boston,

where we changed trains at the Park Street station. Tessie's favorite letter is - no surprise - 'T,' so she was thrilled to see it emblazoned on the sides of all the train cars. (The Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority rail system is known simply as "The 'T.'") Two stops later, we arrived at South Station and made the short walk across the Fort Point Channel to the museum.
After a quicker-than-expected lunch at the nearby Barking Crab restaurant, we entered the museum. One of the very first things visitors see upon entry is a three story climbing tower made of carpeted plywood and enclosed in cable mesh. Sized and spaced for smaller bodies, the tower compels kids to slide, twist and shimmy their way from level to level to reach the top. Tessie took to it immediately, and while she did not summit in her first attempt, she would before the day ended.

From there it was off to the "Boats Afloat" area on the second floor. Aprons are thoughtfully provided, but only in child sizes, so adults must be on guard against splashing kids who gleefully use the room's assortment of buckets, tubes and other playthings to send water in all directions.
Other hands-on activities at the museum include all of the devices in the "Raceways" room, where kids (and o.k., I admit it: me, too) can drop golf balls in a wide variety of machines. There are simple ski jump-type ramps, a sine wave ramp, pachinko machines, a gravity well, and even a design-your-own wall of magnetized tubes.
There's so much more to do at the museum that we had hard time keeping up with Tessie. She got to suit up as a worker on Boston's (in)famous Big Dig:

She got to "drive" an excavator: and dress up as a squirrel:Tessie even got to visit an authentic Japanese house from Boston's sister city, Kyoto. (It was a swap: Boston got a whole house; Kyoto got a street lamp. That's the last time the trade imbalance with Japan was in our favor.) Here she is in the kitchen:and here in the bedroom:
(No, she's not sleeping. She's play-sleeping. We were already wiped out by this time, but Tessie was still going strong!) She sat on some eggs in a nest:and predicted her own future:
Eventually it became time to leave, so back to the 'T' we went. Tessie finally showed some signs of tiredness, then fell asleep on my lap for the train ride home.

Which only meant she got her second wind that night, and stayed up until midnight after wearing us out all day!

(Being slow learners, we repeated the whole experience with a trip to Boston's Museum of Science a few days later. That'll be my next post.)

Portraits by Tessie

Tessie's been making some attempts at representational art lately. Above are a portrait and a self-portrait. I know; could have fooled me, too. That thing that looks like a spoon? That's the self-portrait, "Tessie in a Dress," according to the artist.

The other is a portrait of "Chris." It took us a little time to nail down who Chris is, and that's the real reason I'm posting this. At first, we assumed Chris was a colleague in her pre-school, but Tessie set us straight on that: "Chris who was here," she said, meaning our house guest of last June, an old friend of mine from college who came out to look for a job here in California. (Joke's on him: there are no jobs in California. Employment is sooo 2008.)

"You mean Mr. Chris, who gave you puzzles?" I asked, referring to the jigsaw puzzles he sent Tessie as a thank-you gift. (She loves jigsaw puzzles, by the way.)

"Yes." I am not going to begin to speculate as to why she chose to depict Mr. Chris with a definite frown and what appears to be a dunce cap on his head.

Hallowe'en Recap

Before the event recedes too far from memory, we should get some details from the past Hallowe'en recorded.

Tessie, a strong believer in recycling, joyfully reprised last year's personification of the Pumpkin Fairy. She'd probably be perfectly happy to wear the same costume again next year, if only she would stop growing. (That's not likely, though.)With the 31st falling on a Saturday this year, Hallowe'en became a two-day event here in town. Friday, a few blocks of downtown were barricaded off and our fine local merchants gave out candy to throngs of kids.

Some businesses that perhaps should not be so cavalier about the distribution of their assets participate: Even our local dive bar (the one that appears frequently in the Police Blotter for closing-time altercations) gets in on the act, and ignores its own sign: We decided to forgo the costume contest this year; after all, Tessie was reusing last year's non-winning, store-bought costume. Maybe next year. Instead, at Tessie's suggestion, we chose to end our day with a visit to the town's other watering hole, the one with the long tap list and the short arrest history.

The next day was Hallowe'en, so we got our jack-o-lanterns prepared. Tessie drew their faces on with marker, her mother did the cutting, and I made banana margaritas. The pumpkins turned out great (see photo at top); the margaritas, well, ehh. (Not that Tessie got to try them.)

So once again she donned her costume and we set off around the neighborhood while Tessie's Mom stayed behind to distribute our candy.

Some of our neighbors' decorating efforts easily surpassed ours: Surprisingly, many of the houses we visited on our route were empty, but their owners had left bowls of candy out for self-service. The surprising part was that there was still candy in them when we got there; the even more surprising part was that Tessie left some behind.

