Matilda started a new year at her pre-school today.

Here is her photo from first day of school!

(photo from last year here)

Here are some photos from our summer vacation.

We just got back from 25 day trip to Spain! Matilda and Mateo had an amazing time playing with our family in Spain.

Traveling with the kids was grueling. Heck, just driving to JFK is hard enough but then we had to endure an 8 hour flight to Barcelona (thank you Delta for the free upgrade to Business Class!) with Mateo who is the world’s worst flyer. I think if it were not for the fact that we were in the air, they would have kicked us off the plane! Parents, don’t try to fly a long haul flight with your child on your lap. Its a terrible idea. Spend the money and buy your kid a ticket!

Here is my commentary on things that helped us survive the trip. Your experience in Spain may vary .

There are some really super child friendly things about Spain that I appreciated. Spaniards are generally loud, so they don’t get upset when kids make noise. Many Spanish streets are closed to cars, so kids can play in the street. Restaurants often have open spaces next to them (or playgrounds) so you can let your kids run wild while you enjoy your meal (until 1 AM). And the beaches are amazing. The Mediterranean is far warmer than the Atlantic and the waves are gentler.

I was fairly well prepared for the trip. I tried to bring what I needed instead of buying it in Spain. Generally, I have observed, its difficult to buy things in Spain. The stores are closed on  from 1:30-5pm and on Sundays. And the stores are generally poorly stocked in small towns. And the prices of nearly everything except fruits and vegetables are much higher. If you are in Spain and need to buy hard to find things, try to locate the “chino” which is a general store operated by Chinese people.

Essential things that I packed:

1. A portable DVD player was indispensable. Its exhausting to entertain kids all day (and all night when they have jet lag and don’t want to sleep). The DVD player really helped to keep the kids quiet at mealtimes, or at bedtime. We got a Portable DVD Player and to extend the battery life we got an Energizer Rechargeable Power Pack. I also bought kid size headphones. For DVDs I had Dora, Barney, Baby Einstein and Toy Story.
2. I bought a pack of 16 Squinkies as an incentive for good behavior. If Matilda was well behaved, she got one Squinkie every night as a prize.
3. Sunblock. They have sunblock in Spain, but the products we have in the USA seem to be way better. You have to try Hawaiian Tropic Island Sport Sunblock Continuous Spray. Its a spray on sunblock that dries instantly and is not greasy. The spray is great, you don’t even have to rub it in.  Then for the face, we used Sunblock Stick.
4. Refillable water bottles. Again, they have them in Spain, but the ones that I got here were way better. Tommee Tippee Explora cup is my new favorite toddler cup. Its like the kind of cups that you get at Starbucks for your coffee, but for kids, and leakproof.
5. Bug spray. In Spain, there is something that they call a “mosquito tigre” which is a yellow striped, non-noturnal mosquito. I tried Natrapel which is a non DEET spray (it uses picaridin). I sprayed it on the window screens and window frames and it kept the bugs away. It smells good too!
6. Insulated cooler bag. Ever notice that kids never want to eat at mealtimes, but then complain of hunger a little later? I carried food with me at all times.
7. Zip lock bags and Tupperware. Believe it or not, when Spaniards make a sandwich to eat later, they wrap it in a napkin. You get a lot of puzzled looks when you explain why its useful to have tupperware or sandwich bags. They generally never eat on the go and taking your leftover food away from a restaurant is unheard of. Ziplock bags are hard to find in Spain. I carried ziplock bags with me all the time so I could wrap up leftovers, carry snacks and put dirty/wet clothes away.
8. Water shoes (aka aqua socks). Its a good idea to get these for the whole family. Your beach may not have sand, but pebbles. They hurt your feet. On the plus side, its cleaner.

Being away from home for so long was hard. I ended up spending a ton of money to make life easier:

1. Its traumatizing for the kids to be away from their things. We packed some things from home, but we ended up getting the kids many new toys. I am a big fan of the Imaginarium stores that are all over Barcelona. I also liked the Abacus stores, which are stationary stores (papelerias) that sell crafts, markers, notebooks and educational toys.
2. Matilda really wanted to have her own sleeping space and was unhappy about having to sleep on a sofa or share the bed with us. We bought each kid a little inflatable bed and sleeping bag.
3. We also bought collapsible boxes to store clothes and toys (kind of like these, available at the “chino” store). Each kid had their own box to hide their things. For Pablo and I, it was easier to use the boxes than it was to have to open the suitcase everyday. Also, opening a suitcase for 25 days straight is just plain unpleasant.
4. I went to the supermarket to get foods that are familiar to the kids. As far as Asian foods go, I was able to find soy sauce, but not sesame oil.  Some supermarkets had ramen noodles.
5. We ended up buying another stroller. Even thought Matilda does not use a stroller at home, she needed one for the trip. Believe it or not, the cheapest, crappiest umbrella stroller we could find cost 50 Euro! (around $70)

Useless things that I packed:

• My kindle – I never got more than 5 minutes to myself to read.
• My ipod – We used it a bit in the car, but I never really had time to listen to music by myself.
• Video camera –  We were too busy trying to keep everyone happy to actually shoot video! I used the video function on my camera instead.
• My sneakers and exercise gear – again, who has the time to exercise?

