Ohh those eyes

Closeups of Baby Blue Eyes, and my little Brown Eyed Girl.

Cardinals Christmas Tailgating

The last NFL home game of the year for the Arizona Cardinals happened on Christmas day evening. Jaime and I had tickets, and were trying to figure out the best way of going to the game, tailgating beforehand, and arranging for babycare for Ella & Sam. Our friends Mark & Jessica also had game tickets, but between the four of us we only had one parking pass. Our friend Anna had graciously offered to watch the kids for us, but a 10 hour babysitting stint is too much to ask of anyone (except grandparents :-). A couple days before the game the perfect plan popped into my head. Why not buy a second parking pass and bring Anna & Sam & Ella to the tailgate, and then they would drive home at sunset while the rest of us went into the stadium to watch the game. Since it was Christmas we tried to stick to Christmas traditions, Jewish style: Chinese Food for our tailgate. We ordered a bunch of chinese takeout the night before and brought the grill to reheat it on. We also brought Mark's "volcano" burner and a pot of oil so we could freshly deep fry some food. In there, we threw partial contents of our freezer (lumpia & pierogies), as well as a fresh batch of ricotta fritters (mmm, donuts). That was an awesome appetizer and dessert to sandwich our chinese meal between. Here's a picture of our tailgating setup, though the grill and volcano were outside our shade tent, and not in the picture:

The kids were in our laps, or playing happily in their pack-and-play in the shade:

A great time was had by all. Perhaps a bit too great for some...
We are going to have to keep an eye on this little imp as she grows up and figures out how to reach for the liquor shelf!

Chuckle Fest

I picked the kids up from daycare a little bit early last night, but then they both fell asleep on the drive home and got a good nap in.  That's normal for Sam, but special for Ella, and resulted in them both being in a great mood for the evening.  We spent some time playing with their new blocks, and they thought it was the funniest thing ever to knock the towers of blocks over.  Click on the image to get to the video. Enjoy!

School Pictures

OOPS.   I just realized that I already posted this pictures back in September.  See, I'm not as far behind in my picture posting as I thought.  Sorry about this, you will have to suffer through the cutelings anyway as I'm not deleting the repost.  Scroll down to early October's posts if you want to see slightly bigger versions of these pictures without having to click on them.

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Back in mid-september, before the cacti even contemplated changing the colors of their spines and dropping them into little spiny piles for little phoenicians to jump into with wails of glee, the photo lady came to town (and to school/daycare) and introduced our tots to the annual ritual of school photos.  I think my mom still has our class group pictures from when we were young hanging in a hallway somewhere.  Anyway, we got our kids dressed up in their cutest overalls and trucked them to school for professional picture taking.  Here are the results:

We were impressed by how well the photographer took our adorable kids and made them look, well, somewhat vacant and pudgy?  A bit two dimensional?  I'm not sure what the problem here is (and Ella's pics came out better than Sam's).  We didn't buy very many of them.  But I'm sure we'll look back on them year after year and giggle nonetheless.  The process did make me realize I had tailed off a bit in my own picture taking and remind me that I should be shooting more pictures, more often, and even occasionally posting some of them to the blog.  So I'll start with these to make my next posts seem that much better :-)

winter strikes phoenix

It's been a while since we posted anything. I guess we have been pretty busy with life, and raising our two adorable little munchkins. Lots of growth has been happening in the past two months. They are both bigger, Ella is crawling and pulling up on everything, Sam is clapping and giving out high fives when the mood strikes his fancy. We have been going for daily morning walks, but it's gotten cold recently, quite cold the past couple of mornings, so their walks are on hold. Instead it's dig through the closets for appropriate clothing gifts which showed up back when it was 115F outside and we hardly imagined it possible that they would ever get worn, but now they are perfect (and perfectly cute!). So, for today's clothing, thanks to the Margheim troupe for their La Serena purchased South American garb.  Warm, stylish, and, amazingly, perfectly sized for our over-achieving little miracle-gro munchkins.

