Pause, Reflect, Move

I like to take some time to reflect on one place before I leave it. We're gearing up to move into our new house in just about two weeks, so the time is ripe!

Apartment living in Pasadena: Pros

• On-site professional maintenance team that fixes all my problems. From a dripping sink to a malfunctioning A/C unit, help was just an email away. I didn't have to search for the appropriate service tech online, read reviews, get estimates, or pay any bills. It has been awesome and I know I'm going to miss this feature as a homeowner.
  
• Location - in the heart of it all. We are within walking distance of more amenities here than we ever could take advantage of. If our kids were more, hmm, refined in their dining choices, we would have really enjoyed all these restaurants. As it is, we definitely visited all the ones that serve pizza and/or French fries :) It's also been nice to be so centrally located for public transportation, both for DF's commute and for general traveling needs.
  
• Balcony. Although it's kind of annoying to hear the train crossing dining at all hours of the day and night, the kids have LOVED their front-row view of the train tracks. Also, it's relatively bug-free. We never get mosquito bites here. An occasional fly sneaks in the apartment, but that's about it.

Apartment living: Cons

• Fire alarms. Oh my word, the fire alarms. For awhile we had a faulty sensor in our building and the alarm was going off at least once a day. Not cool, people.
  
• Trains. Sometimes the crossing malfunctions and dings for three hours straight. Again, not cool.
  
• The mile-long walk from the garage to apartment door. Ok, it's not a mile but it sure feels like it sometimes, like today when the boys fell asleep in the van and then wanted me to carry them home. I am pumped to have a garage that's right in the backyard in our new place. Maybe 30 feet, door to door. I can totally handle that. And if the kids are asleep, it would be fine to leave one of them snoozing in the vehicle while taking the other one inside. 

Our new house is just about 2 miles away from our current apartment, so we'll still be able to take advantage of everything Pasadena has to offer. Short moves are the best!

Moving Will Solve All My Problems

With our home purchase set to close later this week (God willing/si Dios quiere/inshallah), I'm feeling anxious, reflective, and hopeful. I've moved a lot in life. It tends to stir up a mixture of emotions/perspectives, but one that I've noticed most often is totally misplaced optimism about changes that will result.

Example: When we moved from Seattle to Memphis (in 2013) I was sure that I would break my addiction to Cheetos. Why? I thought that because I'd be working from home, I'd have time to make myself more healthy snacks. LOL! Sure, I had time, but I had no motivation. Actually, I stopped eating Cheetos and all milk products not long after arriving in California last year because my body just wouldn't let me eat dairy anymore. That wasn't my plan, but it's how life turned out.

And now in 2018, I've pretty much convinced myself that as soon as we move from an apartment to house here in Pasadena, our lives are going to completely change for the better. Here are some of my hopes and dreams.

• We are going to have a dining room table where my children will sit and eat their meals. We will all eat together as a family. I will have a weekly menu board and cook/meal plan tasty dinners that all 4 family members will like.
  
• Of course I will no longer be crouching on the floor next to the couch feeding the children bites of peanut butter bagel for breakfast while they watch Octonauts.
  
• I will create an amazingly functional organization system for the new playroom. Our home will no longer be strewn with toys in every corner of every room. My children will pick up their toys. (Confession: I cracked myself up by typing that last sentence!)
  
• My children will play in the backyard with minimal supervision giving me copious amounts of free time to implement all of my above plans. They will explore and get dirty but not seriously injure/maim themselves while doing so.

Realistic expectations? Probably not. But a girl can dream...

3 Years

Happy third birthday to Gus and Gibson! I've been looking forward to this day when they could play with all the "ages 3+" toys without choking on anything. Ha ha! Actually, they have stopped putting everything in their mouths, so I suppose that's a good sign.

Language
I am not really concerned about them having a speech delay anymore, because they chatter all the time. One issue is that they still use "me" as a subject pronoun, instead of "I." So far I'm just continuing to model correct grammar without making a point to correct them. I figure they'll catch on eventually. In the meantime, it makes for some adorable expressions.

