Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Category: Danielle

  • Another Fantastic Vacation

    Honestly, I could just recycle last year’s post. The weather was fantastic. The same families were in the same houses so Danielle and Victoria had built in playmates. The beach and sunsets are always great.

    The gang from the first week:

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    Danielle, Clara, Madeline, Victoria and Hannah (10,8,9,6 and 5 respectively)

     

    Other friends stayed with us the second week. We hit the local drive-in:

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    Victoria, Marieé and Cooper

     

    This year even Tori was holding the crabs:

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    Danielle created elaborate habitats with crabs organized by size:

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    And fish:

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    I’m not really sure what Tori is doing here:

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    But she’s very proud of her new sweatshirt:

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    As hard as it is, I’ll avoid posting a million sunset pictures. Every night was a great one.

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  • Almost Vacation

    Regular readers know our summer vacation plans. It’s the same this year. Two week (yes, two!) in Cape Cod. Same place, same beach, same sunsets. Expect very similar pictures with taller daughters.

    It’s hard to believe this girl:

    is now 10. But that shot of Danielle was from our first visit to this beach house in 2008.

    More in a few weeks…

  • Leaving the Nest

    Danielle is 10, so leaving in real terms is a good 8 years away. Sleep away summer camps are very popular in the Northeast, but Danielle hasn’t been interested and we certainly aren’t pushing it.

    She’s spent 3 nights at my wife’s sisters place and 2 nights with school camp and 2 nights with Girl Scout camp. That’s it.

    But she’s been pushing for independence. Going to school last year she often asked to go by herself. A half mile in downtown Brooklyn, sorry, not happening. About 3 blocks from school I let her scooter off by herself. I can see her.

    We have a French pastry place next door (seriously good croissants) and they do ice cream in the summer. So I let her take my money and Victoria and they go by themselves.

    I will let her go by herself to the deli across the street. That might seem harmless if you didn’t know our street. Atlantic Avenue is a major Brooklyn street. My wife isn’t in love with this idea. Our neighbor with an 11 year old doesn’t let her daughter do that. But Danielle does it fine.

    Danielle’s best friend Mackenzie moved to Florida several years ago. They have stayed in touch, visited in both directions and in general stayed best friends. Mackenzie has spent the past two weeks with us while they both do a gymnastics camp in Manhattan. It’s been very fun having Mackenzie stay with us. They are clearly best friends. Her mom is here in Brooklyn, but staying a few blocks away in an apartment.

    So next week, Danielle is going to Florida with Mackenzie. Not with us. She’s flying with Mackenzie’s family and my wife will fly to Florida next weekend to pick her up. So pretty much a week away.

    It’s pretty much sleep away on training wheels since she’s just staying with family she knows in a place she knows (and it’s a really nice place). But it’s the first time she’s been away this long.

    I’m fine with it. Danielle is a mature 10 year old and can easily handle it. My wife? We’ll see…

  • Music Can Be Timeless

    I walked into our apartment tonight to hear my girls listening to the Counting Crows version of “Big Yellow Taxi”.

    I’m the son of a liberal Protestant minister. I was born in the 60’s. You can make many assumptions based on those facts and they are probably all true. One of which is that I grew up on folk music. I grew up on the music of Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie (Woody also), and also Joni Mitchell.

    What, you thought the Counting Crows wrote that song? It’s over 40 years old.

    It has always been a great song (and I do really like the Counting Crows version). Joni Mitchell has always been a great song writer.

    Later, Tori and one of Danielle’s friends were practicing gymnastics moves to “Sweet Home Alabama”.

    The original.

    Now I didn’t grow up in the South, but as a teenager I did test my stereo speakers on Lynyrd Skynyrd full blast.

    So amusing to see my kids listening to the music of my youth.

  • More Animation

    Danielle just finished an 8 day summer camp where one part was animation with the same guy who does her afterschool animation class.

    This isn’t as involved as other things she’s done, but you have to remember that this was done by 10 year olds in exactly 7 days. Not full days, because animation is just one part of this art camp. So with that in mind, it’s pretty cool.

    Danielle’s monster appears exactly one minute in.

  • More Animation

    Danielle’s after school animation class published their latest creation.

  • Daily Napkins

    There’s an article in Mashable today about a mom who illustrates her kids napkins for lunch every single day. She has two sons, now 6 and 10.

    Her sons go to my daughter’s school, are the same ages and are in my daughter’s classes. Tori and Ansel are good friends. I’ve seen these napkins for years. As a daily project they are frankly quite impressive.

    The Mashable article led me to her blog, Daily Napkins, where she displays them. That blog led me to a NY Times article from a year ago on the same topic. So she’s been somewhat famous for this for a while.

    A napkin for lunch every day since 2006. Crazy? Artistic? Amazing? Persistent? Choice D, all of the above.

  • Separate Rooms

    We live in a three bedroom apartment. One of the two kids bedrooms is small, so we have always used that as a toy room and Danielle and Victoria share the larger bedroom.

    But Danielle is 10. She’s been lobbying for her own room for a while. It’s time. But the thing about a toy room is that you can accumulate a lot of stuff. We have high ceilings so there’s basically crap stacked 10 feet high. So we knew that doing the split would involve getting rid of a bunch of stuff.

    Last weekend was the time. The mission for Saturday:

    • Pull everything out of both rooms
    • Repaint the toy room and touch up the paint in the other room
    • Move Tori’s bed and some furniture into her new bedroom (second child gets the small room, live is not fair)
    • Throw out as much junk as possible

    Sunday was the “figure out what stuff is going in what room” day.

    My wife went on a throwing out rampage. She went through every toy in the place. I lost count of the garbage bags. The girls have actually been pretty good about it. They are both excited about having their own rooms.

    We weren’t totally sure how Tori would handle sleeping by herself. The first night she came to get me. “Papi, I had a bad dream”. This line is generally a fib, but on her first night in her own room I indulged her and stayed with her for a bit. Sunday night she was a champ, and Monday morning the first thing she did at school was tell her teacher she has her own room.

    It was an Advil kind of weekend for me and my wife, but definitely worth it.

  • Elvis Lives

    As a jazz fan with daughters 10 and 6 years old, my playlist is not typically the popular one. The sole exception is around Christmas. I have the best Christmas music.

    I would argue that simply having the Ella Fitzgerald Swinging Christmas Album dramatically improves your holiday playlist. Add some Diana Krall, Nat King Cole and some classics by Eartha Kitt (Santa Baby), The Pointer Sisters (Santa Clause is Coming to Town), Springsteen (Merry Christmas Baby), Mellencamp (I saw Mommy Kissing Santa) and a few others, and you have some serious Christmas music.

    So that playlist has been going like crazy the past week.

    In 4th Grade, Danielle is reading more non-fiction, particularly biographies. She just finished one on Elvis. So I said, “wait, I have a Christmas song by him” (Here comes Santa Claus). She likes it but says, “I thought he was more rock and roll”.

    Well, it’s not in the Christmas playlist, but I do have the album they released with all Elvis’s #1 hits. So I crank out Heartbreak Hotel, Hound Dog and Jailhouse Rock.

    Picture me and my two daughters dancing crazily on a Tuesday night to Elvis Presley music released before I was born. It really doesn’t get any better…

  • Fun With Clay

    This is one of the things Danielle is up to in her summer art camp. There’s a group called Penciltopia that comes in and teaches animation. They do a pretty nice job for only having two weeks to produce it. The theme was inanimate objects. I like how at the 8:15 mark it shows part of the animation process in super fast motion.