i've got sunshine on a cloudy day

a little bit of sunshine this morning, with hope for more this weekend. maybe francis will get a rain-free baseball game?! that would be a nice change. and greg and i will be celebrating our 11th anniversary! (wahoo for us!) no party plans this year, but i was planning to suprise greg with tickets to teatro zinzanni (he's wanted to go for quite some time, especially after friends went and raved about it. when we got a coupon in the mail, for $25 off per person, only for the month of april, it seemed there was no other option but to seize the oppourtunity!) so i got the tickets, and prepared myself for a long week and a half of secret-keeping. alas! of course, he decided to balance our credit card statement, and freaked out with the charge, thinking someone stole our credit card! so...the cat is out of the bag. oh well. but greg is very pleased, he said "yes! you did surprise me! just earlier than you thought you would!" so that's that. i'll let you know how it goes.

francis is on a roll with his bizzare and literal thought processes and sayings. you gotta wonder what goes on in that brain of his! he called me from the shower to ask me about the head&shoulders bottle. i told him what it was. he said, "well, i had already washed my head, but i did use it to wash my shoulders."

april showers bring...more showers!

well, i haven't been blogging lately, because i've been too busy reading. i have this problem when i discover a good book, and that is: i don't want to put it down. i also don't want to do anything that intereferes with the reading, like cleaning my house, or feeding my family!

however, these past few weeks have been good for reading, because, after that bizarre day of heat and sunshine we had, (april the 12th to be exact) it has been a cold and wet mess for days on end. we've had hail! we've had snow! we've had pouring rain! the weather just can't seem to make up it's mind. or remember what season it's supposed to be...







so i've been weathering out the storms of april, curled up on my couch.

i started reading the Lord of the Rings for the very first time, and i am still going. it took me all last week to complete the Fellowship of the Ring, and this week, i am almost done with the Two Towers.

it started like this:

a few weeks ago, on tv, all three movies were playing back to back. i decided to record them, for francis, because he hasn't seen them yet, and i thought the edited tv version might be less scary. but then, after he went to bed, we decided to watch what was left, and decided: hmmm. still scary!! he found out we had recorded them, and was begging to watch them. he said all his friends have seen it. so what were we to do? when the movies first came out in the theatre, we couldn't wait for francis to be old enough to get to see them with us. so now he's 10, and he's seen many of the superhero movies that are PG-13, so why not this? but something in me, and greg, still wanted to wait. we changed our minds. we deleted the movies from our dvr (what was i thinking? we'll want to have a party! we'll want to rent it in widescreen! when francis is finally allowed to see it, it will be a movie event!) we told francis we weren't ready for him to see it. he was bummed, but he accepted our answer without a big fuss. we told him that he was more than welcome to read the books, and that, in fact, the books are classics, and many many people count them among their favorites. he instantly bit: do we have the books? i seemed to remember acquiring the first book after the first movie came out, but somehow, even tho i got high recommendations, i never picked it up. (somehow, i never read these books in childhood, i don't know why...) so i hunted a bit, and found it, among one of our many piles of books. isn't it funny how something that is great, can sit unappreciated in your possession, waiting for you to discover it? maybe it's all in the timing. i am ready to read this book now. and so is francis. i started reading it, to get ahead of francis, to see if the language would be difficult for him, and once i got going, i couldn't put it down. then i went to half-price books, to get the rest of the them, and also the Hobbit. (i have already read the Hobbit, but my copy is old, from childhood, and i wanted to get francis his own copy.) once he saw the Hobbit, he said: wait! which one comes first? (you see, he likes to do things in order.) so he has decided to read the Hobbit on his own, for his school reading, and we have started reading the Fellowship of the Ring to him, for his evening story-time. so it's all good. he's got time, the movie can wait...

but i haven't been completely useless:

i still walk the boy to school, rain or shine...



and to us, our first signs of spring, are snail tracks!






i even got a hunkerin' for rice pudding,(or was it to make up for all my lame dinners this past week?) but i only know how to make a restaurant-sized batch (from my days at georgia's) so we had plenty to spare, and share:







francis' baseball game was cancelled (due to the snow) but it didn't stop karen's suprise birthday party down at the arcade on pier 57!









so, longer post than i meant to write, gotta get back to my book!

but i will end with another quote from francis: last saturday, with our day booked from morning til night, at 9pm we still had two more destinations. as we were driving into ballard, francis said: "what is it we have to do now?" and i explained we had to pop in on a friend's art show, and then hit another friend's going-away party, and said: " why? are you tired? cause i'm tired..."

and he said: "oh no! i'm not tired at all! i used my da's energizing face scrub in the shower, and i feel totally energized!"

however, by the end of the night...

back to school

we've been a bit groggy this week. morning comes too early after a week of staying up late and sleeping in. francis is usually a morning person who is up and ready before i am, but this week: i am waking him up!

me: "good morning, sleepyhead!" (as he stumbles to the bathroom)

francis: " i am NOT a sleepyhead! i just can't open my eyes..."

all that cold cold wet day...

those days of sun couldn't last forever, right? well, spring break is wrapping up, with alot of rain. on friday we received some serious rain, downpour rain, and even some hail. what do you do on a truly wet and gray miserable day?

