Alien Worlds and Androids

Well, I thought it was time to invade Melanie's blog again and post a few pictures from the opening of the "Alien Worlds and Androids" exhibit at the Witte Museum this past Saturday. --Warning: this post is picture heavy-- I decided to take Eric and Natalie to the opening hoping that it wouldn't be too crowded. Well, the exhibit was very crowded so we didn't get to spend much time there. We had to stand in line outside the museum before going in which was not a great sign. Eric had a blast though. While waiting outside he got to wear a "space helmet" (just a toy/costume piece but he loved it).

The exhibit itself provides a lot of information about different planets scientists have identified, discussion of different types of life found in extreme conditions here on earth, and ideas of what might exist somewhere else. It also provides a lot of information about robots (androids) and the various uses we have for robots now, and what the future might hold. There are lots of displays in the exhibit itself, but the exhibit was so crowded we decided to do some of the "member activities."

This includes having pictures taken with a lot of Star Wars characters that were at the museum just for this purpose. I believe they are all part of a club here in San Antonio and were exceptionally patient posing for pictures. Eric had an absolute blast. He was thrilled and overjoyed to pose for pictures. Natalie helped take some pictures and even posed for one picture, something unusual for her lately.

After taking numerous pictures we headed to some of the activities they had for the opening. This included watching some small robots, Eric even got a chance to control one of the smaller robots. The also played with some dough to make "creatures" and could put small lights on them. Although we didn't really spend much time in the new exhibit (we will definitely go back) we had a great time and Eric was on cloud nine.

Valentine's Day

I totally forgot to post about Valentine's Day. Alex didn't have practice that day, so Alex and I were able to get home by about 5pm.

Patrick bought roses to decorate the kitchen island and he also had another vase with roses in the middle of the dining table. Patrick doesn't give me flowers very often and I'm fine with that because I'd rather get stuff that lasts a while, like a new purse or clothes, but I still enjoy receiving flowers. The fact that he put them in a couple of our beautiful vases made them even more special.

I requested salmon for dinner and chocolate fondue for dessert. We didn't do anything special last year, probably because Natalie was going to be in the A Championships the next day. The year before, in 2012, Patrick made chocolate fondue and it was fabulous! He doesn't make it very often, in fact, I only remember the time he made it two years ago, but I think he may have made it some other time in between. He cut up bananas, strawberries, and french bread to dip into the chocolate. Yum!

The kids loved the grilled salmon--one of our favorite family meals, and the loved the chocolate fondue even more. Way to go, Papa! Thanks for a wonderful Valentine's Day meal!

Natalie Back Update

I last posted about Natalie's back pain last week. This week she complained that it was worse. She went back to the doctor on Wednesday. She had X-rays done to make sure there wasn't anything structurally wrong--there wasn't. The muscles in her back were really tight and on Friday, she got a prescription for a muscle relaxant. She's been taking that this weekend, but right now she can't tell the difference.

Meanwhile, Natalie's coach was able to pull her out of the swim meet that was held today plus the swim meet next weekend. She was disappointed, but at least we didn't have to pay for the entry fees this way. The doctor said she should not participate in PE or in swimming until the doctor clears her. Natalie complains now about being bored in PE. She wants to at least walk around the track since she walks around at school all day anyway. Apparently she's been picking up volleyballs and such during PE, so in other words, she probably could be resting more. We'll see what happens this next week.

For those of you that aren't on Facebook, I posted something interesting about Natalie there today. She has a school assignment where she was asking about her relatives' full names and birthplaces. She was being very needy and I had to repeat every name and place at least three times for her. At one point, I was telling her that her Papa was born in Argentina. She said, "How do you spell Argentina?" I laughed because she really wasn't trying very hard. While I was laughing, Eric started spelling "Argentina", and he spelled it correctly. He then said, "All you have to do is sound it out, Natalie!" Later, when I told her the cities where her Lola and Lola (my parents) were born in the Philippines, she said, "Why can't the city names be in English?"

Soccer Again

After many years of soccer games year round, with Anthony and Alex both playing in club soccer, and Anthony playing in high school, we're out of the habit of going to a soccer game every weekend. Alex stopped playing club soccer last spring, so he hasn't been playing in any soccer games until last month when his high school soccer games started. He's played in a couple of tournaments, but no games on the weekend yet. Patrick and I have gone separately to weekday games, but the weekend games have been cancelled due to cold weather. Last weekend, we both went to Alex's away game vs. Johnson, and we took Eric with us.

It was a pretty nice day, windy but with the temperatures in the upper 60s to low 70s. I still needed a jacket, but Eric was fine with his short sleeve shirt on. I took Alex to school at 7:15am, went home to meet up with Patrick and Eric, and then we went to Alex's away game at 9am. His team played okay in their first few games, but often had trouble scoring. They were playing a traditionally good team, so I didn't get my hopes up too high.

