One day Erica comes home and while wearing socks, she does this sliding motion across the floor.  I ask her what is she doing, and she says “I’m skaping!”

Our friend Tony and his daugher Isabelle have been going to the local rink near our house so we decided to give it a try… for real.

Well the day we chose was the “Skate with Santa”- translation- the place is a zoo.  We managed to get E a rental (boy’s hockey skates) and got them on without too much drama.  The skates seem to fit, and standing the first time was like watching a newborn deer find its legs for the first time…

The ice opens, and we waddle on up to the rink.  When we got to the ice, E wouldn’t step on, and had to be encouraged.  I’m wondering, ok, how am I going to do this… and trying to think back to when I first learned to skate.

I bent over, took a wide stance, and held her under her armpits.  With her big helmet on, I couldn’t really see what her feet were doing, but we took it slow and tried to make our way over to the kid end of the ice.  As we make our way over,  I’m thinking ’she’s kinda heavy’ and I looked down at her feet… which were lifted off the ice and tucked under like a bird in flight. 

“Stand UP!” 

She makes a feeble attempt at standing… and at that point I knew I had to basically carry her, bent over double, to the other end of the ice… at a snails pace.

Once we got to the other end, my back was ready for shiatsu, and as we couldn’t get a metal stand to help her learn, it basically meant holding her up and trying to help her get her balance.  At that point, we’re told to get off as they needed to clean the ice. 

After a wait, we do the whole thing again, but this time someone saw that she was a total beginner and offered up their metal stand (yes there were kids who could skate just fine, but were using the stands for whatever reason). 

From that point on, it wasn’t bad.  She could stand and with Isabelle’s encouragement, get some forward progress.  It was funny to watch her try to “run” with skates on rather than angle the toe out and push off… and she fell down every 20 seconds… and for me it was like picking up a 30lb sack of potatoes every 20 seconds. 

Still, I think she had fun, and even got a helium balloon and candy cane from Santa out of the experience.

We went to see the Optometrist today, and the recommendation is that kids over the age of 3 should also have their vision checked. I was wondering how do you get a small kid to sit and peer through that big eye thingy (the one where you look at a chart and he asks you “Is 1 or 2 better?” while changing the magnification) and get a reasonably accurate response?
We’ve been seeing Dr. Wang for years, and the last time we were in his office, Erica was about Sam’s age (16 months).

Erica was first up, so I took her in and seated her in the big chair. On the LCD monitor, he then projects some clip art of common objects- a horse, a truck, a cake, etc. and asks what they are. I know that Erica know all the objects, but she goes all shy and whispers to me “I want mommy” but eventually comes around to answering. Dr. Wang is pretty soft spoken, but Erica was so shy that her answers were even softer, so I had to restrain myself from blurting out the answers. Anyways, once Dr. Wang was satisfied that she understood the objects, he then shrunk them down, and asked her to repeat the object names while covering one eye.

Next, he played a cartoon and watched her eyes as she focussed on the screen. From the tests he could determine that she’s 20/20 with a bit of far sightedness in the right eye.

I almost wish I got the kid version of the test rather than the regular “is 1 or 2 better?”

Everytime we come in, there seems to be a new gadget or test. There’s a camera which takes a photo of your retina, that was pretty cool to see… and to measure pressure, there used to be a machine that puffed some air on your eye. Now there are these eye drops that kind of sting and is like iodine mixed with glue.  It takes a few hours to blink that stuff out, but I guess it’s a better test.

At one point we had a decision to make with our home.  Do we reno the bathrooms or do we do the yard?

The yard was in ok shape, but it did have a few annoyances- first was a volkswagen sized rock in the middle of the yard, second were 5 trees in the 40-50 ft height range.

The trees definitely gave the yard privacy and a park-like feel, but at the same time they took up a lot of room, blocked a lot of sunlight, and continuously rained needles and pinecones onto the deck and grass.  Here’s a few pics showing what it looked like last fall.

Backyard Oct 08

Backyard Oct 08

Backyard Oct 08

backyard Oct 2008

We decided to bring in a landscaper to see what they would recommend.  Maybe take down a tree and see if we can level out the yard and bring the grass back to the point where I could practice putting on it.

The landscaper takes a look and recommends we take down the 2 trees to the east, and the one big tree on the NW corner.  When they took down 1 tree, it showed signs of inner rot…  and if 1 tree shows signs of rot, then there is a chance that the other trees could also be sick, yet show no outward signs of being so.  Down came the trees and 2 out of 3 show signs of rot.  They then recommed we take down the 2 trees by the deck. 

At this point, the cost of taking down all these trees were a lot more than we had anticipated when we bought the place.  The inspector said they looked ok, but it’s hard to tell without bringing in an expert.  The danger is if the trees are not balanced (leaning to one side) and if they are sick, then it just takes a wind or snowstorm to knock them down… into the house.

So we decide to take them all down.

tree stump

goodbye trees

Then came winter, and the worst snowstorm in 10 years.  Our yard looked like this.

snow!

In hindsight, it was a good call to take down the trees given the heavy snowfall. 

When spring finally came, we had to decide what to do with the yard.  Basically it was cleared out, but it was also a mess and not safe to play in. 

A winter with a hyper toddler also gave us incentive to create a safe yard to boot the kids outside and burn off some energy, and save our sanity.  Therefore we decided to dig up all the stumps and try to do something about that rock.  We hired a backhoe to come in and do the work, and our yard ended up looking like this-

Mighty machines!

504 paving stones removed

Mass destruction

The backhoe trampled over everything, and ripped out all the stumps, but could not turn over the big rock.  In the process, what little grass we had was pretty much destroyed.  We then had to bring in dirt to level out the yard and lay sod.

laying sod

Laying sod

After the sod went in, they said to water it like crazy for about 3 weeks straight.  When they said water it like crazy, they weren’t kidding!  If you see seams opening up between the rolls, it means that the sod is shrinking from lack of water.  Luckily we had a few good days of rain, and that plus some fertilizer really helped.  We probably should have added another inch or two of dirt to help level things out, but that can be done later.

Tomorrow the grass needs to be cut, and I’ll post pictures of how the yard looks after whacking down all the trees, digging up all the rocks/stumps/concrete/paving stones, and laying down new sod, which has been in for about 3 weeks now.

A lot of work, but we figure that everyone can get enjoyment from the yard.  Next up- a “slip and slide”, hammock, and wading pool!