Finding Balance in San Francisco

Ella Rose is here!

We're so excited and proud to announce the birth of our niece and cousin, Ella Rose Fulton. She was born in San Francisco last night, July 23, 2008 at 7:07pm, weighing in at 9lbs., 2 oz. and 20 inches long.

Mom Sarah and baby are doing well.

Quinn and I went to visit her this morning at the hospital, and she's a gorgeous, healthy baby girl. Below is my brother, Rick (in grey) with the new babe and the Mighty Quinn. Quinn later climbed in bed with the Fulton crew.  Rick is a proud daddy.

Ella is already surrounded by friends and family.  With Rick and Sarah, below, is Sarah's good friend Heather.

While we were there, my nephew Charlie came in to meet his sister for the first time.  These shots taken just moments after he set eyes on her for the first time.

We wish Rick, Sarah and Charlie a hearty congratulations and welcome with open arms Baby Ella Rose into the world.  We look forward to growing and changing with the gorgeous new darling over the years.

My parents were watching our boys and Charlie last night when Ella made her arrival.  When they heard the great news, they  poured the boys some juice and said that they were going to have a toast to Charlie's new sister.  They did "cheers" and raised their glasses high...

and Quinn said: "Where is the toast?"

Wordle rendition of "oh my, do we love dinosaurs"

My friend Sarah Lane recently  posted about a fun site called Wordle.  I just pasted in the text of my dinosaurs post, below, and came up with this fun picture. Not sure how to make it larger on my blog (it's much bigger when I do it on the Wordle site), but Wordle sure is a fun little toy.  If you click on the picture below, you can link to the Wordle site and see it in it's larger-sized glory:

oh my, do we love dinosaurs

This morning was one of those mornings that we were on the slow train in terms of getting ready.  Sometimes, you're just on the slow train. I'm going to blame the dinosaurs for our lateness this morning.

A couple days ago, "Masters Quinn and Jordan Hassanein" got a surprise box full of dinosaurs from Ryan's childhood friend's mom (thanks again, Teresa and Harry), much to their delight.  There must have been 50 new dinosaurs in there.  When we opened the box, Quinn and Jordan kept saying in amazed voices "Wow.  There are so many!!" and "Mommy!  Look at this one!  What's his name?"  My favorite quote came from Quinn: "these are gorgeous."

So.  The dinosaurs have been a monster hit, needless to say.  The world has been revolving around these dinosaurs for a few days now.  Hard to tear the boys away from the dinosaurs. We have had to impose limits on number of dinosaurs you can sleep with. Both boys went straight to the "dinosaur box" this morning and started pulling out one dinosaur after another, wondering aloud which one is the most dangerous, which one is the fastest, which one is the strongest.

After I finally pried the boys out of the house, caught them in the garage (they enjoy running from me) and was at long last strapping the last boy into his carseat, I smelled a poopy diaper.  Perfect.  Love it when that happens, especially when we're late already.  Add 5 more minutes to the departure time.

I confess that I was speeding a little on the way to school.  There's this one light at Lombard and Chestnut streets that's particularly long, so when I saw it turn yellow I gunned it. 

The boys had opposite reactions.  Jordan said "Oh, mommy!  That's too fast!"  Quinn said "Woo hoo!  We made it!"

Then he thought about it for a minute and concluded: "Mommy, I like fast things."

Wedding and Epic Tennis in Cape May

I'm playing catch-up with the photos again. These are from our weekend in New Jersey over the 4th of July. Here's Nana with the boys on the 4th of July itself.

Ryan and I went to a gorgeous wedding down in Cape May- one of Ryan's friends from law school. Cape May is an utterly charming, colonial, beachy town at the very end of the Garden State Parkway. The wedding took place at the stately Colonial Hall.

The couple went un-traditional in that they had their first baby (a boy- the little guy being carried by his grandma in the photo below) this past spring.

