Ciao, Coles Family

Last night we hosted a good-bye party for Jen & James Coles. We had at least 50 people come through the place during the two hour party, which I hope you recognize says everything about the Coles and nothing about my hosting skills. I now have the good-bye party hangover...sadness.

But, in trying to keep with the spirit of the blog title and not wanting to bring everyone down, I also wanted to share a quick summary of an article I read this morning in The Chronicle on the Opinion page. It was about Berkeley High and how they are trying to fight the requirement of the No Child Left Behind Act to share the personal info with military recruiters of all the junior & senior students enrolled. They have been actively resisting since 2001 - only sharing the info of students that "opted in." Things have finally come to a head this year - the school district will lose $10 million in federal funds if they don't comply. So what do they do? Hold a student assembly for the juniors and seniors and lets them know that they can "opt out" of having their information shared with the military. I think at this point, 90% of the students have said they don't want their information shared and parent volunteers are going to contact the other 10%. Now I'm not against people joining the military if they choose to, or obeying a draft order, but recruiting high school students? making districts share info of minors as a requirement for money? That's what I'm against.

So, hats off to Berkeley High and the Coles Family for making Berkeley a place I love to be.

little people

Mathilde turned 5 at the end of April. We had a cute tea party to celebrate with her friends. She loved her pres-school experience this year and she is looking forward to Kindergarten next year. She enjoys dancing, cooking, yoga and all kinds of learning projects... She is a great big sister to Lilou and she and Ethan are perfect friends for each other (most of the time).
Ethan is finishing 1st grade. School is all right but playing, inventing things and running around are still his favorites. The children built a gorilla nest in the tree in the back yard. They made it "cozy"with branches and leaves, it is a great spot for the children to stop and sit long enough to eat bananas.
One day Ethan brought back some trading cards from school that his classmates had given him. As he wanted to get more trading cards he simply drew a few inventing names and super powers for these new kinds of mutants. He was so excited at the prospect of trading his cards for the 'real' ones. We thought it would be all heart brake and hard reality when the other kids would categorically refuse any kind of trading with our new found artist. Our surprise was complete when Ethan returned home with new trading store bought cards. He had traded everyone of his home made cards...

This is Ethan's first suit. It is with much surprise that we have seen our boy, who lives for warmer days and shorts, really get into this new and fun item of clothing!

Linnea will be 3 next week. She is very mischievous, she is a tease and knows how to get great reactions from her siblings. You can hear her sing "it's raining, it's boring" and other grand renditions of children's classics. She loves princesses and thinks she is one.
If you are in our neighborhood and you feel like feeding bananas to 3 little monkeys please come and see us!

On the other side

When I first moved to Berkeley I wondered why the "older" student families didn't do a lot with us. I thought that it was a reflection on who we were. Perhaps with some it was, but now I'm realizing that it's more about being tired and having new goals. Now with having only a few more months in the area our goals have changed. We're not as excited about meeting new people, we just want to spend as much time as possible with the friends that we have. We want to see how many Settlers games we can get in before July; how many good restaurants we can go to; how many times we can have Rook competitions; etc. . . Now we just want to hunker down with those we love before we don't see them as often.
Some people have said that I don't seem sad to leave. Au contriare. I just know that if I don't try to see what is good about leaving that I'll spend the next few months in a depressed state. It's not fun knowing that you have to leave what you love so much.
I know that I'll make it. Many of you have shown me that life still goes on after one leaves Berkeley. It's just hard so see that right now. But I know that in a year or so I'll be saying once again that I understand what the other side is feeling.

