Just Who Do You Think We Are?

I thoroughly enjoyed the Olympics opening ceremony, but based on the incredibly bewildered response I've been getting from Californians, I think I need to explain why. I think it did a brilliant job of defining what Britain is today, and what made it the modern country we now see. It spoke more to the Britain that I know, than the image that is often portrayed of bowler hats and tea shops. This was my country, every inch of it.

I love that it felt so inclusive, which is after all an Olympic idea. It felt like an opening ceremony for the people of Britain, and perhaps that's why it has been described as left wing propaganda - although what opening ceremony is not propaganda? A rosy retelling of Statehood? This at least was warts and all and based in reality. Giant baby and sick children trampolining on hospital beds reality.

I was joking with LK the morning of the ceremony that it would be funny if the Queen jetpacked in like they did with the LA Olympics - how hilarious then that she and Daniel Craig recorded that spoof of her parachuting in to the ceremony. That, and the Mr. Bean part lampooning Chariots of Fire was brilliant - we are a nation that likes to make fun of itself. Although - Mitt Romney learned that only the British can list our shortfalls, heaven forbid the foreigner that echoes our concerns. It reminded me of when someone comes to your house and you say 'oh heck, please excuse the mess' to which they're supposed to say 'oh it looks great' and absolutely never 'yes, it is a bit of shambles'. Perhaps you have to be British to understand that bizarre concept.

 I can really understand why a lot of people thought it was mishmashed and confusing though - not at all helped by the NBC commentators who blundered their way through scenes, failing to narrate or explain. Or perhaps a good show doesn't need an explanation - but then you run the risk of dumbing it down and Disneyfying things with  'this is what you should be feeling now' etc. It was so rich, constantly so much going on, that it was hard to take it all in. A visual feast or pandemonium, I suppose it could be interpreted as both. Over here it also went to commercial every five minutes which didn't help things, and apparently an entire section of dancing and honouring the victims of 7/7 was also cut.

I think the NHS scene has caused the greatest mystification amongst American audiences. Even Meredith Vierra was scoffing 'they feel so strongly about socialized medicine over here that they're choosing to use it to represent themselves.' I have to admit, the use of Mike Oldfield's Tubular Bells as background music did not help things, adding an Exorcist theme to the hundreds of children lying in their hospital beds, and the giant baby part was a bit weird. I loved what they were trying to achieve though - tying in Britain's rich history of children's literature with JM Barrie and JK Rowling with our history of free healthcare - literally no child left behind. Whether that was explained properly, that JM Barrie left all the proceeds from Peter Pan to support Great Ormond Street Hospital - the London hospital for critically sick children, was not clear. Or the fact that it was actual doctors and nurses doing the dancing, not paid dancers or State peons. There were more genuine smiles down there than I've seen in an opening ceremony before - although not from the Queen. Could she not have cracked a smile? I think she was hoping Danny Boyle would cut things short so she could go home and put her slippers on.

I loved the music montage - although quite frankly having Paul McCartney sing Hey Jude was probably a much better idea on paper than in reality, his voice being not what it was. They could have wallowed in the 'British Invasion' of the swinging 60s, but it was brilliant that they made it up to date - British music is still hugely relevant in the clubs of today. Not that I would know. Lucy was completely absorbed by the 'kissing scene' as she called it when the boy and girl kiss in front of Hugh Grant in Four Weddings and a Funeral (and perhaps the first lesbian kiss broadcast in an opening ceremony? Did anyone else notice that clip from Brookside - or the fact that they juxtaposed Will and Kate's kiss with the dogs kissing from Lady and The Tramp?). Perhaps a little too inclusive for some people, but Lucy loved it. It's definitely something I could watch again, and not just because it included both David Beckham and Daniel Craig....

What did you think?

Note to Self

When I was Anna's age I used to spend all my pocket money on sweets from the post office down our road. All 10p of it. Anna wants to spend her money on apps, which makes me feel about a hundred years old. Apps, they're dentist approved!

She doesn't yet have her own iPhone or iTouch or any of that, I'm still very much in control when it comes to all her viewing, so any app purchases have to be downloaded on to my phone and come out of my iTunes account. Basically I pay her allowance and she hands it back to me for 'Dragonvale' or 'Butterfly Farm' or another such game that sends me push notices at work which text me and say "your snarkle needs a friend" or "your lightning dragon just hatched, put him in the nursery!" That just screams professionalism in the middle of an EHR meeting. "I'm sorry gentlemen, will you excuse me for a moment, it seems my baby cyber-penguin just texted to say he's lonely and hungry."

