About a year ago, Dova was asked to join the "team" at our local gymnastics place where she had taken tumbling classes since she was four.  I, of course, took this as an attempt by the gym to extort more money from us by raising the tuition.  She never really showed any skill at gymnastics and wasn't even able to do a decent cartwheel after three years.  But she had her heart set on it, so I shelled out the big bucks.  A few months later, they had their spring show and surprisingly, she demonstrated a pretty decent handstand.



After that, she started doing handstands just about everywhere imaginable.  Here she is at Tanglewood in Lenox, MA during the airing of "A Prairie Home Companion".



And at the beach.



This past November, Dova had her first gymnastics meet.  Now up to this point, our only involvement in Dova's gymnastics was to pay the big bucks and send her the practice twice a week.  We really had no idea what her level of proficiency was.  So it was pretty exciting to watch her in all events for the first time.  And sure enough, her handstand during the floor routine was nearly perfect.



Dova's bar routine lasted all of 15 seconds, but she scored an impressive 9.40.



And check out the height on her tuck jump on the balance beam



Such poise and confidence!! We were beaming with pride.



But the biggest surprise occurred at the end of the meet when Dova took first place in the all around competition for her level.  Wow, that's our girl on the top of the podium!



I guess all that money and chauffeuring paid off.  What a sense of accomplishment for Dova!  It was a proud moment for our entire family.  We are so proud of you Dova!

Now that I've reached that age that is nine times older than five, or perhaps only three times older than fifteen, the one thing that has changed over the years is my tolerance to cold.  I used to be just like my kids, hating sweaters and scarves and never ever feeling cold until just before frostbite hits.  Now, when my nose gets cold and I am completely uncomfortable!

Thankfully Brookstone has the perfect solution for cold noses, cold hands, aching muscles, and any place that requires warming.  They call it the Body Bean, but I call it my Brookstone cat. The Body Bean is a miraculous cordless device that stays warm for up to 4 hours after a 15 min of charging.  Since it is filled with saline, it has a nice weight, transfers heat efficiently (like a water bottle) and conforms to your body perfectly.  This doesn't sound like much, but let me tell you all the places it comes in handy:

As a Christmas present, I requested a second Body Bean so I have one at work and at home.  I don't know how I survived winters before!  At work, I inspired a female co-worker to purchase one for herself and we are now twins with our cats at meetings.  A male co-worker bought one for his wife for the holidays, and she absolutely loves it and sleeps with it every night.  I also bought Body Beans for my mom and cousin and everyone loves their new pets.  (I am single-handedly keeping this product in production!)

In addition to the Body Bean at $24.99, Brookstone offers a 3-in-1 Heated Body Wrap at $39.99 which allows hands free holding and warming.  My Brookstone cat is very good about staying in place, keeping me warm, and has become my favorite wintertime snuggler.  Shh!  Don't tell my real cats!

Special thanks to Brookstone for providing the first Body Bean for review as part of the Brookstone Review Crew.

If there's one thing that I'm always on time for, it's the holiday season. Usually, the gifts are purchased well before Thanksgiving, the OCD gift list is dotted and crossed, and the decorations go up on Thanksgiving weekend.  This year I am woefully behind. Our holiday portrait was not even taken until one week before Christmas!

But in keeping with just in time (JIT) production, we've managed to pull it together before the holidays (minus the gift list).  Without further ado, here is Dova's annual holiday video greeting.

"We wish you a Happy New Year! < giggle, giggle, giggle />"
"And... I will be playing, It Came Upon a Midnight Clear."
(I'm not sure what is worse, her giggling or my HTML/XML interpretation of her giggling)

Adam started in a new music school this year and played on a concert grand piano for the first time. He performed the Russian Dance from the Nutcracker in his recital with flair.

[ http://www.youtube.com/embed/knTYEh_2uU0?rel=0 ]

Soon enough, all will be quiet through the house and the children will be nestled in their beds. Dova takes her nestling very seriously!



Happy Holidays everyone!

Instead of the usual stories of turkeys, stuffing and pie (mmm four berry pie), our Thanksgiving was filled double rainbows.  We had a tiny gathering of 5 including my mother.  But she brought along her iPad, a device that my kids had never laid eyes upon in person.  And with that came our first double rainbow.

I may have a slight addiction to Bejeweled as evidenced by Jewel Mania in 2006, then denial by using big scientific words like Stochasticity in July 2009 and finally admitting the need for intervention in Novemeber 2009.  Nowadays, I have pretty much overcome the addiction, only imbibing the jewels on occasion.  I had never reached the 500,000 mark in Bejeweled Blitz and just shook off the high scores over 1 million points as crazy people who don't have anything better to do with their time or harvest the Phoenix Prism gem by luck. When we played Bejeweled on my mom's iPad, it was ridiculous to use the full screen mode because the jewels were so big that you couldn't keep track of the entire board.  But then we realized that all three of us (my mom, Adam and me) could play on the same board at the same time, and we saw the potential for really high scores.  On our second game together, we managed this incredible score over 700,000 points without any special gems!