Alex's team is coming along, though. They were actually passing during this game and more importantly, they were able to score. Patrick and I thought Alex played well, although he never thinks that he played well. They have some good players on their team, and I'm glad that they are starting to work together. They won the game 1-0. This was a nice change from last year when Anthony's Varsity team lost every game. I went to another game just yesterday, and they played well overall, and I can see that they are getting better and better, but Churchill is always a tough team to beat. They lost to them 1-2.

Eric kept busy during the game by using the bleachers as his jungle gym. He would climb up and down the seats, often jumping down to the ground. Once in a while he would come give me a hug and kiss. He started soccer again just this week, so we'll be going to a few more weekend soccer games in the next month.

February Art a la Carte

Eric's February Art a la Carte class was this past week. This time, instead of being off for the day, I had to work on call at the hospital the night before. Luckily, I got a chance to nap before meeting Eric for lunch.

This time I took a picture of the example that Mrs. R, the art teacher, had put on the bulletin board. The art lesson involved a little information about Norman Rockwell and how he liked doing self-portraits. They were focusing especially on winter-themed paintings.

First, she had the kids look into a mirror to see what shape their faces were. If their faces were more oval shaped, she had them draw around their hands with their fingers close together, and if their faces were circle shaped, she had them draw around their hands with their fingers farther apart. I thought this was a great way to help the kids draw the shape, although the problem was that their hands were so small that they had to draw way around their hands to get heads that were of a decent size.

Eric was very set on certain things. The example hat that they were supposed to draw had a puff ball on top, but Eric modeled his after his Minion beanie hat, so there was no puff ball. He thought about drawing a bunch of Minions on his yellow Minion hat, but in the end, he decided not to. This was probably a good thing because he would have had a difficult time drawing that detail with the chalk pastels.

They were also supposed to add some other colors to the background, such as more blue in different shades, and then snowflakes, but Eric most definitely did not want any of that, just more white. Mrs. R also told them to draw buttons on their coat, but Eric wanted a zipper, like on his coat. I love that he knew what he wanted and he stuck with it.

He wasn't the only one that had set ideas of his own. One of the other boys decided to draw an Iron Man hat and scarf--lots of red with yellow for Iron Man's mask. A couple of the kids said that they really loved art class. I do too, and I love learning a little each time I volunteer.

January Art a la Carte

This is a blog post that I should have written and published last month, but I didn't get a picture of Eric and his art work because there wasn't enough time. I took the artwork pictures just this last week, so now I can share them in this blog post. Meanwhile, I hope I haven't forgotten too much of the details.

This first picture is of a chalk pastel that Eric did last month. His class won an extra art class because of their good behavior. I didn't know about this extra art class until the day of the regularly scheduled January class. I saw this hanging in the area that Eric's class artwork is usually hung and I wondered whose stuff that was. Eric's name is so subtle on this artwork that I didn't see it until I found out that this was from the extra class. I thought he did a pretty decent job with his owl.

I brought the usual lunch for Eric--Wendy's spicy chicken nuggets and vanilla Frosty. For some reason, we started talking about being able to raise one eyebrow. I can raise one eyebrow when I want to. Patrick cannot. When he sees me doing it, he usually starts laughing and then sometimes he will put his hand up to one eyebrow to keep it from moving so he can try to raise one eyebrow back at me.

This picture is Eric's attempt to raise one eyebrow only. He actually did raise one eyebrow at one point, but only when he wasn't thinking about it so hard. I couldn't get a picture when he did that, but I thought this picture was adorable. He looks a little quirky, but still endearing.

The lesson for the January Art a la Carte class was about using repetition in art in the style of Gustav Klimt. The inspiration piece was based on his painting, The Kiss. This required a lot of extra help, and so they had asked for five volunteers, one for each table. I convinced Patrick to come help also. He didn't come for lunch, but he arrived when Eric was finishing up his lunch.

The reason why they needed so many volunteers was that there were a lot of steps involved. First, the kids had to paint the background brown. There was one little boy especially who kept trying to get into the paint prematurely. One of the teachers stayed to watch him and him only, and then the co-teacher came to relieve her halfway through class.

There was also a lot of cutting. They cut the "blanket" out of yellow paper and also the "grass" out of green paper. They did some drawing with markers--the flowers on the grass, and the different circles and spirals you can see in Eric's artwork. The white and black pieces of paper were pre-cut before class. I helped cut some of those during a prep class on a different day.