But just in case you're rolling your eyes and thinking that this generation of children are growing up too fast, that Anna is 7 going on 17, she then goes and does something that is pure kid:

We had downloaded an app for her, but it was getting late so I said she couldn't play until the morning. Wanting to make sure she got a jump on the day, and could cram in as much 'screen time' as we would allow prior to going to summer camp she came up with this foolproof (her words) idea to make sure she woke up early and ready......

The precursor to the sticky note. Just sellotape it to your head (text side down of course - you want to make sure you can read it!). 

Good job she saw the sellotape before she saw the stapler!! 

Here's one I made earlier....

Yes it fell off, yes she still remembered to wake up at 6:30am to grab my phone before I had chance to say no.....and yes, I'm still laughing.

Late Bloomer

I don't have a green thumb. I find it hard enough to keep my kids alive, let alone plants. I have one tub of tomatoes that I'm 'nurturing' and that is proving to be enough hard work. Our house lies at the foot of a flip-flop-snappingly steep slope. The only way to keep plants alive is to keep them at the top of the slope where they have access to more than three hours of sunlight a day, but then we have to water them by hand as our sprinklers are temperamental at best, and at worst cost us hundreds of dollars in irrigation a month.

Our back garden is mostly notable for gophers, collections of terracota pots that may or may not contain something that might grow and an old turtle-shaped sandbox that now contains Anna's 'garden'.

We've been trying really hard this year (ie we've been remembering to water almost daily...) and I have a healthy crop of green ball-bearing sized tomatoes and Anna has one ambitious and incredibly leggy pea plant. Yesterday Anna came tearing in to the house clutching a ripe cherry tomato and a pea pod. "Let's have a salad!" she cried, which was both sweet and over-reaching in a loaves-and-the-fishes kind of way.

Let's have a salad! 

In the end we had carnitas tacos and everyone had a quarter of a cherry tomato and either one or two peas, which all felt very Dickensian. LK declined his tomato so that Tiny Tim (aka Lucy) could have a full half.

Next week we will be attempting to make chile verde out of three tomatillos.

I am actually very much enjoying this foray in to gardening. I like hiking up the hill each morning to see if anything's flowered and/or ripened. I know for a fact that it is all going to peak in an explosion of bounty the minute we head off on holiday in a few weeks.

As with most things in life though, you can work really hard at something and see no results, and then something you've been neglecting in the corner suddenly springs to life and Mother Nature makes a mockery of all your careful tending.

Take this night-blooming Cereus which just appeared early one morning and wilted about thirty minutes after this photo was taken:

You cannot be Cereus.

If it hadn't been a weekday morning then we wouldn't have been up with the birds and we would have missed it entirely. They flower very rarely, only overnight and are gone by morning. The flower above is about the size of a large grapefruit.

I said to Anna "isn't that the biggest flower you've ever seen in your life" to which she replied "it's giant but the biggest flower in the world is in Borneo and is a staggering one meter across" which once again proves she is not just reading but memorizing her National Geographic Kids magazines.

Still, I thought it was spectacular, and all the more beautiful for choosing to flower in our   wasteland of a back yard.

What's your garden surprised you with this year?

Fresh But Not Quite So Easy

About a year ago they knocked down our local butchers shop. Not just any old butchers, but the place where Julia Childs used to buy her meat. In its place they built a supermarket, but what could have just added insult to injury, actually turned out to be the silver lining to yet another metaphor.

The store in question was Fresh and Easy - not just a supermarket but a British-based supermarket, owned by none other than Tesco. Be still my beating heart. We waited a couple of days to try it out, so we didn't seem too American and keen, and here we are marveling at the 'British Foods' section. All 10 square feet of it.

Wow! Branston Pickle, and only four blocks from our house!

I was so excited. I love my old mainstay, Trader Joes, but they don't have the staples that you end up needing, like shampoo, tin foil, goldfish and laundry detergent. Fresh and Easy had the name brand stuff, but also, that English mainstay 'ready meals'. American pre-made meals tend to come in two varieties 'Hungryman' and 'diet', and both varieties are processed within an inch of their lives. Fresh and Easy comes with main meals, side dishes, salads etc, all pre-made but with minimal processing and very little rubbish added. I could see a future of decent meals of an evening. Variety. Nutrition. It was going to be fabulous.