go get coffee and cupcakes with some friends!

we hit trophy cupcakes for the unveiling of the new flavor. (the trophy owner had just been on the martha stewart show apparently, and luckily, we beat the crowd.) now, i'm not a huge cupcake fan. i usually can't eat a whole one by myself, but these were probably the best cupcakes i've ever tasted...delicious, warm out of the oven, and not too sweet if you can believe it. the one i split with francis wasn't enough; i got 3 more to take home with us (and i have to say: tasted just as good a day later.) francis and i caught a ride with jen and her kids, and met up with ann-krestene and stephanie and their kids, and together, we all whiled away some of the afternoon rain.









when greg got home from work at 3:30, we took francis to a matinee: nim's island, which was very enjoyable for him, and very tolerable for us. we then gave him the choice of dinner, and he selected chow mein, but we had some time to kill, so we drove down to golden gardens to look at the rain on the sea.



(at least, we did. francis didn't make it. it's nice to know a ten year old still isn't immune to the occasional nap.)





greg and i killed some time in the rain, taking pictures, until we were freezing and wet thru, and then headed to one of our favorite places, chef liao on phinney ridge, to get francis his chow mein and hot tea!



we then had just enough time to hit our friend vic's art show at the phinney ridge center, right down the street from us. vic did a show last year called "sushi is the bomb", (about nuclear arms, some of you may have seen it at the green bean cafe in greenwood), and this year she has new and just as thought-provoking work, titled: "catallactic converters: exploring value, choice and transformtion through salvaged materials". (dealing with the world-wide issues of slavery and human trafficking.) (photo does no justice, and was taken with permission)



come be challenged! see her pieces currently at the phinney center art gallery, thru april 25th, and then they move to the green bean cafe, for the month of may. artist reception on friday, may 9th, 6-8pm, during the annual greenwood phinney art walk.

i had just taken francis and one of his friends to the art museum the day before, and i have to say, i truly love taking him to see the things that people we know have created. it makes the arts that much more tangible and personal. it shows that it's something he could do, too, if he wanted to...

and it certainly gives us things to talk about...

have sun, will travel

so, this week is spring break for francis, and i'm trying hard to make it "spring breaky", even though we didn't leave the city. today marks the second day in a row of sun, and he's at a friend's house, so i'd say today's a good day! as was yesterday! yesterday was sunny, and we hit the zoo, and then met august, hazel, jennifer, and tank (their jack russell terrier) at the park for some high energy play time(them, not us), then came back to our place for tea-time. tea for jen and me(the necessary 4pm pick-me-up), and the kids got ben & jerry's single-serving cookie-dough ice-cream, the kind with the little plastic spoons (so cute!) they remind me of those childhood days of scraping water-ice with a wooden spoon, and how the ice and that horrible scraping sound, could bring on goosebumps in the middle of a heatwave.

we are nowhere near a heat wave though. we are nowhere near summer. i really want it to be. these sunny days make me yearn for it, but when i walk outside, it's freezing! we're still in the 40's out here, and on monday, we got a flash hail storm that lasted for about 5 minutes. crazy!

on sunday, tho the gray skies loomed, we had friends that were going sailing on lake union, who invited us along. i was nervous it was going to dump on us as soon as we got to the middle of the lake, and we had no umbrellas. but i was excited for francis to have this experience, because we've never taken him sailing before. because: we don't know how to sail. the gray cleared to blue as we were over the water, but it was still bitterly cold. that didn't stop francis from trying to drag his hands in the water, and, as no one relished the idea of going in after him (kid overboard!) we had to make the rule: keep your seat in your seat! greg took tons of photos, and i hedged in on his territory: me and my cell-phone! hahaha! it was quite a sight! here are a few, with many more on my flickr.









i feel a bit like this blog has become "the life and times of sir francis". not really my intent, but so you have it. maybe it will be fun for him to read when he's older, documents of his childhood. i remember when francis was a baby, of being appalled by mothers who only ever talked about their children or their husbands, what they did or what they said, and i vowed i would never be like that. now i realize i was probably being overly critical and quick to judge, and it really is a slippery slope. i'm finding lately that given "free time", i'm at a loss for what to do! greg and francis will go out for baseball practice, and i'll say "have fun!" and they'll say: "you have fun too!" hmmm. what are the things i used to do for fun? oh yeah. go out to dinner with friends. go to movies. GO places. and these days, more often than not, if i have some minutes to myself, i curl up with a blanket and a book. i know that sounds boring, but at night, i'm usually so tired that curling up on the couch sounds just about right. but tonight, while the boys are away, i have a date with danajill and joy; we're going out for ethiopian! ta da! you caught me: out of the house! and last week, i went out with jen and a friend to see rosie at the triple door! good company, good food, good music! these things we used to do all the time take so much effort now. organizing your free-time to coincide with someone else's, or usually, making sure your husband can be home with the kid(s)so you can go out with some friends, these are hard things to juggle. even a "girl's night out" for a dinner and a movie once a month is a little miracle. but we gotta keep it up. get together. make the time. it's for your own good. (and theirs!) don't worry. i'm saying this especially to my homebody self...