Like this post? Please visit my new blog www.spanishfavorites.com where I post about things and places that I love about Spain!

Matilda loves Horton Hears a Who. We bought the audio book to listen to in the car and she nearly has it memorized.

If you don’t know the story, its about Horton the elephant who has great hearing and is able to detect a world of people living on a dust speck. He protects them at great personal expense from an authoritative mother Kangaroo with the refrain — “A person’s a person, no matter how small”.

In a sequel, he is tricked by a lazy momma to be bird to sit on hear egg for a whole year until it hatches. The bird shows up at the end to claim the egg just as it is about to hatch, but instead of a bird in the egg, its a baby elephant!

The stories are wonderful, like all of Dr. Seuss’s books. But after reading the books over and over again I wondered, are they anti-choice? Well according to Wikipedia, they are not. Theodore Geisel threatened to sue an anti-choice group to make them stop using his phrase on their stationary, and his widow stated that she “doesn’t like people to hijack Dr. Seuss characters or material to front their own points of view”.

Though evidence points to Dr. Seuss being a left-leaning person, and his wife reportedly supports Planned Parenthood, anti-choicers have co-opted this story for their cause. Anti-abortion groups actually PROTESTED the LA opening of the Horton Hears a Who movie, where children were present.

My opinion is that the story is meant to honor children not fetuses. It makes Matilda feel great to hear the phrase “a person is a person no matter how small” because she is small and often feels powerless. And while Mazie the bird was lazy and didn’t want to care for her egg, it shows how HARD it is to care for an egg. It makes me feel appreciated as a mom to know that Dr. Seuss doesn’t take gestating lightly.

So back off anti-choicers. Horton is too great to be brought into the abortion debate! Leave him alone!

Mateo loves watermelon! Some pictures.

Check Flickr for more pictures!

Photos of Matilda from Father’s Day. We had a BBQ at home. Matilda provided the entertainment.

Hope you all had a good Father’s day!

Someday, I will do a real kitchen renovation. (And I already know who I want to hire to do it!). For now, I am working within my budget which means new paint and tile instead of the vinyl floor.

Before:

After:

We also did a new bathroom floor and vanity and installed some new hardware. So far, we love the curved shower curtain rod!

Before:

After:

I love IKEA. You can’t beat the prices and I think their reputation for low quality goods is undeserved. Many of the items we bought at IKEA  has held up quite well in comparison to furniture that I we bought at Crate and Barrel.

And the design is wonderful. Even though we can afford to buy furniture from other places we always buy IKEA because we love the way it looks.

When it came time to redo our bathroom we decided to go with the Ikea GODMORGON Cabinet ($199 + extra for the legs) and mirror. The brilliant design allows you to have two full size drawers. It gives you tons of storage and comes with neat little dividers.

We chose a BRÅVIKEN sink to go with it ($179.00). The sink is really shallow and wide. Its an interesting design and very european/modern looking.

And for our faucet we chose GRUNDTAL ($89.99), a sleek faucet with a neat mechanism for turning the water on and off.

We started by assembling the cabinet. Pablo and I are pros at this by now and it went quickly and easily. I was impressed by the quality of the materials.

Then came time to connect it to our plumbing and this is where it all went very wrong.

We got under the cabinet and removed all of the old plumbing. I assembled the PVC pipes that came with the Braviken sink and realized very quickly that the pipes are much narrower than the metal ones that we had previously.

Stymied, I started assembling the faucet since I already know how to change a faucet. To my chagrin I realized that the connectors were not the same size as what I had previously AND the cords were too short!

I went to IKEAfans to see if any advice could be found and I found some posts warning people about the fact that the connectors will not work with American plumbing. You would think that IKEA would perhaps warn you of this! (And yes, I realize that the world is metric except the USA, but that is besides the point).

Here is what the drawing the manual looks like. As you can see there are no instructions on how to connect the end of the pipe (bottom left) to your plumbing. IKEA considers that to be 100% your problem. In their defense, everyone’s plumbing is different, so they have no way of knowing what you have.

I made a call to my local hardware store and they suggested that I try Brother’s Plumbing Supply in Elmsford.

I made the trip out and thankfully, they knew EXACTLY what to do. The Grundtal faucet has a 1/2″ IPS connector, my old sink uses 3/8″ compression fitting. So I needed an adapter/extension shown below. The brass part is the adapter which I guess allows me to connect the two female parts. The adapter is the webbed hose part.

Click to enlarge

And for the waste pipe I needed a reducing nut and washer. What you do is put the rubber washer on the smaller IKEA supplied pipe. Then put the nut on it. Screw the nut into the waste pipe that you have and voila, it fits!

Total cost of materials was $19.00.

And here is a pic of it all put together!