The baby came to the wedding and stayed at the reception until the end (around 11pm), as did about 25 other kids aged 3 months to 17 years. It was actually really fun to have all those kids around. They dominated the dance floor all evening. Most of the weddings I've been to in recent years have explicitly excluded kids, but definitely not this one.

The groom is from a tight-knit family of five and also has lots of friends, making for a fun, rolicking good reception.

Ryan's mom watched the boys for us when we went down to Cape May, leaving us with free time to just relax. We walked down to the beach and also went to the Wildwood Boardwalk- quite an experience.

Perhaps my favorite part of the kid-free time was watching the entire epic Wimbledon battle between Nadal and Federer. The longest Wimbledon match ever, and we caught pretty much every minute of it. With the rain delays we were able to move to various venues (my favorite being the Mad Batter) and enjoy Cape May as well as cheer our hears out over fantastic tennis.

Mountain biking and yoga, with 2 boys in tow

We took the boys for a mountain bike ride up in Marin Saturday. Ryan did the bulk of the work, carrying both of them behind him in our "Chariot." I played the part of photographer (mom-arazzi):

we went searching for dragonflies and frogs:

and later Jordan was "doing yoga" at home in our living room ("in tow" in a different sense- more like "on tow.")

I also want to wish a happy 60th birthday to Roland and a happy 7th birthday to Shasta today.

We're getting our fire extinguisher serviced

I've been on a safety kick today, and decided that in addition to trying to set up an appointment to get our new car seat professionally installed that I also want to have our fire extinguisher serviced and check our smoke alarms. Fire extinguishers are supposed to be serviced annually (and we haven't had ours serviced in the 2.5 years we've lived here).

After much calling around, I finally found International Fire Protection in Potrero Hill. They'll service fire extinguishers for $18 each if you drop them off (takes about 24 hours) or for an extra $35 they'll come out to your house and service them. Their phone # is 415-643-1767.

Certified Child Passenger Safety (CPS) Technicians

I recently purchased a high-weight-limit (the kid can use it up to 80 lbs.), 5 point harness car seat for our not-yet-4 year old, who is almost 40 pounds and over 42 inches. 

Motor vehicle crashes are the No. 1 killer of children between the ages of 4 and 8           .  According to SafeKids.org, car accidents kill one million children each year around the world and permanently disable many more.  And almost all of these injuries are preventable.  I want to do everything I can to mitigate that risk.

This morning I was surfing around the 'net for car seat installers because apparently 4 out of 5 car seats is installed incorrectly... and I'm aiming to be in that 1 out of 5 group.  I don't trust my mechanical skills as much as I would those of a Certified Child Passenger Safety (CPS) Technician, so I'm planning to get our new car seat professionally installed.

I learned that I can get my car seat checked at some AAA locations, my local police department and by the CHP.  Various phone numbers I found on the web have been disconnected, wrong, etc., so I figured I'd share what I learned from my research this morning, in the hope that I can save someone else the time and effort of going through the same research exercise.

AAA of Northern California, Nevada, and Utah - the main number for AAA is (800) 637-2122.  The phone number for San Francisco is 415-565-2305, and the woman's name is Yolanda.  I left a message a couple hours ago, but have not heard back from them.  AAA is where I went to have the car seats we have in place now installed, and I remember that getting an appointment can take a couple weeks.

The phone number for the           San Francisco Police Dept (same number for all locations) is 415-575-6363.  I left a message a couple hours ago, but have not heard back from them.  The last time that I went to have car seats installed I didn't have any luck getting the police to call me back.

          California Highway Patrol-San Francisco phone # is 415-557-1094.  They'll transfer you to Officer Chase's voicemail.  Officer Chase promises to call back "within a week."  I left a voicemail, but I'm not holding my breath that I can get it done today or even this week.

There's also a guy who's a certified installer named Alan who does car seat installation as a side job.  He charges $20 and can't do it during business hours at all.  His cell phone number is 415-216-7331.  He answered his cell phone right away, but scheduling seems to be a bit more challenging because of his hours restrictions.

