SF Cable Car Museum

Colin, Katie, and I visited the San Francisco Cable Car Museum over the weekend. The kids enjoyed learning how cable cars work, though Katie complained that the powershouse was "too noisy." :-)

Uncle Vito's Pizzeria

My carefully planned itinerary for our special outing was rudely disrupted by my chosen pizzeria (Escape from New York) being closed on Saturday -- the nerve! Fortunately, the kids enjoyed the Hawaiian pizza at the runner-up selection, Uncle Vito's. Katie calls the pineapple "apples" and the Canadian bacon "lunch meat". At first she wanted the pineapples attached to the bites of pizza, then she demanded them carefully separated.

We wandered by Chinatown as we worked our way to the Cable Car Museum. The kids were quite a hit with tourists as they boldly marched up the ramp to inspect the dragon/lion guardians.

Their first ice cream sundae

At first, Colin wanted just an ice cream cone. But boy were they glad dad insisted on ice cream sundaes instead. I think I've created two addicts in one sitting. :-)

Posing at the Cable Car Museum

Katie tries to spin the Big Wheel

Katie found the big wheel at the Cable Car Musuem fascinating. Here she is trying to "drive".

To the park, James

Here are the kids, ready to go to the nearby park that's part of Colin's school-to-be. The path to the park involves two small hills, and I must say it's getting hard to push both of them up those hills. :-)

Colin is very excited to be attending kindergarten in the fall. He'll tell you, "in August, I turn 5 and then I will go to kindergarten -- and I will go to school every day that daddy goes to work." We can't believe it's time to send him off to school already -- definitely a bittersweet feeling. School every day seems like a lot to me, but then again, I don't have to stay home with him all day.

Airport firefighter

Here's Colin in his "airport firefighter" costume. In one of his many picture books about rescue workers, there's a picture of an airport firefighter in his heat-proof suit. Putting his hood up and his firefighter hat on top of it must remind him of that picture.

Lunch at the California Culinary Academy

We had the fancy-pants lunch buffet at the California Culinary Academy today. (It's very close to where I got my LASIK done.)

The Careme Dining Room is in a beautiful space that used to be a theatre: there were intricately carved columns and friezes towards the front of the room, as well as huge glass-enclosed instruction rooms where diners can see the students and vice versa.

There weren't many kids, so Colin and Katie were quite the novelty. They quite enjoyed the lavish desert offerings. The culinary theme today was North African and Middle Eastern: they had babaganoush, pita bread, a delightfully spiced chicken stew, leg of lamb, and many many more dishes.

All in all, the food was solid but not spectacular. However, the variety of the food, the attentiveness of the staff (all students of the Academy), and the specatucular venue more than compensated.

The duck at the California Culinary Academy

Katie laughed out loud at the duck. What's not to like? :-)

At the eye doctors

I am still going to regular follow-up appointments from my LASIK surgery. Occasionally, the kids come along. They love the fountain right outside of the doctor's office. Not to mention the energy bars, M&Ms, and jelly beans inside the office.

"Mommy, hold you!"

Katie is passing a linguistic milestone, and we're already mourning.

When she was younger, Katie would raise up both hands and say, "hold you!" -- meaning, of course, "hold me!" It was adorable. Alas, she's getting grammatically correct in her old age.

Interestingly, it turns out her mistake is a well-documented one. In Steven Pinker's fascinating book The Language Instinct (highly recommended!), the author describes psychologist Laura Ann Peitto's observation that even deaf babies learning American Sign Language reverse their me's and you's:

Now, in ASL, the sign for me is a point to one's chest; the sign for "you" is a point to one's partner. What could be more transparent? One would expect it using "you" and "me" in ASL would be foolproof as knowing how to point, which all babies, deaf and hearing, do before their first birthday.

But for the deaf children Petitto studied, pointing is not pointing. The children used the sign of pointing to their conversational partners to mean "me" at exactly the age at which hearing children use the spoken sound you to mean "me." The children were using the gesture as a pure linguistic symbol; the fact that it pointed somewhere did not register as being relevant. This attitude is appropriate in learning sign languages; in ASL, the pointing hand-shape is like a meaningless consonant or vowel, found as a component of many other signs, like "candy" and "ugly."

California sunshine!

Today was a beautiful California spring day, with temperatures in the mid eighties. We brought the kids to my parents’ community swimming pool where they enjoyed a typical afternoon of playing with water: that is to say, Katie jumped into the pool like a maniac while Colin splashed around the edge of the pool, dangled his feet into the water, but otherwise refused to have anything to do with the pool.

By the way, I'm dictating these words using Microsoft's speech recognition technology into Firefox. Speech recognition has come long way in the last four years, though I'm not convinced it's a productivity enhancer in this point. But for the old cognitive scientist in me, it's a lot of fun to see working technology that more than one of my professors declared to be flat out impossible not so long ago. For more details, see the post titled Microsoft speech recognition on my gadget reviews blog.

Another fun day at SFO

Frank took the kids to SFO via the Millbrae BART station. They had a great day roaming through the SFMOMA store, the Discovery Store, and riding all sorts of conveyances -- elevators, escalators, moving sidewalks, the Air Train, the BART, etc.

The International Terminal has a decent collection of restataurants, the pair enjoyed a multicultural meal: wonton noodle soup from the Harbor Village Kitchen (Colin ate mostly noodles and the lettuce, while Katie predictably ate most of the shrimp wonton) and a fruit tart from the Emporio Rulli.