A little bit of China in Scotland

Going to school in the Shaw neighborhood can certainly be a challenge at times.  There's a lot of riff raff in the neighborhood.  And I say that coming from Soulard.  Take car cloutings.  When Kay was in pre school someone broke the window of her friend Caroline's car and stole a dance bag with a size 6 leotard.  Neighborhood kids lit our playground climber on fire and routinely write horribly graphic bad words all over the inside of the slide.  At a school auction a car was stolen off one of the side streets.  Imagine that.  Walking out of a school auction with your winnings and not being able to find your car because some punk stole it (ever since then we have hired an off duty police officer for night social activities).

But there are perks too.  It's an academically strong, diverse and caring school.  The students walk frequently to Tower Grove Park and the Botanical Gardens.  The parents are fun, smart and volunteer their talents.    We always have connections to free beer through Schlafly or AB.

The Botanical Garden is also in the Shaw neighborhood.  So when the Chinese Lantern Festival ended we got this pagoda house and a bunch of other cool garden sculpture.  Thanks MOBOT!

Wrapping up the week

Picked up the girls from Camp Cedarledge.  Audrey stayed in the Glen, the same place I stayed  for 2 weeks during the summer of 1982.  Fortunately for Audrey she has a much better hair style than I did.  

Gus' last day of SLU camp.  I love that camp and he did too.

End of year swim party for the girls who played sports this year for SMOS.  

A Soulard tap and run, which is some kind of 4k with beer stops.  Only in Soulard.  And hours later on the same street was the naked bike ride. 

Mansard des Chaussettes

That's right.  Sock Mansard.  Located on Jefferson Avenue just minutes from Interstate 44, St. Louis' newest 99 cent sock store offers so much more than socks.  You can also get a sno cone or a used piece of furniture or a lawnmower or a bicycle.  In other words, "Sock it to me" sells junk it found in the alley or stolen stuff hotter than a St. Louis July day.  Who knows if the socks are legit; I guess they could be if you got a great deal on a truck full of socks.  I just have a hard time believing this is a legitimate business model and that there could be profits on the sale of 99 cent socks.  There are so many good businesses have a hard time surviving and yet I am to believe one selling 99 cent socks is still going strong?  Probably a front for the stolen goods or fluorescent paint or sno cone fraud or something else. 

Sock it to Me definitely gets the badmansard award for sketchiest mansard.

You know who is not sketchy but super cute?  Mimi.  She turned 4 this weekend which mandated a Saturday family party followed today by a kid party at the children's garden in the Botanical Garden.  Great party place, especially when so many of the kids live near the garden anyway.  We went early before the heat set in and the crowds showed up.  They ran around, had fun, stayed cool in the water and put on a puppet show.  And who knew, but the town square in the children's garden is called Mimi's.  It was meant to be.

Exciting things to open!

 I love my calendars.  I use Outlook at work and ical at home and both feed to my iphone.  I also subscribe to my husbands work travel schedule.  I have color codes for everything.  Red for work, pink for school, purple for Girl Scouts, orange for sports, etc.  I have just one paper calendar I hang in the kitchen to keep the kids reminded of relevant dates.  Without my calendar, I am lost. 

I have a category called "neighborhood need to know".  Things like festivals, openings, closings, etc.  A small but important category.

Four dates have me excited.

July 14- reopening of the Grand Bridge.  Finally.  The span from highway 40 to Chouteau will re-open.  Holy Smokes it's been a while waiting on this one and the roads handling Grand's load have been a mess (Vandeventer, Compton).  During the school year the Grand bridge affects me greatly because I use it to get to my kids school from downtown.  And then during the summer my kids go to camp at SLU and how great it will be to pick up the big kids at SLU and get to Mimi's preschool in Shaw without dealing with the congested mess of Vandeventer/Chouteau/Manchester/etc?.  (This week the kids are all at different camps at Hampton/Gravois- Gus at karate, Audrey at Willmore Park, Kay at Cor Jesu).

July 27- Opening ceremony for the Olympics.  I confess. I am an Olympics junkie.  I will watch the Olympics for 3 weeks straight. I think I've even planned the births of my children around the Olympics.  I have good memories of watching the Olympics in the middle of the night while breastfeeding (Mimi Beijing 2008, Gus Turin 2006).  I was pregnant with Kay (Sydney 2000) and Audrey (Salt Lake 2002).    I planned this year's summer vacation around the Olympics so I wouldn't miss any coverage.  I will be glued to my TV.  See this post from my 63104 mom tumblr for an Olympic encounter with 1996 Magnificent 7 member Shannon Miller:  LINK.

