Spring Break in California: Los Angeles

After our gnarlatious visit to San Diego, we made our way to Los Angeles to visit friends who live in the charming city of Santa Monica. It was great to spend time with former New Yorkers Tine and Ivan and reunite our kids, who, in former lives, were each other's best friends. Highlights of the trip included:

Anza-Borrego Desert State Park ... a detour on the way to Los Angeles

Santa Monica Pier

Posing on a dinosaur egg in Santa Monica

Imagining life by the tar pits

Being thankful we didn't live during the Ice Age

Losing sack races, even while breaking all the rules in the book

Enjoying a friendly game of topfschlagen

Practicing sadist donkey attacks

Enjoying some complex readings

More topfschlagen!

Enjoying Olvera Street

Going tubular at the park

Making gneiss poses

Taking for granite how many gneiss poses the kids can rock (yes, they're on a rock here too)

Visiting Little Ethiopia, where I explained everything I knew about the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon (it took 12 seconds)

Spring Break in California: San Diego

As this was the first year E was in school it was also the first year that we did what thousands of parents of school-age children throughout the nation do: We took a spring break vacation. Our long-overdue trip to California started in San Diego, where we visited friends Rachele and Mike (and dog Harley) and tried to stay as quiet as possible at 4:30 a.m. when the kids got up. The hosts and weather were both hospitable and we had a wonderful time catching up and sight-seeing. Some highlights of the trip included:

The Mission Bay playground, where the kids got to run around after 12+ hours of travel

The Turtle Breeding Grounds of the San Diego Zoo

Riding San Diego wildlife

Performing colonoscopies to unsuspecting canines

Striking gnarlatious poses while gripping the rails of our shortboard

Analyzing the proportionality between velocity and grain size  

Conducting field research on the resistance of sand at the littoral regions of the Eastern Pacific

Assessing the tactile, olfactory, and gustatory nature of common silica 

Aarfing with the seals

Testing the maximum tensile strength of marine snails

Exploring the tide pools at Sunset Cliffs

And, of course, just hanging out

NYC: Our winter wonderland

Despite a few cold snaps in New York, the winter has mostly been a mild one, prompting us to occasionally venture out of our warm apartment and into the wild world of NYC to enjoy activities such as: 

The Chinese Lunar New Year Parade

The famous Ping's Seafood (great dim sum)

The NYC Fire Museum

Part deux

Trying on snow glasses

Enjoying a playground in the posh Soho neighborhood (with next year's winter jacket)

part deux

Oh, also I made 'Gaufre de Liege' (waffles with large pearl sugar crystals)

Visit relatives

Fortified by waffles, we braved the elements and noticed that spring is beginning to, well, spring

The Botanic Gardens

See the crocuses (croci?)

Part deux

OK, we didn't venture out for this. I made 25 servings of baba ghanoush during naptime and ate it all in 10 days.

Nor this: H dressing up as a snowman (sans hat, carrot nose, and two eyes made out of coal)

And H now likes to line up his cars into a 'choo choo truck'

March Cookie of the Month: Biscotti

For the grandpas for the month of March we made biscotti. Although weak jaw muscles, small mouths, and a nervousness about biting into something that seems to be some form of rock make this very low on the list of a toddler's favorite cookie, the biscotti is actually quite a good pastry treat for kids of all ages. It is easy to make, it travels well, and, since it is twice baked, it keeps for long periods of time. In fact, according to a wikipedia page we didn't bother to fact check, Pliny the Elder boasted that such twice-baked goods could be edible for centuries. 

As you may know, "biscotti" is the plural form of biscotto. The word originates from the medieval Latin word biscoctus, meaning "twice-cooked/baked."

We hope the grandpas liked them....