We celebrated Claire’s 3rd birthday with a fun party at our house and a week-long visit by Grandma Judy. Highlights included a rented bouncy house, a gaggle of friends young and old filling our backyard, Claire enjoying her new big girl bed, and finally opening Grandma’s presents. Click on the picture of Claire digging into her birthday cupcake for a slideshow.
We spent the month of May unpacking, recovering from our trip to Spain by visiting with friends at and near home. Highlights included visits from Harrison (my godson and our new neighbor in Menlo Park), playing around the house including playdates with Claire’s friends Anna and Logan, tidepooling near Half Moon Bay with Katherine’s moms group and our good friends the Toths. Finally, a few pictures of Juliet’s first haircut at home in her high chair (a much simpler affair than Claire’s first haircut at the fancy children’s salon). For a slideshow, click on picture of Harrison in our backyard pulling a wagon filled with Claire and Juliet.
Thanks to the eruption of Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano, our flights home were cancelled and after a few days of stress we decided to enjoy the most of our bonus vacation week. We considered Paris, but ended up doing a southern loop through Spain to Granada and Sevilla. In Granada we saw the spectacular Al-Hambra, a 700+ year old fortress on a hill that was at various points the seat of the Islamic Moorish government of southern Spain and also of the Catholic government which defeated them in 1492. Highlights included the girls exploring the huge circular courtyard of the Palacio de Carlos V, watching the sunset over the Al-Hambra from Mirador de San Nicolás while Flamenco players performed, and eating some of the best pizza we have ever had.
In Sevilla, we visited the post-Easter Feria de Abril, which was my Spanish friend Alex’s top recommendation for our trip but was after our original departure date. It was really fascinating and fun, sort of a combination of a county fair in the U.S., Brazil’s Carnival, and the Kentucky Derby, with an elaborate social scene, traditions galore (including bright colorful outfits for women), music everywhere, and horses and horse-riding a central part of the experience. Also included are pictures of Juliet wandering around a tiny square, a family horse carriage adventure, and the ride home both in the car we drove to Madrid and the plane that finally brought us home after more than three weeks and enough memories to last us a lifetime (or at least until our next big trip).
Click on the picture of Claire and I looking over the Al-Hambra in Granada at sunset for a slideshow.
Barcelona was one of the main stops on our tour of Spain, and we enjoyed a six-day stay in this lovely city on the Mediterranean that is the capital of Catalonia. We rented a nice big apartment in the Gothic Quarter, site of some of the original settlements of Barcelona over two thousand years ago, and launched into our by-now-usual routine of sightseeing via long stroller rides, making friends at playgrounds, and eating at outdoor cafes on squares where the girls could run around.
One fun thing we did, thanks to Grandma Judy’s babysitting generosity, was go on a tour of the city on Segways, the geeky two-wheeled one-person electric vehicles. Turns out they are actually perfect for tour groups, as you can move around quickly but everyone regardless of fitness level can keep up. We had a great guide, Edgar, who among other things taught us a few local traditions including the centuries-old Catalan addition to traditional nativity scenes. He also helped clear up a mystery from one day in San Sebastián, where we saw groups of people in white clothes with bright red scarves gathered in squares piling up on top of each other while crowds cheered. Turns out that was the day when two of Spain’s biggest soccer rivals, Real Madrid and Futbol Club Barcelona, played each other. Fans of the Barcelona team showed support for their team — and some Catalan cultural pride — by demonstrating the Catalan tradition of forming human towers.
Other highlights included:
Click on picture below for a slideshow.
After San Sebastián we had a break from the big cities with a roadtrip through the Pyrenees. Our first day we headed from from San Sebastián to Aínsa. Aínsa is a small town in the center of the Spanish Pyrenees which has an old quarter that dates back about 1000 years. It was incredibly charming, cute, and quiet, plus served as a great base for exploration of the Pyrenees. We stayed in a little hotel built into the walls of the old city which was restored a few years ago in a style we loved, perfectly blending clean contemporary glass, steel and wood within its centuries-old stone structure. We spent a day driving around the sights of the local Pyrenees, including to the beautiful Spanish Parque Nacional de Ordesa y Monte Perdido, up to the French border at the Col du Pourtalet (one of the classic mountain passes of the Tour de France), and back to Aínsa through a far more narrow, windy, and adventurous road than we had planned. After two lovely nights in Aínsa, we drove from Aínsa to Barcelona thru the little country of Andorra.
