As usual in our family, Mother’s Day is a busy day. Rather than fight the brunch crowd, we always opt to stay home and start our day with a nice homemade meal. Today’s menu featured dungeness crab and crispy prosciutto eggs benedict with homemade hollandaise sauce, roasted new potatoes, sliced avocado, coffee, and a strawberry smoothie.
In addition to a nice family brunch together, the kids got to give Mom her Mother’s Day presents. They each did various projects at school, some of which were funny, and some that were super sweet. Mom was definitely feeling the love this morning and has some new keepsakes to hold onto forever.
After our bellies were full we all sat down to call Grandma Amy and wish her a happy Mother’s Day, then we did a video call with Nana and got to see all the new stuff she’s done around the house. Elise loves cats and her favorite color is orange, so the fact that Nana has two orange cats makes her so happy. She’s dying to play with them in person.
Once we’d spoken to our mom’s, we set out to finish our weekend project, which was building a garden! This is what Jessica wanted to do for Mother’s Day weekend, and I certainly wasn’t going to protest. She ended up putting in the hardest work anyway, which was to clear the area of the heavy growth of weeds and debris. She spent the entire day Friday clearing out the area we had designated for the garden and did an amazing job.
Today was relatively easy, as all we had to was purchase the planters boxes and pots, get the potting soil, and pick out the various fruits and vegetables we wanted to grow. Here’s what we ended up with:
- Puget Crimson strawberries
- Rainier strawberries
- White pineapple strawberries
- Oakleaf lettuce
- Walla Walla sweet onions
- Italian sweet peppers
- Broccoli
- Snow Peas
- Heirloom tomatoes
Now that everything is in place it’s really just a matter of keeping them hydrated and making sure they don’t get too much direct sunlight. We’re definitely looking forward to our first “harvest” and hopefully the kids will pick up a little gardening spirit along the way.
Not only was today busy for us, but so was yesterday, as we essentially turned Mother’s Day into a full weekend event. Yesterday morning Jessica and Elise had one of their figure skating classes, and we all ended up going. I hadn’t been to one of their classes yet and was super excited to see them – especially Elise, who has been talking about skating more and more lately. Every time she would finish a drill she would look at me in the bleachers and wait for a smile or thumbs up. It was fun being there and I’m impressed with how much they have both progressed in such a short time.
Last night we had a babysitter come over so Jessica and I could get out for a little date night. We were both embarrassed when we realized this was the first time this year that we’d gotten a babysitter and gone out to dinner. It’s certainly not intentional, as we love getting away for nice meals and quality alone time. Time just constantly flies for us because we’re all so busy with activities, work, etc. Anway, we went out to a nice little Italian restaurant in Edmonds called Girardi’s. We sat outside, took our time, and enjoyed a delicious meal. We can’t help but be food and service critics amongst ourselves when we go out, and we mutually agreed that the food was 5/5 stars. The beef carpaccio, caesar salad, buffalo sausage penne, and veal marsala were all excellent. The service wasn’t as good as the food, however, but the food was good enough that we would definitely go back. Afterwards we enjoyed walking around downtown Edmonds for a bit before heading home to call it a night.
In addition to celebrating Mom this weekend, we recently had her birthday to celebrate, which we did in style by having a nice family dinner at El Gaucho in Seattle. Obviously Jessica and I both have a lot of history in that place, so it’s always a pleasure going in there and catching up with old friends. To see our own little ones walking through that dining room, visiting the wine cellar (or the ‘secret room’ as they called it), and saying hello to all the friendly staff members, was such a trip for me. That place has meant so much to me over the years, and I think of my time there the way most people reminisce about their college glory days. So to see my own children running around that same space was almost surreal.
Dinner was amazing as usual. We started with tuna tartar, then I had mushroom truffle soup while Jessica had a burrata caprese salad, and the kids munched on fresh fruit. For entrees Jessica and I shared the tableside chateaubriand, which was outstanding, but the most memorable part of the entree course had to be Ava and her king crab leg. She had been saying for a while that she wanted crab when we had dinner at Mommy’s restaurant, so we were happy to oblige. She ended up eating the entire leg, loving every bite. We got a total kick out of it, but were like “Don’t get used to eating $50 entrees kid. This is a special occasion.”
Dessert was just as special as I knew it would be. We sang Happy Birthday to Mom, she got her favorite creme brulee, and the rest of us got the greatest dessert there is to be had anywhere on Earth (as far as I’m concerned) – El Gaucho’s tableside bananas foster. It’s simply to die for. The Olympic Mountain vanilla is the best vanilla ice cream I’ve ever had in my life (too bad you can’t buy it in stores). Meanwhile the caramel sauce made with brown sugar, butter, lemon, creme de banana, and silver rum is used to flambee the sliced bananas. When it all comes together on the plate it’s pure perfection, so it should come as no surprise that I had to physically restrain the kids from licking their plates clean.
It’s nights like this that you remember forever, and we owe a huge thanks to the whole El Gaucho staff for taking such amazing care of us. We certainly don’t do this sort of thing often, which makes it that much more nice when you’re able to get out and celebrate like this with the ones you love.
Before I go I figured I’d give a brief update on what each of us have been up to, starting with Miss Elise. As previously mentioned she has been loving her figure skating class, so that’s been a big hit. She is also loving her Wednesday night dance class with Ava, and the two of them are excited to be preparing for a recital in June. As she wraps up her Kindergarten year, Jessica and I are both impressed with Elise’s scholastics, and really just want to focus on making sure she’s full of self confidence and doing things she enjoys. The sky’s the limit for her and it’s been amazing to see how much she’s grown this school year.
After a few weeks off after the end of the season, Ava is back in spring hockey with the Washington Wild. A bunch of the older girls she’s been playing with have now moved onto the 10U group, so this spring league is Ava’s first chance to start understanding what it means to be one of the big girls on the 8U team. I’ve been explaining to her that she’s going to get to learn about being a leader, and setting a good example for the younger girls.
We recently scheduled a tonsillectomy for Ava, as she has already been regularly suffering from swollen and infected tonsils. Jessica and I both dealt with tonsillitis constantly throughout our childhoods, and we didn’t want to put our own kids through that. So after being seen by an Ear Nose & Throat specialist, we decided to pull the trigger and get it on the calendar. She’ll be going in at the end of June right after school gets out.
Mr Enzo has recently started making big strides in terms of writing and holding a pen/pencil. Up until this week, doing anything related to writing or drawing was something he wanted nothing to do with, but this week he really turned a corner and is now doing great at tracing letters and numbers. I think it’s now safe to say that we are a fully right handed family, as Enzo was the only remaining uncertainty, until now that is.
Jessica, in addition to soaking up all the love from her birthday and Mother’s day, has been keeping busy teaching art classes at the girls’ school, and getting busy with various rock painting projects, as the ‘season’ seems to have arrived. She has also been consistently working 2 nights a week, so she’s as busy as usual.
The biggest thing going on for me right now is the fact that next weekend I will reach one full year of daily Italian lessons on DuoLingo. I can’t say this was planned, but the reality is that last year I made a conscious decision to drastically reduce my time spent on social media, and this was essentially a natural outcome of that. It opened up time for me each day to do something that felt fun and productive, and while I’m not sure I’ll ever become truly fluent, it doesn’t really matter, as I’ve come to love the journey it’s taking me on.
That’s all for now. Before I go I just want to send our love to all the awesome Mom’s in our lives; the grandma’s, sisters, cousins, aunts, and friends that we’re lucky to have close to us. Hopefully you each had the day you deserved! Here’s some recent family pics.
