If You Care to Find Me (after this post), Look to the Western Sky

Last night Gramlynne (the sometimes Good Witch of the North) treated Stacy and I to a night out complete with babysitting. The event: Wicked at the Pantages theater in L.A. We haven't had a kid-free night out in several months. It was awesome!

We had dinner at a cool Brazilian restaurant called Bossa Nova on Sunset Blvd. Pão de quejio, kibe, and caipirinhas! Oh my.

Neither of us had ever seen Wicked, but had heard really good things about it. We weren't disappointed. We had awesome seats, front and center (more or less) and were almost as impressed by the theater architectural design and detail as the show itself.The visuals and music were fantastic and the story was quite clever. (I won't give away the details.)

The storyline poked at the post-modern, relativistic view of morality. (i.e. What does it mean to be wicked? Isn't something "wicked" just because we've labeled it to be so? Doesn't it vary based on your point-of-view?, etc.) I don't think that the show embraced this philosophy, per se, though some of its characters certainly did. By the end the audience member could make strong assessments of who was wicked and who wasn't, so the play didn't seem to be rabidly promoting the the idea that morality is relative, but rather that the good will sometimes be misunderstood and vilified by those who are ignorant or have hidden agendas. All-in-all a thought-provoking play -- something that isn't all that common in musical theater.

Thanks Lynne! I promise to stop throwing glasses of water at you.

Oh, and Stacy informed me that I'd be sleeping with Toto tonight if I didn't include this picture of her without her stage make-up...

Commando Kid

Either N's been into his paint set, or he's joined the Marines. If the later, he'd better work on finding a more camouflaged flack jacket...

Dino Eggs from Gramlynne

Gramlynne's got the goods! The perfect birthday present for L and N:

Chocolate Dinosaur Eggs!

Crack open the egg and inside are lots of little tiny chocolate dinosaurs! Now we know why they went extinct. They were too delicious.

Tyrannosaurus Nervous Rex

Toys are getting more and more involved and realistic, and in some cases, down-right scary. L got the following T-Rex for her birthday. I would have had non-stop nightmares for a month after playing with it for the first time, but as you can see, L and N are thoroughly unruffled.

L loves this thing. (And, OK, Daddy thinks its pretty cool too.) She hauls it around with her tucked gently under her arm. She wanted to take it to church this morning, but her totally Paleozoic parents wouldn't hear of it.

Promises to Hold On To

I got up earlier than everyone else this morning and was doing some work on the computer. After an hour or two I heard the sound of the hall door slowly opening, and soon thereafter I saw L peeking at me shyly, still half asleep, around the corner. Her hair was a rat's nest and her eyes were bleary and puffy from her rest. For some reason this moment melts me every time it happens. I get all sentimental and gushy.

"L," I said, "Can you come over and sit on lap and let me give you hugs?"

L trotted over obediently and climbed up while I succumbed further into paternal emotionalism.

"I love giving you hugs. Someday you'll be all grown up and you won't want to cuddle with Daddy or sit on his lap anymore" (At least I hope not.) "You will still love your Daddy, but you'll want to play with your friends or your toys instead of snuggling with me." I was really over the top.

"Daddy," L replied, "I'll still love you, even when my friends are over."

Proud as a Pea-Hawk

Last night I had painting class so the kids were in bed asleep by the time I got home. I didn't get my usual day's debrief from L until this morning when she woke at the crack of dawn (when all more sensible family members are still sound asleep), and proceeded to give me the previous day's run down while "helping me" get dressed for work.

It appeared to have been quite an amazing day. Evidently after dinner Mommy loaded her and N into the car and went to Vons to grocery shop. After this they went on a "big adventure" -- they went high up into the mountains where they saw trees and horses and cows. They even saw the ocean from this lofty mountain retreat. But most amazing of all, they saw pea-hawks! And the pea-hawks kept going "Me-ow! Me-ow!" L wasn't scared of them but N was "a little scared."

Now L is only four, and while she's an imaginative little cuss, she's not quite to the stage of making up full blown fantasies, but try as I might I couldn't figure out where the root of truth in her story might be. Stacy finally emerged from her nocturnal stupor right before I had to set out the door, so I related L's strange account to her. She instantly translated.