Click on the picture of the view through our bedroom window in Aínsa for a slideshow including the old city, throwing snowballs atop the Col du Pourtalet, driving through the Pyrenees including on some small roads shared with lots of cows, our GPS as we crossed the prime meridian, and a detail I particularly liked at our hotel.
After Madrid, we headed north for three days in San Sebastián, a resort town on the Atlantic coast of Spain just across the border from Biarritz. We rented a nice apartment in the center of town, near the beach and just 10 minutes walk to the old city. This is the region of the Basque people, whose language is quite different from Spanish and whose food is magnificent especially pintxos, a version of tapas that is just 2-3 bites each serving. Our highlight restaurant was Zeruko, which had the most amazing pintxos with many layers of texture (e.g. a crunchy potato-chip like cup holding savory spiced meat with a creamy soft-fried quail egg on top). We also had a fun evening with the girls at a place called Sidreria Calonge up on a ridge overlooking the Atlantic with a local social buzz, a room full of massive casks of mildly alcoholic apple cider, and humongous tasty steaks served saignant.
Click on the picture of Claire on the merry-go-round for a slideshow including the beach, the girls enjoying a children’s park right in front of the town hall, and a beautiful and surreal amusement park perched atop Monte Igueldo in the city.
We’re now in a little town in the Spanish Pyrenees called Aínsa, enjoying a short break from big city excitement. The rest of our time in Madrid was fantastic. Here’s a quick snapshot of an average day:
Judy joined us for our last day in Madrid and was kind enough — despite her jetlag — to let Katherine and me go out for dinner and a Flamenco show.
We also visited two nearby cities. The first adventure was a day in Toledo, the beautiful 3000+ year-old city that was a former capital of the Spanish empire and a place where Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities thrived together for a thousand years until the Spanish Inquisition. The second was a stop at Segovia, notable for its beauty, its well-preserved Roman Aqueduct, and for a castle that helped inspire Disney’s Cinderella Castle.
Click on the picture of Claire and girls in a rowboat on a lake in Madrid’s Parque Buen Retiro for a slideshow, which also includes a shot of our everpresent double-stroller and visiting playgrounds/parks in Madrid’s Plaza de Oriente, Toledo, and Segovia.
We’ve just started a family vacation to Spain, celebrating Easter in Madrid. Our trip has gotten off to a fine start, with long but undramatic flights and a free humongous room at a fancy hotel (thanks to points from all my business travel) with a view out the window of the beautiful Fountain of Neptune. The weather today was warm and sunny and we walked all afternoon, joining lots of families at Madrid’s 500 year-old Sunday market, El Rastro, and enjoying lunch on the Plaza Mayor. Three fun notes:
Click on picture below for a few slides from today, plus bonus pictures including an Easter Egg hunt, egg decorating (and eating), Juliet discovering the joys of toilet paper, and taking our new family wagon to a neighborhood birthday party.
We celebrated Juliet’s first birthday a few weeks ago, with a small group of friends, a special visit from Grandma Judy, some presents, and of course chocolate cupcakes. Our friend Kate took some great one-year photos of Juliet we have included as well. See also a few bonus pictures from the month of February, including Stu doing ‘yoga’ with some help from the girls. Click on the cupcake shot for a slideshow.
At her one-year check, Juliet weighed in at 23 pound 5 oz (83rd percentile, about the same as 82nd percentile when she was 20 lbs, 12.75 oz at nine-months) and measured 30″ tall (79th percentile, a bit lower than 82nd percentile when she was 28.5″ last time). At her 12-month appointment, Claire was 99th percentile in height and 76th in weight.
We spent a long weekend in the snow at Lake Tahoe, meeting up with a group of Claire’s playgroup friends. Thanks to two or three big storms in the days before we arrived, there was lots of snowplay including an afternoon sledding adventure. Katherine and I even managed some skiing after a multi-year baby-related hiatus from the slopes and we all celebrated birthdays of both Katherine and her friend Jen. Also included are a few bonus pictures of Claire’s pigtails and her new hand-me-down train set from her cousin Will. Click on the picture of Claire sledding for a slideshow.
