Our Bold Adventure Continues

Tonight we sought out a traditional "Lion Dance" to celebrate the Chinese New Year. The girls have been learning about it at school and were very excited. They kept explaining that red was the color of good luck in China and they had to put lots of red things in our house for the new year (this didn't happen, though I offered red construction paper for crafts). They also said the house had to be clean for the new year and took it upon themselves to use the wet wipes we use to help make four-year-old hygiene easier (AKA Butt Wipes) to wipe down every bathroom in this house. It may have used a lot of wipes, but who am I to stop my children from voluntarily cleaning bathrooms? The girls' school told us about a Chinese restaurant in town that offers a "Lion Dance" to celebrate the Chinese New Year. We heard it gets crowded, so we got there at 5:30 for a 6:45 dance (both girls sporting red shoes). But despite our early arrival (they don't take reservations) t

The other day a mom of older kids gave M+O each an old cassette tapes of kids' music, so now we have some vintage Raffi and WeeSing going on at our house. Woo hoo! The most amusing part is that the girls are fascinated with the cassette tapes. They want to hold them constantly. They try to take the cases apart. They put the little folded covers out and put them in again incessantly. Once one of them pulled the brown magnetic tape out a bit, looked up at me and said, "oops mama." They can't seem to remember the word "tape" so they call them "those small CD thingys." This weekend when we set out for an errand both girls protested taking the minivan. NOOOO! SUBARUUUU! They never ask to take the Subaru, it's harder to crawl into and the carseats there don't accomodate winter coats well. But, I quickly figured out, the Subaru has a tape deck. No, I promised, opting for driver ease and preschooler comfort, we'll listen to them on the totally

We had an exciting day here in Boulder yesterday. Just a two miles from our house a wildfire burned 1400 acres and seven "structures." It started when 80 mph winds blew down power lines. You could see the smoke for miles, smell it too. An entire side of a mountain appeared to glow orange -- we could see it from the end of our street. It's a mountain very close to our house, one we drive on regularly, and one we hiked on just the weekend before with a visiting grandma. More than 11,000 homes were evacuated along with a lot of livestock. Mostly horses, but I saw a photo of a llama. They brought all the four-legged evacuees to the Boulder County Fairgrounds, which struck me as brilliant, but of course must have been part of the county's standing emergency plan. The Red Cross set up a shelter at a local high school, but in a statistic that illustrates Boulder's wealth, most found friends or hotels: of those 11,000 households, only 75 people spent the night at the sh