Unfortunately Fresh and Easy mimics the British supermarket model in one other critical way - and that's the self service checkout. And that, well, that's causing a bit of a problem over here. The first time we went there were Fresh and Easy helpers everywhere, eager to educate people on the finer points of scanning their own groceries. I was game for the challenge, no technology can defeat me, and worked my way through scanning my four British food items. Two weeks later, and I'm there on a Friday afternoon with two exhausted children and an entire week's shop, queues a mile long and one incredibly harried looking checkout helper.

It was an unmitigated disaster. Every four items the belt would freeze as one or both of my girls would lean on the conveyor, activating the weight sensor and causing the machine to freak out that my scanned greek yogurt was actually 4lbs heavier than predicted and thus there was a *foreign object unscanned* so the lady would have to come and unfreeze the scanner, while simultaneously trying to help every single other customer having the same issue. Then the sheer volume of groceries started backing up, on to the conveyor, causing yet more error messages, then it wouldn't accept the sku code of my baked potatoes, then Lucy touched the sensor again and I'm glaring at her like 'so help me if you put a finger out of place again I will snap you like a twig', while the increasingly frazzled assistant is both bagging, re-setting the sensor and wishing she'd had the qualifications for a job at H&M instead. To cut the glacial atmosphere I joked "wow, it's not exactly family friendly this system is it?" as Lucy dumps a pile of bananas on the conveyor without scanning them first - oh the horror!!! and the computer beeps frantically. And then the assistant glares at me and says "they brought it over from the UK to take away our hours" and I'm thinking "OK then! Trader Joes it is! They have stickers!"

This is how mad the Fresh and Easy clerk was at me - milk, olive oil and a ten pack of capri suns in one flimsy plastic bag. Do you think she was trying to tell me to bag my own groceries?

I will be back, for my clotted cream and Branston Pickle, but only when I'm buying a maximum of two items and only when I'm child free.

To be honest this is probably the way of the future, but to launch full throttle in to self-scanning (as your only option) in an American grocery culture where customers are not even bagging their own stuff is maybe too much of a great leap forward. This is still a customer service heavy culture. Self-scanning works for one item by not for a family-sized shop.

Still, the Thai green curry was very tasty though, and that bread for 98c wasn't bad either....

The Games People Play

LK loves to find treasures at thrift stores (charity shops, for those in the UK). Some of his finds are pretty good:

and some, well, you get what you pay for.

Take this game of Jenga. You create a tower from wooden blocks, and each player takes a turn pulling out a brick and placing it on top, creating an increasingly unstable structure. Perfect rainy-day family fun, except it never rains here.

The girls opened the package and started building a tower out of the blocks. They were pretty excited to begin playing and called us over to take part.

"Err, you might want to take this one back to the thrift store" I tell LK after only the briefest of glances at the game.

"You can't take stuff back to thrift stores" says LK.

"Oh I'm pretty sure you can take this back" I say as I hand him one of the blocks, the one that says 'fake an orgasm'. Each one of the blocks had a handwritten message on it, 'mas cerveza', 'take a shot from the belly button of the person on your left', 'remove an item of clothing'. You get the picture.

"Oh man" says LK

"Exactly"

"I totally went to the wrong college. Where were these parties when I was at school and what the hell is 'lefties'?"

"......."

Meanwhile Anna wants to know how to fake an organism, so we start talking about bio-ethics and Dolly the Sheep as LK packs up the game making sure to read every single block.

This is the PG-rated selection, but somehow I don't think 'lefties' means 'socialists'.

How The Real World Eats

I get home at about 6pm with both girls and LK walks in at about 7:30pm. While I'm waiting for him to get home I feed the girls. As soon as he walks in the door I head out to go for a 30min migraine-busting run. Consequently we eat late, and as I have my lunch hour from 12 til 1 at work, I'm ready to gnaw the ulnar of an unsuspecting child by the time dinner's on the table.

Tonight I came home and as dinner was cooking, I helped myself to a few crisps (chips). LK chimes in "your body rebuilds after a run with whatever you eat directly after", so I counter "well, where's my perfectly balanced dinner waiting for me when I get home?" He fires back "you should have run longer". So there we are, a happily married couple bickering away due to low blood sugar.

Cut to me, wishing the Trader Joes frozen Cioppino would cook a little faster, turning the gas up and watching it boil.

LK: It's boiling already.
Me: I just want it to cook faster, I'm hungry.
LK: It's not going to boil any boilier.

