Museum, Art & park filled weekend!

We LOVE San Francisco! We are so lucky to live in the coolest city. Friday night we went across the street in GG Park to the De Young Museum. In the summer they have little Friday night parties with a band, art projects for the kids and cocktails for the adults and a couple of installations (this time it was dress up in fancy clothes and be photographed). It's a popular place for neighborhood families to come. We ran around outside, posed by sculptures and went inside to draw with watercolor pencils. We meet Nancy, Vernon and the kids there, along with Margret and Monica (Nancy's sister & niece). Skyler made a butterfly and then he made Luke with a light saber. Then he copied Monica's sunset picture - he's big on copying lovely works of art, I think it's a great skill to have.

Saturday we started off at the Randell Museum http://www.randallmuseum.org for Matt & Sky's ceramics class but it was canceled so they could have a Sun, Wind, Water Power Day. They made s'mores and baked cookies with solar power (a beautiful sunny day), had lots of crafts like making windmills out of paper & straws, suns out of coffee filters tie-died with food coloring (Skyler decided to make Earth, Venus and Uranus instead of a sun). They had the animals out and we got to pet & hold snakes, frogs and lizards. Skyler laid down and let a 13 foot boa constrictor named Balboa crawl across his tummy, smiling the whole time.

In the afternoon we went to our new park, across the street in GG Park they re-opened the Children's Playground. Said to be the oldest children's park in the country it needed a makeover and they did a great job. It has play structures for each age group to climb, slide, swing, tunnel and play on. They have a water area (kids love sand and a trickle of water) and a rock climbing kind of wave shaped thing. And best of all they didn't get rid of the old cement slides that come down the hill, bring a piece of cardboard and you have hours of fun for kids (and plenty of parents). Children's Playground has one of the most beautiful carousels around and for the last year that was the only reason to go to that part of the park, so it's nice to have a big playground again. Then we picked up Nana and had a delicious Italian dinner at Pasta Pomodora.

Sunday we went to the Matisse exhibit at SFMOMA http://www.sfmoma.org. On our way there we walked through Yerba Buena and found they were having the SF Theater Festival. They had kids plays, improve groups and random actors standing around acting out scenes (Cinderella with the ugly step sisters played by two big men in bad wigs). We went to the museum, walked around and saw beautiful works. Skyler learned what the word "Nude" means - he knew naked, but saw "Large reclining Nude" and loved the idea. Then walked around guessing the names of art "Woman standing nude", "Woman sitting nude", "Woman nude with arms over head". He liked the way people could be painted with lots of different colors that people don't usually have on them like "Woman with the hat" where she has green on her face (he wants to copy that painting because she has green on her face and a big hat). He also discovered that paintings and sculptures of people can be beautiful even if they are missing arms, legs or heads, and, that painting someones eyes on the side of their head is just fun art, not a mistake.

What a wonderful City!

Mid-summer news

Skyler said to Matt, "Your feet are both of your foots, and your foot is one of your feet."

You can reach the light switch and you don't need to stand on your tippy-toes.