Days of Miracle and Wonder, Part One
Photos from the summer of 2023 - part one of a three-part series
By Alex on September 13, 2023
It’s been a busy summer! We haven’t written in a while, so it feels like we need to set the stage a bit. We’ll start with our son Hase. As the summer of 2023 began, Hase was spending his weekdays in preschool with the same classmates he had known for over a year.
At some point, Hase developed a taste for the album Graceland by Paul Simon. The lyrics about “days of miracle and wonder” seemed like a fitting description for this summer. Also, it was a welcome change from Hase’s old standby, Truck Tunes by Twenty Trucks.
Our daughter Mae loves dogs, music, and swingsets. Our nanny Sydney helped Mae stay busy during the week with gymnastics, music class, and trips to the Children’s Museum, Howarth Park and a French bakery called Sarmentine (Mae also loves croissants).
As for us, Char is still leading a geriatric clinic at Grove by Sutter Health. Last spring, I started my own software design & development agency called Woodshed. We are both grateful to have jobs that allow us to prioritize spending time with our kids.
We started the summer with a three-day trip to Fort Bragg over Memorial Day weekend. We rode the Skunk Train, ate ice cream, and got good and mucky playing at Seaside Creek Beach.
The house we stayed in was a short walk to the sand dunes of Ten Mile Beach, where we spent our evenings slaloming down sandy hills as the sun set over the ocean.
Over the course of the summer, we spent several weekends at the ranch with Fritz, Pat, Jim, Hans, Rosalie, Everett and Esme and went down to Maacama Creek to play in the cool, clear water.
As the weather warmed up, Hase and Mae started a nightly tradition of digging in the mud in our yard with hoses and shovels, much like Char and I did when we were young.
Early in June, we traveled to Loomis to visit my family (John, Sarah, Colin, Laima and Jānis). We had a great time playing on my parents’ new lawn, swimming in Folsom Lake, and visiting the Sacramento Zoo.
Later in June, we went on a hike to the Umbrella Tree in North Sonoma Mountain Park with a big group of friends including Darien, Chris, Otto, Attila, Rachel, Pete, Nora and Louisa. We liked the spot and repeated the hike a couple of times over the summer.
At the end of the month, we went to Train Town in Sonoma, where we rode a quarter-scale train through a highly detailed landscape and played in a miniature town.
Trains turned out to be one of the themes of our summer. As you’ll see in later photos, we also rode the Tilden Park Train and the train in our very own Howarth Park in Santa Rosa.
We hope you enjoy the rest of these photos. We’ll be back in a week for part two!