Ice Skating!

I did some crossovers yesterday! I've been terrified to try, but I did alright. Wini has had two weeks off of school, and she's having trouble passing out of Beta level, so I decided to cash in all the free rink time cards that have been piling up because we're too busy to get to the rink. A side effect of all the skating is that I've gotten better at it myself. Wini is hung up on T stops, where your foot is shaped like a T, and you stop (duh). It's a little trickier than it sounds because on the foot that goes behind, you use the outside edge of your blade to stop. But once you get it, it makes a snappy little stop and you spray a satisfying little path of snow behind you.

Wini is still having trouble getting it, unfortunately. All the other elements to pass out of that level - which are very hard, if you ask me - she has down pat. She has to do backwards crossovers (6 in a circle), backwards strokes with a lifted leg, and those darn T stops. We may have to quit lessons for a while because they absolutely won't let her advance until she gets the stop.

On the first day of the new class, all the other kids were new and Wini was beginning her third pass through Beta. They worked on backwards crossovers and Wini was skating circles around them literally. But when the teacher lined them up and they did T stops, every other kid did the stop but Wini. So the class is focusing on the backwards work and Wini isn't getting the coaching she needs.

These days I can skate backwards a bit and I'm actually pretty good at T stops from all the extra practice.

Nick is Nearly Normal

Nick has been eating healthier as I eat NS. A lot of what he has changed has to do with eating smaller portions and cutting down on treats at work. Today he weighed in at 190! Way to go, hon! We checked his BMI and he's 15 or 20 pounds from being considered "normal" weight. Looking at him, I can't even see where those 20 pounds would be coming from. He's got a tiny pooch but it doesn't seem like 20 pounds worth. (Click to enlarge)



Yay for Nick!

I'm enjoying these weeks off with Wini with no vacations planned or special trips. We have met with friends a few times during the week, and other days we've puttered around the house working on projects and crafts. She's attempting her first paint-by-number (kittens, no surprise there).

Yesterday, a friend that lives about a mile and a half away called me to say that her remodeling project is proceeding and they were going to be repainting or tearing out most of the walls in her house; did we want to come over and paint silly stuff on the walls? We answered a resounding "yes!" Instead of driving, Wini rode her razor scooter and I biked. What a gorgeous fall day it was, the kind of day that is cool and crisp yet you still get warm in the sunshine. Every now and then the wind would pick up and leaves would fall like golden snow as we rode through the ones piling up on the sidewalk. There's something so satisfying about crunching leaves, especially on a scooter or bike.

As far as exercise though, it was fair to middlin'. Have you ever biked along with a 6-year-old on a scooter? They're not that fast, and at the slightest sign of a hill they go into heavy dramatic I-can't-scooter-up/down-that-hill mode. The neighborhood must have been interested to hear that my daughter thinks that I'm trying to kill her. But it was a wonderful way to slow down and enjoy the afternoon. The painting on the walls was a blast, too.

Doctor Visit

Good and bad as usual, I guess. My regular doctor has moved out of state so I have a new doctor. They didn't have my labs so I had to wait an hour before the doctor saw me (sigh). My blood pressure was high, not good. I don't know where that is coming from, it's been good since I've been off that medication. Maybe because it was incredibly hot in the office - the heater was pumping full steam and I was wearing a long sleeve shirt because it's cold outside - and I was a little ticked at having to wait so long?

Good stuff:
- my HA1C was 5.0 and that is well within the good range. Total cholesterol is 125, triglycerides are good (80), weight is down.
- got my flu shot.

Bad stuff:

- my fasting blood sugar was 66...the scary part is I don't remember feeling low. So that's not so good because I'm probably walking around with low blood sugars, and I need to take my blood sugar more often. She reduced my lantus by 1/2 (it's now down from 160 units per day in January to 30 units per day) but she is upping the metformin, go figure. She says that mix will work better for me.

- my "good" cholesterol is down 3 points. They want you to be around 35 or 40 and I'm at 27. My lowest was 17. Because she's never seen me before, she said something like "it's time for you to start a program of walking." Oy. I told her I've been exercising since February, peaked at a minimum of 60 minutes per day until my injury, and that I'm trying to get back to that from there. The bad thing is that all that exercise only got me up to 30 points. She is putting me on Lipitor 20 mg. to see if that helps since all the other ways to increase it - exercise, stop smoking, lose weight, increase your fiber, eat monounsaturated fats - are already in place. What I'm reading on the internet isn't making me happy about this because it seems like Lipitor isn't helping anyone increase their good cholesterol, but I'm willing to try it.

