All blissed out, yes for sure it's a fine thang.

Well little darlings IM HOME
Re-entry has be fairly smooth with the exception of some bends at the 9am 1st grade field trip Tuesday morning.

I feel refreshed in a just been away losing sleep for for fabulous reasons like the presence of top shelf wine bars in my vicinity kind of way.

All good things are to come as a result of this wonderous getaway and I intend of refreshing and repleneshing annually with this posse of old friends in the FINE city of San Francisco. It's also my intention to make the slightly more affordable Walnut Creek (hear me universe!) my home within 3 - 5 years.

Peace out.

Hi!

Still in Los Angeles! Heres a photo of me flying a plane.
Just kidding.
Max, hope you had fun at Annan's house today. Tomorrow will be great - you are going to Damma and Pops for the weekend! I'm sure it will be fun filled, ice-cream filled and movie-licious.

Enjoy!

I'll call you during the day. Tomorrow (Friday) I'll be flying in a plane from Los Angeles to San Francisco. Meeting up with Julia there! Jonah and Helena are at home in R.I. as well. We'll all have an east coast playdate next week.

LOVE TO YOU!
Mom
p.s. I'm come home with a brand new fun toy for each of you! Will you meet me at the airport?

Living it up in LA

Dear Max, Clara and Zoe,
Good Morning!
It's 8:30 and I'm sitting here rolling with 4 cups of coffee and pj's.
I think I'll go sit by the pool in a few minutes and then follow up with a SHOWER which doesn't sound like a big deal. But how fabulous it will be for me, in light of our ongoing bathroom remodel resulting in baths. I love baths, but just for the purpose of pure relaxation, not contortionist bathing where I have to use my core strength while washing my hair under the faucet.

I digress.
LA is wonderful! Aunt Amy has been serving up delicious food since the second I arrived. In fact, she is making a strawberry pie from scratch right now and it's only 8:40am!
I think we'll go shoe shopping later and perhaps get some manicures. (Dave did you fall off your chair yet?)

Missing you!
xoxo
Mom

Updates from the skies

Took off from Cleveland, now flying over nebraska! Flying up at 30,000 feet, we'll be up here for 4 1/2 hours now. Can't wait until were flying as a family to DISNEY. Just 3 more months.
Max, check with daddy to see all the states I'm flying over

A little baby screamed for the first 2 hours of the flight. Clara how do you think mommy felt inside? Happy or sad?

Zoe, you'd be happy to know that I spoke in depth with my seat-mate. Her name is not Stella, but rather Suzanne. I asked her all the questions you would have wanted the answers to. She is a girl, she lives in a house in Cleveland and she has many friends - also not named Stella. I'll see if I can get to the answers to some of your other favorite questions as the flight continues. I'm thinking maybe moving forward we'll actually interrogate people together so that you feel more satisfied in general.

I'm working on lots of Yoga homework up here, should be caught up by the time I'm back home again with you....
xoxo
Mom

Cleveland, OH; 12:10pm; next stop L.A.

Hi guys!
Here in Cleveland. Flew in on a very small plane that I was not that pleased with but all went swimmingly! (THankfully not literally).
Now waiting for plane to arrive so that I can hop on and get to Aunt Amy and Uncle Paul in L.A.

Hope you guys had a good day in school and that Zoe enjoyed Library with Ms. Agnes!
I'll call you tonite when I arrive in L.A.

Max, ask Daddy to research all the big brown spots I saw on our descent into Cleveland. Cleveland looks allot different than RI! And did I pass an ocean? There was a large body of water...

Let me know in comments....
: )
xoxo
Love
Mom

Hi from TF Green!

Hi Max Clara and Zoe!
Sitting here in TF Green waiting to leave for Cleveland en route to L.A.
Missing you.
Zoe there are lots of people here who I'm sure have interesting stories to tell! Too bad you're not here to ask "Who is she?" "Who is he?"
I'll tell you all about them when I come home.

Talk to you soon! Have to run, my airplane is about to board!
Tune in later today... I'll email you from Cleveland airport.
xoxo
Mom

A taxing dialogue

I just figured I'd share another scintillating (yeah, I know I misspelled it. Probably misspelled the word misspelled too. I'm over it.) conversation that went on for nearly 20 minutes today.
Setting the scene: Trip to Town Hall
Pulling in, Zoe is scanning the scene to see what she can start talking about.
Zoe: "Mommy, who lives here?"
MommY: "The tax assessor and we need to have her stamp something"
Zoe: "Who is that girl?"
Mommy: "The tax assessor"
Zoe: "But WHO IS SHE!?!"
Mommy: "Stella"
Zoe: "NO MOMMY SHE IS THE TAX ACCESSORRERRRy, not STELLA Mommy. Shes not Stella Mommy!!!!"
Mommy: Silence
Zoe: "Mommy does she live here?"
Mommy: "No Zoe she just works here."
Zoe: "BUt does she LIVE here?"
Mommy: "No Zoe, she does NOT live here, she works here"
Zoe: "Does she have friends?"
Mommy: "Yes"
Zoe: "Are we her friends?"
Mommy: "I guess Zoe"
Zoe: "DO HER FRIENDS LIVE HERE MOMMY?"
(Said with great emphasis, this is CLEARLY important for her to find out. THere is always the critical question in every dialogue with Zoe and until you answer it, the conversation will not end. Realizing with her emphasis that this is the big question, I contemplate an answer that will give her closure so that, while as sure as the sun will set, this conversation will continue, at least we can move on from the topic of the tax assesor to something more exciting like the guy sitting by the fire hydrant.)
Mommy: "Zoe, the tax assessor does live in this house. The town lives in this house - it is the Town House. All of the tax assessor's friends live here with her and in fact all of the people in all of the land are our friends and all live in this Town House except for us we live in our house."

