Steve Fischer's Random Blog

Category: Victoria

  • 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.

  • Monkey Bars

    Life’s little accomplishments are often the best. Victoria has been apparently doing this for a while, but a couple of weekends ago was the first time I got to see it…

  • Eat Here

    Tonight was a great Brooklyn night. Danielle had a sleep over at a friend’s place and they picked Danielle up after school. So Victoria got a night by herself. Now Tori loves Danielle and misses her, but this was a bit of an only child experience that she never gets.

    Since Danny was out for the night, it made sense to try to go out for a nice dinner. Tori is the more adventurous eater, so we tried a trendy place that we haven’t been to before. With no reservations, a table would have taken a while, but they have counter seating in front of the chefs and we could sit right away.

    This was actually a bonus for Tori. This is one of those places where the entire kitchen is right out in the middle of everything. So watching them cook everything was totally entertaining.

    The place is called Colonie and was fantastic. The chefs were going crazy keeping up with the crowd as we watched, but they still looked up to say hi to Tori.

    The food was excellent. The kind of place you don’t find elsewhere. Tori ate well and was rewarded with a Brownie Sundae that was out of this world.

    Have I mentioned how much Brooklyn rocks?

  • 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.

  • New Bed #1

    Victoria’s bed arrived yesterday, so I put it together this morning. She wanted a bunk bed, so that is what she got (small room, tall ceilings, makes sense).

    She’s a happy girl…

    ToriBed2

  • 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…

  • Proud

    We visited some friends in Jersey last weekend. They have a nice community pool and it was a gorgeous day so we spent most of the day there. It’s a very nice big pool, with a separate toddler section and a pretty cool water slide.

    The water slide has a height requirement, and when we visited them last year Tori was well below. So I warned her that she still might not be allowed this year (she’s 5). And sure enough, she was about two inches too short.

    But there’s a loophole. If you can show a lifeguard that you can swim a full length of the pool, you can do the slide. The pool isn’t Olympic size, but it’s pretty big. Tori has become a good swimmer, but she’s never gone that far.

    What the hell, worth a shot.

    So I tell Tori she can flip over to her back, do whatever she needs to, she just can’t touch the side or the lane rope. When Tori swims, she is all legs. We’re working on getting her arm motions better, but in a pinch she goes underwater and just kicks. She loves to swim underwater.

    So that’s what she does. She puts her head down, kicks underwater for about ten feet, then pops up for a breath. And again. And again. Really, barely using her arms at all.

    At the halfway point it’s obvious she can keep this up all day. The lifeguard watching her just says, “she’s got it”. Doing a length was total cake for her. I was quite proud.

    And she spent the rest of the afternoon on the water slide…

  • Ballet and Bounce

    I haven’t posted any pictures of the girls in a while. This is Danielle following her ballet recital, on a friend’s roof deck in Brooklyn.

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    And this is Tori with her friend Mia at a birthday party at Bounce U in the hurricane simulator. Yes, that is claiming 78 mph winds.

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    They are getting big…

  • Flower Girls, Again

    Our niece Alexandra got married last weekend, and Danielle and Victoria got to be flower girls again. They get to do it again in a month for our nephew, so they are becoming wedding professionals. I’m thinking this could turn into a paying gig…

    Anyway, the wedding was beautiful. A nice intimate family wedding in Westchester. The bride was beautiful, everyone had a good time, and my girls danced the night away.

    The obligatory pictures…

    The Setting
    Before the wedding
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    Flower Girls
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    With Alexandra