Letting Go Is Not That Easy

Owen recently took over the care of our neighbors tadpole while they were away on vacation. I came home from work several days ago and Owen was so excited to tell me all about the tadpole that had come into our possession that day and how only a couple of hours after we took it in, Owen and Ken thought it might be dead (apparently while Ken was upstairs with Zora, Owen had taken the tadpole out of the house to show the mailman and in the process had spilled all of the water out of the little tank). But while Owen assured me they had managed to save it, Ken shook his head and mouthed silently that it was, in fact, dead. I was a little concerned that within hours of our neighbors entrusting us with their tadpole, we had managed to kill it. Later, I asked Ken when he was going to tell Owen. He wasn't sure. And then I went over and shook the tank and lo and behold, it moved. Barely, but it moved. I guess it was just traumatized but not, in fact, dead. Over the next couple of days it continued to not alone be alive, but actually grow legs and turn in to a frog, much to Owen's delight. After a few more days it was out of the water full time and we decided it was time to let it go. So yesterday Owen, Zora and I went down near Lake Mendota and found a nice spot to let the frog go. Owen was a little melancholy about the whole thing and said that now it would be lonely without his pet frog and he was worried if it would survive out in the wild. I assured him that the frog was where it was supposed to be and would be fine. As we walked back, he looked at me and said "It is just so hard to let it go into the big, wild world after taking care of it for so long." And I looked back at him and said, "I feel the same way."


The tadpole survived the trauma to become a frog.


The frog in it's new home.

Bathtime for Zora

Like most toddlers, Zora gets a big thrill out of making people laugh. She has a silly streak a mile wide and all it takes is one little laugh from someone and she goes into performing mode. That's what happened the other night when I was giving her a bath and she dumped a bucket of water over her head. For the next 5 - 10 minutes she dumped one bucket after another over her head as everyone in the house came in to see. She couldn't have been more pleased. And thanks to Mike and Ginney, who loaned us a camera, I was able to catch some of it on video.

Summer's Bounty

Look at the great haul we received from our CSA yesterday! Up until now we have mostly had greens with a few other things like onions and broccoli but this week it looks like the season is in full swing. Broccoli, carrots, green beans, sweet corn, tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, cucumbers, fennel, onions, cabbage. Wow. Now to find some recipes to use up all this amazing produce.

Pirates and Fairies

Last weekend our neighbor Kieran had his 5th birthday party. They recently went to Disney World so Disney was the theme and the kids could come dressed as a Disney character. Owen decided he wanted to be a pirate so we borrowed a costume from some neighbors but it was long sleeved and more suited to October 31st than July11. So we made a trip to St. Vinnies Saturday morning and picked up a few things and fashioned our own pirate costume. I think it turned out pretty good and we plan to use it again next week when one of the local libraries has a "Pirate Party". The birthday party started at 1 pm and Zora got up from her nap at 12:55. I didn't plan for her to wear a costume but just as I was getting her up I remembered that we received a box of clothes from my friend Melissa (passed on from her daughter Mia) this spring that included a brightly colored fairy dress complete with wings. I'm not sure of the exact Disney character she was dressed as but surely there are fairies in at least one Disney movie, right? Amazingly enough I actually found the dress in less than 5 minutes, fashioned a wand of a Tinkertoy and some tinfoil and we were off to the party. The kids had a great time and it just so happened that the party was also the debut for Ken's Red Tricycle Ice Cream Company. The bike was a hit with the grown ups and the ice cream was a hit with the kids. We went home hot, tired and happy and Owen and Zora wore their costumes for the rest of the day. They even wore them when, because I was too hot and tired to even think about cook, I took them to Noodles and Company for dinner and I'm sure they would have worn them to bed if I would have let them.

The Pirate and The Fairy

Owen VERY carefully takes an apple from the wicked witch

Zora shows off her fairy shoes

The Ice Cream Man cometh

Owen takes a whack at the pinata.

Red Tricycle Ice Cream Co debuts!

