to the beach, to the beach

Lazy weekend with not much planned until we woke up Sunday morning to find warm sunny weather and we all thought that we couldn't bear not to be outside....we finally figured out what that meant to all of us and then were able to get a car at the last minute and drive out to Long Beach. It was a
nostalgia trip for Arnie although he couldn't seem to remember his address in Long Beach, bagel lunch at his favorite place, time at the beach and playtime in the water for Kate and a road trip for me. I'm the one who just enjoys sticking my head out of the window and playing with the wind. Really it's just the change of venue which makes it all palatable.

We had time for a quick side trip to Pt. Pleasant for a bayside restaurant for a drink. Dinner on the roof. Purrfect day.

Life with Stieglitz

Well, not exactly life with Stieglitz. However it is life with an up and coming photographer who had his first show last night at a gallery on 14th Street. Arnie's photography class culminated in a celebratory show of his work along with his fellow classmates. It was great. Arnie looked like a very distinguished photographer and his B&W photos of kate were terrific. They have spent endless weekends going to Bryant Park in various costumes so that Arnie could photograph her. Hard work that....

Lucy Banks, Kate and I all walked downtown to see the show and found the street infront of the gallery crowded with people. Glitch. someone had forgotten to buy hooks for all the photographs! Delay!

Not any camp I ever went to

Post from Street Math Investigators:

We've had a great week so far: we created wonderful math problems on the High Line and our activities may get a mention in the West Village newspaper in July (we'll email you the link when we know for sure.) However, we had a great time at the Museum of Natural History, where we learned about the relative size of things using the "Powers of ten" exhibit, and then walked through 13 billion years of time. We then made our video and then, taking a page from the movie "UP!," calculated how many balloons it would take to lift your child off the ground. We also calculated that it would take over 13 hours to fill up enough balloons to accomplish this task, which was made all the more harder because the balloons only hold the helium for 8 to 10 hours!

Tomorrow we are off to the Trinity Church graveyard to compare the lifespan of people from Colonial America to soap bubbles, and survey the use of mathematics in Native American culture at the Museum of the American Indian. Thursday we will go to MOMA to connect mathematics with modern art, and create a mathematical piece of artwork of our own, courtesy of Sol LeWitt, and then Friday we will sail on the ferry to Governors Island, where we will learn how to find the area of an island by shooting it with cannonballs!

Math Street Investigators SMI New York

well, ok, so it's Math Street Investigators but I've been calling it Math Camp. Call it what you will it's basically the most fabulous opportunity for kids to use mathematical concepts in a day to day way as they go around the city. Kate was thrilled and spent all of dinner chattering about it. Which of course made me so happy. Yesterday the group of 5 went to visit the HighLine which is an amazing new park in Manhattan. They used this visit to estimate the height of the Highline which is built on some abandoned railroad tracks that run above streets in the West Village. then they estimated how much steel it would take to build it, interviewed visitors to the Highline and videotaped them about how high they thought they were off the ground, etc. etc. They in turn were all interviewed by a wandering local newspaper reporter and today they are off to MOMA to explore and talk about mathematical concepts in modern art.

The sun has just come out!!!!

Father's Day

Yet, again, another wet weekend. But it made for a relaxed time because no one had any energy to do anything. We got to take Miss Murray to the Park in an interim dry period but that was almost it. Fathers Day was celebrated with Chocolate sauce for Arnie, chocolate croissants and dinner at a Vietnamese Restaurant. Where strangely enough he didn't eat Chocolate Pudding for dessert!

I want Kate to do everything that I did, if I liked it, and then do all the other things that I was either afraid to do or didn't think i could do, like Math camp. I dropped her off this morning and Can't wait until tonight to hear what she has to say.

The Sun

This time last year we were in mid air on our way to China and this year the sun came out for the day.So that's a celebration initself....

rain, rain, go away

Alice has a couple of days off -- don't ask -- and so we are retrofitting kate's schedule to compensate. Today's Baby sitter of choice is our young cousin Lucy Banks and my extravagant ideas of sending them to the Brooklyn Aquarium have been downsized because of the rain. I actually wans't too sure that it was a sensible trip for LB and kate to make because I'm not entirely comfortable that either one of them are competent Marco Polo types and will do well on the subway. It's a long trip. But Let me be clear. This is not just rain. This is RAIN. And it has been doing this R thing for some time now and the early morning forecast is for this R substance to continue to come down through the weekend. Heretofore the weeekends have been sacrosanct and sunny but now it just keeps on coming down.

Kate had a hair cut which looks great and then we took her out to dinner at our favorite restaurant as a reward for a sensational report card. She was beat having walked most of the day. Apparently LB felt walking was the safer path for junioir Marco Polos.

Report card time

Good report card for kate! When I think back to what my parents went through with my
report card, it makes me said in retrospect for them. i know at the time I didn't care except I hated all those earnest talks about doing better. I know that Arnie and I are really lucky. Kate is a really good student who likes school and will actually go off, willingly, to Math Camp!