By that time they were starting to rush because class was almost over. The kids were supposed to draw themselves and something or someone else they loved. One of the kids mentioned a Minion from Despicable Me 2. Eric loves Minions. He was trying to draw one and was particularly frustrated because it didn't look like he wanted to.

Now, some of the other volunteers were being almost too helpful to some of the kids. One of them was basically gluing and drawing stuff on her daughter's artwork. I guess she felt like her daughter should have glued more white and black pieces on or drawn more flowers/spirals. I really believe that the artwork has to be the child's artwork. They aren't being graded on this anyway. They just need to have fun with it.

Even though my OCD tendencies always make me want to reach in there and help Eric all the time, I don't--unless he asks me to. He has so much fun doing this stuff and in the end it usually looks pretty decent and I can say that he did it all by himself. The exception was when I drew a Minion head for him. He started looking a lot less frustrated at that point and started drawing the Minion body and arms. He also drew the side view of himself as instructed by his art teacher. Yes, this art is definitely Eric.

Back Injury

Natalie hurt her back early last week during PE. During part of the “Pacer Test” her back and ankle started hurting. Of course, Natalie being Natalie, she continued to run until she made the minimum number of laps to be considered a “100” for the fitness test before telling the coach that she was hurt. Patrick received a phone message about it and called the school nurse. They told him that her ankle was hurt but they put ice on it and she was back in class. When Natalie came home her ankle still hurt but she was also complaining about her back. She took swim practice off that evening but tried to swim the next night. During that practice her back hurt enough that she only pulled through practice because kicking hurt.

We immediately thought of a couple of years ago when Alex complained of his back hurting. The doctor said then that it was because Alex was growing so fast that his muscles were getting stretched and therefore hurting him. Natalie, although she is physically changing, does not have that same problem of getting too tall too fast. We were concerned about her complaints of it hurting, but she didn’t really look or act like she was hurting that much. We weren't sure if she was just stoic and was really hurting a lot but not showing it, or she was not hurting that much. When she had Swimmer's Ear, she didn't want me touching her ear, but she still kept swimming, and I was told that swimming with Swimmer's Ear hurts a lot.

She still wanted to go to swim practice. Fortunately some practices were cancelled due to weather or conflicting meets so she got some additional rest. This past Monday night she swam again, and again she simply couldn’t kick much without pain. We talked with her about it and told her that she needed to be able to practice fully, or not practice at all. On Tuesday she came home from school saying her back hurt worse than the day before. Patrick made an appointment for Natalie to see the doctor the next morning.

The doctor examined her and said that Natalie strained the muscles in her lower back and that trying to work out with it aggravated the injury and caused it to spread. She said the other back muscles work harder to compensate for the injured ones. The doctor also said no swimming and PE for a “minimum” of one week.

This evening, Natalie’s friend Margot was visiting, and Natalie was complaining about having to sit out of PE because it was “boring to just watch.” Maybe we should have just said she needed to rest her back, but she'll actually do it now that the doctor told her to rest and not just her silly parents. The doctor stressed to her that she needs to let her back heal before going back or she would just re-injure it and have the injury spread.

Unfortunately, she has a swim meet next weekend, so we'll see if she recovers enough to be able to go to swim practice before then or even if she'll be able to swim in the meet. On the plus side, this frees up our week a little. Eric starts soccer practices next week and Alex's soccer season is in full swing with practices every day after school and games once or twice per week.

Beautiful Weekend

After the cold weather this past week, the weekend was beautiful. The cold weather isn't my favorite, but the part I really didn't like was the wet weather and the gray skies. I was really ready for some sun!

These are just a couple of photos that Patrick took of Alex and Eric at our neighborhood park. I really love seeing those two together. Despite their very large size differences, they get along so well. I especially love the second photo because Alex is showing Eric a video he made. Eric was basically talking like a Minion from Despicable Me 2 and Alex added a special effect which consisted of five videos of the same thing within the one video. He even texted it to me.

We actually didn't have anything scheduled this weekend, except for a work thing for me on Saturday morning. Alex's soccer game was cancelled on Saturday and they thankfully let us know about it ahead of time. Otherwise, Patrick would have had to take Eric with him to Alex's school early in the morning when he would have had to drop Alex off for the away game.

Natalie wanted to go shopping so, since it was nice outside, we went to the "outside mall", La Cantera Mall. We went to Barnes and Noble first where I had to keep Natalie from buying all of the 10 or so books that she picked out. She narrowed it down to two. Then, it was still too early and the stores had not yet opened (this was on Sunday at 1130am), so we went to lunch. I shared a pizza with my baby girl then we went shopping at Forever 21. Every time we go to that store, I'm surprised at how cheap their prices are--$70 for two pairs of jeans, three camis, two bras, one shirt, and one lace dress. After shopping we had ice cream at Brindles.