Oh, and I know many of you are wondering what "quite cold" really means in the context of phoenix. It means a couple things: 1) I actually both swapped my shorts for trousers and wore a sweatshirt this morning and 2) Our overnight low was ~30F which constitutes a hard freeze in our garden. I guess it's a good thing we don't have any basil growing because if we did, it would now all be wilted and gone.

More bathtime fun

Jaime shot a video of last night's bathtime hilarity using her cell phone.  Ha!
Ha Ha.  Ha Ha he he he he ha.

simchat torah services

Simchat Torah was this past wednesday evening & thursday. We took the kids to the evening service, which Jaime helped to lead.  During the service there are seven hakafot, seven times when the torah scrolls are paraded around the sanctuary.  At our service, each hakafa was led by a different grade school class.  The first of them was led by the pre-schoolers, and we carried Sam & Ella as part of the procession.  Here are some videos of the celebration:

Passport Photo Shoot

We are planning a SuperFunWedding (tm) Reunion in Mexico this autumn.  That means it's time for the kids to get their first passports (and there's barely enough time to get them...).   We did a home photoshoot with a white sheet backdrop to get the pictures.  Here are the pictures we chose to use: 


It took a while to get the right pictures and the kids didn't always enjoy the process perhaps:

But I'm sure they will enjoy the end result when they get to play on the beaches of the yucatan.

School Pictures

The kids got their first ever school pictures last week. Perfect for slipping into your wallet to show off to all your friends. Enjoy.

Good Sit!

It's been a while since we updated things, and yes, I know we failed to post much from our trip to Austin. Let me just say that it went very smoothly, and the kids did great in the airplanes. I might still get a picture or two from the trip up on the blog this weekend, but I actually didn't snap that many pictures, so I have to see if I have a good one to choose from.    We are back at home in Phoenix now, and the kids are making several advancements:   1) They have pretty good head/neck control, and can now sit up in chairs, kiddie jumper exersaucer things, and their non-baby-seat strollers;  2) We think they have both started the teething process, based on their fussiness level and exorbitant drool production, though we haven't seen or felt any teeth coming through the gums yet;  3) They are becoming excellent swimmers.  Well, not swimmers actually, but pool visitors as we bring them in there for about 5-10 minutes each evening, and they float on their backs (with head support from mom & dad and of course extremely careful supervision), "swim" on their fronts (we hold them under the armpits with their heads out of the water, but their lower torso and legs in the water, and they kick as we pull them through the water), and even take a quick dunk completely under (which doesn't bring on crying nearly as often as I though it would; also babies have a breath-holding reflex so they don't try to breathe when they are underwater).   It's been a fun week. 

To celebrate their new found abilities, we've been setting up some of the great gifts we got back at the baby shower which are only now becoming relevant, such as high chairs and swim toys.  We set up two chairs at our table yesterday, and the kids seem to love them:


What fun!  Have a great weekend y'all.

Hup Holland!

The gang's all ready for today's world cup semifinal. We'll be rooting for Holland to beat Uruguay and make it to Sunday's final game against either Germany or Spain. We aren't sure where we'll be watching today's game, but we'll probably find a nice sports bar here in Austin to root for the Oranje.

greetings from austin

We are in Austin for a week visiting friends.   More info later, but here's a quick pic from this morning's hotel room:

Cute Baby Close-Ups

I know you were all happy to finally see a new post yesterday, but some of you might secretly have been let down by the lack of cute baby close-up pictures.  Well, to satisfy that craving, here are a couple shots from the campground:

Father's Day Fun!