- for the plantar faciitis all she could do was give me a referral. She told me to never wear sandals like the ones I'm wearing (but they are very supportive...but okay, most of the time I use them in the shower and first thing in the morning, that's it.)

- blood pressure - she retook it and it was 135/70. Still, it's been 120/70 since I stopped taking that medication. I don't want to have to go back on it and deal with passing out. I told her about all that and she said she hadn't read back very far in my chart, so she looked over the cardiologist's report and backed down. I was on the lowest dose of Lotensin and it was making me chronically dizzy. I don't want to argue my way out of a medication if I need it, but I guess I want to monitor it myself more and see if it's warranted.

If anyone has any bright ideas about the good cholesterol I'd love to hear it. It does me no good to have a low total cholesterol if my good stuff is low because it's a ratio thing, not a direct number.

See below...

The next two posts are of the Brownie ceremony, and for some reason I can't delete this one. So the text is 2 entries down and the pictures are right below this.

Brownie Investiture Ceremony Pictures

Before we left the house, we took these pictures. Notice how tidy that uniform is at this point.





Signs led to the magic woods...




The girls' signs:


Before the ceremony:
















Marching up the hill:










Then they attacked the food.





Then it was time to play!

Brownie Investiture Ceremony

Sunday the 8th was our investiture ceremony. The girls who were with our troop last year technically were "bridging" up to Brownies, but we had new girls and we wanted to be inclusive of everyone, so we combined our ceremony so that all the girls were starting on the same foot.

We held the ceremony in a local park that has a canyon with a beautiful woods of tanoak and liveoaks. Even though it had been overcast and rainy for days the sun came out and it was pleasantly warm. The girls had made decorations by making pictures that showed examples of the Girl Scout law; we strung them in a line from a curved oak tree that was bending its way up the hill. The spot we chose was on a slope with a creek at the bottom. Before the ceremony, the girls wanted to hit the creek, so we distracted them by having them pose with funny faces for photos.

Once the ceremony began, the girls marched up the hill in a line. Wini led the line as the "leader daughter" - frankly, only because she got there early enough to practice the route with me as we had only practiced in our meeting room. Wini led them up the hill, then over a bridge we made with a Barbie balance beam placed over a blue yoga mat to represent a bridge over water. Then they formed a horseshoe facing the parents.

They performed a silly version of the Brownie story (in which a girl goes out to the magic woods at night, is told by a wise old owl to look in a pond and say a chant and she will find a Brownie), then they repeated the GS law and made the GS promise. Here's how the ceremony goes from there:

LEADER:
"Cross your little fingers,
Stand upon your toes
That's a bit of magic
Every Brownie Girl Scout knows.
Now we all are standing in a forest glade.
Listen very carefully
See the magic made.
Open your eyes
Here we are in the big woods
Before you is a pond
You can almost hear the Wise Old Owl
And the friends of whom you're fond."
(Assist each girl to the pond and while turning her - repeat:)

"Twist me and turn me and show me an elf,
I looked in the water and saw.
(girl says, "Myself".)

(Place Brownie Girl Scout pin on uniform upside down, give Girl Scout handshake, and ask the new member to repeat the Girl Scout Promise. She then stands to the side. Repeat process for each girl.)

After the ceremony, the girls hit the snacks, and then it was wild runs down the hill to walk on the stones in the creek, climb on the pipe across the creek, and swing on the rope swing where a few weeks earlier a mom had broken her arm (as an older girl informed us).

Pictures to follow, this is a test post.

New pictures! We went ice skating last night for a special treat for Wini - a LATE night (8:00 - 10:00) which was a big deal to a 6-year-old. Also, it's an outdoor rink, which always makes it a little more magical.

Me and Wini skating:






I love this picture because Wini is just a blur. It really shows how she just zooms around effortlessly.



I'm thinking of using this for our Christmas card this year! It's seasonal and we all look happy.



And here's me with Nutmeg, who needs a lot of cuddling now that the weather has turned cold.

Picture Day, Fall 2006

Picture day, 2006. The sleeper awakens, sort of:



Mom gets her in a nice dress by striking a bargain: she will wear the dress if she can wear her cowboy boots and dance tights. Done and done. But what to do about the hair? A palmful of silk therapy oil and a lot of hairspray later, we have a shiny helmet that will hopefully hold long enough before deteriorating back into cowlicks.