I had to laugh. We need a wife.

Do any of you work long hours and still cook when you get home? How do you avoid reaching for pre-made junk food or ordering a takeaway? I suppose I could eat with the girls as soon as I get home and let LK eat alone, but I think that way I'd end up eating two meals and defeating the whole purpose of a run!

Gymtastic

It's week four of summer - it must be gymnastics camp. This one was a new experience for all of us. I'd personally never fancied gymnastics as a kid - something about the violent j-curve of every gym-rat's spine screamed 'stick with ballet'. Anna was persuaded in to it by a friend from school - one of those zippy little girls who can effortlessly cartwheel seventeen times in a row. On the way there I told Anna that she shouldn't do anything she wasn't completely comfortable with (a recipe for a dull but spiral-fracture free life.....). "what" she replied "like a double back flip?". Well, yes, that definitely qualified.

Two days in to the camp, and I got the call. The gymnastics teacher phoned me at work to say there'd been an incident and I needed to come out there. The call every parent dreads.

"She's got dry skin" the camp coordinator said, "we've tried sunscreen but she says it's really itchy and she needs you to bring some lotion."

Leaving work to bring some Aveeno to your child hardly screams professionalism does it? I did feel a tad guilty though. When Anna was born her skin was so soft that our fingertips felt too coarse to do it justice. To truly appreciate the combination of silk and velvet of her newborn skin, we had to touch it with our lips or the back of our hands. It was other-wordly soft. Cut to age seven and three weeks of tennis/swim camp, with its endless round of pool, sunscreen, sweat and sun exposure meant her skin had changed into a hide that would make an eighty year old Floridian proud. She was positively scaly and I made a big production of lubing her up every night with lotion or the incredibly greasy but effective Aquafor.

I'd dug my own grave. By commenting on her dry skin it had become a 'big deal' one that meant she had to call me in the middle of her camp. I fobbed her off until lunchtime, hoping that if I left it a couple of hours and called later they would tell me everything was okay and she'd stopped complaining. No such luck "she's still asking about it" they said.  Perhaps there is some gym camp rule that means they can't apply lotion to a minor, perhaps the act could be misconstrued, perhaps they wanted to see just how over-indulged this child really was. Who knows. I had to remind myself that she's only seven, and more importantly, that I could make her pay for it later. I still can't believe I spent my lunch hour driving lotion to my crusty child. I suppose I should just be glad that she had a good time at the camp, and she did, she had a great time. The lotion call wasn't a ruse to get to see me during the day (even I can't flatter myself that much).

Her big finale on Friday was the back-bend / bridge (?) seen above. Not a double back flip in sight, and what gorgeous shiny skin.....

Do You Have A Flag?

I have to admit, I love this American flag that Anna made at camp yesterday. I like to think that her half-British subconscious caused her to draw it backwards.

I realize that for most Americans this holiday is more about the birth of a nation, than it is about overthrowing Colonial rule. Even so, it is a difficult holiday to be both British and American, so this flag is a keeper.

In the spirit of the holiday though, I'd like to write a list of all the little things that I think make America great. In no particular order. Please feel free to add your suggestions and I'll repost the list with your name and a link.

Reasons to Celebrate America:

• S'mores
• Mailboxes
• Confident children
• LL Bean flannel sheets
• Ranch dressing
• Jeans
• Thanksgiving
• Drive-in movies
• Drive-thru restaurants
• Cocktails
• Have a nice day
• Road trips
• Going out for breakfast
• Customer service
• Coffee
• Free refills and ice
• Hummingbirds
• Why are so many of these food related?
• My LK
• Summer camp; Brunch; Fireflies; Cardinals (the birds, not the catholic priests); Crate & Barrel; reliable beach weather, bagels and challah bread - Nappy Valley Girl
• Marshmallows - Anonymous

Please feel free to add your suggestions and I'll repost the list with your name and a link.

Anyway, I hope you had a very happy day, whether it was Independence Day, or just Wednesday.

How To Pay For Summer Camp

I think this time of year actually unites working Mums and stay at home Mums. What a concept. The summer is brutal for both. Unless of course you actually like spending every waking minute with your bored progeny, explaining why they can't spend 18+ hours a day rehabilitating cyber kittens in their virtual vet clinic.

This time of year has got to be hard for both species of Mum. Stay at home Mums are suddenly in the trenches all day as schools let out, and working Mums have to stitch together a patchwork of camps, odd pick-up times and ride-shares. It's another full time job.

