Thanksgiving 2009: Return of the Mishpacha.

It's time once again to play Spot the New One!

Benji's Birthday Cake

You know, if you're into that sort of thing.

Kisses.

Nana and Poppa's Lake House.

Nana and Poppa's new house in West Virginia was completed a couple of weeks ago, and we spent a few days there last week.

Plastic Cups and Principles of Hydrodynamics.

It was hot Friday, so my friend Tara and I took the children to the South Side to play in the fountains. I know I promised never to make movies again, but I just had to include both clips -- the first because of the unbridled joy, and the second because of the neat trick Tara showed the boys with the plastic cups she brought. The fellow in yellow is Tara's Ben.



I feel bad that Anne was not in these videos, but that's because this is pretty much what she did the entire time. She is all about the looking cute and the sitting and the not getting too wet and the did someone bring snacks I sure hope so.

Berry-Picking With the Moritzes.

Anne's Second First Birthday Party.

Those little buckets initially held water and a bunch of animal-shaped squirters. Benji almost immediately upended the buckets and repurposed them as hardhats and/or sun visors.




















Cream cheese frosting melllllting in the heat.




















You might think she was enjoying herself, but actually this face means, "Sticky! Do something!"
































































Zack wearing his party favor.














Admiring the dress Megan made (!!) for Anne.

Clone Watch.

Going pretty well so far. Needs brown wig.

Touch-a-Truck.

The Junior League of Pittsburgh held its second annual Touch-a-Truck event a few weekends ago. It was a hit.

Scenes from Anne's Party.

We had the cousins over to celebrate Anne's birthday last week. Here is some cute video footage, strung together into a "movie." (The scare quotes denote overall badness. This took me forever to do, but you'd never know it.)

Benji's Modern Dance Debut.

Yesterday Benji had his first (unscheduled) dance performance, as part of the Pittsburgh International Children's Festival. No cameras were permitted in the performance, but it was so beautiful, I feel I must describe it.

The performance, Farfalle, was by an Italian modern dance troupe, and it was an abstract telling of the butterfly's life cycle, from egg to caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly. The stage was sunken, with a few shallow rows of carpeted seating on two sides of the stage. We were all asked to take off our shoes before the performance. The theater was in almost total darkness, while lights and images were projected onto the floor and two walls of the stage (the two sides where no one was seated). Two female dancers interacted with the light projections and with the music to interpret the life cycle of the butterfly.

For the "chrysalis" segment of the performance, the lights suggested a moonlit night, with eerie, otherworldly music. One of the dancers lay in the middle of the stage, while the other walked around the edge and through the audience. She first took the hand of a little girl, almost exactly Benji's size, and led her along until they came to Benji. She then took Benji's hand, too, and whispered in his ear to ask him to come with her. He hesitated a bit, but then followed her, slowly, cautiously, to the stage. The two children held hands and looked at each other and at the lights. They had the feel of some archetypal portrait of Innocence and Wonder, with their baby faces and tiny statures.

The children were led to the dancer lying on the floor, and she took their hands and had them sit with her. The other woman danced around them, carrying a folded canopy of netting. She then lay one end of the canopy on the stage, and unfolded it over the children and the other dancer. It was a wire structure with netting stretched over it: the chrysalis.

Benji sat perfectly still inside the chrysalis, he and the little girl, with the most perfect expressions of wonder on their faces. The dancer continued to circle the chrysalis, until she exited the stage and came back with two single wings on wire staffs, when she opened the chrysalis and led the children back to their seats. The performance continued with projections of butterflies, which filled the floor and walls of the stage with color, after the monotone eerie gray-green of the "chrysalis" segment.

It was a wonderful birthday present.

Beach Boy.

From our trip to Los Angeles:

So green, so yummy.

Springtime for playdough.

Also the bit about the Yoga magazine.

"Chesa Boudin seems like a genial guy with a bright future stretching far ahead of him. If 'Gringo' is any indication, that future should not include committing sentences to paper with the intention of distributing them widely."

Oh SNAP.

I Wanna Be Perambulated.

This week in JAMA.

Special diabetes theme issue!!!! WOOOOOOOOOO!!! Get your copy now!

Big Picture.

The Big Picture blog is always good, but this is an especially good collection of pictures from Afghanistan.

Happy 40th birthday, Very Hungry Caterpillar!

Eric Carle's web site.

Newsweek:

Carle was born in 1929 in Syracuse, N.Y., to immigrant parents from Germany. He remembers his first six years fondly: Mickey Mouse and Flash Gordon, family camping trips, the big windows in his kindergarten class. When he was 6, his mother got homesick and the family moved back to Stuttgart. They lived in a big, four-story house with many of his relatives. "My grandmother had nine sisters," Carle says. "I had an interesting, wacky family. They're all liars but wonderful storytellers." Carle had trouble adjusting to his new country. His first-grade teacher still haunts, especially because Carle once picked up a ringing phone, and the teacher lashed his palms with a bamboo switch in front of the class. "I was this free American kid," Carle says, "but I was careful after that."

When World War II broke out, Carle's father was drafted by the Germans and his family was engulfed in the chaos of war.

And Google is using a special logo today, too.

Happy 50th birthday, Little People!

A little more here.