Here she is with her dancin' boots on. Luckily it's not PE day.

Los Ricos Tambien Lloran

The other day I was riding around my neighborhood on my bike with a camera. I have the (in my opinion) misfortune to live one block away from Atherton, a township with super-rich residents. The minimum size of a housing lot is one acre, and in the Bay Area, that's unusual. There's also absolutely zero commercial zoning, nor do they have a public school. I don't know how they swing that legally, but they do. I live in your typical middle class suburb; it's an immediate transition from regular folks to the likes of the CEO of Google.

So here's my bicycle tour of Atherton.

First, they have this sort of nonsense. I'm convinced it's so you can't give easy directions so it cuts down on the riff raff.






Oh look, it's greenery recycling day! They get pickup once a week in Atherton, which is a good thing, because it takes this many containers to clear those lawns of pesky leaves every week. To be fair, this is for two houses, so that's only 6-7 containers each per week. We barely fill up one container every two weeks, and we have a big oak tree in our yard.



Then there's the creative folks, like these people, who have TV screens in their outside property wall. They turn them on at night - I've seen vacation photos, regular TV shows, and weird art shots of bloodshot eyes. Oddly, all the TV screens have been bombed by birds. Why? A mystery for the ages.



See? It's a pretty house, except for the color. It's not really showing how putrid it looks in person in this picture. It's stucco - yellowish, greenish, brownish stucco.



Now here's a little fixer-upper.



You can't really see it in the picture, but the windows are broken out and it's obviously been abandoned for a long time. Gotta love the fake timber x's and all that. What would you pay for this little home improvement project?



A cool 3.9 million and it's yours. It's not like this is on the bay, or the Pacific, or even on top of a hill. There is no awesome view, it's just a big lot on a quiet street, in the "right" neighborhood.

Construction is always going on in Atherton. There's more home improvement permits issued in Atherton than there are lots. On this bike ride I passed seven of those portable taco trucks -- I counted. There's that many crews at work on any given day.



The funny thing is you're probably thinking this is for a basement, right? Well, basements are pretty rare in California, but I have seen this more than once in Atherton. My guess is that this is for the underground garage. Probably so that the owner can house his or her classic car collection.

So a little closer to the polo fields is this little gem, which made me laugh out loud. It just looked funny to stick some cheap patio furniture in the middle of a vacant lot, but I suppose it makes sense. The realtor has to have somewhere to sit on Open House day.



How much would you pay for this landlocked, middle-of-nothing-special lot? There's plenty of room for your 10,700 square foot dream house. You'll only have to be paying property taxes on this amount, though:



I can't diss Atherton, though, because it gives me a flat, nearly carless place to ride my bike as fast as I want. Wee!

It's the first day of First Grade! Wini is sporting a new haircut. Her hair is so thick, it lays a couple of inches away from the back of her head! She's lining up for class (she's in front of Juan Carlos - remember him from the house across the street, Emma?).




On the third day of school, Wini got hurt! She got her lunch, but had to go back for her fork and her milk. She was running across the blacktop and tripped on her shoelaces.

She was helped into the nurse and they cleaned her up. When I saw her coming out of class the first thing she said to me was, "I'm okay, mom!" (in a peeved tone of voice). She and her friends rushed over to tell me the important part: when she got out of the nurse's office, her lunch was gone - somebody stole it! (No doubt the yard duty people cleaned it up.) But they gave her another lunch and didn't even mark it on her card, Wini says.



The last Friday before school we went to Bonfante Gardens. I just thought this was a funny picture of Wini in a strawberry.

A few more pictures from our trip to Humboldt Redwoods. For some reason blogger messes up and only gives me one chance to upload. When I try to do it a second time, it bombs out every time, even if I make it a separate entry.

These pictures are from a short 2 mile walk in the redwoods. It was so hot that day, it felt nice and cool to stroll under the shade of these trees. We were trying to memorize the stats on the Founders Tree because at the nightly campfires, if you could answer a question you won a free bag of firewood. Wini did win a bag, but I don't think it was on the Founders tree...maybe she'll remember what the question was she answered.







This last picture is of a very tall tree that crashed in the 90's. It was over a thousand years old, and it was so loud that a neighbor across the valley thought there had been a train wreck. They found mud splattered on neighboring trees almost a hundred feet up.

Wini is doing the yoga "tree" pose. Nick is just being Nick.