It's turning colder again, but it should warm up again after that. Some people have complained about the warm then cold, warm then cold weather. I like that it doesn't stay cold for long.

First Filling

Eric got his first filling in one of his teeth on Thursday of this past week. Patrick took him to our family dentist. Dr. C said that he often referred his pediatric patients to a pediatric dentist nearby, but he felt like Eric didn't need that. Patrick said Dr. C did a great job showing Eric the different instruments he was going to use, including the drill. He explained what they were for, and even turned on the drill so Eric could hear what it sounded like. Eric is a very good listener.

He had no fear. He jumped right up on that dentist's chair. They put some sunglasses on him to protect his eyes from the light they used to see what they were doing. Dr. C put some numbing stuff on Eric's gum so he wouldn't feel the small amount of local anesthetic Dr. C injected to numb the tooth. Eric just lay there quietly until the end. They said that some of their adult patients don't do this well.

Patrick said they were all commenting on how impressed they were at how calm Eric was and that Natalie had also been a good patient when she had her first filling. Luckily, Natalie has not had any more fillings since then and hopefully Eric won't have any more either. Still, it's nice to know that if he gets another cavity and needs another filling, he will have no problem at the dentist's office.

They didn't want Eric to eat solid food right away since his mouth was still numb, so Patrick bought him a Sonic vanilla shake and kept him home from school the rest of the day. He got Eric some Wendy's to eat later and that was his reward for being such a good boy.

Snow!

This isn't terribly dramatic, but we did have a light dusting of snow yesterday morning. It was mostly melted by the afternoon, with a little of the white stuff still on the roof on many of the houses in our neighborhood. The temperatures stayed right around freezing all day and went below freezing again last night. There was no interruption in schools or work for the most part, although there were quite a few accidents during some peoples' morning commute.

Today, quite a few people said they saw sleet all over their backyard, and there were apparently some road closures earlier today, but everything was open again by the time I went home. Alex's Junior Varsity soccer game tomorrow was cancelled--one less thing for Patrick to do tomorrow. Natalie's swim practice was cancelled tonight.

Of course, this does not even compare to what other parts of the country are getting, including Anthony up in the Boston area. He had his regularly scheduled classes today.

Snow Day

Anthony actually sent me pictures yesterday (Wednesday). He texted us on Tuesday that Wednesday was going to be a Snow Day for him. He welcomed the small break since he has been super busy lately. He is taking two Mechanical Engineering classes and one higher level Math class this quarter, and because he also has an on-campus job and he's pledging with one of the fraternities, he doesn't even have time to Skype with us.

When he sent me these photos, I asked him if he had "played in the snow" yet. He said that he would play in the snow once his homework was done. Priorities!

This is a picture of Anthony's dorm building covered in snow. Since I had taken pictures of his dorm building with a lot of green grass in front and all around this summer, I asked him for a photo of it now.

Tomorrow I'll share a photo of the snow we got here at home.

Super Bowl Party

So much for trying to post more often! Life has just gotten in the way. Later this week I hope to have a short blog post about some of the little things that have happened in the last week.

For today I want to write about the Super Bowl Party that we went to this past Sunday. Patrick had always planned on making his chili for Super Bowl Sunday. We were going to have a small gathering at our house, but then our good friends Al and Alicia invited us over to their house. They have a media room that Al finished out next to their garage.

Patrick still made the chili and then brought it over to their house along with margaritas. I decided to make some Sausage-Stuffed Jalapeños also. I looked up the recipe online but a friend made something quite similar a few years back and I've been wanting to try it since then. I also made the Rum Glazed Banana Cake that used to be a favorite a few years ago. That's another recipe that I haven't made in years. It's funny how life gets in the way...

We went over shortly before kickoff. Eric played with Sofia and Natalie hung out in Anna's room. Her friend Margot was also there because Margot's parents went to a different Super Bowl Party. Margot understandably chose to hang out with her friends instead. In fact, the girls never really came out of that room except maybe once to get something to eat.

Al, Patrick, and Alex hung out in the media room. Alicia and I chose to watch on their other big screen TV in the living room so that we could be closer to the food. I was so stuffed but I really enjoyed all the food, so I paced myself and kept eating.

Eric and Sofia got creative when we didn't allow them to get on electronics. They played with this play tunnel. First they put a remote control car on the floor and put this tunnel lengthwise on top of the car. When the car moved, it pushed the tunnel this way and that. They got tired of that game so they started taking turns dragging each other across the floor.

The football game wasn't very exciting, so after halftime, I decided to go home and get Eric ready for bed. I was getting a bit sleepy myself since I didn't get to take a nap due to all the cooking and baking. It was a low-key Super Bowl Party, but we enjoyed spending time with our good friends.