My final review on the sink/faucet/cabinet. The finished product is beautiful, but don’t buy it unless:

• Your hot/cold shutoff pipes are short. Ours protude 4.5 inches from the wall. Further out, and you will not be able to open and close the drawers in the Godmorgon cabinet.We were fortunate that our hot/cold pipes are relatively flush against the wall. If they had stuck out another inch or two the sink would not be touching the wall. And who wants a sink that is 1″ away from the walls?
• You are replacing something that is the same width as your current vanity. This goes for any sink. The faucet and the drain hole need to be located in line with your waste line.
• If the above don’t apply then you should be willing to hire a plumber to redo the pipes under the sink, move the plumbing etc…

Further reading: If you are more knowledgable at plumbing that I am (not hard!) then you might be interested in:

• Steve’s Blog – He explains how to install an Ikea faucet.
• Parkerman’s photos on Flickr – I found this on IKEAfans. He discarded the pipes that came with the Braviken and did it with American fittings.

PS Today, while at the plumbing store, I learned that this is not called a “Monkey Wrench”. Its called a pipe wrench. They guys at the store were both offended and amused that I used the term which is an anachronism.

Matilda was introduced to Disney princesses when she was 20 months old by her older cousin. At the time, she was fascinated by the dolls and later the dresses. I decided that I would not fight back against it and let her have her princess dolls, sheets, and books. After all, I liked princesses back then and still do.

Now that she is older, I am really starting to be concerned. He favorite princess is Sleeping Beauty and she has started to complain daily that she does not have light skin and that she wants long yellow hair. She constantly plays at “being married” and asks me who is her prince.

Perhaps I should just chill out.   But as I put Matilda to bed at night and read her one of the below stories, I cant help but to worry about what the effects hearing these stories over and over again. There are repeating themes of competition between females, not having a mother or friends, stress on the importance of beauty not to mention the violence.

Here are my evaluations of the popular, Disney princess books. The film versions differ greatly from the books. Matilda is scared to watch movies, so we have not gotten to that point yet.

Sleeping Beauty

Every character in this story has a name except her mother!

This is a really scary story for kids. The drawing of the witch is scary and its scary how Aurora get lured up to the highest tower by the witch so she can meet her fate.

This is the most violent of the stories. Just try to explain this to your child –  “when the baby reaches her sixteenth birthday she will prick her finger on a spindle and die”. The book features a page where the prince stabs the dragon/evil fairy in the heart. There is blood.

Beauty and the Beast

There are so many stories in our culture of  beautiful, long suffering women who love men who are violent and have terrible tempers. In the grown up versions of these stories, the woman usually ends up dead so that the male character can feel badly about it.

Stories like Beauty and the Beast teach girls to believe that we can change the beast into a prince through the power of our love! Beauty and the Beast is probably the first story of this theme that girls are exposed to.

Belle like most girls in most stories, has no mother. She also appears to have no friends.

There are good things about Beauty and the Beast however. Belle is a brunette and the smartest girl in her town.  They sell dumbed down versions of the book that show Belle and Beast as just friends. They are like Goofus and Gallant. Belle is polite and clean and Beast is rude and dirty. I try to stick to these books rather than the actual story.

Snow White

The female competition between step-mother and daughter is intense in this one. Snow White’s step mother decided to kill her because she is more beautiful than the aging queen.

Thankfully, Disney books has edited the story. In the original, the evil stepmother instructs the hunter to take Snow White to the forest, cut out her heart and bring it back in a box. In the new books, he merely abandons her in the forest. A strange man comes and kisses her at the end and carries her off.

Matilda used to like this story a lot but I had to stop reading it to her because it gave me nightmares.

Cinderella

More female competition.  Cinderella has mean, ugly stepsisters and a step mother who hates her.

Her big achievement in the story is to have small feet and marry the prince.  Matilda asks me all the time when is she going to get married. And tells me the details of her wedding.

This is probably the one that I read to Matilda the most as there are no witches or violence. I also like the way that Disney worked the mice into the story.

The Little Mermaid

I actually have few problems with this one. Ariel does not wear a crown and in the stories she actually has a fully developed personality. She actually spends some time with Prince Eric before they marry and he seems to be a nice prince. Her underwater friends are great too.

Though Ariel has no mother, she has a complex relationship with her father and defies him.

Ariel’s story is best told in the movie. It doesn’t work well as a 15 page book.

I have tried a couple of things to deal with the princess problem. I attempted at one point to retell the stories my way. But she caught on pretty quickly that I was not telling the story “correctly”.

Disney has of course introduced some diversity to their line of princesses. There is Mulan, Jasmine, Pocahontas and Tiana. However, Matilda has no interest in these princesses.

So tell me. Is your daughter obsessed with princesses and does it concern you?

Pablo and I have a design company called Hanee Designs. We generally do not do any marketing as all of our work comes via word of mouth and we have more than we can handle.

But blogging for the family has been so much fun that I decided that I need to blog for the business. So yesterday, we launched the new www.haneedesigns.com. Please check it out!

We also launched a facebook page for the company.

Pablo got me a new light fixture for mother’s day!

Before

After

Its called a Nelson Saucer Lamp. The design is by American designer George Nelsen. It was designed in in 1947 and is part of the permanent collection of the MoMA.

I love the way it goes with my mid-century design chairs!