Corwin is starting to develop the teenager’s listening disability. He appears to frequently fail to process various statements from parents, although it tends to depend on the content of those statements. He still doesn’t have it quite right because frequently he requests clarification with “what?” when Mom and I are talking to each other, not him. I am sure that as he matures he will fully master teenage selective hearing. Sometimes, though, very odd things happen, such as this conversation in the van
Dad: What are you playing back there, Super Mario Brothers
Corwin: Yes. [pause] What?
Momentary contact with the inner Corwin.
The weather was quite hectic yesterday. It got up to 53°F with some drizzle, but by evening it was 15°F with strong winds and light now. Corwin and I went out in for his Webelos meeting. When we left, both of the side doors on the van had frozen shut, so Corwin got to ride in the front seat. This was a major thrill for him because the van has seat warmers.
Dad: Corwin, do you want your butt warmed?
Corwin: Oh yeah!
[Dad tries fiddling with the doors for a bit, then gives up]
Dad: Is your butt warm?
Corwin: Oh yeah!
Such is the tapestry of events that move a boy from childhood to adulthood.
Fresh from his triumph at Super Mario Galaxy, Charles has now switched back to Lego Star Wars. It has a lot more activity in the hub (where the player is when he’s not on a mission). Charles has been playing that a lot, perhaps a bit too much. He played the entire time Jack was visiting, and then complained in the evening that “you never let me play Lego Star Wars!”. Charles did frequently scream happily while he was playing, though, so it evens out.
It’s been very dry here lately, because of the weather. Alice, it turns out, as befits a princess, has very delicate skin. We apparently forgot to leave hand lotion at school for her and she ended up with bloody knuckles. I figured she’d either roughed up some other students or had been practicing wall punching. But no, it was just dry skin. Her intimidator days are still ahead of her.
Alice started playing Super Mario Galaxy this evening. I even taught her her first button combo, the back flip. Alice even remembered camera mode and made me switch her in to that. I realize that Alice is a little behind her brothers in computer skill, but she still has a chance at catching up.
Alice has fun for a while, but then she wants to go on a mission and makes me take the controls. She contributes with helpful advice like “go left there!”, “don’t fall off”, and “if you did what I said you wouldn’t die all the time!”. Sadly, the mission she picked was one I hadn’t completed in my copy of the game, but I did in hers. Sigh. At one point I commented “perhaps Mommy wants to watch some Mommy shows” to Mom. Alice replied for her, in a very matter of fact tone, “no”. Later, though, I did switch out to let Mom get some viewing time in, which set Alice off in a storm of tears. I fled to the basement.
Yesterday Alice announced that she needed to have her finger nails painted pink. Obviously another special delivery from Wonderland. Mom, being a softy, did that for her today, marking Alice’s first foray in to make up. Mom did get Alice to promise to stop putting her fingers in her mouth, which has been a bit of an issue lately. After all, every cloud has a pink princess acrylic lining.
Maggie plays with Alice’s guitar.
I was lucky to get this picture. Alice was willing to share most of her toys, but not the guitar.
The boys had school off today just because the wind child was -10°F or something like that. It’s winter! Needless to say, it made the boys appreciate the season a bit more.
Corwin decided to go to the Klondike Derby for the local scouts this year. He blew it off last year — I don’t know why he didn’t go last year or changed his mind this year. The Boy Scouts actually camp out the night before, but the Webelos just go for the day. Nevertheless, we got a long sheet with very specific lothing requirements, the key element being “no cotton”. We cheated and let him wear cotton underwear, on the presumption they wouldn’t check that. We managed to find most of the things he needed (luckily, he’s about Mom’s size so he could wear some old Mom running non-cotton running tights). Corwin even fit in to some of my silk sock liners, left over from the days when I went out in the cold. And it’s been cold here — it hasn’t been above freezing for a week or two, although it’s projected to do so on Saturday, just in time for Corwin. On the other hand, there’s no snow cover so he won’t get to learn what it means to get wet out in freezing temperatures.
Alice and Charles are invited to another birthday party on Saturday. One of the children at Alice’s party also has a January birthday. Mom told me that Alice’s class had a chart of birthdays, with one or two per month, except for January, which had 10 or so. Maybe next year we should plan ahead, get together with all of the January birthday parents and just have one big party for the whole crew at once.
Charles has been rather more fragile than usual lately. His crisis for today is that Corwin is playing a new first person shooter game (Battlefield 2). Unfortunately, this game is a bit beyond Charles’ capability so he can’t play it by himself. On the other hand, the game doesn’t seem to support bots1 for multiplayer so if Charles plays with Corwin, they have to shoot at each other or there’s nothing to do and that makes Charles sad. It turns out that all of Charles’ other games now bore him. Only Corwin’s new game is any fun.
So I ended up spending a lot of time getting a upgrade (536 megabytes!) and upgrading the computers to a version of the game that let Corwin and Charles play together with bots. This made Charles happy for a little while.
