The gals from birthday to spring 2009- enjoy!


After seeing a YouTube clip of someone climbing up El Capitan, Ursula ran to fetch this tangle of rope and bungee cords that needs to be stowed back in the car. When asked what she was doing she reported, "I'm going rock climbing on Mount Diablo."

Trying to dress up Tilda's favorite jammies ...

Emergency adjustment to the chair Ursula designed. Yes, DESIGNED. See the next photo. We thought it was pretty clever of her.

Ursula diagrams her chair construction. Those are the blocks on the bottom and the book on top of course had to include the cover illustration.

Well if Ursula's building things then Tilda wants to build things too. Tilda wa so proud of her, um, sidewalk? Look at that face - so satisfied. She spent a good half hour on this.

Bees and ants are the topic of every other conversation around here. This is Ursula's solution to a suitable bee costume. Princess hats make excellent stingers. Watch out. She chased me around the apartment with this stinger mercilessly.

April 25
Hummus! Sounds boring, but we've finally found some alternative proteins for Tilda to eat. There are only so many meals with meat and cheese, milk and cheese, meat and milk, and black beans, that a parent can tolerate. Ursula eats a splendid variety ... of vegetables. Just don't try to sneak some meat (yes that includes hot dogs, sausage, lunch meat, and chicken nuggets) onto her plate or she'll pawn it off on Tilda. "Dippables" and "Flavor Sensation" are very common words at the table.

Daddy's favorite critic approves.



Pickle power. Strange kid.

April 12
Happy Easter! The egg hunters woke up way too early...found some chocolate, but 'the bunny' also stuffed the eggs with tangible real objects to try and de-candify the holiday. Opening up an egg and finding a wooden mushroom and play juice box and baby animals was just as much fun...but sure as rain- the chocolate malt balls were the big hit...oh well, try again next year!


Ursula was very excited because we watched The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill yesterday. Daddy has peanut stains on his monitor because "I need to feed Mingus some nuts 'cause he's hungry"...


Add this wooden play tomatoe to the Farmer's Market stash!


An Easter Dress for the recession!


Lilliput and Blefuscu meet up in Ursula's travels.


Ursula runs drawing marathons on her favorite toy...





March 29

Apologies for the light posting lately...the pre-school age is a bit tricky...navigating language classes, different meals (yes, one is a true meat eater and the other loves veggies) and two professors running back/ forth with one car. We're (finally) getting accepted into pre-schools and can't imagine what this process is going to do to us- once we start the kindergarten process. Tilda's full mouth of teeth is complete...our Doctor scolded us for her light weight (off the charts!) and even gave us some infant fat liquid...we force fed her a Wendy's Frostie today after we finished another good hike- that makes two mountain peaks for Ursula (4 if you count twin peaks)!


Ursula is getting to the risky stage...climbing without fear to the top of the rope devices at the parks...a couple falls didn't deter her...in fact she started over and repeated the line with a stubborness that I've seen elsewhere... *myself*


Helping Daddy with his new installation...



She looks about two years older in this photo...strange.



Mar 9
We finally (!) did an entire hiking loop as a family in honor of mama's birthday - even 3 1/2 miles long. Ursula got very confused and kept protesting that we were going the wrong way to the car. Steep hills definitely seem to help - less mooning over "sand!" and "rocks!" and "mud!" for some reason. Still, it can be slightly embarassing when our 3-year-old is asking every passerby "are you my neighbor?" or loudly repeats, verbatim, the snippets of conversations she overhears when passing.

Tilda spent most of the hike in the backpack carrier plaintively reaching for bushes, leaves and hair.

When Ursula heard that this hike was a really nice present for Mama she furrowed her brow and asked, "are we in a box?" This could have been a good teaching moment about Materialism and Spending Time With Loved Ones, but then she had already spotted some more "mud!"

The last thing we wanted to see before reaching the parking lot was a jungle gym thoughtlessly placed next to the trail (there was a fair amount of kid-lugging throughout the hike and we were getting tired). Mama endured about 5 minutes of (Ursula) climbing before insinuating that Daddy just might get back to the car first and eat all of the cookies by himself. This worked really well and Ursula was soon running hysterically after Daddy screaming "no Daddy! *sob* Don't eat my cookies!!" [s]

The sequoia stumps really make her look like a wee sprite. Redwood Regional Park.

Tilda toes on a trip to our black sand beach.

Happy B-day Mommy!