As many of you know, this past Sunday was fathers day in the U.S. (and select foreign countries). It was my very first fathers day as a dad, and I had a most excellent time. I was up early (but not too early) to play with the kids when they first awoke. They are always happy then, with big smiles to greet the day and their parents who come to get them. They had some breakfast and played a bit, and then we called/skyped our dads (the new granddads) to wish them a happy day. Jaime & the kids got me just what I'd been hoping for: a new double burner griddle for the stove, so I got to work mixing up buttermilk pancake batter and making the lightest fluffiest pancakes I've had in quite some time (for those of you who are curious, I found the recipe online by googling "light fluffy buttermilk pancake recipe" and it didn't disappoint). After brunch we watched the world cup soccer game of the moment, which I think was the Brazil-Ivory Coast match, and then we packed up the car and the kids and headed out for our first family camping adventure, up to Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon.

We stayed in a tent-only campground (manzanita) and set up our new family tent for the first time.  Here you can see the tent with the fly rolled half way up.  Everyone is sleeping in this picture, though it might be hard to see.  Jaime is napping inside the tent, and the kids are napping in their carseats. Later on when people were feeling more rested, we all moved inside the tent for some playtime. You can see just how big this thing is inside: we fit a queen sized inflatable mattress and both their sleeping pads (actually, they are changing table pads doing double duty) with plenty of space on the sides of all that for our bags, cooler, and to walk around. It's tall enough that I can stand upright along the centerline, without having to bend over. When the kids get bigger and want a little privacy from their parents, there is a wall/curtain which divides the space into two rooms, each big enough for a queen size mattress. Camping in comfort it was, and will continue to be :-)

Go USA!

Only two hours to gametime, USA vs. (soon to defeat) England in the World Cup, and we are all anxiously awaiting the start of the game. In the meantime, we are watching (tape delayed) Argentina run ragged through the Nigerian defense.

Actually, we'll be watching the US vs. England game tape delayed as well, as Jaime has to work this morning and we couldn't watch the game without her. So in the meantime, we are off to the Zoo! Hopefully we'll get some fun pictures from that too.

Uncle Ted's Birthday

Some of the pictures were posted sort of wonkily. The one of Uncle Ted on his birthday holding Baby Sam is especially cute. Here it is.

Maternity Leave

We took my maternity "leave" very seriously and left Phoenix for a two and a half week road trip. Some people were amazed by our adventurousness while others thought we were flat out crazy. All the same, at only 6 weeks old, Ella, Sam and their parents hit the road for California.

Our first stop was Zadey and B'nana's for a few nights where they got to meet Gary Higer, Rosalie and Stan Weiner, Julie Wynn, Ida Lieberman, Linda and Harvey Kulber and Paddi Bregman. From there we drove up to Ventura and relaxed by the beach for a couple of nights where E and S met our friend Nairn Baliber for the first time and enjoyed their first experience at a sushi restaurant.

From Ventura we headed up the coast, stopping along the way at Pea Soup Anderson's and eventually making it to Aunt Susan and Uncle Allen's for a delicious dinner! Ella and Sam loved hanging out with their Aunt and Uncle in the redwoods. In Santa Cruz they also got to meet their dear friend Sandrine with whom they hit it off right away.

Our next stop was Aunt Dominique and Uncle Ted's house in Redwood City. We stayed there for the next 4 nights. Ella and Sam stayed awake for most of those nights and chose instead to sleep during our car trips. We visited friends all over the Bay Area and ate lots of delicious food (well, Jaime and Marcel ate lots of delicious food. Ella and Sam only ate their milk). We had dim sum with Randy, Jim, Amber, Renny, Bill, and Matt Clapp. The babies were a big hit with everyone and also won over the Chinese wait staff. After lunch they also met Kim Gitnik and her son River as well as Maya and her son Noah.