The NHTSA website offers a link to help with locating local car seat installers.

I'm hoping that with a little luck I'll be able to get our new car seat installed sometime this week.  I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Take Me Out to AT&T Park

I'm a little behind on the photo uploads, so I'm going out of chronological order here for a bit.

These shots from the SF Giants vs. Chicago Cubs game on Wednesday, July 2nd- and a shot of the post-game fireworks. The Giants lost, but we had great seats (thank you Jordan 1) and still had a good time. Felt fitting to be watching baseball right around the 4th of July.

Jordan was playing hide and seek with daddy for a good long while:

Speaking of daddy, he was in the midst of the pink eye epidemic that's hit our home - someone or other in the Hassanein household has had pink eye for the last 6 weeks!  Thus, the glasses and red right eye:

The boys actually watched some of the game:

... but there was a lot of horsing around as well.  Jordan made friends with the kid in the row in front of us, who it turns out is a week older than he is

we stayed until the very end (kids were not in bed until 11!!) to watch the fireworks, but it was pretty darn foggy.  Woulda been cooler if they'd done the fireworks during the 7th inning stretch.

We could still hear the fireworks, however, and the boys were impressed with the loud BOOMs.

Summer Fun in Foster City

We had a great time in Foster City last night at the summer concert series. The kids ran around all night, partying it up and having a great time


Caroline, Clara and Hugo (who turned 1 the day before) joined in the fun. My dad took them over to the rec. center in my parents' boat and we all had a nice little picnic.

My sister-in-law Sarah is due July 23rd with a baby girl... despite being at the very end of pregnancy she's been in great spirits and a very good sport.

At one point, my mom and I took the kids over to a stage, where they paraded around and hammed it up.

They played the 80's anthems all night... ABBA, Bon Jovi, Michael Jackson, Madonna... perfect for our little dancers.

The Apocalypse and the butterflies

With all of the wildfires in California this past week (below is satellite image of CA coastline):

I can't seem to ignore my apocalypse feelings (shot below from recent Northern California blazes):

The apocalypse feelings center around humans ruining our planet and the happy days on our sweet, life-giving Earth coming to an end. The skies in San Francisco have been hazy, with the sun feeling distant like this:

Because of the very poor quality of the air, there have been health alerts, with people of "sensitive" condition (including children) advised to stay indoors. Despite my efforts to keep the kids indoors, Jordan seems to have developed a chest cough and his eyes seem to have been burning a bit- most likely from the particulates in the air.

So yesterday I decided that we should all go avail ourselves of some good air quality and oxygen levels at the San Francisco Conservatory of Flowers.

The air inside the SF Conservatory of Flowers is humid and feels filled with the good, thick air that plentiful plants bring.

I could almost feel the air cleansing our lungs.

The Conservatory of Flowers is currently having a special butterfly exhibit, which delighted the boys. There's a whole room filled with butterflies fluttering about.

it was hard to get the boys not to touch the gentle creatures

and they also had larger than life statues of bees, bats, and butterflies that the boys enjoyed

As harmless as butterflies are, the boys were still a little squeamish about them.  We wound up getting a lecture from another patron about the kids squealing too much.  The lecture-giver was a man pushing a stroller containing a kid who looked to me like it was about 3 months old.  I tried not to be annoyed, but wanted to explain to him that it's near impossible to keep 3 year olds from screaming and running around- his little speech would be on par with me giving someone with a 3 month old a lecture about the kid crying.  In other words, there's not a whole heck of a lot the parent can do to alter the kid's behavior.

Our good friends Clara, Caroline and Hugo joined us for the butterflies and a subsequent picnic, but my camera had run out of batteries by then. 

Our pals were fellow recipients of the lecture from the patron who started his speech saying "I don't want to be that guy, but..."  Note to self:  if you start a lecture that way, pretty much guaranteed you are indeed being That Guy.