Fascination in a field


Make your own lunch is fun


A young art teacher at work


Forget the chicken...Tilda finds her first love- climbing stairs


On a trip to Scharfenberger (spelling...) we let Tilda drink some liquid chocolate...sadly, they are shutting down their Berkeley factory.


The evening ritual is competitive!




Argh, don't mess with my eye patch or you'll walk the plank.

Feb 14th.
Happy Valentines Day! We've shared our bounty of chocolate and love with the lil ones. Hope everyone has a day filled with special treats. Tilda is on edge...canines are emerging...yuck.


Morning cuddle time


A special laundry fairy to clean dirty households. Rates negotiable.

Jan 27
It's getting hard to fathom 70k jobs lost in a day..twice the size of Mimi and Papa's town of Keene NH....starting to feel very lucky to just have a job.

The girls are getting cabin fever with the temperature dropping back to a normal SF winter. And who taught Ursula not to like corn dogs...jeesh, we thought it was genetic; all kids love marshmallows, ice cream, corn dogs and chocolate!? Speaking of which, we've heard that Fran's Chocolates are the President's favorite...(gotta try some of those salted caramels...yum)

Note to self: use gym membership or get a treadmill.


Yes, we hiked up the twin peaks with ice cream! Very American.


It's always good to step back and appreciate the places we enjoy


(a view down Market Street from Twin Peaks)

Jan 12
Feeling old...that super full moon is keeping us up at night...old wives tale, but sure does feel real. The girls are keeping us active during the day...going for walks, demanding to be carried...when will they hike a good distance by themselves?!

Enjoyed pomegranate popsicles today after a nice hike...still feels weird enjoying an icy treat in January, the 65 degrees sure made that feel ok.


Ursula in a 'Lady Dress' on Rody...we call it that to prevent the princess meltdown everytime we walk down those aisles at Best Buy or Target.


Tilda looks over to say "Your ride ain't got nothing on mine"


Daddy's new art project gets turned into Fort Ursula...none shall enter.


Da moon

Jan. 6
We are back from a family visit in New Hampshire.

Ursula found the seating quite comfortable on the flight home.

"Snow!!"
Ursula doesn't remember the last time she saw it, so she'd been talking for months about being able to see snow when she gets to visit New Hampshire. We (parents) expected to go outside and commence sledding but she of course spent a good amount of time poking her feet through the snowy drift crusts, testing the cushiness of deep vs. shallow snow, piling snow on lumber, scooping, and fondling.

Tilda gets a tow up the hill.

Papa Diego was literally a baby magnet.

So this is what wrapping paper is for!

Mimi & Papa's grandkids.

This is the best picture we could get of Tilda trying to make out with this stunned little boy at a mall playground. Usually she uses the ears as a pair of handles, so it can be a little intimidating.

Tilda and her cousin Spencer kept crawling up onto this divan to sit together.

Aunt Sarah gave Ursula some dance lessons to the Peanut Butter Jelly song. My goodness that thing is catchy, but we are still a little suspicious of the lyrics ...

Ursula was mightily impressed with Aunt Sarah's piano and piano-playin'.

Aunt Sarah treats Ursula to some "mimi nails."

Ursula tries out the lead singer position in Wii Rock Band.

The cat receives some, ahem, love.



We have mice it seems...


Salad days


Double trouble


We really do feed the girls...something devlish causes them to grab anything and thrash it.

Daddy spotted these exposed electrical wires on our twilight neighborhood walk and wondered if they were "live." And mama, in a less than brilliant moment said, out loud, in front of Ursula, "well we could always put our tongue on it to find out."

Aunt Nancy and Uncle David hosted a wonderful dinner where Ursula finally got the chance to use Uncle Bob's telescoping fork to steal HIS food. Take that Uncle Bob. And see that tongue-of-concentration? That's one reason her mama was so bad at gymnastics. Think about it.

Holy cow - Santa showed up at Nancy & David's house!

Present-crazed 3-y-o tries to play guitar while riding the Rody while following along the tap video. Every present is just so cool that she is having trouble using just on at a time.

Mama is repeatedly rebuffed every time she tries to tune Ursula's new guitar because "it's special to [her]."

Milk break in the tube.

Ursula discovers she has to, ahem, raise the roof'.

After a couple hours of Christmas chaos Tilda grabbed her "bahbah," started clinging to our legs, demanding a nap. She was a little extra tired since the cat woke everyone up Christmas morning just before 6am by noisily puking.