The next day we drove out to the East Bay and had lunch with Dennis and Carine Mink and Ilene and David Bobrowsky. Dinner was a Cajun feast with Crofty and Lori in Oakland. Sam and Ella wowed everyone with their amazing ability to sleep through even the loudest dining experience. Meanwhile only their mom, dad, aunt and uncle knew that they were staying up all night crying and fussing. The next day they got to meet Peter Williams and Bridget Mattingly at a S. American coffee house in Standford and then spend the afternoon in San Francisco having croissants with Renny in the Mission. Dinner was with Jessica, Ivan and Noa (and the yet unknown twin baby boys that were in their mama's tummy). It was so wonderful to catch up with everyone and to show off our little darlings. A special thanks to Ivan for being the baby whisperer and calming dear Ella down during our visit.

After a wonderful Ethiopian birthday lunch with Uncle Ted and Aunt Dominique we headed back down the coast for a weekend in Ventura with our dear friend Doda Audra who flew in all the way from NYC to meet Ella and Sam. Of course no visit to California would be complete without at least one trip to Tommy's. And it was especially important to bring Ella and Sam there for their first and second time.

On the way to get Doda Audra from the airport we detoured and visited Far Foster's Donuts and Anna Silverman at Scripps college. This was Ella and Sam's first official college tour. Sam liked all the young women and wished that he could go to that college some day. Sorry Sam - Girls Only. While in Ventura the babies also got to meet Vandana and Noah, Andy and Sandy, Renee, Jaelyn and Noa, Danna, Collin and Ariel, as well as Nairn (for the second time) and Spaz.

Our final stop was a wonderful seder in LA with the entire Shpall family. This was Sam and Ella's first passover experience and I think they really loved it. They also got to meet Laura and Marc who were also in town for a family seder. Finally, two and a half weeks later we drove back to Phoenix. Whew.

Here are a few pictures from Sam and Ella's big adventure. Enjoy

Happy Weekend from Sam & Ella

The kids are doing well, and starting to play (just a little bit) with toys. Enjoy the vid!

Happy Birthday Zadey

Today was Ella and Sam's Zadey's (my dad) birthday, so we had them pose for a special birthday photo shoot. We all can't wait for B'nana and Zadey's visit in early June.

Happy Birthday. :)

Technology Updates

Many things were on hold during months 0-3 of their life, but now that Jaime is back to work, and the kids have started daycare, we are trying to play catch-up. One of the things we are updating is our tech; Jaime just got a new internet-able smart-phone, and I'm upgrading out home network, backup disks, and data-sharing. So now Jaime can take pictures with her cell phone and upload them straight to the web, and I can more quickly share pictures taken with my cameras over our internal network so that both of us can see the pics, and post them up to the blog. Is it helping with our frequency of posts... I'm not sure yet. I've got to finish the network upgrades and then flush out the plug of old baby pictures taken over the past 3.5 months. But the kids are getting cuter everyday and like posing for pictures, so I'm sure there will be many new ones to come. These were taken just yesterday :-)


UPDATE: Sorry about the picture not showing up when this was first posted.  I guess I still need to make some modifications on the updated computers....    BTW, this post (in both original and updated form) was made by Marcel, not Jaime as is claimed by blogger.

Daycare!

The twins turned 3 months old on Sunday.  Jaime started back at work this past Friday, and the kids started daycare (at the temple pre-school & daycare) yesterday.  So suddenly, I have some time during my day for things like cleaning the kitchen, folding the laundry, cooking lunch & dinner, and posting to the blog.  Eventually, once I clear the backlog of cleaning, bill paying (oops), and weed removal, I will also have time for astronomy research, glass creation, and microprocessor programming.  woot.  Anyway, the kids were the stars of their pre-school class yesterday.  All their teachers/caregivers were raving about what good kids they were.  Then we got them home and they started wailing, but once we got the margaritas mixed up, and started their evening walk, all was wonderful again.  Today we'll be ready in advance with the stroller and margaritas, so there will be no wailing necessary.  Now back to laundry folding.