After almost an hour of trick-or-treating, Tessie's candy pumpkin slipped from her grasp, too heavy for her to hang on. So, a successful Hallowe'en! (Tessie gets two pieces each night, if she finishes her dinner. At our current rate, she'll still have candy left in March.)

P is for Physics

Actual conversation with my three-year-old, shortly after sunset on a recent evening:

T: "Mommy, look! Real clouds!" [ed. note: while the Station Fire was raging, we were making a distinction between the columns of smoke sent up by the fire, and "real" clouds]

Me: "I see. Aren't they pretty?"

T: "Yes! They're orange and blue! Why?"

Me (thinking): "Umm... Well, when the sun is setting, the light has to go through more air in the atmosphere, and it bends differently, and that makes it orange. Bending light makes different colors."

T: "Yes! Like a rainbow!"

Wow. Simple association (different colors = rainbow), or profound insight into how refraction works?

P is for Precocious

After a round of singing the Sesame Street classic "C is for Cookie," and including variants like "T is for Tessie":

Tessie: C is for cookie, that's good enough for me... C is for cookie,
that's good enough for me... P is for pneumonia, that's good enough for me...

Tessie's Mom: Did she just say "P is for pneumonia?"

Tessie's Dad: Yes, she sure did.

Tessie: I'm a strange child.

And there you have it.

(Credit/responsibility/blame for this must go to the Barenaked Ladies song "Crazy ABCs" on the Snacktime album, which Tessie greatly enjoys.)

Brewers - Tigers

We didn't celebrate Tessie's birthday with just cupcakes and a haircut, of course. That was just Day One of Tessie's Birthday Festival. (Despite the title of this post, though, we didn't follow up with a baseball game.)

The morning after her actual birthday, we piled into the car and set out. First stop? A brewery. Stone Brewing in Escondido, CA, to be precise. O.K., so Tessie still has 18 years to go before she can get any enjoyment out of that, but we took the tour anyway. Standard stuff, but mixed with Stone's own particular attitude. The beers are fine, but they try a bit too hard to be outrageous, with brews named "Arrogant Bastard Ale" and "Sublimely Self-Righteous Ale," and they push their recipes to the limit, confronting your palate with an overload of hops, or bitterness, or both, simply because they can and brag about it later. They seem to view brewing as an extreme sport.

We also had a snack in their outrageously expensive restaurant. Two appetizers + two beers + milk for Tessie + tip = over $40.00! Yikes!

These fermentation vessels, if I am remembering this correctly, hold 12,500 gallons each. Our tour guide made that somewhat more comprehensible: if you wanted to drink one dry, that would mean drinking a six-pack worth of beer every night for 65 years.


Anyway, that's not why we went to Escondido. The real object of out visit was to take Tessie to see her favorite animal, the tiger. (Tiger starts with T, Tessie starts with T. We're pretty sure that's why.) So we got ourselves memberships in the San Diego Zoological Society. We'll certainly be visiting their famous Zoo at some point, but this trip was to their slightly less famous Wild Animal Park.

Begun as a breeding facility serving the zoo, the park opened to the public in 1972 as an attraction in its own right. The animals there are mostly African species, like these elephants:

There's also a petting zoo. Tessie likes petting zoos:

Most of the animals are large enough that they require lots of area to roam. There's a tram ride called the "Journey Into Africa" that carries visitors around the otherwise inaccessible parts of the park to view the larger animals. Here Tessie is waving to a giraffe:

We could have taken the hot-air balloon ride, but weren't quite sure how Tessie would react. We also saw "Dino Mountain," an assortment of foam-rubber animatronic dinosaurs that Tessie seemed to enjoy, especially the one that spat water at us.

There are tigers as well, in the Asian animals area. Regrettably, they were so far back in their enclosure, and so well hidden in the shade, that we're not sure Tessie actually saw them. So we made sure she got a close-up look at one:

She seemed satisfied with that, just as she seemed to enjoy the whole trip. Her favorite part was feeding the ducks in the park's central lagoon. Don't worry - there is extensive video, which will be shared soon.

Three!

Tessie turned three not long ago, and of course we didn't let the occasion pass by unobserved. Her birthday was on a Friday, which meant she would be in preschool, so Tessie's Mom and I went there to help her celebrate with her classmates.

Celebration had to wait until after nap, though. That's Tessie at the far right:


Once all the kids were awake, they were treated to cupcakes Tessie had made with her mother the night before. Tessie delighted in handing the cupcakes out to her friends:

Of course, the best part of cupcakes is eating them:
The festivities ended with hugs all around...:
...and then we took Tessie for her very first haircut. Really. That's what she wanted:
A few snips later, and she was done. There's not a dramatic change in her appearance, but the ends are a bit neater. From there, we went home for dinner and to open presents:
The next day we embarked on her birthday trip...