Remembering Laurel Fullmer

Since I'm still on the RS email list (yes, I can't quite bring myself to unsubscribe), I saw the notice about Laurel Fullmer's recent passing. It's such sobering news. What a wonderful woman! The Berkeley ward won't be the same without Laurel and without so many others of the older women that are now passing on or are leaving the ward due to illness--women who gave the ward such character and vitality. Women who grounded the ward in depth and history making it more than just another young student-family ward. And women with such interesting, remarkable, and admirable personal histories. I think that it is just amazing to to think of how so many of the older women in the ward like Laurel, Mary Wallman, Mary Commendant, Miriam Osmond, Donna Helwig, Charlotte Schulyer, etc.. reached out to us younger women and our families with genuine interest and love. I think that I'm not alone to say that I felt that I felt I had real friendships and relationships with these women. I admire them not only because of the remarkable women that they are, but also for how they easily could have kept to themselves and murmured about how the ward was full of such young families that wanted to fill RS and Enrichment lessons with topics only about motherhood and marriage. They could have been so bitter about the character of the ward and its fluidity. Instead, they treated us like we were their peers. I'm so grateful for this experience and this example.

As for Laurel, to me she was a person that really had sparkle (as cliche as it sounds). Some of us have a countenance that's on the dull side, but Laurel had something in that smile that not everyone is gifted with. And who doesn't love the crochet ball she gave out when you had a baby in the Berkeley ward? I remember after Max was born selfishly hoping that she wouldn't forget to give one to me....of course, she didn't, and we still have it for baby #3 to play with now. I also remember how she made Gospel Doctrine class interesting. I admire her for how, before her health prevented it, she could be counted on to support whatever activities the ward put on. In fact, the first time I ever met Laurel was while Adam and I were living in the Hilltop ward but we went to the Berkeley ward's chili cook off with some friends of ours who lived in the ward at the time. The activity was not only a chili cook off, but some kind of dance night too--like learning country line dancing or something like that. Now, I can think of plenty of women over 65 who would have stayed home on a ward activity night that involved some kind of line dancing event. But the only people I can remember that went out of their way to introduce themselves to Adam and I that night were Angela Wade and that group of older ladies. I still remember Adam commenting on how great it was to talk with such cool older women.


We loved you Laurel. It won't be the same without you. Thank you.

Ethan is 7!

On December 31st we celebrated Ethan's birthday with many family members and young cousins. The party culminated into a parade around the house with children marching to the loud sound of their banging of spoons on metal pans and lids... the new year had arrived into our home a little short of 9pm that night...
Ethan is a great boy! We love him and are so grateful for all the joy he brings into our family.


The chocolate cake here is baked in a bundcake pan in the Fennimore fashion, we filled up the center with frozen berries and iced it with melted chocolate and cream... now here is the recipe and remember to put as much chocolate as you like it!
Ingredients:
1. 1/2 cup of boiling water
8 oz dark cooking chocolate

2. 1 cup butter
2 cups sugar

3. 4 egg yolks

4. 1 t. vanilla

Warm the oven 350. In a bowl you mix all the ingredients in 1. In another bowl mix 2, then add 3 and 4.

5. 2 1/2 cups cake flour
1 t. soda
1/2 t. salt
1 cup buttermilk

Mix all the dry ingredients (5) in yet another bowl. Then add the wet ingredients to the dry ones. Fold in 4 egg whites stiftly beaten.
Bake for 40 to 45 minutes.
This cake is even better the day after! Let me know what you think! I am sorry for the poor write out of the recipe, I hope you can decipher it!
Here are a few cook books I really enjoy right now:
Enchanted Broccoli Forest (Mollie Katzen)
Vegetables Everyday (Jack Bishop)
The Silver Spoon (Also known as the bible of authentic Italian cooking!)
The American Boulangerie (Pascal Rigo)

I wish you a very happy new year!
Lot's of love!

11 a.m. and still in my pjs . . .

Jennette - we miss you too! Linda and I are always saying how much we miss you guys and the whole firelane crowd. Berkeley isn't them same without you. Our lack of space sometimes makes me lose perspective on how great this place really is. Thanks for the reminder!