This summer Anna is doing tennis camp, swimming camp, gymnastics, Girls Inc, her old preschool and her top pick 'farm camp'. We are also - amazingly - going on vacation for a week, so that left only TEN weeks of vacation to cover. I have so many camps, with so many weird drop-off times to manage that I wrote it all on the calendar because if I get hit by a bus in the next few weeks it will kill me that my carefully spun spider web of activities will be for naught. I also wrote it on the calendar because you can guarantee that LK has invested as much time in planning Anna's summer of 'enrichment', as I have planning England's European Cup victory party. Nada.

Don't even ask how much this is costing.

Did you know that there is a very real possibility that budget cuts will mean the next school year will be three weeks shorter? By my reckoning that means that Anna will only actually be in school for three days in February and four days in March.

Good job California - what a great way to plan for an educated and productive future workforce. No really, I think you should keep all those State retirees at full pension. It's the only obvious course of action!!

Lucy on the other hand is in preschool, which - thank the Lord - means she only has one week of holiday to cover. Otherwise my head would explode with the logistics of it all.

Anna is happily oblivious to all this. Like me, she sees an unending summer of camps, but where I see thousands of checks written and calling in a year's worth of car-pooling debt, she sees the possibility of new friends, new skills and new opportunities. She is already nut brown from spending every day of the last three weeks in the pool (if you're reading this from the UK - yes American schools finish in the first week of June). She is having a wonderful summer.

The rationale behind this GIGANTIC summer vacation is that America was an agrarian economy and children were needed to work in the fields over the summer. So it seems a no-brainer to me that we should be allowed to let our children actually work in the fields over the summer. Right? That way instead of paying $250 for a week of 'organic farm camp' at the Center for Urban Agriculture, Anna actually gets hands on experience picking strawberries down in the fields of Oxnard. I get childcare and the family gets a little money coming in instead of going out.

But apparently that's against the law. Sheesh.

Here's How Thankful I Am

Do your kids write thank you letters? I know it's the bugbear of every child and every party, yet it is nice to acknowledge that that thoughtfully wrapped gift didn't just disappear in to the void. If my Aunty can get a gift to Anna from Switzerland, then we can get a thank you to her as well. At some point...

When Anna was little I used to transcribe emails from her, asking carefully staged questions like "Dear Aunty X, thank you for the Y, the thing I liked most about it was....."

It was always funny to see how she saw fit to fill in the blanks. Sometimes I edited. When you see what happened below, you'll know why...

Anna is now at the age where she can put pen to paper herself, and as long as we just do one thank you letter a day she doesn't get overwhelmed. She sits at the table, and I sit across on the couch and shout out requested spellings. The other day she had taken a break from writing her magnum opus "The Spooky Old Pickle" and she was writing a thank you note to her friend H.  There she is above, deep in concentration. H's Mum was kind enough to get Anna a gorgeous swimming costume and the first two books in a horse series - something obviously very dear to Anna's heart.

This is what she wrote:

Dear H. 


Thank you for the swim suit and horse books. I wear the swim suit to camp every day. I love the horse books and have read them both. Tell your Mom to go get me the other ones.


Love, Anna


You can lead a horse to water.......

Fortunately Robin is a good friend and has a good sense of humour, because hell yes I sent it.

Now We Are Seven

A tiger Mum makes every waking moment a learning opportunity. If you want to have a birthday, then you have to make your own invitations.
Yes, that is how we spell Saturday in California.

After hosting a birthday party for one of my girls, it's always me that feels like I've aged a year not them.

Birthday parties are hard work.

This year Anna did me a huge favour by requesting a bowling party birthday. She'd gone to one earlier in the year and it's all she's thought about since. This was one of those parties where you pay a set amount per child, you get a party room and an attendant, and you actually get to sit back and enjoy the fun. I may have only thrown a few birthday parties since becoming a Mum, but I do know that the ones that are the most enjoyable are where there's

a: no house cleaning,
b: an attendant,
c: the mind-numbing effects of alcohol
or d: all of the above.

Bowling may not seem like a no-brainer for a seven girls aged between 3 and 10, but it was a blast.

How does a 3 year old bowl?

With the help of an alligator of course.....

Pity me at your peril, fools. This gator and I are going to dominate....

If it wasn't for her penchant for 1960s pink satin birthday dresses, this girl would be packing up and moving to Milwaukee to drink PBR and bowl every night.

Clearly having quite a lot of fun.