OMG, Grandma, Adam and I jumped for joy, whooped and hollered and were completely besides ourselves. On her very first day of playing Bejeweled Blitz, my mom got a 500k star and beat my all time high score!!   We finally unlocked a secret of outrageously high scores.  Now I just need to get my hands on my own iPad.

Later that weekend, Adam mentioned the phrase, "OMG, it's a double rainbow!"  I asked him how he knew about double rainbows, did he see the video?  Nope, he never heard of the video, he knew it from the Pocket God game.



In that case, I insisted that he see the original video.

When I first saw this video, I thought it was just a goofball that was totally high.  But when Adam saw it, he started laughing and could not stop.  He literally rolled off my bed laughing.  He laughed so hard that he couldn't catch his breath and his eyes teared up.  He laughter was so contagious that everyone around started to laugh despite themselves.  He kept repeating lines from the video, "It's starting to look like a triple rainbow", "What does it mean?", "Double rainbow all the way across the sky!", "It's so intense!" and  simply, "Whoa!!!  OMG OMG!"  Then we sang along to the Spongebob version of the Double Rainbow Song.

[ http://www.youtube.com/embed/Gyq4ZGMRV7A?rel=0 ]

The double rainbow video was easily the funniest thing Adam had ever seen in his life.  I'm not sure whether it was set up by knowing the Pocket God version first and finally learning why those silly people were so gaga over double rainbows.  Either way, I'm glad it made his day.

Hope your holiday was filled with double rainbows!

Oh, the tales of unprecedented October snow and power outages in New England!  Ours was not so dramatic, but still a bit of an adventure for our family.  On October 29th, Saturday afternoon, Adam had his coldest soccer game ever in rain that changed over to snow.  I was fortunate to be warm at home with Dova  preparing for a dinner party when the flakes started to fall.  She wrote this message on our white board for our guests (changing HTML colors is more painful than changing markers, but I couldn't stop once I started).

On Saturday evening, we shared stories, good food (ginger butternut squash soup, curry chicken and home brewed beer) and warmth with our friends around the wood stove.  When they left, we laughed because they hadn't brought a snow brush for the unheard of October nor'easter.  The first sign that something was amiss would have been the drooping trees with branches heavy with snow.  Adam immediately donned his snow attire to shake the snow off the trees, but we couldn't find any snow pants or snow boots for Dova.  We promised to buy her some the next day.  Our friends had to veer around a tree that was hanging low in our driveway to get home.

Later that evening, we settled down for some TV and our satellite was not receiving signal due to the heavy snowfall.  I climbed out on the deck to clear the snow but it didn't help.  We decided to watch an episode of Psych on our DVR, Tuesday the 17th.  This episode was a horror movie spoof based in Camp Tikihawa.  In one scene, the power had gone out and the villain was going after a victim with a wet mop against a sparking electric panel.  As soon as the sparks flew, our own power went out.  Wow, spooky!  Our lights blipped a few times and came back.  But this time, the satellite receiver would not initialize at all and we couldn't finish watching the episode.  We all went to sleep with the wood stove keeping the house warm.

On Sunday morning, I awoke at 5am and noticed that the power was out. I fished through the various items in my nightstand drawer and finally found a flashlight to put some more logs into the wood stove. When we finally got out of bed around 8am, I saw Adam sitting on the couch playing Bubble Ball on my iPhone.  I immediately yanked it out of his hands saying that my cell phone was for emergency use only!  It was our only connection to the outside world with no TV, internet or phone (free VoIP with Ooma).  In fact, there was actually no cell signal at the time, as our nearest cell tower must have lost power.  Having no power isn't a major safety issue for us, we have a wood stove for heat and town water to drink and flush toilets.  But losing electricity for more than a day is stressful and a major inconvenience.  No fridge, no stove, limited hot water, and constantly wondering when the power was coming back...

Adam was first to go out and survey the foot+ amount of snow on Sunday morning.  He told us that there was a huge tree down across the end of our driveway.  At this point, Doug and I jumped to action to cut up and move the tree, so we weren't trapped in our house.  Jumping to action meant that I failed to photograph the full extent of the snow accumulation and damage. My co-workers thankfully came through with these shots from the area.


Bench seating for snow only.


Low passage. This tree was hung up on the power lines.


Fallen street lamp and broken power lines.

