Mosaic Fever

Window Mosaic Art

We had another craftastic week with the kids over the holiday break, continuing our tradition from last year. This year Dova received a Window Mosaic kit for her birthday, which she eagerly dived into (with a little help from mom). The extra gel pieces immediately went onto the window directly to make flowers and another butterfly. This mosaic completes our mosaic media trio, gel for windows, sticky foam for her jewelry box and magnetic foam for infinite variations.

Orb Factory Sticky Mosaics: Jewelry Box

Last year's Sticky Mosaic Jewelry Box had over 1000 pieces, but it was a great project to share with mom. Dova still proudly displays it on her dresser and keeps all sorts of girly things in it.

Orb Factory Magnetic Mosaics Jr.

Once you break apart all the pieces for the Magnetic Mosaics Jr., it is super easy to make the cool picture patterns that come with it. The fact that all the pieces are contained inside the metal tin makes mom very happy as well.

Orb Factory Mosaica

The magnetic Mosaica is like Tangrams. The larger pieces are better for smaller hands to manipulate, but the patterns can be a little tricky for the younger folk.

Happy New Year everyone!

Note: Posts are never sponsored on this blog, mosaic crafts are truly a staple for this family. Feel free to click through and buy from the Amazon affiliate links though.

O Christmas Tree

Adam's first Christmas at 7 weeks old in 2000.

Last month, I met a woman who said that she bought a Christmas tree for her 2-year-old daughter's room. At the time, I thought it was a bit excessive to have a Christmas tree in a child's room (much like having a TV in their room).  But by the next day, I thought it was a fantastic idea that my kids would love. I carted the kids off to Target and told Doug that we were on a quest for small pre-lit Christmas trees. He was expecting tiny table top trees, but we all fell in love with these 4' trees.


Dova especially loves her tree because it is the same height she is.

Dova has a special affinity for Christmas lights because it was her first word. At eleven months, as I was carrying her under the icicle lights and she pointed at them and said, "Light!". She had to wait a full 365 days for her first Christmas because she was born on December 26, 2003 and 2004 was a leap year.


Dova loves to put ornaments on her tree.


Adam and his tree.

The kids wondered whether Santa would put presents under their trees as well, but he only put presents under the main tree.  Dova was so excited about Christmas this year that she woke up at 2am on Christmas morning, woke her brother up as well, and went downstairs and brought all her presents up to her room and starting opening them.  Bad kitty!

The best part of the Christmas trees in their rooms is using it as a night light. The kids fall asleep looking at the pretty lights, dreaming of Christmas. Nevermind that they already have Christmas lights permanently installed on their ceilings. It's still magic.

Check out ArtsBoston for Christmas vacation week

If you're facing a week with the kids now that Christmas is over and didn't make plans, check out ArtsBoston for half price tickets to arts and cultural events.  The 7th annual Mayor's Holiday Special still has many venues through the beginning of January.



One event that caught my eye was the Sing-Along Sound of Music at the Regent Theater in Arlington, MA.  With our family's recent obsession with the Sound of Music, I thought this would be a perfect place to see how Adam's high notes stack up with the best of them.  The description of the event was downright hysterical.

Have you ever been to a film musical and had the uncontrollable urge to burst into song? Yes!

Do you muse over the endless tailoring opportunities for chintz curtains?  Um no...

Have you always wondered what it would be like to wear a wimple?  Gah!

Sing-a-long-a Sound of Music is your chance to test your vocal range with several hundred other assorted nuns, Von Trapp family members and Julie Andrews look-a-likes.

The evening begins with a live show in which your host will lead you through a vocal warm-up, judge the fancy dress competition and award the prizes. Costumes are not compulsory but they are highly recommended and you will be amazed at the inventiveness on display. The host will then show you how to use your free goody bag throughout the film and suggest some appropriate heckles and accompanying actions (such as hissing the countess, barking at Rolf and, of course, cheering for Julie).

Then, you sit back and watch the original 1965 movie in glorious Technicolor™ with the lyrics for all the songs on the screen, so you won’t miss a chance to sing your hearts out. The audience takes over as the star of the show from this point and almost anything can happen – the first rule of Sing-a-long-a is THERE ARE NO RULES!