I'm amazed on a daily basis how easy you all made having more than one child look. I'm barely able to get out of the house with all of us dressed, fed, and mostly happy by 11:00 a.m. You're all super moms in my book! Any tricks to pass on? Having two makes me better understand the God of the Old Testament. Israelites, you're being naughty - time out for at least forty years! Trials? I can't help you right now these other people are having bigger problems I'll get to you in a decade or so. Hopefully that doesn't sound too sacriligious. Please post any advice you might have for surviving 2+ kids!

Above is our latest picture of Talia and one of Siena's favorite new trick - jumping from our couch to her bean bag chair as her alter ego "SUPER DOG!".

How do you spend your Saturday nights?

I admit, I have purposely stayed away from this blog site since Marie-Laure's first post about Berkeley Bowl. For one thing, I'm kind of lazy and it takes me a long time to get around to doing stuff sometimes. But also, I was worried it would be too painful for me to revisit some of those treasured Berkeley memories. We've been living in Delaware for about a year and a half now, and during that first year away from Berkeley I've was all too eager to tell anyone with ears about just how terrible Delaware was and just how unhappy I was, and about just how much I missed Berkelely. Well, in the past few months I feel as though I've finally been able to turn a corner and accept and even enjoy my life here, as different as it now is. Then several weeks ago as Adam and I were flipping channels one weekend night we came across the Cal/USC game being broadcast on network tv. It was a home game (in Berkeley, that is), and suddenly just seeing those hills behind the stadium, seeing the Cal field, seeing the bear statue onPiedmont, and shots of the moon over Strawberry Canyon, it was all too much for me. And after only a few minutes I made Adam change the channel. It's not that I'm a big Cal football fan....in fact, we went to only one game in the 7 years we were there. It was that I knew exactly what Berkeley is like on game day, I knew what the weather felt like and what the eucalyptus trees smelled like, and what it was like to see that moon, and I could imagine all too well what we would be doing there on a weekend night like a big game night. And now, there we were sitting at home on a Saturday night, alone, on the same striped sofa we had in Berkeley. It made me envious of the time when we might have been with any number of you at any one of your apartments eating Cheeseboard or Zachary's, playing games, out in the firelane for a bbq discussing politics, religion & culture, watching a movie on the "big screen" at the Barratt's sorority, meeting for gelato on Shattuck, meeting for a girls' night out in Emeryville, having an 80s party at Florian and Meghan's, or even just Adam and I going out on a date because we didn't have to pay a sitter $40 to listen to our kids sleep.

So I intentionally stayed away from this blog because I realized that I hadn't yet completely found a way to embrace my memories and experiences of life in Berkeley and move on and accept my new life without it being tremendously painful. There are hundreds of time in a month when I remember something about my Berkeley life: when I'm doing Yoga in front of my tv instead of with Liesl and it's a bit strange to be so warm instead of in the cold of the community center; when Adam took Max to serve at the local food shelter here in Wilmington and we talked about missing our first-Friday-of-the-month-nights with the Failors, with the Siebers and with Rebecca's chocolate chip cookies; when I feel awkward calling people in the ward to watch my children during the day when I know I could have called any one of you without hesitation; when the ward's play groups are in someone's basement instead of at fabulous parks like Totland or Thousand Oaks; when I have to drive to a local park instead of walking to Willard; when we need a good outdoor spot for Max's birthday party and there's nothing as ideal as The Little Train in Tilden, when the "fanciest" cheese and best crusty bread I can find is at Costco; when our Ward's Christmas party is, frankly, pretty lame and Adam is the one dressing up as Santa (now that's just wrong!); when our ward's book group is reading stuff that you might find being sold in a supermarket's book aisle; and on and on and on.

I'm sure that we all could make dozens of posts about what I miss and what has shaped me from my life in Berkeley.

I realized, as I read your posts today, that more than anything in Berkeley I miss you all. Thanks, Marie-Laure, for keeping us together and keeping this wonderful connection of Berkeley alive for us. But also, I want to keep getting to know you, and I want to know how you are now and what shapes your life today. And I want to see pictures of your children and how they've grown. Thanks to you all for these posts as well.

Long live Berkeley and long live our friendships!