Category Archives: Photos

Grand Central and Rockefeller Center

(Continued from last week)

My friend Rosita and I strode out of our hotel with our almost 13-year-old sons. We headed for the subway in high spirits to begin our Boys’ Birthday Adventure in New York City…If you’ve been reading along, you’ll know that I have a spectacularly bad sense of direction, aaaaaand you can probably guess what happened next. After a couple of false starts we had to stop and consult our iPhone maps to get us back on course for the station.

 

Rosita and her beloved, permanent iPhone prosthesis!

Rosita and I laughed as we remembered another earlier trip we had made to New York City with our friend Katherine. Rosita was the only one of us, who had an excuse for not knowing her way around a city that was new to her. Katherine, like me, had been a student in NYC, but despite the years we had lived in the city, and despite the fact that it is rationally laid out in a fairly systematic grid, we were still constantly getting lost and disoriented. At one point, when we were having trouble figuring out which way was north, Katherine said in all seriousness, “Let’s figure out which way the sun is shining on the buildings!”

“Oh yeah, and let’s also look for which side of the buildings the moss is growing on!” I suggested.

 

The boys wait…

We stopped to smell the roses along the way…

 

 

 

First stop: Grand Central Station, celebrating its 100th birthday this year…

 

…and looking grander than ever!

 

 

 

 

Rosita caught the frenetic activity of shoe shiners:

 

The beautiful food court

 

Teas

 

Spices

Rosita’s photo:

 

We caught the last day of the Nick Cave installation of raffia horses on the ground floor of Grand Central, but sadly missed the Alvin Ailey dancers donning the horse suits to bring the sculptures to life.

 

 

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Billy Collins was commissioned to write this poem for Grand Central’s Centennial
Golden Clock

The iconic Chrysler Building:

 

The quintessential mode of transportation in NYC:

 

Rockefeller Center

 

 

 

 

 

Minamoto Kitchoan, the Japanese confectionary at Rockefeller Center.

 

 

 

 

 

Cherry confection captured by Rosita

It’s not so much about the taste, as it is about the aesthetic experience. I still maintain that desserts are not the forté of Asian cuisine, (red bean paste — need I say more?), but everything in this store is absolutely  exquisite…to look at, anyway!

Next stop: F.A.O. Schwartz, Dylan’s Candy Store, and Times Square

*Check out Rosita’s blog post about our trip.

 

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Chronic Chroniclers

My friend Rosita and I are both chronic chroniclers…

I love that you can see us both with our cameras aimed at our sons in this shadow photo…

Occasionally, our subjects tire of the relentless flashbulbs:

“No more pictures!”

But the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree:

“Say cheese!”…(That’s a waterproof camera, by the way).

Here’s Nicholas recording his FaceTime conversation with his little sister.

Next week: More photos, of course! Until then – have a wonderful weekend!

My son and his buddy

My son and his buddy are both turning thirteen this month. The boys met when they were just three years old during storytime at the library, and they immediately hit it off.

(My son is on the right).

I became fast friends with the mother of my son’s friend. Besides the fact that our sons were born in April and have names beginning with “N,” we share other similarities. Rosita and I are both Korean. We married Englishmen, who happened to have studied at Cambridge at the same time, and whose families live in the same general part of England. When we met, we were both in the trenches of parenting our firstborns and were delighted to have found a kindred spirit in each other. (As you might guess from her name, Rosita has a fascinating background, which you can read more about on her blog).

The first time Rosita and her son came over for a “playdate,” (I put that word in quotation marks, because after all these years it still makes me wince and want to apologize for using it at all), the boys disappeared into the playroom. Rosita and I sat next door in the living room drinking tea and chatting happily. We kept hearing loud crashes and noises, interspersed with peals of laughter. We were not yet seasoned mothers, so we were foolishly reassured by the laughter. We had gotten past the point where we couldn’t blink for fear that the boys might drown in a toilet, impale themselves upon a sharp object, or tumble headfirst down the staircase. We thought we had at long last dropped our anchors into the relatively safe harbor of toddlerhood. In any case, we were desperate for adult conversation and companionship and it was easier to just ignore what was going on next door.