We can't yet leave presents under the tree without alot of rewrapping every few minutes (we learned that last year). So in the meantime the Christmas tree is a nice spot to set up an animal uprising. Or feed the chickens little bits of the Christmas tree for breakfast.

Last minute messages from Amazon that a gift won't arrive until January drove daddy to a different mall ... with one of the strangest mall playgrounds we've seen. It's all themed on a horse racetrack for giants. Can't really say we know what Ursula is climbing on right here, but it made her pretty happy.

I don't think we've seen Tilda this gleeful before to be surrounded by giggling, screaming kids. There was quite a bit of her so-excited-I'll-run-in-place dance.

Gigantic pair of binoculars.

Ursula was working on a "drawing [of] daddy's eyebrows" last night. That's gotta be him on the left, right? I asked her this morning if that was mama on the right holding hands with daddy? But now that's mama on the left with "really big toes." Hmmm. I think daddy's eyebrows are much bigger than my toes ... [s]

How long can a one-year-old play with some birds and nests? At least one hour. We think these birds might lay some chocolate in their nests by Christmas.

Woo Hoo big boxes! It's hard to be so far from so many of our loved ones, but these boxes they sent us are pretty awesome.

Tilda picked out a Christmas tree.

Mama's homemade ornament project this year is tiny houses with an opening for a christmas light. Thank goodness the heat sleaves from daddy's coffee make perfect roofs.

These are a little too interesting to the kids and have been moved higher and higher up the tree each time we discover a child trying out different lights in the hole in the back.

We visited Grampa and Nani's for Thanksgiving. Here Aunt Erin has asked Ursula for help updating the menu. The girls must have spent at least an hour drawing on this chalkboard.

For most of the visit someone had to be following Tilda up the stairs ... over, and over, and over again.

Ursula is very interested in cameras, but not always clear on which way to point it. Is this her retina??

Tilda swipes a butter knife and desparately tries to keep it.

Ursula is impressed that this Christmas tree farm has "a stage for me to tap!" We pulled her off just in time when one of the workers, armed with a chainsaw, needed to use it to trim and truss a tree.

... our wonderful city


Thank you Gramma Kay for the new apron!

They've been playing together alot. Problem is, I never trust that it's going to be safe, whatever it is that they're doing. You know, like, Tilda's not so good at being a pony ride yet. Most of the time, though, it's somewhere in between. Like two kids scooting around the room by bouncing around on a rocking chair. So in this instance I, uh, took a picture and then forbid it.

No Tilda!

No Tilda!

The fridge letters are constantly in play these days. And every now and then Ursa will put a real word together. But I'm gonna have to say that EOMb is not a word ... I think.

Nov. 18
The picky eaters are here. At Tilda's age Ursula was eating just about anything we put in front of her. No such luck with Tilda. Turns out she's one of those Breatharians. And since we are not legally allowed to turn her carseat around until she weighs 20#s I am wondering if I could get her to eat a stick of butter. The only sure things seem to be frozen peas, watermelon, black beans, cat food, mozzarella cheese, and only the freshest steamed string beans.

Ursula ... well Ursula loves lettuce lately, but not just any lettuce. It has to be Red Leafy. Green leafy and tender baby spinach are not acceptable. Whole, pitted, black olives from the can. Frozen peas. Cheddar (not mozzarella) cheese. String beans if they have been bathed in butter and dusted with salt. [s]

One parent can go shopping while the other is stationed at the sunglass display, whatever the store. This one also had some fancy jewels. Black still seems to be her favorite color ... since "sparkly" is not yet a color.

Tilda goes super happy to have a family day in the grass.


Went back to feed the cows at Tilden. Ursula tries to feed a milker some celery. The cow refused to eat...only to let the next kid over feed her. Apparently, that kid had some special organic celery...I guess we had the cheap stuff. Picky cows...must make the milk taste better ;)


Recovering from the flu with her old buddy and full length pj's. We had the family circle of sickness...both the girls have lingering colds...yuck.


File under gratutious San Francisco color theory architecture photos


Tilda's last-minute-lion costume is a homemade hooded cape ... er thingy ... with evolving ears ... well what are lion ears supposed to look like anyway? And Bjorns are soooo limiting for costumes. Here, the tail is obscured. And you can see why we decided she couldn't be the fourth witch of the troupe ... someone was liable to lose an eye.

Trick-or-Treating at businesses in the neighborhood seemed the safest bet. Here Ursula encounters gigglers in a nail salon. We were lucky to get her out of there without a pedicure. I am so not kidding.