December 2012- reopening of St. Louis Public Library's downtown branch.  I am so excited to see the remodel.  Love sunny Barr Branch, but Central is so much bigger.

Sometime in the future- a Great River Greenways trail expansion from downtown all the way down to the River des Peres trail.  If I have my information correct, I'd be able to get from my house in Soulard to a trail along the Mississippi that would then take me to the River des Peres trail or northward to downtown and beyond.  Does anyone know how exciting that would be?   If there was a Sidney Street trail head, I'd be only about 1/4 mile from the trail.  As opposed to now where we have to load up the bikes and drive to a trail.  With 4 kids, that doesn't happen very often.  I'd need an industrial bike trailer to get those bikes around.  See here:  LINK.

Lemay

Poor Lemay.  It's a little hamlet right where St. Louis' south city ends and south county begins.  And for that reason, both the city and county people make fun of the hoosiers in Lemay.  Admittedly, Lemay is a little rough.  In fact, I think the people in Lemay would proudly tell you it's a little rough.  As in "I wouldn't want to get into a bar fight in Lemay."  But I know folks from Lemay and for the most part they are hard working, honest folks who like cold Busch beer and biker bars.

Bar fights and hoosiers aside, Lemay is an important place.  It it a very old part of St. Louis going back to when a French guy named Lemai had a ferry service over the nearby Mississippi River (thus the street name Lemay Ferry).  It has some nice sturdy homes and attractive architecture.

This poor building, not so much.  A bad mansard front and a solid brick behind.  And why was I driving through Lemay?  See below.  Softball game. 

Audrey jumping.  I wish I could tell you she was fielding a ball but really just doing an action pose for me. 

Sunny Side of the Street

A sunny day made more delightful by the discovery of a sunny mansard with a bad green top and then a trip to the zoo with my favorite 5th grader and preschooler.  

Children #1 and #4 were on a zoo field trip together.  The 4/5th graders are 

'buddies' to the little ones in the Montessori preschool classrooms.  With 2 of my kids going to the zoo it was clearly one of those field trips I was going to be chaperoning.  I tried to cram in a million errands before reporting to school by 9 for driving duties.   As I made my way down Pestalozzi I spotted this yellow and green disaster.

I am getting a little sad this special school year is coming to a close.  It was neat to have a 1st year preschooler, a kindergartner, a 3rd grader and a 5th grader.  I'll never have that line up again.  

Sunny Side of the Street is one of my favorite Pogues songs.  It's even a little cheerful.  Click here

Mimi (in jumper) and her friend Beatrice.  I call them Miatrice.  Some trivia for you- B's sister is also a Mimi (her real name is Mildred whereas my Mimi is a Magdalena).  B's dad and I went to law school together and my father in law (Mimi's grandfather) went to grade school with Beatrice's grandfather at Holy Redeemer in Webster Groves.  

Another backside

Another party, another mansard backside.  This one is a favorite Soulard mansard we visited at a last minute BBQ arranged by our neighbors.  I tell you what- our little intersection of 12th and Sidney in Soulard is where all the action is happening.  When we moved into our house 10 years ago there were no kids in any of these houses.   But alas, we now have enough for a sizable party.  The count at the BBQ was 14 kids, age 11 or under.  I'm glad we could all get together.  Next time remind me to stay away from the knock-me-on-my-ass margarita mix.  It sneaks up on me every time- 1 can limeade, 1 can tequila and 1 can beer.  

Pinball wizard

Pinballing is the only word I can come up with to describe this weekend. You know those periods where time simply does not belong to you bouncing along from one event to the next?  Where there is so much to do and so many places to go that nothing on the to-do list gets done.  For instance, I wrote "get poop off bathroom wall" and it's 12:09 on Sunday night and I still haven't gotten it done.

Statistics:  Friday school volunteer, kindergarten parent lunch, volleyball clinic, lacrosse game, football game, karate class, 5 (yes, 5) soccer games, hockey learn to play, Girl Scout April Showers (shoot me now), church with John's parents, brunch, science fair project, reading project and a birthday party.  It's the by-product of 4 kids.  Each of them does one-two things and suddenly you're driving around all weekend.  And I would add that I am driving around with a "check maintenance" light so there goes another thing onto the to-do list.

