My mother left today after an all-too-short week-long visit. Phoebe, Theo and I saw her off to the airport in Boston. There is a really cool wall of multi-angled mirrors in Terminal C of Logan Airport. Here are the 3 of us, on our way back to the parking garage after my mother headed through security.
In answer to the question of my previous post, here is Theo with his striped shirt. (Though in this photo he is not holding the glass.) This photo was taken by Phoebe, by the way.
You can also see here that the other striped surface was a placemat. (Since you asked, Sally.)
And here are Phoebe and John, toasting with the sparkling apple cider.
Can you see what we had for Phoebe’s special birthday dinner? Here’s a hint.
Looking at these photos, as I am about to publicly share them here, I am reminded of several things: 1) I am not a big fan of wallpaper. However, having removed wallpaper from one of the rooms after we moved in, I decided that I could live with the wallpaper in the other rooms 2) It is hard to find an angle to take pictures in our house that does not involve piles of clutter and 3) We still haven’t had our “new” deck doors finished that we had to have put in after the old ones rotted…about 4 years ago.
We had dinner in the dining room for the first time in…I don’t remember when. We had a little early celebration with my mother of Phoebe’s birthday, since my mother won’t be here for the big day itself. We had some sparkling apple cider and used stemmed glasses, which was novel for the kids. This reflection (or refraction, really) in the stem of one of the glasses caught my eye. Happily, my camera was close at hand.
These are some photos from a month ago, taken that same morning that I photographed the ice drops. The light was so beautiful that I went back in to get my camera after the school bus came for Phoebe. (The iPhone does quite well for many occasions, but there are times when I really want to be able to better control the focus and the depth of field.)
I do seem to be sharing a lot of photos of ice and snow these days…
We decided to have an excursion into Boston today, to do something fun for my mother’s visit. We didn’t have a specific plan in mind, but thought we’d take the train and play it by ear for the afternoon, and then get dinner at Pho Pasteur. (2 years ago, we took the train into Boston and happened to eat there after wandering around the Common, and now it has become a tradition when we take the train into Boston. They have really yummy soup.)
On the train ride in, we decided that we’d check out the Institute of Contemporary Art, which none of us had been to (at least in its current location). It looked to be a reasonable (~15 to 20 minute) walk from South Station.
The building itself is very cool, with amazing views of the harbor.
We all enjoyed looking out, as well as looking at the artwork in the exhibits.
The walk from South Station may have been a bit long for those with shorter legs, especially bundled up and wearing clompy snow boots. There may have been some tiredness. We ended up staying about 2 hours, which was about right. Then we took the T toward dinner.
Whenever we go to art museums, Phoebe and Theo are always inspired to do their own art. Here we are at the restaurant before our food arrived. Theo was drawing a train.
Taking the T back to South Station after dinner, and looking a bit like poster children.
On the train home, we managed to score one of the coveted tables. Theo was happy to be able to draw some more. He spent most of the train ride drawing.
He was looking a bit tired, but his picture was super cool. He later explained to us that it was a robot as big as a planet that had thousands of robots inside.
In June, Phoebe got to go on a field trip with her Daisy troop to a horse stable, and the visit included a ride on one of the stable’s horses. Given her current love of all things equine, Phoebe was over the moon.
The horse was very tolerant. (Not shown are the photos of the horse being surrounded by 10 excited 6-year-old girls.)
Phoebe would love to be able to do this more often…
The visit also included a lesson on how to care for horses. Phoebe was enthralled to be brushing a real horse.
This week’s friday foto finder theme is “horse¹.” To see what horses others have corralled, check out the friday foto finder blog.
¹ Coincidentally, we watched National Velvet for the first time tonight. It was rather startling to see Angela Lansbury playing the role of a teenager. (She played one of Elizabeth Taylor’s sisters.) I suppose it would have been more startling to see her playing the role of horse. Though come to think of it, she did play the role of a teapot.
Heart of cheese.
Roses are red,
Roquefort is blue
Actually, it’s more of a green
But this photo’s of provolone, anyway.
I liked the way that these tall piles of snow managed to stay upright, nestled in the branches of this tree in our front yard. In the afternoon light, it even had a bit of a glow.
This photo was from Sunday. Now, remarkably, much of the snow is gone. We had a warm stretch, and lots of rain, melting and compacting the 2 feet of snow from Saturday down to maybe 4 inches. I thought that much snow would stick around for weeks! 2 years ago, we had a winter where the snow just kept coming, without the melting in between. There were a number of roof cave-ins around the area from the weight of all that snow. I like the quick melting snow much better!
Speaking of balance, I’m having a bit of trouble getting all the things done I need to do. It’s been another crazy stretch, with all kinds of commitments left and right. Valentine’s Day stuff for the kids. Work stuff. Home stuff. I have an early meeting in Boston tomorrow, and then I will collect my mother at the airport. The house is a mess, and I still haven’t found the guest bed. And I really, really want to share a story about a Big Thing I did last week. But I need to go to bed!
I also feel compelled to say that now that I’ve publicly announced my intentions to post every day this month, it suddenly feels like more of a burden to post every day this month. I know that’s sort of silly, especially given that I don’t actually *have* to post every day this month. And I certainly don’t need to do anything spectacular when I post every day this month. But now I have this strange compulsion to repeat the phrase “post every day this month.”
Did I mention that I need to get to bed?
Today I registered Theo for kindergarten. Come fall, we’ll have two elementary school students in the house. I feel a bit sappy and nostalgic (my baby!), but I am also really looking forward to the easier schedule we’ll have when the bus comes to the house to collect both children. (The pick up and drop off at Theo’s preschool take about 45 minutes on either end, what with the 15 minute drive plus the time it takes to deliver or collect. It’s like I have a commute even on days when I work from home. I can’t seem to manage to get Theo to his preschool and be back before Phoebe’s bus, so I don’t get back home to start working until around 9:30. )
My post title is, in case you don’t recognize it, a reference to “Sunrise, Sunset” from Fiddler on the Roof, which has been running through my head much of the day. Of course, I feel like I’ve just grown older tonight, as in the course of choosing a photo to go with this post, I managed, with the help of a very annoying bug, to completely screw up the keyword tagging system I’ve been using in iPhoto the last few years. I’ve noticed that a bunch of my keywords were showing up on photos that I hadn’t tagged as such, and in the course of “fixing” some of these, I witnessed the bug in action. As I watched, I saw keywords getting applied to thousands of photos that shouldn’t have had them. So now those keywords are completely meaningless. Years worth of tagging rendered useless. So, you see, I can measure my aging by means of the technology that torments me. Why 10 years ago, I didn’t even have a digital camera of my own, let alone a digital photo library of many thousands of photos to mismanage.
In other (less cranky) news, the wave of nostalgia triggered by getting ready to send my baby out into the wild world led me to go poking into my blog archives from the time when Theo was a new arrival. In addition to finding the expected ramblings about having a new baby, I also found this other post, which (if I do say so myself) is quite entertaining:
Advanced Topics in Procrastination. If you are a procrastinator, you should definitely put it on your list of things to do later on.
collecting tokens 