After the sixth and final block of Trick-or-Treating Ursula was hysterical that secret operatives were controlling her candy supply and deeply suspicious that foul play was involved in a Blow Pop confiscation. She agreed to this picture on the grounds that she be allowed to open one more candy.

Oct. 30
We have been a little late to Tilda's talking party. We noticed long, long ago that she was saying mama and daddy. But then a month ago we realized that she was saying all sorts of new words, which we were ignoring to her fury. Doesn't she realize she is a "second child"? She says baby (bay ee), Tilda (till ah), ball (baaw), a very emphatic soul-wrenching mama (mamaaaa! mamaaaaa!) when sleepy, and signs food and mama. We suspect there are a few more words in there if we could just get beyond that Hamburglar accent. [s]

This photo just does not do justice to this scene: the pleated sequined tulle skirt that I sacrificed and reconstructed for Ursula's witch costume, the fact that she put the costume on and demanded to go trick-or-treating already, whatever that is (this'll be her first time), and the naked dancing pre-bath baby that escaped us. But I would say that Ursula's guilty look is captured pretty well as she got into my containers from yesterday's traveling lunch.

"No Tilda!" is being interpreted as a dare these days. This is Tilda's pre-dawn look of squinty-eyed determination that no matter where we sequester this chair, she will find it, climb on it, and use it to climb on something higher. She has been spotted moving it around the apartment to get up on tables, where she performs a gorilla dance.

By the time I realized what they were into there wasn't much salad left.

Initially Ursula was helping me "spin the salad." Then I heard giggling and some lip-smacking.

Trying out a snow witch costume, sporting an experimental cardboard hat - and yes, that is the ring-bearer dress mimi made for Lauren to wear to mommy and daddy's wedding.

Oct. 15
Time flies in a recession. Here's some new and old photos...


I'm picking out a pumpkin for you...


Down in Half Moon Bay, riding tall




Tilda turns over the king, capitulating to the onslaught of Ursula's pawn promotion


No, she isn't climbing yet...we just scoped out this incredible new climbing gym down near Crissy Field

Sept. 30
Happy birthday to Ursula (on the 25th) and Tilda (on the 26th)! We had a great visit from Mimi and Papa, who made the girls week with some fun new games, hugs and kisses. Ursula asked this afternoon- "where is Diego?"...that was Papa's new make believe name.


Tilda cheers on the designated candle blowerouter. Next year, she can get the special duty.


"I want a brown cake and red candles"..here you go!


Showing off a new handmade Mimi outfit!


Mimi and Papa help Ursula (in her styling Mimi handmade jacket) construct the Baroque Cathedral


Tilda gets her own doll to nurture. Her name is baby Greta. (...that little hat is a birthday gift that mommy made)


Mimi, Papa and the girls enjoying the view up on Twin Peaks.


Just in time- Tilda is walking upwards of 15 feet across the room, this walker will be fun.


A very fun dollhouse for Ursula to put her peoples on the tables to "clean off their feet".


Yes, we purchased an antiques toy for the girls to play with. They just don't make cool stuff like this anymore...(we've taken away the deadly choking hazards which probably doomed this toy to the garbage heap)


Mimi keeps an eye on the 'lil horserider

Sept. 24
Should you buy apocalypse-depression proof Gold before someone else owns it? ..even if it's just an electronic screen saying that you have the rights to this bullion?....Yep, the kool-aid has forced us to look into some extreme saving options. We truly hope that the spiral down is easy on your family, your job and your well being...and Tilda just took her first real steps...she calmly walked 6-8 feet this evening during the Bush economy speech.

WaMu...kaput. Who's next? Mimi and Papa are in town to sample some sourdough...



Are you ready for some futbol? Ursula lines up for her first practice and yes, they asked for shinguards- those 3-5 year olds pack a mean slide tackle


Blokus is whatever you want it to be...here she makes a fun make believe animal.


Someone enjoys the old jump on the bed game


babies sometimes have a 'transitional' object that can help an infant during the weaning phase...Tilda rejects the traditional stuffed animal or blankie and insists on carrying around playmobil people 24/7.


Ursula's beautiful sculptures have progressed to a point that we're really worried that she'll want to be an artist...two in a family is quite enough. There is an old wise saying that 'we became doctors and lawyers, so that our children could become artists'...but what do two artists hope for their child? Happiness.


Graduating up to sumi ink and bfk rives


pretty cool lil' peoples showing up lately


looks like the horses and zebra needed a time-out!?


Did you miss the last couple weeks of pictures?