Gibson, tearfully at the park when trying to describe a snack, "No me know me talking about!"
(Turns out, he wanted to eat bunny grahams)

They use the word "love" frequently
Me: Please don't bite your brother
Gibson: But me loooove bite Gus!

I hand Gus a sandwich on an orange plate.
Gus (frowning): Ahh! No me love orange things!

They haven't started asking "why?" yet, but they do ask a lot of questions. Lately, they want to know what everything eats, including animals, plants, the cast of Octonauts, and non-living things like rainbows. Their syntax is, "Mommy, giraffe-es eat?" (The plural of giraffe is 3 syllables)

Pronunciation of some sounds is hit or miss. My current favorite word is "zizzors" (aka scissors)

Physical Milestones
We gave them balance bikes today for their birthdays. They rode around at the park for quite awhile without any major incidents. "Rode" isn't the right word - it was just walking with the bike underneath them. But it actually went better than I thought, so I'm sure they'll be zooming around before long.

They can run fairly fast without tripping.

Potty training hasn't been successful yet. We have a September deadline or else they can't start preschool, so yeah, better get on that soon...

Fine Motor Skills
They make tiny little blobs out of Playdoh.

They're doing better holding crayons/markers, except they don't like to be constrained to decorating only paper.

They are starting to grasp the concept of water color painting.

Personalities
We continue to see unique personalities develop.

Gibson likes to be silly. He is usually resilient and adaptable.

Gus is the rule enforcer. He's got a tender heart.

They are both playful, enjoy music, and are a bit wary of new people.

Overall
They have become little kids. They like babies, but they definitely don't consider themselves babies. They are more interested in playing with other kids at parks and etc. With them starting preschool in the fall and our family hopefully moving to a new home, I expect we'll see all sorts of changes in the year ahead!

Where to Be Rich in LA

House hunting brings out the demographer/sociologist in me. I haven't lived here long enough to have a total handle on what are the "good" and "bad" areas, but I'm starting to get some ideas.

(I apologize in advance for all the feathers I'm about to ruffle.)

Areas that are good tend to have:

• Rich people
• White people
• Maybe Asian people
• "Good" schools as defined by a score of 8+ on Great Schools
• Well-funded public services
• Crime that is not overt

Areas that are bad tend to have:

• Poor people
• Brown people
• Black people
• Asian people who aren't integrated into mainstream American culture
• "Bad" schools (scores 1-3)
• Poorly funded public services
• Visible crime, graffiti, gangs
• Noise and/or pollution

You know what I see as the main differences on these lists? Socioeconomic status and race. So if I ask myself, "Where should we live?" what I'm really wondering is, what kind of white people are we? Statistically speaking, our income puts us in the third quartile for Pasadena (between 50-75% of median). I feel awkward calling myself rich, but I think it might be true.

Then I see these lists like "Best Places to Raise a Family Around LA" which should be titled "Where Rich People Live." I mean seriously, #1 on the list is Manhattan Beach, where the average sales price of a three bedroom home is $1.8 million. So I guess my family is richer than we are poor, but we're not rich rich.

The point I'm trying to make here is that one can't just choose to be rich. In many cases, the deck is stacked against you from the start. And we can't keep using socioeconomic status as a proxy variable for everything in life. Which leads me to the following scatter plot:



(If that's not displaying properly on your device, or you'd like to see the supporting data, click here.)

What are we seeing in this chart? 
A correlation between a school's rating on Great Schools and the percentage of its student body that is low income, which means qualifying for free or reduced-price lunch. (As an aside, that is really poor around here because there's no adjustment made to the calculations to factor in cost of living in your particular area within the lower 48 states.)

What are we not seeing?
A large portion of the not-low-income families in Pasadena that are not represented on this chart, because their children aren't enrolled in these schools.

Pasadena Unified School District has kind of a mixed reputation around here. In the 1970s, the district was ordered to bus students to end de-facto segregation, a bit of history I haven't found anyone too eager to talk about. As of 2016, only 55% of students living in PUSD boundaries attended public schools. The rest are in charter, private, home school, or transfer out of the district. At the same time, there are several schools with new magnet programs focused on STEM, Arts, and IB, and they also offer dual language options. I'm familiar with a group called Pasadena Education Network that seems to be doing good work towards promoting integrated schools. So overall, I'm observing some positive trajectory.

