The Best Toys in the House

It's been a busy 24 hours since John picked up these two and their mom, Lindsay at the train station. The weather was perfect for sitting out on the porch and getting caught up.  Although Sage is an extremely busy toddler, I think the way they survive on a houseboat is that she's never very far from Lindsay, and Grace is pretty good about keeping an eye on her too. Lindsay told me that the hardest thing about living on the houseboat with a toddler isn't the water, or even the fact that the rolling water requires a need to acquire sea legs, but the fact that they have been doing renovations almost continuously since they moved in. Adisa was at home doing that in relative peace.

I made a spaghetti sauce with fresh tomatoes from Dana and she and Jim joined us for dinner last night. The spaghetti was a hit and the meal was less chaotic than one might expect. 

We took them to Sebastopol this morning for a gathering of the online charter/homeschool families and teachers where Grace will be this year. It's a long way from Sausalito but I guess the catchment area for this program is quite large. While they were at this gathering, we took Spike on the circuit around the marsh elsewhere in the park. This was another place we went often when we spent weekends in Sebastopol and had Ozzie with us. There is a hidden entrance through the trees and brambles down to the creek, and Ozzie knew exactly where to find it and made a beeline to the water. We kept Spike on the lead there because he doesn't know the way yet, but I suspect we may be doing this fairly often, and it might turn out to be the place where he can experience swimming.

Their train was at one o'clock, not quite enough time to go home and come back to the train,  but long enough to stop at Grossman's deli, right across from the train station for some lunch. John had to move our car from its first parking place because he couldn't make the parking meter work. I guess we don't get out enough,  because I was a bit shocked by the price of sandwiches, but they were very good. We ate them in the park across the street because we had gotten take-out. We watched people gathering around a different kind of parking meter trying to figure out how to make it work.  At one point there were six seemingly unconnected people standing around the meter, but apparently the group think worked, because they eventually all walked away, one guy complaining that now they were even later for their reservation because they had had to spend twenty minutes trying to figure out how to pay for parking. (This is yet another complaint I have about how the city of Santa Rosa has done everything in their power to ruin the downtown.)

We said good-bye to Lindsay and the girls and made our way home, ready for a nap.