When I read this description to Doug, he called it the "Rocky Horror of Sound of Music, bring your own rice".  You can be sure that this would be a mom and kids only event for this family.

I immediately thought that I could dress Dova up in braids as Marta since they are the same age, although she likes Liesl the best. Adam would have to grow some blond hair to be Kurt or Friedrich, and I'd have to fashion some chintz liederhosen for him, although he hates dressing up in costume. Anyway you slice it, I would make a terrible Asian Julie Andrews. But we'd all have fun belting out those high notes.



If you're not into interactive arts, there's always the timeless classic of Boston Ballet's Nutcracker. For school vacation week, there are kids activities and special performances. Earlier this month, we took the kids to see the José Mateo Ballet Theatre production of the Nutcracker at the Brandeis University Spingold Theater with half price tickets courtesy of ArtsBoston. With free parking and more affordable prices, I thought this would be a better introduction to ballet for the kids than a longer drive into Boston with traffic and parking to contend with.

For the week prior to the ballet, I immersed the kids in Tchaikovsky's music from the ballet, so they knew all the numbers from around the world. Adam was dead set against enjoying the ballet, but once it started, he was completely mesmerized at the edge of his seat. Dova was in her element, except for a tantrum over her dress, or lack of one.  Doug said that it was the best performance of the The Nutcracker that he's ever seen.  It was more intimate, unpretentious and you could really enjoy the purity of the performance.  Of course I very quietly captured these scenes from the ballet.


Exchanging presents


Waltz of the Snowflakes


Spanish Dance


Arabian Dance


Mother Ginger and her children


Waltz of the Flowers






Pas de Deux

After you dig yourself out of the upcoming blizzard, I hope you can make it out to a cultural event through ArtsBoston!

Note: This is in no way a compensated post. ArtsBoston is simply a fantastic organization that everyone in the Boston area should know about.

Happy Piano Holidays

Last month, I was emailing with a friend and told them that I was taking violin/fiddle lessons along with the kids. They replied, "I'm jealous that you can manage to get your kids to do an activity with you."

Well, with my overbearing Suzuki parenting method, they have no choice. So I replied, "The piano/violin is not without much coercion on my part (i.e. lots of screaming and crying at times). But sometimes it is all worth it."



Dova is a natural performer and wanted to provide the intro herself.  "Hello everyone. Tonight we're playing the song Silent Night.  I will be playing an octave higher.  And glad you have a good Christmas.  Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!"  She's even charming when asking to start over.  Not camera shy at all, this one.



Adam, with one more year of piano playing under his belt, whips off the Waltz of the Flowers from The Nutcracker.  Adam is opposite from Dova when it comes to performing, I have to pull teeth to get him to speak on camera.  And he is super hard on himself, despite the fine performance.

Hope these videos bring a smile to your face as they do to mine.  Happy Holidays everyone!

The Magical Season of Winter

This post originally appeared on BlogHer in November 2009.

Can you believe how beautiful the winter sky can be even with an iPhone?

When I tell people that my favorite season is winter, they think I’m crazy.  Most people think of short days, cold weather, hectic holiday shopping, and endless snow.  Of course I also mind these inconveniences, but I still relish the coming season.

Perhaps it is because I was born in January in the middle of a blizzard in North Dakota.  Perhaps it is because my kids were born in November and December.  There are a million reasons, but the heart of my love for winter is that life can finally slow down, so you can stop to appreciate the love inside your home and the beauty outside.

In the summer, especially in New England, there is an expectation to make the most of the good weather.  There’s no excuse just to laze around indoors.  You have to travel while the kids are out of school.  If you’re not traveling, you need to make the most out of every non-rainy day by doing something outside.  Never mind that it’s hot and sticky, you must take the kids to the playground, or on a hike, or to a lake, beach, water park or amusement park!

