Birthdays and Tram

The August birthdays came and went. They felt a bit anticlimactic this year because I had been anticipating Daisy and Sebby's ages early for some reason. It seemed like they were already seven and eleven, so the birthdays just seemed to echo an already-existing reality. I really almost felt they should be turning eight and twelve, in fact, so I didn't feel any extra nostalgia about the occasions. :)

Daisy has always been fun to watch when she's opening presents. This year she got several homemade things from brothers and sisters, plus a present from my mom, plus a present from us. And every single time she made some variation on this face:

This is the face she makes for cute, tiny things. And ALL of her presents were cute tiny things.

She's such a cutie.

Here's the 3D Maze Sebby made for her. He loves making that sort of thing.

For Seb's birthday, we went up to Snowbird and rode the tram. Seb has always loved trams, as you probably know by now. There was a time in his life when he categorized practically everything he saw as a "red tram" or a "blue tram." He'd see two people with colored shirts walking in a crowd. "Look Mommy! Red tram and blue tram!" Or two packages on the shelf at the store. "Red tram and blue tram!" That was after our trip to New Mexico where we rode the tram, I think.

Anyway, he still likes them, and so do we all, so that's what we did.

I call this series "Girls standing on ledges"

Teddy was super cute looking out at the scenery. He loved it. As long as Sam had him, that is.

Sailor girls

Birthday boy. Nice casual pose.

We let Abe and Seb ride the mountain roller coaster once as a special treat. My favorite part about this lower picture is that you can see Sam and the other kids in the lower left sitting on a bench watching—and Teddy toddling about trying to get things. 

Here's Daisy with her present: a tiny doll for her doll Rosie. She loves to have all three of them match whenever possible, of course!

Daisy says she "considers herself eight" already, so I guess next year will feel anticlimactic too!

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Portraits of Seb

Sam got me a new camera lens for Valentine's Day and I've been having fun trying to figure out how it works. And then I was looking at this old post and thinking how much I like having these pictures of tiny Sebby-boy in all his expressiveness, and it made me want to take more portrait-style pictures of all the kids. It's odd; when I took those other pictures I thought I would always remember what little 4-year-old Sebby looked like, but now I look at them and he's a little bit of a stranger to me. But there are a few shots where I can see him, the same Seb I have now, and it makes me nostalgic. What will I have left of this 10-year-old Seb in six more years? Well…these pictures, that's what. And this guy, himself? I still like him.

Anyway, think of these pictures as a substitute for a tête-à-tête with Sebastian at age 10. Always a pleasure. (And don't be alarmed, but there are lots more pictures of all the other children still to come!)

You know how it is with kids and pictures, but after we got the mandatory silliness out of the way, I made up some nightmarish airport scenario and asked Seb to tell me how he'd get an airplane landed safely in those conditions. He was happy to oblige, complete with gestures and hypotheticals and caveats and tangents. I love the concentration in his manner when he's explaining something. He gets this very serious almost-scowl on his face and tilts his head a lot and uses his hands. He searches for the precise word he wants and examines your face to make sure you are following. I love it. And I love his furrowed brows and, when it breaks through, his sunny smile.

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Papery

If you've been anywhere near Sebastian for the last six months, you know he's been saving up his money to buy a digital camera. I got my first digital camera from my parents when I graduated from college. Several years later some of the functions on it broke, whereupon we gave the camera to Abe to use. Several years after that, it stopped working altogether, and Abe gave it to Seb to play with and take apart. Which Seb did---repeatedly. After taking it apart and putting it back together and disassembling the lens and unraveling the electrical wire millions of times, Seb decided he also wanted his own WORKING camera. We impressed upon him repeatedly that he should NOT take his new one apart, once he got it, and he insisted that he wouldn't. (We'll see!) He found a used camera on Amazon for $20, so he's been working and working to save up for it.

It was a long wait for him, and while he waited, he was constantly pretending to take pictures with his old camera, and making dozens of model cameras out of paper. Every day there would be a bunch of new ones lying around (each iteration slightly modified, as Seb added a telescopic lens here or a battery compartment there).

And now he finally got his actual camera! He loves it and keeps it with him constantly. I am going to miss those paper cameras, though!

More paper construction: Seb made this paper "California Screamin'" roller coaster model after we got back from Disneyland. It is meticulously constructed to mirror the curves and loops of the actual roller coaster (he looked up pictures and satellite views until he got it right). Seb gave this to Abe for his birthday.

And, Seb has spent HOURS and hours making these paper speakers. He read somewhere that you could make a working speaker out of a paper plate, so he's been trying to do that for months. I was amazed at how persistent he was—adjusting the length and gauge of his coils of wire (he was raiding everything in the house for wire: flashlights, his radio, his CRT!), trying out different shapes and strengths of magnets, experimenting with paper shape and thickness. I would have given up on it after the first few tries, but he must have made twenty of them, until finally, he got one to work! Then he was even more obsessed trying to make adjustments so it would be louder and work better. This speaker pictured above is one of his best attempts. It played the music loud enough for us to hear it several feet away. He was so proud of it! And rightly so.

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