Where should I try to buy a house, then? (I mean, assuming we stay in Pasadena. We also have been looking around Glendale and Eagle Rock, which is a whole other ball of wax.) To complicate matters, PUSD offers open enrollment, meaning that if you don't want your student to attend your neighborhood school, you can go through a lottery system to obtain a seat for your child at a different school. So it doesn't even really matter, school-wise, where we buy because we can put the kids in a different school. We just have to give them a ride.

But you see that? How privileged am I that the need to provide transportation daily to/from a school a few miles away wouldn't even give me pause? We are a two parent family with only one of us working outside the home right now. We have the resources to pay for a vehicle, gas, and insurance. I'm not trying to work two minimum wage jobs just to keep food on the table here. And I have the mental bandwidth to think about all these things two years before my kids will even start kindergarten.

What a world we live in.

If you want to learn more about these topics, here are some resources I recommend:

• How America's Public Schools Keep Kids in Poverty (TED talk by Kandice Sumner)
• Follow Integrated Schools on Facebook
• "The Problem with Great Schools" inspired me to write this post

Home Shopping with Toddlers

In the past six weeks, we've taken our kids to some 40 open houses. And as far as I know, they haven't broken anything! They've picked a couple lemons without authorization (#socallife) and might have trampled a few flowers underfoot. They've tripped over too many uneven floors/unexpected steps to count. They are doorbell-ringing experts. And, they've learned to be on the lookout for cookies or other goodies up for grabs. 

In fact, they've been house hunting for so long they've even started playing "open house" at home. Really! They set up boxes on the floor, then one kid said, "ding dong, you have sign? Me come see you house?" The other one said, "no, too dirty, me vacuum first." LOL

Real estate in the Los Angeles area is expensive. Exorbitant. Some might even say unreasonable. And yet, we've decided to throw our hats into the ring and purchase here as well. 

Why, you might ask? I'll tell you. 

The rent is too damn high.

For realz, people! We decided that we might as well make a mortgage payment for as much as we're spending on rent. The other option would be to move from our (expensive) apartment to a slightly less expensive rental, but we still want to buy eventually and moving with two little people is no joke. (We just did it last year, you know!) So, we sold the condo we owned in Seattle and now we're ready to buy here. We're hoping that the market doesn't totally tank right after we make a purchase, but one never knows.

It is hard to believe how quickly properties get snatched up and how much they wind up selling for. We are finally ready to put in our first offer on a house in the next couple of days. I am not overly optimistic about our chances of winning the bidding war. It seems like everyone I ask around here put offers on 5-10 properties before they finally got one. Maybe this will just be our warm up offer. The house is pretty cool, though, so I'll keep my fingers crossed.

Things I've learned about real estate in California (perhaps in general):

• Be super skeptical of homes without many photos online
• "California basement" is a polite term for "den of spiders and rodents"
• You could hire 21 different types of professionals to inspect your property, if you so desired
• Always pan up on Google Street View to check for giant power lines overhead
• It's hard to thoroughly inspect a property during an open house when your children are running amok
• There are way too many factors to consider in the home buying process. It is overwhelming!
• People who write home descriptions like the words/phrases "exclusive," "rare," "in-demand," and "don't miss out"
• There is no point in describing your listing in the Glendale/Pasadena area as "close to shops, restaurants, and schools" because that literally describes every home around here, as long as by "close" you mean "within a couple miles"

Hopefully before too long, we'll have a new nest to feather. Until then, we'll keep perching here in our cozy apartment. (Actually, not cozy. That's a code word for tiny. I should describe this apartment as spacious and well-appointed, in the highly-sought-after city of Pasadena!) 

Coconut Milk Tres Leches Recipe (dairy free)

I've been eating 100% dairy free for six months now. I decided to experiment with a dessert to take to dinner at our friends' last night. It was a success! Here's my recipe, based on one from the Pioneer Woman. Note that while she rated the degree of difficulty as "easy," I'd say it's more like "medium." I mean you have to separate eggs...that takes skill!