This weekend was the dreaded Puerto Rican Day parade and so on our way to Grandma Dot's for Sunday lunch we stopped off to pick up my new quilt. Gorgeous! You can look over it and tell stories about most of the squares.

Then Saturday night we had dinner with some friends of Arnie's who live out on Long Island somewhere. Very nice but very suburban. I can't imagine or actually, don't want to imagine that kind of life. Coming into New York must be such an incredible pain in the neck. However they took us to dinner at an Italian gun club on MacDougal in the Village that I've walked by thousands of time but didn't know was a private club and if I thought about it at all probably thought was a funeral home. Great 4-story private club with several bars, restaurant that looked like Rome in the 1940's and a shooting range. We all shot before dessert. That was quite an experience.

the Quilting Bee - the Modern Way

I'm so excited -- My quilt is ready. What quilt you might well ask: My quilt of course that is made up of treasured bits of fabric that i've been stockpiling over the last couple of years. Old napkins, placemats or T shirts that finally fell apart are part of my quilt. I took several large shopping bags over flowing with this kind of stuff and dropped them off with a doorman on the upper east side. It's a new way of homesteading,although of course I didn't sew a single thing. I hate to sew but I think this will be fabulous and I can't wait to see the finished product.

Our other news that Arnie and I are going to be class reps for Kate's 7th grade class. God help us all.

A little late

So, I'm a little late writing about the weekend which was beautiful. That's the new pattern this summer -- lousy during the week and simply splendid sunny for the 2 weekend days for us working stiffs.

Arnie was laid low and properly drugged for most of the weekend so Kate and I escaped the house and went to the movies and shopping to buy her bras. We went
to K-mart which is certainly cheap but leaves me grinding my teeth every step of the way. Is there one real person who works in the goddam store? I finally shouted out loud and immediately got service. That used to be the old wives tale about how to avoid scary looking people on the street was to act like you're crazy. So shouting in Kmart fits the bill to a T. Kate was wildly embarassed but that's my job to embarass her in public. actually I must remember to act even crazier.

Yearly check up

So, I'm awash in papers this morning for school. for camp, for god knows what...But the good news is that Kate has grown 3 or 4 inches. Still not taller than I am. And she weighs 70+ pounds. The last time we went through this rite of spring she weighed 53 pounds. The fabled growth spurt. and the even better news from the doctors office is that they are going to be taking my insurance!

Summer vacation

It began today with drenching rain, a sweet end of year ceremony at Kate's school and a totally reshuffled day of activities.

I had very carefully planned a road trip to Gouvernor's Island by subway and then ferry to this newly reopened Island which is beginning to attract droves of my fellow new yorkers. I thought an early summer Friday would be just the ticket. Nobody there, bikes to rent and plenty of space. And it would have been a great place to go right after Kate's Middle School end of year ceremonies to have a picnic, bike ride, etc, etc. but for the rain which was nrelenting and continuing. Back up plan was to go to the movies and Arnie would join us after the Assembly and we would grab a piece of pizza and be right on the front of the money line. Given that the movie grossed $44 million this weekend that was the right strategy. Plan C. Alice and Kate went to the movies and Arnie and i went to the Emergency Room. Diagnosis: Kidney Stone. It was almost exactly what happened in China and so now I'm prepared...don't know how to prevent it but being prepared will do wonders.

During the assembly Nurse Chris spoke as part of the Quaker open forum and the one thing she said that I remembered was Life is short. Eat dessert first.

Perfect Parent

As a single mother, I used to characterize my days as either perfect parent days or single mother mornings which meant that the dog threw up on the carpet, wouldn't pee or Kate would refuse to leave the house at the exact moment we were due to walk out of the door and hit me with a last minute request.

A Perfect Parent day is what you might expect: rare

So, this morning was for me something of a throwback to those days. The dog didn't do what it needed to do at 6:00 am,it was raining and Kate was churlish and laden with attitude. For no real reason. She was just overburdened with attitude and I started talking about attitude adjustments. And on the way to drop her off at school my cellphone rang and my boss started haranging me for something that had gone wrong. He apologized later. But the immediate result was that I started dropping all my possessions in the cab and tried to give the driver $2 instead of the $7 on the meter.

The fact that I can even write about it without dripping vitriol and self pity on the page is a great step forward for mankind.

Almost the end of school

I took Arnie for lunch yesterday before his surgery at one of my most favorite Euro trash restaurants where you can sit outside and pretend that you are in Rome. Then I sent him on his way to the near by plastic surgeon who was going to slice and dice his face and get rid of a basel cell carcinoma. He professed not to be scared. I kept wanting him to be nervous but that's me. Of course when I got home he was exhausted from not being nervous....Big white bandage on his forehead. But in very good shape and in good cheer.

So today I signed Kate up for Math camp and tried to get 4 other parents to do the same thing. We'll see what transpires but I think this will be fun for Kate. More to the point so does she. And now I'm trying to find a kid's fencing class....