I was messing with Charles yesterday, threatening to do “piggies” on his toes. He kept refusing to let me do that, so I figured I’d trick him.
Dad: So, Charles, should I do one piggies or two piggies?
Charles: Three!
So I did piggies on him three times.
We had another sledding adventure today. The night before, the snow had come down for a long but so gently that while there was a couple of inches everywhere else, the ground was bare under the pine trees. It was barely enough snow for good sledding but we’ll take what we can get.
This time, I took along two extra pairs of gloves for Corwin and so we managed to stay out for about 90 minutes instead of the 20 minutes last time. Corwin had a good time, going down the main slope and the secondary run (where he tended to go over a small ramp in the saucer sled backwards).
Charles had a good time as well. He has taken to yelling all the way down, “wooooooo!”. He didn’t used to do that. His tolerance was a bit less than Corwin’s and he left early.
Even Mom was there and she took Alice on her first sled ride down the backslope. Alice seemed to enjoy it, although they did just the one run before Charles, Alice and Mom headed back home while the hardy menfolk remained for a bit more sledding.
Corwin has been spending some of the time he’s not allowed to play his Gameboy playing with matches instead. At one point, someone (probably me) got the book Backyard Ballistics. This has a number of interesting projects in it. Corwin read through it and decided he wanted to try making little rockets out of matches. He had to struggle for a long time before he got one to work, but he’s having success reasonably often now. A good launch will go 2 or 3 feet but it does make a nice little arc as it travels. It’s at least something non-electronic for him to do.
Alice seems to be feeling a bit better today, although she had a bad night. I think now she may have been hungry but not awake enough to do something about it. This morning she started crying as Mom held her, squirmed down and walked over to her high chair. Normally we have to strap her in. She must have been very hungry. She ate most of a banana and some cereal plus a couple of other small items. A big improvement on the appetite front. She’s also pooping mostly solid now and doesn’t seem to be suffering from a cold or gummy eyes. Maybe she’ll soon be well enough to start taking pictures of her again!
Charles’ obsession with stop signs has mutated in to an obession about pictures of stop signs and traffic lights. Check this out:
There’s even more on the door now and just as many on the back side.
What happens is that Charles comes in to my office and asks me for a picture of a stop sign (later traffic lights), which I draw and give to him along with some tape. He then takes it over to the door and tapes it on. Charles finds this very exciting (although if he messes up the tape it’s melt down time). At one point I decided that I would whip up a traffic light on the computer and print it to save time. That turns out to have been a mistake. When Charles saw how fast I could make them he increased his level of demand and the variety of traffic lights he wanted. Now he needs turn arrows on them and Heaven help me if I make the arrows point the wrong way.
Saturday Corwin, Charles, Jessie and I went to see the “Magic School Bus” live on stage. We got to sit on the first row of the balcony which the kids seemed to enjoy. During intermission we got snacks, and we succeeded in not dropping soda or popcorn on the poor folks below. Though there were a couple close calls.
The show was cute. There were lots of songs, which aren’t really a part of the books or the TV shows. But on stage you cannot shirk to microscopic proportions or change into water vapor, so they were kind of limited with what they could work with. Jessie really liked it. She got up and danced. Charles liked it too. He didn’t stand, but he sat on my lap and clapped and counted with his fingers. I think Corwin felt that he was too old for the kiddie show. He just slouched in his chair for most of the show, but afterwards he told Dad that he liked the show.
Next week… The Phantom Tollbooth.
If you’ve thought about visiting to see Corwin, don’t bother. This is what he’s going to look like for the next 10 years or so. On the other hand, Corwin did claim to like Mom better than the Gameboy, but still refuses to be definitive about Dad.
I was looking for a snack in the pantry, holding Alice (because Princess Grumpy-Monkey Pants was in one of her moods) when she grabbed a breakfast bar off one of the shelves. I thought she was just going to play with it, as she is quite fond of food wrappers. However, Alice started gnawing on it in a serious way and was through the wrapper in short order. Since she hasn’t been eating well for a few days I let her go at it. However, I tried to get the wrapper out of the way. This was a bit tricky as Alice took no notice of my fingers and she does have a reasonably large set of teeth. I managed to get a chunk of the bar out sans wrapper, which I handed to Alice. She looked at it for a few moments and then threw it away in preference to biting down on a wrapper encased part of the bar. After some more struggles, I managed to remove the wrapper entirely and throw it away. Alice responded to this by getting squirmy so I would put her down, dropping the last chunk of the breakfast bar and pulling the wrapper back out of the garbage. Well, at least it should provide an interesting surprise for Mom in a day or two.