Sam & Ella: shiny happy babies having fun

I'm in charge of the morning shift, and I've noticed over the course of the past week that the kids are downright happy & cute in the morning. Check out this video I shot the other day. It's a bit long, and might take a while to download, but if you need to fill up on cuteness, this video will definitely overflow the tank.

Getting some culture

There is this great program in the Phoenix area called the Culture Pass. Available through the library system, it lets anyone with a library card check out a free pass (when available) to one of about 15 local museums. Availability is limited, and the most popular venues (e.g. the zoo) can be almost impossible to get, but I've been able to snag several passes for places I want to visit, and I take the kids along as an outing. I know that at this age, they could care less whether they are in the art museum, the botanical garden, the science museum, or our living room. To them, these trips are a ride in a car, some sun, a somewhat bumpy stroller ride, a bottle, and another car ride. But to me, it's a chance to get out of the house and see something interesting while pushing the stroller and lulling the kids to sleep. Last week we went to the Phoenix art museum. It's a good sized museum and we only made it through about half of it. We started with an Ansel Adams exhibit which was excellent. That guy could take a really nice picture. Really, really nice. Then we strolled outside through the sculpture garden so the kids could fuss while I prepped their bottles, and not disturb too many people. They ate, I shot some pictures, and then it was back inside to the modern & contemporary wing of the museum. It's a decent size, just about the right amount to not be overwhelming, but I wasn't overly impressed by most of the works. My initial reaction upon walking into one of the galleries was, "Okay, so contemporary art has to be BIG, but not particularly technical, or visually appealing, or good for that matter." I'm sure the curator would disagree with me, and I did find a couple pieces that weren't just huge, but at least in that first gallery, they were few and far between. I enjoyed the upstairs gallery a bit more, as there were several pieces I really liked. One in particular, a piece called, "You Who are Getting Obliterated in the Dancing Swarm of Fireflies " by Yayoi Kusama I would love to take the kids back to see when they are 2-3 years old. It consists of a dark room with mirrorred walls creating a feeling of infinite space. Dangling from the ceiling are lots of wires tipped with color-changing LED lights which turn on and off and change colors while you stand amongst them. It's a dazzling effect, and the only problem is that with mirrors on the walls and a very dark room, it's hard to find the way out (especially when pushing a double length stroller!). I also liked a big installation by Peter Wegner ("Guillotine of Sunlight, Guillotine of Shade), and a smaller painting by David Hockney.

The art museum was last week's trip, and it was very successful. Yesterday we tried to go to the science museum, but that was much less successful. Five minutes after entering, Ella got extremely fussy, and despite trying to feed her, trying to hold & comfort her, and changing her diaper, nothing would calm her down, and we had to leave. That might not bode well for her future science career, but I'm not worried about it. At least she settled down to a slumber while walking the long way back to the car.

Tucson Visitors

Our good friends and former neighbors in Chile, Chris & Rikki & their son Jack came to visit Arizona this past weekend. They were all down in Tucson, where lots of our other friends and former neighbors in Chile live, so we packed up Sam & Ella and headed down there on Saturday afternoon for a party, poker game, and overnight slumber party. It was lots of fun, and great to have so many old friends together again. After the party/poker game at Simon & Nancy's house, all us out-of-towners headed to Greg & Ilene's for the night. We woke up Sunday and had a scrumptious breakfast on their roof.

Since it was pretty bright up there, and hard to get the kids in the picture, we posed for the group shot at the top of this page in Greg & Ilene's "Arizona room," another of the many very nice features of their house.  Full from breakfast and with the sun high in the sky, we then piled into two cars for the drive back to Scottsdale.  Chris, Rikki, & Jack all stayed in our guest bedroom, and Jack was treated to his first poffertjes breakfast on monday morning.  Judging from the post-meal smiles, I think he liked them: 

Jack is super-cute, but I know that pictures of him are not why people tune into this blog, and by now many of you will be complaining that the pictures of Sam & Ella are too small & far away to really see them.  So to sate your desires for a little while at least, here they are: