Renaissance Man

A man of science...


of man of art...


a gentle nurturer of infants...


and a lover of muscle shirts and bike stunts.



He is passionately interested in so many things now that there's hardly time in the day to do half of the ideas he comes up with. We are often waking up to bright eyed Silas listing the things he wants to do (counting them on his fingers for emphasis) and instructing us in how we can help him meet his goals. He invents a new science "experience" almost every day. Most of them either involve a pipette and a "test kit", as he calls the ice tray, or a trap for bugs with variable kinds of bait. He still spends a lot of time making art, usually drawing, and although the marks he makes on the page are getting more complex and a bit more purposeful he still leans towards the abstract representations of maps, things towing other things or wild storm/fire scenes of chaos and rescue. The bathtub art you see above was first described to us as a map, then as a cheetah, wolf, great white, two headed turtle, etc etc. Much to my delight many of his works are now signed, with his awesome backwards "a".

When he's not conducting experiences or creating art, he's indulging his newest obsession: listening to bluegrass music. His two favorite bands, far and away, are from Walnut Creek and have overlapping members: Oak Grove and OMGG [site plays music on loading], but he can get into any band that will play Tennessee Waltz or Wagon Wheel.

It's so hard to keep up with the blog since our photo situation got more complicated (I won't bore you with the details of my mac confusions). And there's also that little problem of Silas's resistance to any photo that is posed alongside another person. So just believe me when I say we have had fun visits from my dad and from Kevin's mom, and maybe pictures will come along some day.

Leviathan and other amazing sea creatures

Silas has great passion for learning about new things, especially sharks and whales. So the recent discovery of Leviathan is a hot topic of conversation in our house. A prehistoric toothed whale who eats other whales is pretty cool by anyone's standards, and we are currently using the Leviathan tooth (40 cm) as a unit of measure around here (e.g., our friends' newborn twins are "a little smaller than a Leviathan tooth.")



He loves to wear his shark costume (made by Mimi for Halloween 2009) as often as possible. A great white shark has been spotted riding his bike to the Habitot museum many times. People love to see a shark on a bike. Silas says "And they say they've never seen a shark riding a bike on land, only in the water".

When I'm sprinting to catch up with my biking blond shark who is waiting at the corner for me I feel very lucky indeed.
Occasionally we are able to round up a herd of children from the neighborhood for these outings, a few of the usual suspects: Zimry and Silas out front, dad Rudy, Jasper bringing up the rear with me.
Try not to be too scared of this next picture - the Oceanic Whitetip shark is one of the more fearsome maneaters, but this one is friendly.



We have a few shark books and magazines, and the local library provides an awesome selection (which we hoard with renewal after renewal). Silas is rapidly becoming an expert in shark identification and shark trivia. In fact, he's rapidly becoming an expert in just about everything. Some days I get hoarse answering his questions, thank goodness for his smart and patient preschool teachers who pick up the slack 3 days a week.

Cue Woody Guthrie's song "Why oh why" which he wrote about his own curious kids, with Silas asking in the background "WHAT? WHAT DID HE SAY? WHY DOES HE SAY THAT ABOUT THE HAMMER?"... Yes, most of these interactions are in all caps.



I'm enjoying several food blogs lately, particularly smitten kitchen and our friend Elsa's sage sprout (I get to be a recipe muse). But since I have a kid blog that I can barely keep up with, not to mention deteriorating photography skills, I'll just have to put my own cooking blog fantasies on the back burner for now. But let me tell you, we eat pretty well around here.

Snappy Snap Pea Salad, from Vegetarian Planet cookbook by D. Emmons, created with Fully Belly CSA cabbage and onions, homegrown sugar snap peas and Iranian sumac powder from our awesome neighbor Olaf.