Two great finds:  at the soccer games we saw the new playground surface at Epiphany.  It's that nice spongy surface now.  Gone are the horrid little pebbles.  Raise your hand if you've ever gone to Epiphany and had a kid 1.  lose something in the pebbles or 2.  Come home so filthy that a black ring developed in the bathtub.

And the birthday party.  I muttered to myself as we walked in that we should have skipped it.  Too much going on.  But for little Mimi about whom the weekend does not evolve around, it was the most awesome thing ever.  Poor kid had never been to the baby pool at the Carondelet YMCA.   In fact, I seriously doubt she's even spent that much time in a baby pool, let alone one with a slide.  We just don't do that thing much anymore.  Our pool doesn't have one and I cannot think of the last time I took the anyone to a baby pool.  Her joyful shriek was so cute and she did that slide no fewer than 50 times.    

Now I feel guilty.  How much else has child #4 missed?  Did I somehow also forget to take her to the zoo, or to the Magic House (no, but you get the point).   One thing I didn't forget was to check the boxes of her sisters' old clothes for a swimsuit.  Pretty cute for a hand-me-down dating to 2005.

at the Island

Here are the badmansard kids at Soulard's newest frozen yogurt place, the Island. The Island is so named due to the Soulard neighborhood being somewhat of an island, cut off from surrounding neighborhoods by Broadway, Highway 55, Gravois, etc. We walked to the Island on our way to Pontiac Park.

The Island is located on Russell near Menard in the space formerly occupied by Paste. It is like Fro-yo or Yo My Goodness in that you add crazy toppings to your yogurt and your purchase is weighed by the ounce. According to my resident frozen yogurt expert Audrey, the price per ounce at the Island is much less than her former go-to spot Fro-yo.

I had a raspberry pomegranate yogurt and it was quite good. We spent about $13 for 5 of us. The kids concocted bizarre yogurt/gummy bear/m+m/fruit cups.

The lady behind the counter was helpful and sweet. The decor was cute. I hope this place does well. I love having an ice cream shop in Soulard. The last place I had for ice cream was the DQ on 7th Street and that closed abruptly about 3 years ago.

Go get yourself some Island frozen yogurt!

Raising kids in the city- Girl Scout cookie time

I am going to post a photo every week of my kids living in the city of St. Louis. If you want to see more of my kids, click over on my 63104mom tumblr on the right of this site.

Here are 4 of the 16 Brownies in our multi-school troop selling cookies at the Arsenal Schnucks.

A first time for everything

Mimi went to a birthday party for our neighbor's daughter (also a classmate). the party was held in the CWE at our neighbor's cousin's house.

The theme was great. Kind of a pony theme, but a thinking woman's pony theme. Handmade cake, pony rides, darling unicorn headbands, etc.

The first first was Mimi (far right) sitting in a miniature donkey cart. The second first was finding a bad mansard in the Central West End! And it's a fanciful bad mansard with scrollwork (or maybe bamboo?) in the window..

Yeah for miniature donkey carts and bad mansards sitting on the same block as grand mansions.

Danger!

I was planning a really, really ugly bad mansard post today. It didn't happen. This antique pier mirror messed everything up. My husband bought it for me from Sambeau's in the Central West End for our one year anniversary in 1999. We brought it from our first house in Lafayette Square to this house and bolted it to the wall in 2002. I never thought another thing about it.

Until this morning when it came crashing down on top of our 3 1/2 year old Mimi. And there was blood, glass, shattered wood and teeth everywhere. She had a few scrapes and three baby teeth got knocked out by the force of her face hitting the floor (fortunately an area rug softened the blow). Despite the injury and damage, I felt incredibly lucky. That thing could have killed her. It's heavy wood and the glass is about 1/4 inch thick.

Our good friend is a dentist and will check her out tomorrow. Fingers and eyes crossed everything is ok.

So, to all you moms raising kids in old houses, I have advice for you. The dangers of keeping little ones safe in a house 100+ years old are different than in a newer house. For sure newer houses have problems too. But older houses have some inherent risks to kids.

• Our staircases are much, much steeper. There are 21 stairs from my first floor to the second floor. They are not carpeted. The stairs from my 2nd to 3rd floor are incredibly narrow and steep. You haven't had the wits scared out of you until you hear a toddler fall down 16 stairs.


• The glass in some of our windows and mirrors is old- usually super thick and leaded glass. It usually won't break, but when it does get out of the way because it created giant jagged pieces of mirror daggers.