“Chitchat, chitchat, chitchat…” (Crash! Bang!)

My son’s friend kept popping into the room to drop hints that we should be paying more attention.

“We’re being Thing 1 and Thing 2,” he said.

“Oh, uh-huh,” we nodded absentmindedly and continued communing with each other like long-lost sisters, “Chitchat, chitchat, chitchat…” (Smash! Boom!)

He disappeared into the playroom again, only to reappear a few minutes later to announce plainly, “We’re doing terrible things in there.”

Clearly, it was time to check on the boys. When we got to the playroom, our jaws dropped. We were aghast. We were speechless. Every single toy was on the floor. Every single puzzle had been upturned and all the pieces strewn about the room. Every single board game had been opened and the pieces shaken out all over the floor. Every single book had been taken from the shelves and had been dumped on the floor. There was literally no inch of carpet visible under the ungodly mess the two boys had created in a matter of fifteen minutes.

We scolded. We cleaned. We gave stern looks. We reorganized. We shook our fingers. We reshelved books. Finally, we got the room back in order.

Not wanting the boys to mess up all of our hard work again, we sent them upstairs to play in my son’s room.

“Don’t make a mess!” we warned and went back to our tea and sympathy.

“Chitchat, chitchat, chitchat. Chitchat, chitchat, chitcha–”

Suddenly, we realized that it was alarmingly quiet upstairs. I think most parents would agree that silence is far more ominous than noise.

We raced up the stairs to see the two boys hunched silently over stuffed animals, industriously giving them haircuts.

“We’re being barbers,” the boys announced proudly as they looked up from their work. The badly shorn lions and bald teddy bears stared at us reproachfully…

I’ve always been convinced that the boys will be lifelong friends. Rosita’s family moved away to Madison, Wisconsin four years ago, but we still stay in touch and we see each other at least once a year. This past weekend Rosita and I met up in New York City with our boys to celebrate their thirteenth birthday together.

Tomorrow I’ll share pictures from our trip, but for now, here are a few pictures I took of the supplies the boys travelled with:

Hair-spiking gel? Check.
Remote control fart machine? Check. Water-squirting camera? Check.
Video-recording spy glasses? Check.
The Googleyezer
Googly eyes in Chinatown
Googlyeyezed Starbucks Lady.
Best buddy? Check.
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Weekend Snapshots

We bid a fond farewell to our friends Hiroshi and Naho, who return to Japan this week after two years in Charlottesville:

Helping Hands wrapped up its winter session. This is how much money we’re donating to some of our favorite organizations:

Soccer season began:

My sister and parents made the trek to C’ville, partly to see my son’s school play and partly for the bubble pancakes at Taste of China:

I wasn’t sure what the quickest route to my son’s school from the restaurant would be, so I asked my friend Siri. You know, the one who likes to mess with my head? (Lost) :

My mom said, “I can’t believe she called you a dummy!”

I can.

We somehow made it to Back Pain Candidate for Gloades School without Siri’s help. Café 007  is an annual event at Tandem Friends School. It’s a series of skits, poems, musical numbers, and short films written and performed by the seventh graders, who are all required to take drama for the second half of the year. To me this is learning at its finest. Putting a show like this together involves creative writing, problem-solving, cooperation, and collaboration…It was hilarious and moving to watch the kids performing skits and songs they’d written themselves, dancing with wild abandon, and hurling themselves headlong into their goofy roles. You could tell they trusted each other and the support of their community.

A Fettucini Brother
Awkward Man!
Ghostbusters
A Knight
?!

Roooaaar!/Baaaaaa!

“In like a lion, out like a lamb.”

A week ago today we woke up to no power and this:

Can you see the tree that fell in our backyard in this next picture?

School and work were cancelled! It was cold, but cozy to be hunkered down with everyone on that first day.