As many of you know, Ken has been spending a lot of time over the past couple of months restoring a 1950's Worksman ice cream tricycle that he found on craigslist. Well, it's finally ready. The last touch was having the freezer box custom painted with a funky design and lettering. Ken picked it up Saturday morning from his friend Brian's garage where he had been working on it. I hadn't seen the bike since he first got it. Although I have tried to be supportive of Ken's enthusiasm for this project, I have to admit I've been a little skeptical of the idea and wasn't exactly loving all the late nights he was spending over at Brian's working on it. But, wow! It really turned out great. I would post some pictures but unfortunately we have no camera right now (The trusty Canon we've had since Owen was born has been acting up more often than not for several months. I finally replaced it with a camera I bought from Woot.com a couple of months ago and that camera also stopped working after about 1 month so we only get pictures on the rare occasion that the Canon decides to work). But Red Tricycle Ice Cream Company debuted at not one but two events yesterday. First Ken rode it over to pass out ice cream sandwiches at our neighbor Kieran's 5th birthday party and then later yesterday afternoon he took it to a wedding in Allen Centennial Garden's to pass out fruit juice bars to the guests after the ceremony. Both our neighbor's and the photographer at the wedding took lots of pictures so hopefully we will have some pictures soon. In the meantime, you can check out some pictures of the bike when Ken got it and some pictures taken during the restoration on Facebook (search for Red Tricycle Ice Cream Company) and on the very-under-construction website (www.redtricycleicecream.com).

Fun on the 4th

Our 4th of July started out with an unsuccessful search for sparklers - who knew that most stores in Madison don't actually sell sparklers? Granted, we were somewhat limited in our search radius since our car was still not running so we were on our bikes, but still. The few people I asked suggested we head to a fireworks stand. For sparklers? Really?. Fortunately when we got home we saw our neighbors headed out and stopped to chat. Turns out they were on their way to Walmart and if any store is going to be selling sparklers, it's Walmart. So they offered to pick some up for us.

We decorated the bikes again this year (Shorewood - the little neighborhood that is actually a village right by our apartment has a bike decorating "booth" as part of the village 4th of July festivities) - though we missed the parade due to Zora's nap again this year.

But we did head back down in the afternoon and watched the water fights there. People in the village form teams and 2 teams face off with fire hoses, trying to move what looks like a small keg hanging from wire, across the other teams end. It's sort of a water push-o-war. It was pretty amusing to watch and with the wind we got cooled by a nice mist from all of the water coming from the fire hoses.

Enjoying our homemade blue popsicles - very festive, right?

Zora shows off her new blue face

And her swingy braids

We had watermelon and sparklers with our neighbors after dinner and then Ken, just home from work, took Owen and his friend Kieran to the fireworks.

Our young entrepreneur - or maybe not so much

Several months ago we started giving Owen a small allowance. Part of the motivation was to teach him about saving and part of the motivation was to try to curb the constant requests for us to buy him just about everything he sees. It has helped with the requests because he has realized that our answer to his pleas is now just about always, "sure, you can buy it if you have enough money." The lesson on saving seems to be a hard one though. Even the smallest amount of money seems to burn a whole in his pocket. Whenever he has a bit of money, he wants to go to the store to buy some lego or playmobil set. I try to tell him it will be too expensive but he wants to go anyway, just to see. Then we get there and in fact he doesn't have enough money so he looks around to see what he can buy. I suggest that maybe he should not buy anything and continue saving until he has enough for the lego set he really wants. Finally he decided he would try to save. The lego set he wanted was 12.99. The money was slow to accumulate and he said he need some way to get more money. I suggested a lemonade stand would be just the thing. So after talking about it for a couple of weeks, we picked a hot friday afternoon and set up the stand. We (I) even made chocolate chip cookies to sell along with the lemonade. Owen was very excited and as soon as it was set up, several of his friends were lined up as his first customers. I went back in the house for something and came back out to see that he was happily giving his friends refills. And when I asked one of his friends if he had given Owen his money, he said no. Owen then said "that's okay, Phoenix doesn't have to pay because he doesn't have any money." Not so business savvy. But I have heard that restaurants where you pay as little or as much as you can afford, like the SAME Cafe or the Karma Kitchen, are the new thing in some places, so maybe he is just on the cutting edge. At any rate, with a little tighter supervision, Owen did manage to make about $12 at his lemonade stand, enough to finally buy that Lego Star Wars set he wanted. And much to my surprise, when we went to the store the next day to buy it and it looked like they were all out, he didn't even whine. And while I went to find someone to see if maybe they had another in back somewhere, he found one tucked away behind some other legos on the shelf. I was so relieved because when I told him a few weeks ago that he would have to keep saving his first question was "what if they are all gone when I come back" and I of course told him that I was sure they would still have some left. And Owen was happy. Happier than if we had just bought it for him? I'm not sure about that -but he did seem pretty proud of himself.