Sure we also go skiing in the winter, but it is prohibitively expensive to do on a regular basis.  After the holiday season, our calendars are finally free of non-stop activities.  And finally, I have time to do things around the house that have been piling up around me.  One of my favorite things to do is go through all the photographs from the previous year (i.e. obsessively tag them in Flickr) and choose which ones to print.  If I’m ambitious, I even make a photo book.  Sewing and knitting projects are finally completed.  And those books and magazines piling up?  They are finally read in peace instead of in bits and pieces during sports practices.  It finally becomes okay to be a homebody for a change.



Winter isn’t dark, look around at all the beautifully lit houses around the holidays.  Candles in the windowsills look ever so peaceful.  White lights are always classy, colored lights are festive.  Add some snow and it becomes a picture-perfect postcard.  Last year, my daughter caught her finger in a door late one evening and we packed her up to bring to the emergency room because she was screaming in so much pain.  In the car, we kept telling her to look at the lights.  After a few minutes, she was quiet and mesmerized.  At that point, I turned to my husband and said, “Let’s just drive around and look at the lights, I think she’s fine.”  We drove for a half an hour through the fancy sections of town as she ooh’ed and ahh’ed at the beautiful decorations.  We brought her home, tucked her in bed and she was just fine.  Magic, I tell you.

Here’s another piece of beauty that I experienced this weekend.  I was driving home from shopping with my son at 4:30pm and it was already starting to become dark.  It had rained heavily the day before and was overcast for most of the day, so the weekend was pretty much a wash out.  But as we looked at the darkening sky, we saw clouds streaking the sky in long lines as if painted by a paintbrush.  As we pulled off the highway onto country roads, we saw fog forming in the trees.  The setting sun beamed hazily through the fog and turned the sky brilliant colors, first orange and then purple.  As the sun set, the trees were enveloped in a soft purple haze, the furthest ones barely visible.  We had great music playing and I kept exclaiming to my son, “Look at the trees, isn’t it amazing?”  He truly seemed to appreciate the beauty we were experiencing, that can only happen during the colder parts of the year.



Winter is not cold, it is the warmest season, just ask author Lauren Stringer.  There is nothing cozier than sitting by a fire while it is snowing outside.  And what warms better than hot chocolate or spiced apple cider?  In the winter, our cats are finally allowed to sit in our laps and sleep on our beds, we have tick problems in every other season.  It is so warm!

Winter Is the Warmest Season: Lauren Stringer

Hopefully, my love of winter has rubbed off a bit.  Happy winter solstice and enjoy it while it lasts!

A Perfect Dova Day

Beautiful, cranky Dova tries to ruin another photo.  At least her hair is brushed.

Over Thanksgiving break, Dova had a cold, and I had one of the rare opportunities to care for her during the day.  I took her to her room for a nap but she was too excited to sleep. So we had a conversation about how we are alike.  Sometimes, she is so foreign to me in her looks, personality and interests, I often wonder where she came from.  It is incredibly easy to count of the ways Adam and I are alike.  We both love math, card games (cribbage has been our nightly ritual), board games (the Oranges are mine in Monopoly), jigsaw puzzles, video games and Harry Potter.  We think and look alike and have similar traits like stage fright and a minimal need for sleep.  He has great timing and exactness in music and an incredible ear for pitch.

But when it comes to Dova, sometimes I am hard pressed to come up with a list of similarities.  She loves clothes and all things pink, purple and girly.  She is comfortable performing and is well-spoken.  Her eyes are big, beautiful and light brown (and weren't even brown when she was born!).  Her hair is fine with beautiful highlights, where mine is thick and dark like Adam’s.  She is talented in music, but has trouble with rhythms and still can’t read a single note (then again she is six-years-old).  And let's not mention the "I lost it!" and "I broke it!" gene.  Everything in the Where Did our Genes Go Wrong post from 2007 still holds true today.

So our list of similarities was a compilation of odds and ends.  We have the same ears.  They are identical, it is almost uncanny.  We both love to eat and try new foods.  We are both incredibly stubborn.  Hmm, ears, eating and stubbornness.  Hardly enough to say we are mother and daughter.  But we still love each other completely.