Charles has now found a new use for his Lincoln Logs — parking curbs. He puts the half-logs down and then he has a nice place to park all of his cars, just like a real parking lot!
Charles is also a bit confused about baths. The other day Mom decided he was getting a bit ripe and declared that he needed a bath. Charles looked up, put his hands down his pants and announced “I not wet!”. Mom tried to explain that baths were required even if a boy had been very good and not soiled his pants with urine, but Charles thought it was just crazy talk.
Well, we finally gave in and let Corwin by a Gameboy. His friends Jacob and Jack have one and Corwin has been agitating for one for months. I think Mom was worn down by Corwin actually saving up the money to buy it instead of just whining.
So while I was out today buying emergency supplies to deal with Alice’s current illness, I sent Corwin over to the electronics section to admire the Gameboys. He ended up getting a red one (of course!) and one game, which left with him with just $7 left over as his net worth (everyone who gave Corwin money for Christmas, that’s where it went).
Corwin also took care to buy a different version of Pokémon than Jacob so that they can trade game cartridges later on (what’s different about “Ruby” Pokémon vs. “Saphire” Pokémon, I have no idea).
Corwin went over to Jacob’s house in the evening, although he claims that he and Jacob didn’t spent the entire time sitting next to each other twiddling their Gameboys. As we pulled in the garage on the way home, Corwin looked up for a moment from playing and said “I love my Gameboy!”. “More than me?” I asked. Corwin mumbled and darted inside the house to avoid a definitive answer.
Dad: Charles, it’s time to go see your little friends. Come sit over here so I can put your shoes and socks on.
Charles: I have to get a stop sign!
[Charles runs off to the basement, gets his stop sign and returns, at which point he happily lets Dad put on his socks and shoes]
Alice had a personal best today. She’s having a bit of diarrhea again but this time, having practiced her exploding whirly-poop attack she managed to blow out the front of her diapers. A new personal best! Take that, Gwyneth and Ashlyn!.
Mom’s being doing a few things around the house to get the propery values up.
A few months ago she replaced the lights in the front rooms. This area has an elevated ceiling and the lights are high up. They used to look like this:
Mom decided to go with two alternative styles, so now they look like this:
The fan is over the media room which will probably be nice during the summer.
Mom also got some custom stained glass recently for the high windows in the front area. There are two sets of three windows, one over the front door and one in the media area. Both pieces are the same and fit in the middle window. They look like this:
Mom’s always been a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright and this was done to be stylistically similar to some of his designs.
I think they turned out nice, although they look much better when backlit. So during the day, they’re nice from the inside and at night nicer from the outside.
Charles can put on his underwear,but he seems incapable of putting on his pants or shirt. If I recall correctly about Corwin, it was the underwear he had the most trouble with.
I had to drag Charles screaming in to daycare today. We were running a little late and I forgot to take his sippy cup of milk along and Charles didn’t mention it as we left (he did stop me as we went out to get his airplane). About half way there (it’s a 5 minute drive) he started crying about his milk. I pushed on but Charles just competely melted down. What was interesting, though, was that he didn’t say “go home!” but “go that way” and pointed down the road in the opposite direction we were traveling.
The kids were still having snack when we arrived and they were even having milk! But it wasn’t in a sippy cup so Charles remained in melt down state. While I was trying to comfort him, Alice fell over, banged her cheek and smacked the back of her head, creating a little hurricane of crying children. I ended up having to dump a blubbering Charles on Miss Darcy while I evacuated Alice.
Yesterday I was in the basement with Charles and Alice when Charles asked me to build some towers out of the little wooden blocks. I built a 7 story, 2 brick wide tower and some smaller outlying buildings before Alice-saurus came over to destroy things. I managed to save the tower but the out buildings were pulverized. Alice, of course, ended up screaming because I wouldn’t let her knock over everything. As I took her off for comfort, Charles grabbed some blocks and flung them in to the tower, collapsing it. I asked Charles why he did that and he explained that since Dad had built the tower, it had to be destroyed. I don’t think that was quite the lesson I was trying to instill.
I just want to note that in this picture, it’s about 15°F, yet Corwin has his jacket unzipped and no hat. He came in a bit later and complained that he was cold and his ears were frozen, as if that were our fault. I pointed out that Mom had pro-actively provided many hats and ear warmers, which perhaps Corwin might use to prevent this kind of problem, along with zipping up his coat. Corwin didn’t look very convinced.