The kids' immediate concern was how they were supposed to go trick-or-treating for Halloween on Monday.  At 1pm on Sunday, the power came back on.  We had our dinner guests back over again since they had not regained power so that the dad could charge up his laptop and get some work done, and his son went back to playing video games with Adam.  Dova invited over a power-less friend as well.  We put on a pot of coffee and resumed life as usual. But our glorious electricity was short-lived as the power went back out in two hours.  Doug had taken a shower in the two hours the power came on, and I failed to, so I took one in semi-darkness.  The power remained out until late Monday afternoon, and I only remember sketchy parts of it being in "survival" mode.  Here's a snapshot of how we spent our time:
When the power came back late Monday afternoon, I was so thrilled that I kept chanting, "I love electricity!!"  Dova thought I was totally crazy for loving such a thing.  But after being stressed out in "survival" mode for 1.75 days, it was such a relief to return to normal life again. My work was still closed on Tuesday, and most of my town was still out of power.

You know you're old when your kids ask you to jump in the leaf pile with them and you say, "No way!"  I remember loving to jump in the fall leaves as a kid.  Even in New York City before the 1978 pooper scooper law, I used to beg my mom to let me run through the leaves.  Nowadays, I whole-heartedly join  other types kid fun, but somewhere along the way, I grew out of leaf jumping.  But these kids have taken leaf jumping to new heights of joy.

Who would ever think that getting a faceful of leaves thrown at you could be so much fun?



Or a talking leaf pile?  I should clarify, a crazy talking leaf pile.

Let's not forget Dova's rendition.

But my favorite photo is this gravity-defying explosion of leaves and kids.



Autumn is good. Too bad it's snowing outside right now here in New England!

I've been a long time online shopper of inexpensive prescription eyeglasses for my kids and myself.  The kids still go through glasses every 4 to 6 months and at buying glasses at a tenth of retail is a no-brainer.  But my own eyeglass prescription is very strong, requiring significantly more expensive high index lenses.  The last time I purchased glasses online, I went for some fashionable rectangular lenses, forgetting the fact that a wide frame make high prescription lenses extremely thick on the edges.  Plus the wide lenses gave my face the "smashed in" look on the sides.  If I had the opportunity to try these frames in a store, I may have realized that the frames would not have worked on my face with my prescription.

When I had the opportunity to review glasses from GlassesUSA.com, I was glad to search for some smaller frames.  The one thing that I really liked about GlassesUSA was their virtual mirror. Other sites also allow you to upload a photo, but you can never really tell the scale of the glasses in relationship to your face.  GlassesUSA provides a pupillary distance ruler so you can scale your photo to match the size of the frames.  See how exact it is?



You can also compare eyeglasses easily and send photos to friends to check out. Yes, those are the real prices for the frames and basic lenses at $38!



I received my glasses within a week and was extremely pleased with the quality of the frames and workmanship. With my new smaller frames, the high index lenses were the thinnest on the edges that I've ever seen.  When I wore my new glasses to work, my co-workers complimented me, saying that my face no longer looked "smashed in" and that I didn't look extremely near-sighted anymore.  Wow!

Next time you are looking to buy glasses, check out GlassesUSA.com.  They are high quality, inexpensive and delivered lightning fast.  Also check out these coupon codes!

Disclaimer:  GlassesUSA provided a gift certificate to cover most of the cost of my glasses for review.  No other compensation was provided.

Since the kids have been indoctrinated in the New England tradition of apple picking, we have not missed a fall season of apple picking in recent memory.  And since my Groupon Summer of 2011 is spilling into autumn and beyond, we tried a new apple picking farm featured in Groupon this year.

I was first intrigued by the Groupon for Schartner Farms because of the corn maze attraction, or "corn maize".  The aerial photo reminded me of crop circles which I've always wanted to experience first hand.  How do they mow it so precisely??  (The maze, not crop circles.  Crop circles are real, right?  Right??)



The kids were a little apprehensive about diving in, but once we had maps in hand, we didn't get too lost (except in the tractor wheel).  Four acres of corn maze is pretty expansive, but we got through in about 20 minutes.



And for another new activity, we tried out the corn cannon.  I am so not "country", that I had to google "corn cannon" before we went to see what the heck it was.  I described it to a co-worker and he said, "You mean a potato gun, but with corn?"  I don't even know what a potato gun is.  Obviously not a native New Englander.



The kids could have done the corn cannon all day, but my wallet dictated just three shots per kid. Here's Adam trying to shoot the corn through the hoop in the woods. (First day using the video mode on my new Canon Rebel T3i, so I couldn't get the hoop in focus.)

After this apple picking photo op, I relaxed on this bench while the kids did all the apple picking. I enjoyed the fresh autumn air and the view of the corn maze in the distance.  It was so peaceful.



Let's not forget a pumpkin or two to bring home.  Adam picked out this perfect 25 pounder.  He is so photogenic with pumpkins!  Remember this technicolor pumpkin picking from two years ago...



And no apple picking day is complete without the bubbly goodness of apple pie.  Mmmm pie!



Happy Autumn everyone!