Then it was time for cake, presents and a sack of tokens each for the arcade. I may have nicked a few tokens from the more gullible children to have a go at the wheel of fortune, but as has been proved many times, I am not the fortunate one. I won four (4) tickets. My oldest daughter.....798 tickets.

Hitting the jackpot on her 7th birthday. You can't write this stuff......

She traded all those tickets in for 700lbs of candy, and she has not stopped bouncing since.

How much did all this cost? Well, according to the bill it was eleventy hundred dollars priceless.

And that was just LK's bar tab. 

Fathers Day

LK caught in the act of fathering his children.

Wait....that didn't sound right did it?

Disneyland in Pictures

The faces tell it all.....which is a good job, because apparently when I take a camera to Disneyland, all I take is close-ups of my family. We could have been anywhere. Anywhere selling ridiculously overpriced stuffed animals.

Their faces never lost this expression for 12 hours.

Oh lollipop. How I love you.

Those bubbles were terrifying.

It's takes a real man to carry this around for 8 hours.

I have never seen Lucy 'coy' before, until she met a real live princess. Personally I thought Sleeping Beauty was a bit saccharine, and Anna's dress is the one that kicks ass.
Am I the only one that gets Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella mixed up? 

No, they don't serve booze to the general public at Disneyland, so we had to refuel at the Rainforest Cafe. This  Coronarita, for the record, was INSANELY good. Or maybe we were just ready.

Poor Lucy getting a bit squashed here.

Yes that is a baby pegasus.

$200 to enter the park - and only because we 'pretended' Lucy was still 2.

$700 in plush toys.

Birthdays

I'm terrible at keeping secrets, which is why the fact that we're planning on heading down to Disneyland this morning for Anna's 7th birthday is killing me. Fortunately it's a very last minute decision otherwise we would have given the game away days ago. Even LK almost blew it last night by saying 'which car do you think we should take tomorrow, the red one gets better gas mileage' quickly covered with 'but either will do on that short trip to school!'

Nice save LK. Swift.

We'd offered Anna the choice of Disneyland or a party for her big day. I think she chose a party because of the opportunity for extra presents, so she elected to go bowling, which my iphone insists on translating to 'boweling'. Nothing says happy birthday like an invitation to bowel with a bunch of small children. I was quite glad at the time, because Disneyland in June - on the week that most schools finish for the summer didn't sound like my idea of fun. But, due to a too-good-to-be-true break in LK's schedule, we're now heading down to LA to join the rest of Southern California in that Pirates of the Caribbean queue. Sorry, line.

This time of year is birthday-tastic in the Aliblahblah household. It has been non-stop.  LK's was a real winner this year. He's always hard to buy for, because what he really wants is either a Honda S2000, a fully loaded camper van, or gin. Nothing price-wise in the middle. That's why I was chuffed to bits to find a groupon for glass-blowing, something he used to do many years ago in college. Not quite a gift with paperwork from the DMV, but fun and a little different - plus we now have four beautiful pieces of glass  just itching for the girls to break them:

Still, I wanted to make him feel special on his birthday, particularly as he was going to be putting in a looooong day at work. I woke up very early and on a whim decided to sneak out of the house and go and get him surprise early morning bagels and coffee.
What a nice wife.

Of course, it would have been more helpful if I'd switched off my 6:30am alarm before I snuck out of the door. When I returned twenty minutes later, bagels in hand, LK was sitting blearily at the computer having had a rude awakening AND found his wife had mysteriously left him in the middle of the night.

He never said whether that was a good or a bad thing.

It was only later that day that I remembered another surprise birthday present I'd planned to get him. A big berry manzanita bush, a junior version of one we both think is beautiful at the local Botanic garden. I'd popped up there a few days before his birthday to pick one up. I also managed to sneak in a quick photo op - because our botanic garden is too beautiful not to share.

So, midway through his actual birthday I suddenly remember the manzanita hiding outside on our bedroom balcony. I immediately called LK to let him know he was such a lucky bloke there was yet another surprise present waiting for him at home.

"I know" he said "I watered it yesterday".

Big Berry Manzanita

So, not exactly a genius when it comes to surprise birthdays. I bet you can't wait to find out how the girls responded to their Disneyland surprise. Any guesses?

Sitting Pretty

Watching all my fellow Brits braving the downpour at the Queen's Diamond Jubilee was a good reminder of how we take weather for granted over here. Want to play tennis outside a week next Thursday? No problem. Planning an outdoor party, a night in a roofless tent or a two hour run? The weather won't ruin it - because it's not going to rain until at least October.