To their great chagrin, I insisted that the kids wear helmets to play out in the snow. There were trees down everywhere and I kept hearing the ominous creaking and cracking of limbs:

That night my oldest son said he would “test” his hardiness by roughing it in his own cold bedroom. My husband did the same. The sybarites among us, (including me), camped out in the living room with the gas fireplace going:

By the next morning the lack of power was getting really old. My husband and I had both done huge separate shopping trips the day the power went out to stock up for the storm. We made a pathetic attempt to salvage some of the food:

My husband tried valiantly to cut up a huge tree that was blocking our road with a rusty old saw. A neighbor with a chainsaw took pity on him and helped him clear the path:

Two and a half days without power left us feeling like primitive cave dwellers.

A week later, the bees are buzzing, the birds are chirping, and our yard looks like this:

What a miracle that this was hiding underneath all that snow!

Here’s that tree that fell. Over the weekend another kind neighbor with a chainsaw surprised us by performing this act of mercy:

I’m so thankful for good neighbors, a warm house, electricity, and signs of SPRING!

Silver Diner

Just a few photos of the kids at their new favorite restaurant…

We must have heard “Lion Sleeps Tonight” at least seven times…

How My Mommy Saved Me…

As you may have noticed if you’ve been reading along, I take my camera everywhere I go. So naturally, when I drove my mom to the Korean grocery store, I brought a camera to record some of the sights. If you haven’t already, please do look at yesterday’s post. I risked my life for those pictures!

Everything was going swimmingly until we reached the housewares section. As I started taking pictures of the pretty and colorful dishes, an agitated ajumma* in an H Mart vest came scurrying towards me, chattering away like an angry squirrel. I don’t understand Korean, but I could tell that for some reason my picture-taking was making her nervous. I pretended not to notice and kept shooting away, but visions of a wrestling match in the aisles of H Mart were flitting dangerously in my head. From the corner of my eye, I could see my mother shuffling over in paaaaainfully slooooooow motion to join the fray. I was sure the ajumma was about to leap onto my back and take me down with a choke hold, when my mother finally intercepted her.  Was my mom going to whack her with her cane? Was I going to be in a three-way rumble with this ajumma and my aged and venerable mother right there in the middle of the housewares aisle of H Mart? I kept expecting to hear the resounding “thwack” of my mom’s cane, but instead I heard her fend off the woman with a few words in Korean spoken in a mild tone of voice. Suddenly the murderous gleam in the ajumma‘s eyes died out. Her shoulders relaxed. She gazed upon me benignly, and…was I imagining it? perhaps pityingly?

As we drove home, I asked my mom what she had said to disarm the ajumma.

“Oh, I just told her you were a country bumpkin and that you had come to visit me in the big city and were soooo excited about all the sights, so you had to take lots and lots of pictures of everything.”

Ummm…Thanks, Mommy.

*ajumma: a Korean woman who is middle-aged or older. In order to qualify as a true ajumma, she must also have a bad home perm, known in Korean as a “pama.”

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H Mart, a photo essay

Animal:

Vegetable:

Mineral:

Tofu aisle:

Kimchi aisle:

Banchan aisle:

Tomorrow: why I almost got kicked out of the store and how my mother saved me from that ignominy!

Cousins

Once my dad told me, “I used to think you were the richest of my children…”

I was very confused. If anything, I’m probably the poorest of his four children.

He continued:  “…because you had two boys.”

Aha!

“But now your sister has you beat,” he concluded matter-of-factly.

My sister has a brilliant, beautiful, charming, and accomplished daughter. She is a gifted writer, actress, singer, and pianist. Among her many other accolades and awards, last year at the tender age of 13, she won the National STEM Video Game Challenge with a game she designed to teach kids about math inequalities. She’s been doing the press junket ever since. Most recently, this past weekend she was invited to present her game to congressmen and senators as part of the inauguration celebration…

But in case you haven’t figured it out, what my dad was talking about was the fact that my sister hit the MegaMillions Korean Jackpot. Not only did she have triplets, she had triplet BOYS!!!