Alice hasn’t had a day time accident for a while, although she still goes through periods when she wets the bed almost every night, but then stays dry for a week or two. It hasn’t interfered with our sleep much, because if she wets, it’s usually around time to wake up or because we let her sleep late, and she’s grown so accustomed to it that it doesn’t wake her up and we discover it when we try to wake her up and she’s soaked. It’s kind of a mixed blessing — more sleep while the kid marinates…
Daaaaaaaaaddyyyyy! I made poo-bits for you to wipe!
— Alice
P.S. Alice is very much a Mommy’s girl, but she does prefer Dad for a some things. A few things. Well, three things. For now.
If you look very closely, you can spot Charles, despite his camouflage shirt, pants,and backpack
It’s a common feature of parenting to spend large amounts of time and money on fun things for one’s children, only to find that they have quite a different view on what’s a good time, such as chunks of PVC pipe.
Another instance of this is the amount of fun Alice and particularly Charles have with the Wii. It has this online connection that lets you vote in various surveys and see the results (e.g., “Do you have a mobile phone?”). The young kids love this. Charles and Corwin also spend a lot of time with the “Miis”, which are little characters you can design to represent yourself. These are handy for keep records (like who is a professional at various sports). I did one up quickly for myself, but the boys can spend quite a lot of time designing new ones, and searching through online sets of them for later import. They fight over favorites, since there is only one global set of them with a finite number (50, I think) of entries.
Now, Charles is driving Corwin crazy by playing Super Mario Galaxy with a copy of Corwin’s game by just cruising around the hub. Corwin asks “don’t you ever got tired of that?” but Charles just laughs and jumps around as he plays. Even Mom asked about why Charles liked it but my theory is, hey, it’s Charles. If he thinks he’s having fun, that’s good enough for me.
I picked up some McDonald’s for the kids one night recently when we were rushed. I got two Happy Meals® for Charles and Alice and was asked for gender, which I specified as “one boy, one girl”. Naturally, the toys were identical and, somehow, we ended up with four of them, all Gordon from CatScratch.
Charles likes the Gordons quite a lot. He’s been playing with all of them on and off for a few days. I was attacked by a squad of flying Gordons this morning. Other times I have seen the Gordons carefully set up around the room, keeping an eye on things for Charles. Mostly, though, they like to stick together with Charles.
Mom let Corwin off easy, so that he only had to do his homework to get his 50th star. I was much meaner — Corwin was struggling on one mission and finally broke down and asked me to finish it for him. I made him say “Dad, you are the master!” afterwards. On the other hand, he got the star and 999 star-bits, the latter being very important because he needed a lot more star-bits to get to some of the other missions. I also showed him how to beat the “Rocky Road” mission, after failing at it myself for 90 minutes or so, but naturally realizing the key to victory shortly after giving up. The next time I tried it, I won on the second attempt. Afterwards, Corwin finished the primary game, defeating the main opponent.
Charles likes to help Corwin and I play. A second player can’t play the main character, but can provide quite a bit of help and do some things the main character can’t and Charles seems to enjoy it.
Corwin found 49 of the required 50 stars for Super Mario Galaxy, then Mom made him go to bed. I gave him a pep talk about how it was Mom’s Wii and he might want to think about what he could do for her that would nice enough to persuade her to let him get that last star.
We survived Alice’s party. It was quite the crew — most of the invitees showed up and Mom, not wanting to let any social effort go unpunished, ran in to one of Charles’ soccer team friends whose little brother played with Alice during practice and invited both of them. In all, there were 11 guests for Alice which was a bit over whelming for her (Mom came down to me in the basement at one point and described Alice as “freaking out” she was so wound up).
We had a few organized activities. There was a game of musical chairs, which didn’t go one long but seemed to be a lot of fun for the participants, both those who knew what was going on and those who had no clue. There was a round of tiara decorating, which oddly did not get a lot of participation from the boys. Mom had planned on an organized opening of the presents but Alice tore in to them in a frenzy once the announcement of imminence was made and Mom surrendered to the moment. And lastly, we had a piñata in the form of Dora which the kid whacked at with much enthusiasm. Mostly, though, the kids just played.
Alice played with most of her guests at one point or another. We managed to get her fellow Alice classmate to attend, which I thought was fun. You could tell which other guests were classmates because they all called our Alice “Alice C.” and the other Alice “Alice G.”. Maggie was there as well.
The basement was totalled, after Charles and I spent the morning getting it in shape. Several of the children had to be almost literally dragged out at the end, which generally indicates a good time was had. Three of the parent stayed for the party, which was an enormous help. I suspect we would have been locking kids in closets otherwise.
Alice got some good presents. One was a princess doll, sort of a rag doll style, which caused a crisis when it was time for bed and it couldn’t be found. Eventually Alice found it and sleep was enabled. She also got this rose petal fairy castle thing, which was apparently an enormous hit with all of the girls. I didn’t see any of it because I was waiting patiently in the basement, watching the hard boys, when Alice stormed the present pile.