INGREDIENTS

Cake

• 1 cup flour
• 1-1/2 teaspoons baking powder 
• 1/4 teaspoon salt 
• 5 eggs, divided 
• 1/2 cup + 1/4 cup sugar
• 1/2 teaspoon vanilla 
• 1/3 cup unsweetened vanilla almond milk 
• 1 can coconut milk  
• 1 can sweetened condensed coconut milk

Topping

• 1 container Cocowhip, thawed
• 1/2 cup toasted shredded coconut
• zest of 1-3 limes, depending on how limey you like things

INSTRUCTIONS 
Preheat oven to 350 degrees.

Spray a 9 x 13 inch pan liberally until coated. (Use a dairy-free cooking spray)

Whisk together flour, baking powder, and salt in a large bowl.

Separate eggs.

Beat egg yolks with 1/2 cup sugar on high speed until yolks are pale yellow. (Use the paddle attachment for Kitchen Aid). Add in almond milk and vanilla. Mix until combined.

Pour egg yolk mixture over the flour mixture and stir very gently until combined.

Beat egg whites on high speed until soft peaks form. (Use the whisk attachment for Kitchen Aid.) With the mixer on, pour in remaining 1/4 cup sugar and beat until egg whites are stiff but not dry.

Fold egg white mixture into the batter very gently until just combined.

Pour into prepared pan and spread to smooth out the surface.

Bake for 30-40 minutes or until a toothpick inserted in center comes out clean.
Note: If you need to toast some shredded coconut for the topping, now is a great time to do it. Line a baking sheet with parchment paper and sprinkle coconut in a thin layer. Toast for 5-6 minutes, stirring once. Watch it closely so it doesn't burn!

Allow cake to cool completely. When cake is cool, pierce the surface with a fork or toothpick all over. You're making small holes for the delicious filling to ooze into :)

Whisk together coconut milk and sweetened condensed coconut milk in a small pitcher, or a bowl with a pour spout. Slowly drizzle the milk mixture all over the cake, and don't forget the edges. Mine started "ponding" when I had about 1/2 cup of liquid left, so I stopped. Your results may vary.

Allow the cake to absorb the milk mixture for at least 1 hour, and preferably overnight. (Store in the refrigerator).

Just before serving, spread Cocowhip over the surface of the cake. Mix the toasted coconut and lime zest together in a small bowl. Sprinkle over the top of the cake.

Cut into squares and enjoy! Best when served cold.

Putting Kids to Bed: Crossfit Edition

Are you into working out? Have I got a routine for you! It's called Crossfit: Bedtime x2 (no copyright infringement intended)

Material required:

• A room with a door that can close
• 1 nightlight
• 2 raised platforms, 12" high
• 2 medicine balls, 27 lbs each (or heavier for added challenge)
• Plywood for inclined planes
• Optional: toys and books

Set up:

• Position the two platforms against opposite walls, approximately 5-6 feet apart. Make sure they are stable.
• Build ramps rolling off each platform with a holding space at the top for a medicine ball. Ball should be able to easily roll down the ramp; it should not remain on the platform for more than a few seconds.
• For extra difficulty, rig up a pulley system to open and close the door and allow balls to escape into the hallway
• Scatter toys/books around the room
• Plug in nightlight
• Turn off overhead light
• Close door

Workout method:

• Grab one medicine ball. Place it on the top of a ramp. Be sure to squat and use your leg muscles.
• With your core engaged, turn to the other platform and place the second ball atop its ramp.
• Lunge back to platform #1, scoop up the ball from the floor, and replace it.
• Hop over toys so you don't stub your toe
• Get distracted by hopping and allow ball #2 to escape out the door. Retrieve ball #2 and place on platform.

Reps: 

• at least 100

Cool down:

• Ask your workout partner to come in and sit by one platform to hold the ball in place while you do the same for platform #2. 
• Take deep cleansing breaths. 
• Remain seated until the balls are no longer wiggling and are nearly asleep. 
• Tiptoe out of the room. 
• Pour yourself a glass of wine.