Charles M. Schulz Museum

Ever since our recent visit to Santa Rosa and our hunt for Peanuts statues (which you can see here) Ava and Lola have been obsessed with Charlie Brown and Snoopy.

Kim and I have been wanting to visit the Charles M. Schulz Museum in Santa Rosa for quite some time, so with the girls new interest in his work I started organizing a visit. As luck would have it, our visit to the museum was just in time for the Charlie Brown Thanksgiving Celebration.

Thanksgiving 2014

Happy Thanksgiving for yesterday!

Seven Months Old

Guess what? I am now seven months old!

Over the last month I have been learning lots of new things and brushing up on skills I've previously learned. I'm getting super fast at crawling, I can wave, I can feed myself from a squeezy apple sauce pouch, I'm learning to drink out of a sippy cup, I can climb over (and on top of!) all sorts of stuff, I'm good at pulling myself up to standing against furniture and people, I've been practicing lowering myself down from standing, and I can stand on my own for a few seconds. I'm pretty proud of that last one. It always makes me smile.

The Little Ice Rink Giveaway

Can you believe that the holiday season is almost upon us?

December will be here in just over a week. That means I'm going to have to get cracking on this year's advent calendar. I'm a big fan of giving experiences as gifts and our advent calendar is no different. Rather that filling the calendar with chocolates or candies I like to fill it with vouchers for fun activities for the kids: writing letters to Santa, visiting the Giant Gingerbread house, baking Christmas cookies, making Christmas crafts, decorating the Christmas tree...

My all time favorite activity that appears every year in our advent calendar is ice skating at an outdoor rink. Having spent most of my life in Australia I'm used to hot, Summery Christmases with ice skating only possible indoors. I absolutely love that Christmas falls in Winter here. Even though we don't have white Christmases here in the Bay Area, there's just something magical about Christmas in Winter. Being able to take part in wintry Christmas activities like ice skating outdoors makes it feel even more magical.

This year we'll be visiting The Little Ice Rink at Alameda's South Shore Center for our outdoor ice skating. I can't wait to take the girls and they're pretty excited about it too. My favorite thing about skating at The Little Ice Rink is "Bobby" the Seal skating aide (you can see it pictured below). Ava took ice skating lessons for a year and a half so she's a pro on the ice, but Lola has only skated a few times and is not so confident. Usually when we go ice skating I spend half my time hunched over holding Lola's hands. With "Bobby" Lola will be able to skate around on her own with confidence - or take a rest and be pushed around! How cool is that? 

Golden Gate Bridge Walk

Having visitors from home is a great excuse to get out and explore San Francisco. So when our friends Kylie, Joel and Sebastian visited recently we knew we had to do something we hadn't done in a long time: walk across the Golden Gate Bridge.

The Golden Gate Bridge is one of those landmark structures that amazes me every time I see it no matter how often that is (I can see it from our apartment). Every time it pops into view it's a reminder of what a fantastic part of the world we live in. It's magical in much the same way that the Eiffel Tower appearing from behind a building feels magical when you visit Paris. Or the Empire State Building in New York. Or the Harbour Bridge in Sydney (five years of seeing that one almost every day and I was still in awe!).

Santa Rosa Peanuts Sculptures

Recently we visited Santa Rosa, the Sonoma Valley city that was once home to Charles M. Schulz, creator of the beloved Peanuts comics.

In honor of Santa Rosa's most famous resident sculptures of Peanuts characters have been erected around town. There are two permanent bronze sculptures while the rest are movable and can be found dotted around the city. 

Ava and Lola are quite fond of Charlie Brown, Snoopy and their pals so we set out to find as many of the sculptures as possible. We were there quite late in the day (after our visit to Petaluma Pumpkin Patch) and the sun was starting to set so we didn't manage to find all of the sculptures but we did find quite a few.

Pumpkin Fun

Time for another Halloween catch up...

After our visit to Petaluma Pumpkin Patch we had lots of fun work ahead of us with our pumpkins. We carved jack-o'lanterns, roasted pumpkin seeds and made Mathilde and Sebastian pose inside of carved out pumpkins!

It was a beautiful day here so we spent the afternoon up on our roof carving pumpkins until the sun set. Here's a look at our pumpkin fun...

Pumpkin Patch 2014

A few weekends back we visited Petaluma Pumpkin Patch to pick our pumpkins for Halloween.

Ava and Lola had been looking forward to visiting the pumpkin patch for such a long time. It's one of their favourite things every year. This year we had our friends Kylie, Joel and Sebastian visiting from Australia. We were excited to share such an American institution with them. Plus it was Mathilde's first visit to a pumpkin patch and therefore a huge photo opportunity!

Milk Carton City

We drink a lot of milk in our house. I mean a lot. Milk is such an important part of our family's day. We drink it by the glass, pour it on our cereal, blend it in smoothies, bake with it, and the grown ups in our house drink a lot of lattes. We just love our milk.

All that milk means a lot of empty milk cartons. The milk cartons usually go into the recycling bin but sometimes it's fun to recycle them ourselves by getting a little creative.

Looking at all the milk cartons in our recycling bin recently brought to mind an image of row houses; the picture perfect kind that you see throughout Europe. I mentioned this to Ava and Lola and right away they decided that they should turn empty milk cartons into a little play city.

Halloween 2014

I've been a little absent here on Little Hiccups of late.

I've been so busy with visitors from home, Halloween, school field trips and all that regular day to day stuff that steals away my time. I had grand plans to catch up and share all the latest fun with you this week now that it's a little quieter around here but I've spent most of my spare time filling out police reports and dealing with insurance after the recent theft of our beloved cargo bike. Bike thieves suck!

I have so many fun posts to share with you so let's start with a look at Halloween...

This year we had our friends Kylie and Joel visiting from Australia with their little boy Sebastian over Halloween. This was their first time celebrating Halloween and Mathilde's too so it was extra special.

We had a real mish-mash of costumes this year: Ava was a fancy ghost (although everyone thought she was an old lady!), Lola was a werewolf, Mathilde was a chicken, I was a spider and Kim was, you guessed it, the class nerd! We're making him recycle the same costume every year as it suits him so well! Kylie and Joel dressed as vampires with Sebastian dressed as a bat. A little more cohesion in their family costumes than ours!