• Lead paint and asbestos. Even if your house has been sanded down to wood, repainted this decade and abated, it won't stop some moron from throwing contaminated drywall and insulation out the second story window of your neighbors house creating a layer of poison dust all over your yard.


• The doors are giant and solid wood. Little fingers get pinched quite easily and accompanied by a horrifying crunch.


• Hardwood is lovely but slippery.


• The ceilings are so very, very tall. My 6'5" husband has to stand on top of a ladder to access the lightbulbs. One time he fell and almost landed on then-baby Gus snoozing in his pumpkin seat.


• Because the ceilings are high and the rooms can be large- furniture is super-sized. Bookcases, mirrors, dressers, etc. Looks great but more horrible if it falls on your kid.

I will argue that an older home is 100% better for raising kids than a newer home. That said, let's all do a safety check and make sure the accidents happen less frequently.

Le salon

Our parlor. I guess if I had a garage I could offsite some of this junk. But I don't. This is high Victorian mud room. It has 4 seasons:

1. Mardi Gras party & Girl Scout cookies- usually it works that we have our big party first, then the cookies arrive a few weeks later. Except this year the cookies arrived before Mardi Gras. I serve as the cookie mom for two troops and therefore we skipped the party this year (for many other reasons as well)
2. Christmas. This is the only room I decorate.
3. Fall birthday party zone. My kids are born in July, September and October (2) so we use this room to open presents, play games, work on crafts, etc. See picture below of Audrey's Top Chef birthday party where the girls decorated aprons.
4. The hold on to your hats time we are in right now- float trip/summer camp/back to school/vacation/go to the lake with grandma staging area.

About now. We're cramming all the above activities into a 21 day period. So why bother putting anything away? Here's some junk that will stay in the parlor until school starts and it's time for birthday parties. Counter clockwise from the cute girl in the purple shirt:

• collapsed Easy Walker jog stroller. Love it. Got it cheap. Mimi is getting close to growing out the stroller but we will take it to the beach to transport the cooler, towels, etc.
• that cool Japanese print? My grandmother doesn't care for Japanese art and gave it to me. Love it.
• I love that mirror too. One of our first antique purchases. Got it from Sambeau's in the Central West End when we were first married in 1998. Had to have the mirror installed later (Chippewa Glass). It's huge.
• Mantle is original to the house. It has a nice shell pattern. I have seen some mantle twins around town. I feel a special kinship with those other home owners. "OMG! We are mantle twins!"
• Back to school supplies. Young Mimi can go to Montessori preschool this year with her older siblings so for the first time I bought back to school supplies for 4 kids.
• Some bikes and scooters. Total city thing. Put your bike in the living room. Where else am I gonna put it?
• Busch Bavarian and Bud Select cans. Hells to the yeah. I told you I was floating and going to the beach. Gotta have cans in coolies. Needn't fear. I have some better beer for drinking in the house.
• Puked on booster seat. Gus got car sick onthe way to the float trip and barfed all over this booster. That was weird since it's been years since he's gotten sick. And then I remembered. He had Sunny D before we left. My mom is convinced orange juice makes his stomach queasy and car sick. She was clearly correct, assuming of course sunny D qualifies as orange juice.
• There's Audrey. She's packing her shower tote for girl scout summer camp. She's the second oldest and gets a lot of hand me downs from her older sister. She was so happy to get a new shower tote and watch her older sister get stuck with the old one.

Badmansard weekend

Scenes from the badmansard weekend. Friday night we had a pool party for the 2nd and 4th grade GirlScouts atthe LafayetteSquare Bath and Tennis.

In our garden, the

Southern Magnolia re blooming. The bloom is lovely, but with the bloom comes shedding of big, crispy brown magnolia leaves. I pay the kids a nickel a leaf

to pick them up. THe other plant picture is my tree lawn (the strip of plantings betwe

en the sidewalk and

street). White Shasta daisy, purple sage, knock out roses.

Saturday featured a Crawfish boil. Good times were had by all. Fortunately, we put our collective parenting foot down and told the kids there would be no crawfish pets taken home from the party. And imagine my surprise when we arrived home- not soon thereafter the naked bike ride went by our house. In fact, there was a collision pile-up of nakeds!

Finally, Sunday was learn to play hock

ey at Affton, the only time we left the city limits. Gus calls this his hockey face.

Lindell moderne

Modern mansion on Lindell between Union and the Musee de Histoire in Forest park. Look closely at the roof- little baby squishy mansards perched on each level.