I’ve been trying to get Corwin to cut down on the amount of electronic entertainment he indulges in. As part of that effort, today I attempted to introduce Corwin (and to some extent Charles) to one of the joys of my childhood. Mimi remembered it and sent up for Christmas a couple of bags of small wood planks (rectangular, about 1×3 cm and 2-3 mm thick). What I used to do as a child was get together with my brothers and build large cities out of small cedar squares. After each of us had built a city, we’d get some small catapults my father had built for us and fling the remaining blocks at the other brother’s city. The winner was the first person to knock down every standing block. It was great fun.
I decided that Corwin wasn’t quite ready for that (as I’m still waiting for my catapult to show up), so instead I built a small set of buildings, loaded up their rubber band guns and let them gun down the buildings. Both boys thought this was great fun. Corwin enjoyed it enough that he tried to build some buildings with me but his hands weren’t quite steady enough to build anything complex. It’s hard, because the require style of construction makes the walls act like dominos so a single mistake can wreck most of a building. It is precisely this, however, that makes shooting at them fun.
Of course, as soon as I stopped building, Corwin gave up and asked if he could play on the computer (with the tonal overlay of “now that I’ve sacrificed my valuable time to your vicarious childhood recreations”). Sadly, it wasn’t until hours later that Corwin got computer time again.
It turned cold and snowy earlier this week and I figured it was time for Corwin to go back outside. I sent him out one afternoon but by the time I got outside myself (with camera!) he had already slipped on the ice and banged his knee twice and was heading in for some recuperation.
We had a bit better luck today. I didn’t the the snow cover was sufficient, but the tinge of hysteria in Mom’s voice as she said “You guys need to hurry up and go sledding before it gets late!” convinced me that it would be best if I took the boys sledding.
We bundled up and headed out for a small hill nearby. I was thankful that Charles is now old enough that he can walk along instead of having to be pulled in the sled.
Corwin breaks trail through the wilderness
When we got to the hill I told Corwin that I was going to extract a heavy price from him for going out in the cold and driving him to the hill. You can see the terrible cost of the trip for Corwin directly below:
Yes, Corwin had to stand still while I took his picture. The horror! But it was worth it — check out the dimples on that boy.
As for the sledding itself, Corwin went off on his own
while I took runs with Charles, who insisted on having me along. This would be explained in a typical Charles fashion.
Dad: Charles, do you want to go down by yourself?
Charles: Hmmmmmm [pause for thought] How ‘bout you go?
Dad: Would you like Corwin to go with you?
Charles: Hmmmmmm [pause for thought] No.
Dad: You want me to go along with you?
Charles: Hmmmmmm [pause for thought] Yes! [Charles giggles at his clever answer]
Charles and I had a number of good runs like this one1 2. I suppose Corwin did as well but I only caught sight of him now and then. I’d try to see if I could spot him as Charles and I walked up, just to verify that he wasn’t bleeding in some tree from a wipe out.
Charles was willing to pull the sled up the hill himself this time
Charles trudges over the frozen tundra
instead of having to be towed in the sled, which was much appreciated by Dad’s sore back. On the other hand, the icy ground and thin sled meant feeling every little bump in the group on the way down. It was like a crazy mausseus hammering on my butt and lower back.
We didn’t stay too long as Corwin took only woolen gloves which quickly became snow and ice encrusted (Corwin trying to eat snow off his gloves didn’t help the situation).
Later in the afternoon, Mom’s desire for less boyness not yet having been satisfised, we went out again to play in the snow around the house. It was too cold for snow balls unfortunately. But I did manage to chase Corwin around with the camera3. I also managed to amuse Corwin by warning the boys about the slickness of the ice under a layer of snow right before I fell down and almost broke my camera lens. But, it’s OK, it’s good to throw Corwin a bone every now and then.
Corwin abandoned the chilly environment first, but Charles insisted on sweeping snow, first from the dead end straight (“Need to clean this so cars can go!”) and then the driveway. Charles pointed out that it was getting dark and I said that meant it was time to go in. Charles countered that he moon wasn’t up nor was the sky black and that we needed to stay outside until both of those conditions were met. Luckily I managed to trick him in to going in before we both froze our noses off.
1 The fingers in the frame are because I had to shift the camera from hand to hand to try to use the other hand to steer. As you can tell, this was ultimately unsuccessful. You can see Charles almost go flying out of the sled, prevented only by my unseen foot hooking him and flipping him back in the sled.
2 As I was filming one run, one of the other children sledding called out to me “If you fall off that’s it for your camera!”. Certainly true, but that’s just the kind of wild and selfless risk I am willing to take for all of you.