But before you start thinking it's all daily margaritas by the pool over here, consider the downside to so much sunshine.

I know this may be hard to take if your four day Jubilee weekend now has a severe case of rising damp - but there are real difficulties with living in a warm climate. I'm sure you can agree that having to apply thick gloopy sunscreen to two small children several times a day is no picnic, but the real challenge is maintaining that perfect pedicure. I know. Hard times.

Every second shop in Santa Barbara is a pedicure place. Everyone (and I'm including a lot of metrosexual men here) get a pedicure at least every couple of weeks. Open toed shoes are part of the Santa Barbara lifestyle. Several of my co-workers wear flip-flops daily. Having nude toenails means you're just not trying hard enough. You're practically letting yourself go, and the California lifestyle is less about fun in the sun as it is about relentless self-improvement. You will be judged for your barren toes, so you'd better be a triathlete or a hippy to wear flip flops with bare nails.

-- Interesting aside -- my Aunty used to be a nurse and when she was in training in the 1960s they told her if a woman came in to the hospital with painted toenails they would ALWAYS test her for syphilis. How times change --

In an effort to prove I was syphilis free training for my run meant that for over six months I remained without a pedicure. They advise you to buy brand new shoes when running, for the sake of your knees. LK bought me a brand spanking new pair of Sauconys - but I'm not sure I exactly broke them as much as they broke me in. I had developed a perfect road-map of callouses on my feet. I nurtured them, knowing that each callous meant one less blister on my next run. A pedicure was out of the question.

It was inevitable - the way to celebrate finishing my half marathon was to go and get a pedicure, and I took Anna with me. It was a big treat. She's had her nails done once before, with a group of tiny ladies for her sixth birthday party nearly one full year ago. Leaving her twelve months between pedicures meant that Anna had come up with an elaborate and much mulled-over pedicure plan. She presented the poor Korean lady with four nail polishes - she wanted red and turquoise on alternate toes, each with a different glitter top coat. I could sense a big tip was in order, and that June, our pedicurist thought I had more money than sense (only wrong because I don't have any money either).

I chose to go for a very deep navy colour, that the elderly lady next to me seemed fascinated with. There I was sitting next to my six year old who was getting multi-coloured alternate nails, but no, she was fascinated by my Boots #7 Navy polish. "Well" she said "that's bold, where did you find that colour, it's very.......impressive". Impressive? Not a word I'd usually associate with toenails, but then, maybe I've actually achieved self-betterment through toenail polish. The American dream.

Widow Maker

Can you see how lethal this thing is? Can you spot the hidden danger?

I know, the idea of a bike trailer always made me nervous. I'm not the best on a bike to begin with:

Only I can make a quiet bike ride and a tree into an 'extreme sport'.

LK was adamant though. When the girls were small, he wanted us to be able to go on family bike rides down to the beach, and he would tow them in the bike trailer.

I thought it would be a bit like those mothers you see with pushchairs thoughtlessly flinging their children out in to moving traffic before they'd even stepped off the curb. I thought cars wouldn't see the trailer, that my two tiny daughters would be hurtling along in an aluminium and canvas frame below eye-level of even the tiniest European car.

I was wrong. The bike trailer worked a treat and no-one hit us. Unfortunately the girls HATED it. Strapping the two of them together in such close proximity to each other, both wearing over-sized mushroom-like helmets was a disaster. I've searched our photo library looking for a photo of the two of them in it - but it doesn't exist because there was never a point where one or both of them wasn't screaming.

So the bike trailer sat unused by the side of our house. Until I decided it was more than time that we sold it in a garage sale.

Who would have thought that would be the dangerous part of the whole exercise?

Look who had made a comfy new home in our bike trailer:

A massive black widow spider.

OMFG.

Preventing my curious, scientifically-minded 6 year old from 'taking a closer look' was hard. Persuading them both to go inside while I - no spider-lover myself - disposed of it was another thing. Taking the time to get a photo, convinced it was going to lunge at any minute (they do not really lunge - or do they??) was testament to how badly I need blog content dear readers.

Eventually I 'guided' it with a trowel in to a huge jug of water (to slow it down and/or drown it). Keeping my eye on it, doing the front crawl around its watery prison, I carried it as far away from our house as possible.

I know they're everywhere over here, but to think one had been living where we were strapping our kids down (albeit a few years ago) just gives me the willies.