To put this into perspective, my parents had three girls before they finally had their much-wished for boy. They named him Theodore, which means “gift from God.” They were lucky. There was a family in my father’s Korean congregation who had eight children, because the first seven were girls.

Here’s a picture of my sister’s fabulous foursome from way back when:

And here they are with my kids this past weekend:

Not only does she win national awards, she also wins every breath-holding contest too!
My brother-in-law entertains the boys and his daughter at Breeze Cafe
My sister and her #1
Tatiana adores her only other girl cousin.
Nerding out with the iPod.
Ommmmmmmmm.
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The Torpedo Factory with my Friendy Wendy

Wendy!

Wendy!

Wendy and I have been friends for (gulp!) 30 years. We became friends in high school, but became even closer after we graduated. This is somewhat surprising, because if you were to create a Venn diagram of our friendship, there would be very little that would go into that part in the middle where the two circles overlap.

For example, Wendy loves the outdoors and hiking. I love the indoors and sitting on my couch. Once I ventured one little toe into her side of the Venn diagram when I went for a walk with her in Great Falls Park. Anyone who knows me will understand what a huge stretch that was for me. And how much I’d really have to like someone to go into the woods with them without being blindfolded and having a gun pointed to the back of my head.

It was a boiling hot summer day. Wendy wore what normal people wear to go hiking in the high heat of a Virginia summer. Petrified of ticks, I showed up wearing jeans with socks pulled up over the hems, a long sleeve shirt, my hair pulled back so tightly into a ponytail that I looked like I just had an aggressive facelift, and a baseball hat. It took every ounce of self-control I could muster not to take a baseball bat with which to ward off errant bears and rattlesnakes. It is to her credit and a testament to her good nature that she did not start cackling in my face when she saw me, but merely gently questioned my choice of apparel with a slight grin tugging at the corner of her mouth. It’s also to her credit and a testament to her good nature that since then, she’s never asked me to go hiking again. Instead, over the many years of our friendship we’ve seen a lot of movies together, visited art galleries, and spent hours and hours talking…

Wendy is a kindergarten teacher, which puts her right up on a pedestal with the other two categories of people I revere: nurses and social workers. She teaches in a school with a population predominantly made up of recent immigrants. In my book, that puts her on an extra little shelf right at the top of that pedestal. She does so much for others every single day that I can’t write about, because it would embarrass her. Suffice it to say, I think the world of her.

Over the weekend we took my kids to The Torpedo Factory:

The Torpedo Factory is located right on the waterfront in Old Town Alexandria. It used to be – (surprisingly enough!) – a torpedo factory from 1918-1923. After that it served as a munitions storage facility. In 1975 it was transformed into an art center with three levels of open studios and galleries. There’s something quite delightful about a factory for producing weapons evolving into a space where art is created instead.

You can wander through the studios and watch artists at work. They’re usually very happy to answer questions or talk about their art. Every inch of the interior is devoted to art. There is a papier mâché pachyderm perched on a ledge, friezes decorating the outside of the curved stairwell, and under the staircase in one of the treads is a lighted ledge which houses an array of miniature sculptures.

If you’re feeling inspired, you can sign up for one of many Art League classes. Finally, you can cap off a lovely art-filled afternoon with a bite to eat at the Bread & Chocolate café.

My kids got a little too jacked up on bread and chocolate and were overly boisterous on the way back to Arlington. Wendy and I were right in the middle of a serious conversation when I finally snapped and pulled the car over to squawk at the kids in a completely undignified manner. If I had witnessed this fit of apoplexy, I’m sure I would have snickered. But remember, Wendy is a kind person. She politely pretended that it was perfectly normal to threaten your kids that they would have to hoof it back to Arlington if you so much as heard another peep from them. As soon as I was done snarling at them and had pulled back onto the road, she picked up the thread of our conversation as if nothing had even happened. That’s my Friendy Wendy.