Last Saturday, we had the usual difficult times with Dova.  She flipped out during intermission at a performance of The Nutcracker because she wasn’t dressed up like the other kids.  I had asked her to wear a dress and tights before we left but she adamantly refused.  And knowing that it is never worth fighting with her incredible stubbornness, we let her go in jeans.  When she saw that all the other girls were dressed up their Sunday best, she started yelling at me for not bringing her dress and tights with us so she could change.  I tried to explain that I was respecting HER wishes not to get dressed up.  She just lost it more and said I should have forced her to wear a dress.  You can’t win with this girl.

So imagine my surprise when Sunday turned out completely different.  In the morning, I put on my treasured Baryshnikov Nutcracker vinyl LP on the stereo and we danced around the living room together.  She is a beautiful free spirit when she dances and I soaked up her radiance.  She had wanted to get together with her friend that day, but I wanted to take her to an MIT alumnae potluck at my old dorm.  She whined and pleaded, but she finally agreed when I told her there would be balloon animals and juggling. 

Dova insisted on dressing up for the party even though I thought it was probably casual dress.  She made me dress up as well and even agreed to take a mother daughter holiday portrait. 



When we attend parties, Dova usually shuns away from other kids, preferring to Velcro herself to me and hang out with the adults. She is not unusually shy, she is just extremely discriminating as to who she befriends, sometimes to the point of being intolerant of other kids, much to our dismay.  She is very well-spoken and comfortable with adults, so we generally let her hang with us.  But sometimes I wish she could run around and have a good time with other kids like her brother easily does.

At this party, there were plenty of other kids her age, but once again, she started out glued to my side.  She had no interest in learning how to juggle with the other kids.  At least it was easy to pile a variety of food from the potluck onto her plate.  But slowly, the other kids started to play with her.  An 8yo girl asked to play Connect Four with her.  I’ve never actually seen Dova play Connect Four, so I was a bit worried that she would be completely trounced.  Nearly 7yo Dova who doesn’t really like games against the 8yo daughter of a MIT Aero-Astronautical Engineer turned patent lawyer.  Yikes!



But she held her own and won about half the games.  In fact she tricked the other girl twice with the same move!  Wow, I was impressed.  Once Dova was warmed up, we proceeded to the balloon animals.  Some kids made their own creations.  Then I started realizing that these kids were quite intelligent.  Scary smart in fact.  Look at this abstract frame this 9yo (class of '23) made.



Wow, incredibly creative!  I took my hand at creating some animals, and once I started I couldn’t stop (over-achieving Asian gene took over).  I even made a new creation, the bee with a stinger.  I was trying to make a flower, but ran out of balloon after two petals.  Dova and her new friend ran around with balloon animal bees and had a blast.



Dova was fine when I left her to try my hand at juggling.  I’ve always been fascinated with juggling and own sets of balls, rings, clubs and scarves.  But I never took the time to learn and practice.  That day, I finally learned that I needed to start with two balls, not three, alternating the starting hand.  And then I needed to tandem juggle with someone else to get used to juggling from one side at a time.  We got up to 14 throws.  And only after I have the balls down, can I then try the clubs.  And I need to start with one club and two balls (“if you don’t mind the connotation”), not three clubs all at once.  Once again, over-achieving tendencies have prevented me from learning this hobby.



When I saw these juggling balls neatly lined up on the floor by one of the kids, I immediately thought of Adam, who has been organizing and lining up his toys since he was a baby.

It was incredible to see Dova so comfortable with other new kids.  And then I realized why.  She was just like them.  She is also scary smart, way ahead in school.  We try not to emphasize this with her because we don’t want her to feel superior, although we do express pride in her accomplishments.  She is clearly super intelligent and she felt right at home with these other precocious kids.  In fact, she was Just. Like. Me.  I also felt at home and incredibly energized to be around fellow alum:  smart, accomplished, and funny women. 

Afterward I took her around my dorm and showed her my room with the incredible view of Boston.  I felt an incredible bond with her as we walked the halls and the streets around MIT, knowing without a shadow of a doubt that she was my daughter.  It was a perfect Dova day.

In perfect balance with V8 V-Fusion + Tea

Here's a reminder to check out my review for V8 V-Fusion + Tea and a chance to win $100. Photo credit goes to my son Adam.  Here are the outtakes...


Falling right...


Falling left...