Yuck.

Memorial Day vs Veterans Day

Memorial Day sunset            

Anna asked me this weekend what the difference between Memorial Day and Veterans Day was. Good question I thought. A three day weekend? Barbecues? The United States is hardly dripping with public holidays, so it is a little peculiar that of the ten holidays or less observed by the working drone American, two are so similar.

Apparently Memorial Day is to observe those who died in service to their country, and Veterans Day honours all military personnel, alive or dead, active or well, passive? de-active? They both seem like good reasons for some time off and a bit of reflection if you ask me, so I hope the current administration doesn't see fit to bundle them like they did with Washington's and Lincoln's birthdays.

Lucy reflecting on our fallen heroes and Pirates Booty.
Mostly Pirates Booty.
Pirates Booty is a puffed corn snack by the way, not an actual Pirate's bottom.

Once again, it is hard to be on this side of the pond, trying to revel in a three day holiday when the UK is whooping it up with yet another Jubilee hard on the heels of a bank holiday Monday. And they call Britain the workhorse of Europe.

Sheesh.

So what did you fill your time with this Memorial Day? Chez K we cleaned and scoured, painted and purged. We almost completed a long overdue spring clean. I have a balcony stuffed to the brim with garage sale items. I bleached and buffed the kitchen cabinets. I really, really wanted my car to get the same treatment but sadly our trusty car detailer has been deported. No bueno. I called around and got various quotes, inside only for $100 +. That coupled with the fact that I am literally too ashamed to take my goldfish and chocolate milk encrusted car to a garage meant that I spent a good chunk of my weekend cleaning my car with a toothbrush. It was like an archeological dig. Layers of matter, weeks of art projects, glitter, McDonalds happy meal toys, odd socks, half-eaten lunches, stickers, lollipop sticks. Bleurgh. I got it as clean as possible and now feel like banning the girls from stepping inside. Certainly no food. Art projects are questionable.

Despite all this Martha Stewarting - we had a brilliant Memorial Day weekend in the end. LK had a whopping two days off in a row - the weather was amazing, no May Grey in sight, and we were delighted to take our friends up on outdoor barbecues with live music, trips to the beach, and an afternoon at the pool.

It's not such a hard life out here after all is it?

Nasturtiums growing wild on the path down to the beach. 

Camping

Lucy and Anna roughing it under canvas at our yearly camping trip. I say 'our' yearly trip, but this was the first time I'd bitten the bullet and decided to stay the night. Usually I hang out at the river for the afternoon then beat a hasty retreat as the sun begins to fade, back to the comfort of my own bed and exclusive use of the remote control.

I don't really know why this year was different. LK managed to score a ridiculously cheap tent at Costco, we had an inflatable mattress, and as you can see from the image above - a Pottery Barn duvet cover hardly screams pioneer woman does it?

Camping divas with a serious case of mattress-head

I was actually quite excited about sleeping under the stars. For one night and one night only. The real novelty of living in California is being able to sleep with nothing but mesh between you and the night sky. Not quite the sluicing down rain in a muddy cow-pat strewn field that I remember from camping with the Girl Guides.

LK told me it'd be the best nights sleep of my life, and I have to admit, as the girls and I snuggled down, cosy in our bed, and I watched their breathing slow and eyes close, I was having a great time.

It's amazing how noisy the wilderness can be though. Crickets and ciccadas chirped and whirred. Things rustled. Girls farted. Plus there was this queer periodic booming sound which might have been a Californian bittern, a truly giant frog, or most likely some dodgy missile testing from the Air Force Base up the road.

Then the temperature dropped. The sky exploded with stars. There seemed to be more stars than night sky. I buried myself in Lucy's monkey pyjamas trying to extract some heat as she slept blissfully. I resorted to stealing Anna's woolly hat that I'd made for our recent trip to England. Then I pulled on a goose-down gilet.

Anna sporting her handmade hat - before I stretched it over my giant melon.

The air mattress began to sag, every movement created a ripple effect like the cheesiest of 70s water beds. Somewhere across the campsite another child cried out for it's Mum. The river gurgled endlessly down the hill and I tried not to think about needing the loo.

LK finally climbed in the tent, sending shockwaves through the deflating air mattress. It got colder. Lucy kicked off her blankets as she does every night, except now they were mine too and I was freezing. I pulled them up to my face, my beanie down to my nose. The cold air night air kissing my face, babies sleeping next to me. It was - finally - a good night's sleep.