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I know that San Diego is not supposed to have seasons, and in all honesty January can be warmer than July (truth: it did happen a couple of years ago). This is exactly why I love San Diego.

January 15, 2014 (notice the 81/26 degrees on my birthday)

However, even here you can feel when Spring is the air: the perfume of fresh flowers is everywhere. So this is an even more fun time to be in San Diego, and with the super early daylight saving inception you get more daylight…yes, you hate every morning for a good two/three weeks when you get up in the dark, but there are more hours to play.

And play we did. We added a new spin on usual activities, like the zoo visit. Check out how cute these pandas are. Unfortunately the latest baby was not on display, but these two, mama panda and one of her 6 kids, made up for it.

We took advantage of the fact that Matt needed to survey a nearby canyon to change our usual hike route. One think that did not change was Keegan’s whining about it. He does not like to hike on flat areas…if there is climbing, well, that is a different story.

Even a visit to the air space Museum had a nice twist. A new space craft for space exploration, Orion, is getting ready for its first flight. It is intended to travel beyond low Earth orbit. While the first test flight will be unmanned, the spacecraft “will serve as the exploration vehicle that will carry the crew to space, provide emergency abort capability, sustain the crew during the space travel, and provide safe re-entry from deep space return velocities.” At the museum, there was a banner that you could sign that will be at the Orion launch. By the way, our signatures, are on the top left part of the photo, right above the O.

The museum visit was fun as always: Keegan, and Matt for that matter, never cease to be impressed by the cool planes.

Even in San Diego, we had a small celebration for Carnevale: Keegan dressed up for two consecutive weeks for his Italian class and on Fat Thursday, they learned about carnival’s traditions and made their own masks.

We are also trying to make Keegan a “well-rounded” kid, and to expose him to a variety of “gender-neutral” activities: Matt is teaching him how to use power tools.

We also enrolled him in a Woodshop class at school. He loves it and I am keeping my hopes up…maybe he will be the furniture maker I am wishing for! The teacher drives up to school in a refurbished bus, with individual stations for the kids. No power tools, but plenty of hammers, saws, hand drills. The kids complete a small project each lesson. The coolest thing is that the instructor is a woman. In fact there are more girls than boys in his class. Yeah!

proudly displaying his jet and his back-scratcher

Of course, Matt tries to inspire a love for cooking, especially since Keegan declared that “mom is a disaster in the kitchen”. This is obviously not true, as I can whip up eggs and soup and pasta…but we all know I hate cooking, with a passion. Lucky for us, our friend Daniele is also another great male cook, so hopefully it will come naturally for Keegan. Last time we visited him for dinner, Keegan and Gaia helped making hand-made tagliatelle. Keegan loved to make his own pasta. Well, we do have a pasta machine, but I am not sure I am ready for a whole afternoon adventure making pasta…and the mess that comes with it.

Dinners at Daniele’s are always excellent, but the pasta tasted particularly good after all the work our kids did. The two went along wonderfully: they really like each other, and Keegan especially is smitten with Gaia, who, for some strange reason, enjoys his company and is incredibly patient, despite the three years difference.

We also went to Engineer Day at the mall. Keegan seems to be very interested in science and experiments, and he had fun checking out the different booths. He got to build a gum-drop tower.

We saw some of the people who works at URS. It was a little weird, since Matt’s last day there was the previous Friday, so it felt a little bitter sweet, at least to me.

One other science-themed event was the High School Robotic Competition. This is a great annual event in which teams from different high schools create a robot able to play a per-determined game. It was awesome to watch, and I really hope it will be inspirational for our little guy, even I have to say I was the most excited by far. I would be happy for Keegan to be interested in these kind of things during his high school years. Even sweeter, two teams were from our local Clairmont high schools, and one of them, the Devil Duckies from Madison High won the competition.

one of the robots from Madison High in Claremont

There is hope for Keegan’s high school education! The competition took place in a Sports Arena, decorated with beautiful band pictures. Here my little guy posing with Kurt Cobain and two random robots.

Lately Keegan has changed his desired future profession from Diver to Scientist. We are trying our best to help foster his interest: we have a few scientist’s kits and we try out different experiments, we watch scientific videos and we will enroll him in the Mad Scientist summer camp to foster this interest…and let’s keep our fingers crossed.

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