Why was I traveling Lindell? I went to Vatican Splendors with Kay's 4th grade class. It was wonderful; would have been better if I could have looked at all of the fabulous material without being interrupted by a bunch of 9 year olds.

Warning- they are HARD CORE at Vatican Splendors about cameras (none), cell phones (totally off), and food/drink. I had to excuse myself when Mimi demanded her raisins. Still, highly recommended.

Encore avec les Italiennes!

Here's another Italian bad mansard on the Hill, un maison d'enterrement !

Hopefully my criticism of the Calcaterra funeral home's roof doesn't get me banned from DiGregorio or get my kid kicked out of the Italian American youth Bocce league. Yep, Bocce. Are you wondering whether my husband or I are Italian and are passing down a family tradition to our daughter? Well, none of that. Audrey plays with a friend and she really likes it. Bocce requires only strategy and the ability to toss a ball with a certain momentum. A group of 7 year old Bocce players can take on kids age 4 or 10 and it can be a pretty well-matched game. And it's a free league.

Forest Park v. Tower Grove Park: We're all winners here

End of year kindergarten trip to playground.
Kay vogue-ing after soccer practice last fall.
Children's Concert Series, Piper Palm House, last summer.
Swimming in Victorian wading pool. Free admission. Lifeguard on duty.

Tennis lessons. Park also features St. Louis' only grass courts.
You know those green gates that keep cars off some of the streets? Don't run under one because you may bang your head like Audrey here and need stitches in your scalp.
Audrey climbing.
Gus on ruins about a year ago.
Kay, Mimi and I at St. Margaret Easter egg hunt.

Stupid to even debate which is better- how lucky are St. Louis is to have these two wonderful parks. Actually, St. Louis has many wonderful parks anchoring its neighborhoods. John and I first lived in an apartment at 4504 Laclede at the intersection of Taylor and Laclede. Forest Park was our pre-child playground. I'd start the day with a 5-10 mile run (!). Amy Z. and I would ice skate on Sunday nights. Beer fests, softball, picnics, Boathouse happy hours (even before it was rehabbed), Jewel Box weddings- all were in our backyard. Now that I think of it, in high school John and I would drink vodka and Mountain Dew in Forest Park on Art Hill, so our Forest Park days go way back.

We bought our first house about 10 years ago on Mississippi in Lafayette Square. Lafayette Park is about 1/50th of the size of Forest Park. Even though it is much smaller, it felt more 'ours.' We worked in the rock garden with neighbor Rebecca who refused to use Round Up (she still won't- I do, albeit sparingly). I ran the .9 miles around the park numerous times to eek out a decent run. More drinking- sometimes at the summer concerts, but mostly just cocktails and walking the dogs. RIP Bear, our 110 pound dog that pulled me like a water-skier over Lafayette Park's pebbly roads.

I'll always remember my friend Colleen R., whom I did not know at the time, pulling up and asking, "Hey, were moving here from Kansas City- are there any kids that live in this neighborhood?" To which I replied that I sure did hope so because I was pregnant with one. When Kay was born we pushed her through the park and met up with the handful of other moms at the playground. Colleen still lives in the same house she bought 10 years ago and is a hostess supreme and is one of my favorite people. By the time I was pregnant with Audrey, the Lafayette Square house was on the market and we were on our way to Soulard.

Soulard has no single central park- there are three smaller parks- Market Park, Pontiac Park, and teenie-tiny Aboussie Park on 13th. I go to all of them. Kids love exploring Aboussie Park on evening walks. The Pontiac playground and nearby garden are newly renovated and worth the trip. When I run, I usually loop the brewery a few times and do a few loops of hilly roller-coaster park, Lyon Park.

We're getting to the end and it is this: Tower Grove Park is my grown up park. Originally plotted along with the Missouri Botanical Garden, it is a privately maintained park available to the public. The groundskeepers are so considerate that they turn off their equipment when you walk by so as not to disturb you.

We're in TGP at least once a week: School field trips, tennis lessons, school picnics, soccer, t-ball, Easter egg hunts, family bike rides, brunch at Cafe Madeleine at Piper Palm house. The beauty of TGP is that while I'm doing my mommy thing in TGP, other folks are happily doing their things. Old dudes resting on benches. Birdwatchers. A gay kickball league. Bosnian and Mexican kids playing soccer. Weekend Farmers Market. Urban family reunions. Good times for all- just the way Henry Shaw must have hoped for.

Rome of the West has a lovely post on TGP and its history. Click here.