3 One of the reasons for fewer pictures of Corwin here is that he now actively avoids having his picture taken.
Last Wednesday Corwin’s godfather Blaine came over to visit. His wife Sarah and little boy Bleys came along as well.
Corwin had a good time, although he acted a bit peculiar. He spent the time just before they arrived watching the window and asking when they’d get here. As soon as Mom announced “They’re here!” he started screaming and fled up to his room. Corwin kept up the monkey-like screeching so that Blaine would know he was hiding. Mom thought it odd but I pointed out that it was the same thing Corwin does with Uncle Evil — getting tickled or otherwise tortured, escaping and then pestering to repeat the cycle.
Eventually we got Corwin down and had a nice supper and after dinner visit. Bleys isn’t quite walking yet and he’s very touchy about his personal space. Since Alice is walking and very inquisitive, this lead to a bit of baby stress. But we managed to avoid any permanent psychological injury. At least Charles didn’t press his attentions on Bleys…
Bleys, Secant and Alice
We had a snowstorm yesterday, although it didn’t end up dropping more than a couple of inches of snow. I had to go out and pick up Mom, Charles and Alice so they wouldn’t get snowed in and of course, it basically stopped snowing as we were on the final stretch back home (so instead of rescue before the worst, we were out driving in it).
Anyway, the road home passes by a woods and as we went by every branch on every tree was dusted with snow. Charles called out “look at that!” and I thought he was admiring the beautiful sight of the frosted forest. So I replied “yes, the trees are very pretty”. “No!” said Charles, “what that sign do?” (by which he meant “what does the sign say and what does it mean?”). My son, even more of an oblivious geek than I am. *sniff* It makes a Dad proud.
Charles may not eat much, but he generally has a good time at dinner
Alice is now enjoying fetching things for me. Not things I want or ask for, but just things that happen to not be near me and are neatly arranged somewhere else. A few days ago she spent a while hauling books off the shelf in the boy’s room and bringing them out to me as I sat in the chair in the upstairs landing.
I don’t remember Corwin doing that much but Charles was quite the enthusiast. Charles would load up a parent with a big pile of stuff and then move it all back, sometimes repeating the entire operation multiple times. Alice isn’t there quite yet — she only brought me 7 books or so before she decided she’d done enough helping. But she certainly seemed quite proud of herself every time she handed me a new book.
Today was Charles’ turn to go to the doctor. Charles was very cooperative, even if he wouldn’t respond to any of the doctor’s questions.
Charles is now 41 inches tall and weighs 37 pounds (although he definitely feels heavier than that). This turns out to be relatively tall and skinny for his age. That’s a bit surprising because Charles still has a noticeable tummy.
Other than that, Charles is in fine health.
Alice exercises the laundry basket
Alice scatters the laundry so Mom doesn’t have to reach in to the basket for it
It’s become very hard to keep the children together, especially in the basement. Alice’s destructive drive means that if I don’t hold Alice then there will be crying children in a few minutes. It used to be that Alice crawled around aimlessly and would only by accident intersect with Charles’ transportation network. Now, however, she heads straight for it.
It’s also not possible to keep Alice constrained. She’s fine with being held by an adult who is standing, but sitting is right out unless she’s tired and having some bottle. Otherwise, if I sit down Alice will squirm away in a few minutes and head out to destroy whatever Charles is playing with. The only solution is to take Alice away upstairs, but then I have to keep the door shut in the hallway or Alice will sneak off and play with the toilet. Oh well — at least she’s not dating.
Alice went to the doctor this morning. She got a chicken pox vaccine. A few tears, but she recovered her composure quickly. As I was paying, she even showed off her walking skill.
She is now 19 lb. 9 oz and 30.25 inches long.
Thanks to a degenerate school system, Corwin is becoming interested in watching sports. His teach is apparently a big fan of the local university’s basketball team. She’s been using various facts about them to teach math (e.g. “If Mike scores 23 points and Stewart scores 16, how many points is that?”). Sadly, this has done more to increase Corwin’s interest in sports than math. Corwin now knows many of the players by name and recites facts about them (“Did you know that Mike —- is 7' 2" tall?”).
It gets worse — Mom is encouraging him to watch organized sports on TV! I realized when I married her that Mom engaged in that sort of activity, but I didn’t think she’d do it with the children!
Fortunately, Corwin’s attention span for anything that doesn’t involve sugar or rampant destruction is limited so generally Mom is just getting settled properly when Corwin wanders off. By that time, of course, Mom is trapped by a semi-asleep Alice. It would be a fitting punishment except for HGTV.
Today was Alice’s first birthday. It’s hard to believe that she’s been around a year already.