Silence

Zoe: "Mommy, where are we going?"

Mommy is actually going to california by herself for 6 days tomorrow!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I'll miss you guys allot but will come back with something FUN.

xoxo

Zoe's Birthday Tea Party!

Zoe your three! We celebrated with a Tea Party for our friends and beloved dolls and teddy bears. Ginger tea was served with peanut butter sandwiches, crumpets and morsels of sweetness. Your friends engaged in the ritual with great enthusiasm and it was a perfectly beautiful day, just as it should be for a little Zoe...

On a TV fast with nowhere to go...

So here I sit. On a TV fast with nowhere to go, so I thought why not catchup on the doings of the Max, Clara and Zoe!

Max: Your my toothless boy darling. REcently you lost the 2 top teeth and it's the cutest look ever, just in time for your first grade pictures!
You don't care for school and dare I say I don't care for school? It takes you away from me at 8:35 a.m. and you don't return until 3:50 pm. It's too long of a day and at orientation I glazed over just hearing about your schedule and the news of the "working snack". Apparently I have to send you with a snack that you can hold in one hand so that your other hand is free to multitask and facilitate non-stop learning. This means the snack also has to be left hand appropriate and fairly uncomplicated so that your right hand can carry on. I sense "NO child left behind" is in full force with testing standards and pressure on teachers. I'm ready to propose the "No workbooks for 6 year old children" act but I'm not sure that will endear you or I to the elementary school staff so I'll wait a few months before I come visiting in a clown costume to brighten your day. Other than school, we've been having loads of fun playing tennis, skateboarding, mountain biking etc... You call every weekend a holiday and I try pack in as much fun as we can before 8:35 a.m. Monday morning rolls around.

Clara: I continue to speculate that at birth, a jewlers glass was inserted into your cornea just for the purpose of inspecting produce. You take great joy in pointing out the smallest imperfections in bananas and apples so then I have to perform produce imperfection extractions because really I have nothing better to do with my life. I guess it's better than fetching juice because a part of me feels like you have the motor skills to fetch your own juice and only spill it when doing so in order to keep me on retainer.
On other fronts, you've been very happy in school this year with the exception that there are now BOYS in your class. For the first 4 weeks, everytime I picked you up you told me that you don't care for boys and why do they have to be in your class? But now they are beginning to endear themselves to you and I sense some acceptance on the horizon. Of course that will turn into condemnation again at some point as you seem to enjoy exploring every possible emotion in relation to every possible subject. (reminds me of someone else I know... hee hee). We went to the beach every Thursday this summer and it still amazes me that your favorite beach day was the one when you were romping around on the beach in the freezing, pouring rain while the rest of us huddled under a canopy. WHy were we there you ask? I don't want weather to affect our actions so we stick with our plans unless there's a small craft advisory in effect. I need you to be hardy and willfull so that you will fit right in to our family dynamic. We are CAMPERS and I need you to be down with rain and bugs. So far it's working!

Zoe: My delicious baby. I think you believe your purpose, now that you have a robust vocabulary, is to talk all the live-long day. My favorite though is everytime I get off the phone or everytime a teller at the bank serves us or everytime someone gives me change at the Dunkin Donuts window you ask "Who is that Mommy?" If my answer is "someone serving us coffee" etc you start yelling at me, "Mommy who is it?" So sometimes I say Stella and that doesn't work either as we start to cycle in and out of conversations along the likes of the following:
"Mommy who's that lady"
"The lady serving us coffee"
"Mommy who is she?!!!"
(me thinking, OK she needs a name so I throw out:) "Stella"
"Who's Stella?"
"She's the lady serving us coffee?"
"BUT WHO IS SHE?"
"I don't know Zoe!"
CRIES CRIES CRIES
So then I try a different tact and throw out a name she knows. "Calm down Zoe, its just Damma..."
"NO ITS NOT DAMMA, ITS STELLA"
And I won't go on with this because I can't bear to think about this for another minute. Suffice to say this dialogue goes on a 2-3 times a day or anytime we have any type of human contact with someone she doesn't know. I'm going cast humanity aside any minute now just to avoid this unbearable dialogue.

So that's it for me right now. I'll write about more fun and sunshine tomorrow and all the wonderful traits you all have. The image of 5 loads of laundry left to be folded upstairs is burning a hole through my brain and casting a shadow over my typically sunny dispostion....