Yes, after dinner she had taken the kids to Vons, but since it was a nice evening she decided to go on a drive afterward. There was no road trip to the Canadian Rockies, or even the Angeles Crest; it was a simple drive up Hawthorne Blvd. up onto the Palos Verdes Peninsula, which at about 450 meters is our local "mountain". The PV hill is the chock full of trees and horses and at the south side you do get great vistas of the San Pedro channel and Catalina Island. (Stacy wasn't exactly sure where the cows fitted in.) As for "pea-hawks", PV has for years and years been the home of dozens (hundreds?) of wild peacocks that roam the arroyos and washes of the hill. They do make a very feline sounding cry, as well as a rather piercing screech, which makes them somewhat less than beloved by their neighboring Palos Verdians. (I'm sure there's some great, dramatic story to explain the peacock presence there. I've heard some good stories giving the histories of the flocks of parakeets I've seen through out the Redondo Beach area. Talk about a double-take!)

So L's fantasies are based in reality after all.

What she doesn't know (and what I probably won't tell her so she can be surprised) is that the peacocks sometimes venture down from the hill. A couple of years ago we had a couple of interlopers strutting and caterwauling in front of our house, and doing unspeakable things to my car. They are really beautiful to look at, but man, are they ever ugly to listen to and clean up after. I fully understand the PV love/hate relationship with them.

Jurassic Party Animals

We celebrated L's 4th birthday yesterday. We decided to have it old school.

I mean very old school...

Like a couple of million-years-old school...

(When I say "Pre-Cambrian", I mean well before we honeymooned there.)

Stacy had the whole event planned out for weeks. The sweltering heat and the fact that I hadn't worked in the yard for a week or two did add to the whole overgrown jungle je no c'est quoi.

First there was a quick lunch of dinosaur-shaped chicken nuggets. (Or at least Stacy said they were chicken. I've heard several dinoexperts suggest that dinosaurs were indeed very bird-like...) Then there were little dessert cups perfect for the budding palaeontologists: Chocolate pudding mud with crumbled Oreo dirt, complete with a couple of resting gummi-worms nestled within.

The reaction was mixed.

Then, (can you believe it!?!) we stumbled upon a massive dinosaur fossil site in our very own backyard. Our little sandbox, it seems, must have been an ancient dinosaur burial ground. We found several fossils and dozens of very well preserved, you could almost say plasticized, mini-dinosaurs. Luckily we had plenty of willing volunteers to work the archaeological site. The haul was incredible.

(I personally was more worried about "fossil records" left by our neighbors' kitty cats, but the ultraterritorial dinos must have kept them at bay.)

After a hard day in the fossil pits there's nothing to rally the spirits like a good, rousing game of:

Next there was the dreadful eruption of Mt. Vistacyus.

The only downturn to the day was a brief one centered around the playing of an ill-conceived version of musical chairs we called... the EXTINCTION GAME!!!



Not exactly the kind of thing to try with a bunch of 3 and 4 year-olds. On the very first round, the first little species eliminated burst into inconsolable tears and hid in her mother's arms for the rest of the party. There was a similarly Darwinian response from the next extinction. Sensing that survival of the fittest was not a preschool friendly concept, we abandoned the effort after the third endangered guest was snuffed out. I wonder if it was this traumatic for the dodo?

The global crisis was averted with the serving of cake - or should I say, the ritual slaughter of one small stegosaurus! (OK. Maybe I shouldn't. We got into enough trouble with the extinction game.)



At some point in the day there was a jungle siting of the extremely rare Velosodaddy. These voracious carnivores, while ferocious eaters, are rather inaptly named, considering there aren't too many velocities these large creatures can attain without being thoroughly winded.

But they are dreadful nonetheless.

But in spite of all the cataclysmic upheavals, it was truly a party for the eons.

As all great eras do, the Partiozoic Era was soon a thing of the past and L was allowed to put on her dino-jammies and play with her toys for a bit before going into a characteristically mammalian hibernation state.


I'm pretty sure this must be the most humiliated T-rex to walk the planet. It would likely consider extinction a pleasure...


Ahhhh! Asleep on the primordial sea of dreams... and blue balloons.