It was a fairly low excitement day. Alice doesn’t do the party scene so much. We all took a walk in the late afternoon, during which Charles pushed Alice’s baby-jogger. We opened presents in the early afternoon and had some cake after dinner. Alice received many nice presents and the same birthday card from both grandmothers.
Alice liked some of her toys, although her brothers liked them better. One of her presents was a little push wagon.
Alice enjoys her wagon and Allosaurus
Alice quite liked it but Charles broke down in tears when we told him that Alice could take it away from him becuase it was her toy. Corwin and Charles also fought over some tumbling mat blocks that Alice got. At least it’s a sign that Alice might play with them even when she’s a bit older.
Alice is now walking on a regular basis. She’s doing reasonably well and can toddle all around the basement. This means that walking no longer interferes with her ability to reign destruction on poor Charles’ transportation systems.
Mom is also shifting Alice over to milk instead of formula. Alice still gets some formula but most of her liquid consumption is now milk. Gosh, that makes life so much easier! It almost compensates for the walking.
Charles didn’t have a good morning. I tried to get him up a couple of times so that it wouldn’t be a terrible rush to get him off to daycare, but he was unmovable. When he did finally get up, I was in my office to which Charles came pathetically crying because I hadn’t helped him with his night clothes (“you not HELP me!”). Charles needs help with these particular night clothes because the cuffs on the arms and legs are very tight and require more strength than Charles has to get on or off.
After we solved the night clothes problem, Charles wanted to know where Mom and Corwin were. I explained that Corwin had gone off to school and Mom off to work, at which point Charles collapsed in to tears. A normal child might have done this because he missed his mother. Charles, however, was distressed because he had missed riding on the bus. Telling him that Mom would pick him up in the afternoon for a bus ride did nothing to mollify him.
After some further travails (including an Alice who, as far as I can tell, uses my wearing of my coat as a stimulus for pooping in her diaper) I managed to get a somewhat sullen Charles in to daycare. As long as I don’t have to drag him, wailing, in to the room I count it a success.
We passed another big milestone this morning. As noted previously, Alice still isn’t sleeping through the night. This means that she’s usually in our bed in the morning. Normally when she wakes up and there are no parents in the immediate vicinity, she starts crying and I go and rescue here. Today, however, she used her newly acquired furniture dismount technique to get off the bed and go wandering about upstairs before announcing her distress at lack of parent. I guess I should be happy that at least she’s not getting off the bed head first.
It’s shock time for Corwin. He’s back at school after spending the last couple of weeks waking up at 10 AM, watching TV and gaming all day. Today he had to get up at 7 and actually be busy getting ready. He’s already been warned that his computer game and TV intake was going to be drastically curtailed when school started. As a result he was in a bit of a grumpy mood. But I still managed to get him out the door and to the bus on time.
Aice is fully in her destructive phase. She is discovering her world by deconstructing it. For example, she helps me fold clothes by attacking the piles of folded clothes and returning them to the chaos from which they came. There was a slight variation on this last night. As I was putting the folded clothes back into the basket, Alice placed a couple socks in the basket too. This was the first sign I had seen of Alice trying to increase order. Perhaps it was an accident, but I see it as a hopeful sign of things to come.
Charles, Alice and I experimented with the city bus service on New Year’s Eve. Given the lack of parking on campus, I’m going to try the bus system for commuting this spring. It was an unnaturally nice day and with low traffic, I figured it would be a good time to try out the bus route.
Charles likes all things bus, truck and train, so he was up for riding on the bus. If all goes well, I’ll be able to pick him up from day care and we can take the bus home. Hopefully eventually Alice will go to the same daycare so we can all travel together. Charles watched everything with great attention just as he had on the train a few weeks back.
The bus was pretty empty. and it got us to the engineering campus pretty fast. So I guess the big question is how much variance there is in bus arrival time. In our neighborhood during commute times, the bus arrives every 30 minutes. The last time I rode the bus in Pittsburgh the bus also arrived at 30 minute intervals. Unfortunately, the probability of bus arrival was not related to the actual bus schedule, but instead was pretty flat. Hopefully it is a little bit better here.
Once we got there, we got lunch in campus town. Then we walked to my offce, where I had hopes of setting up my laptop on the network. Unfortunately, I was missing a key password, so I’ll need to figure it out at home this weekend or bug folks Monday. Charles immediately found the non-dry erase marker and started scribbling on the white board. Alice started looking for electrical outlets to cram her fingers into.
On the way back we walked through the park. There were several people flying pretty kites and some kids playing with a tethered giant purple spikey inflated soccer ball.