Charles had fun. A couple of the kids were a year or two older than Alice and boys and so willing to play with Charles. I knew Charles was in good when one of the kids announced that they should get toy guns and form a patrol to secure the house. Eventually this necessitate building a fort in the basement. They were going to shoot over the walls, but I built a small gun port in the wall for them. They thought this was way cool although it took them a bit to figure out how to duplicate it. After a while, “night” fell and the basement got dark. I had to fetch flashlights for everyone. At one point I made a loud, low moaning noise. Charles and one of the other boys immediately started shooting at me, until the other kid turned on the light, looked over to where I was, and announced “Charles, it was just your Dad!”.
Poly also had a good time, snarfing down most of a plate of cheese and summer sausage slices, which she eventually left for Mom near the front door in a somewhat more digested form. Corwin and Keith hid in Corwin’s room with their Nintendo DSs.
Most of the kids at the party — a couple are missing
Clockwise from the red chair: Sean, AliceG, Isaac, Ryan, Alice, Alison, Lucas, Charles, Helen, Maggie, Lucia
Missing: Andrew, Brandon
Charles spent the morning lazing in bed reading Foxtrot.
Later, while getting goody bags together for Alice’s party, I found an old goody bag with a big sticky hand in it.
Mom: No sticky stuff on the walls!
Dad: What about sticky stuff on Charles?
Mom: That’s OK.
Dad: Hey, Charles, come down here!
Charles: No! I know your trick and I won’t fall for it!
Gosh, how did he figure it out? That’s a clever boy indeed.
Later, after Charles and I cleaned up the basement (Corwin was off for an overnight at Colin’s), Charles and Alice raced cars on the now open floor. Unfortunately, Alice’s car kept running out of gas.
Later Alice and Charles had a falling out because Alice hit Charles with a padded sword or dropped the entire armory on him, it wasn’t clear from Charles’ after action report. While Charles was laying on the couch moaning, I said that, because I was a very nice Dad, I would get a hammer and use it to hit one of this toes straight on. Then every other concern he had, such as what Alice did to him, would disappear and the only thing he would care about was how much his toe hurt. I went over to his workbench and pretended to get his hammer. I came back and swung at his toe. He was freaking out until he realized my hand was empty. At that point he started mocking me for not actually hitting his toe with a hammer. “You didn’t hit me, you didn’t hit me!”. I pointed out that this was not the optimal strategy for a boy who didn’t want his toes whacked with a hammer.
Corwin saw Alice’s YouTube premier and was intensely jealous. He demanded that I film something that he could put on YouTube as well. His first thought was a magic trick style video, since he’s done those before. I denied him then but agreed to work on something the next time Jack came over.
Here, then, is the result of that. This was the second take, after the “script” was tightened up. Really. Corwin wanted to fiddle with it some more, but Jack and I figured it was better to get something out and work on improvement in the next one.
Alice had a rather sedate birthday. Her party is on Sunday, because Saturday she’s going to another birthday party for a classmate of her (who is invited to Alice’s party, so the two of them will be partying hard this weekend).
Alice got a small bath tub and accessories for her Bitty Baby. Here you can see her and Charles preparing to give baby a bath, as Alice demonstrates her natural instincts for infant care
Alice also got a Lego™ Princess Palace kit, which she was very thrilled with. Charles thought it was great, too, and it was all we could do to keep him from running off with it immediately to construct for Alice.
Charles himself tried to make a present for Alice. He took some sheets of paper and stapled them together, with a title page and an sentence on each page, in the manner of a coloring book or sketch pad. Alice wouldn’t even look at it, which made Charles very sad. Charles’ theory was that Alice hated him. I suggested that Alice might have been more receptive had he used a better presentation than throwing it at her on couch from upstairs.
Last Thursday Alice started ballet class. Alice enjoys tottering around the house in her hot pink tutu, so it seemed likely that she would enjoy ballet for the clothes if nothing else. She is in a class with a bunch of other 3 and 4 year olds. One of the little girls is a daugther of a former co-worker, which was a nice suprise.
I didn’t get to see much of her actual class. They normally don’t allow parents in the halls to look through the windows. You are supposed to sit in the lobby and look at a TV split into four smaller sections (one for each class room). This is only useful to verify that your child is not throwing a fit and they are not performing some satanic ritual. However, during the beginning of the session they were allowing parents in the hallway. Unfortunately, the classroom Alice was in had an unusually small window and there were already many parents crowded around it.
Alice seemed to enjoy the class, but she wasn’t able to say much about it. Eventually, she showed me the ballet skip she learned. She wasn’t able to show how it was different from a regular skip, but it was somehow.
Poor Charles had a very bad day today. “My worst day ever!” according to him. I initially suspected hyperbole, but he is only seven. It wouldn’t take much for something to achieve that rank. First I, and then Mom, tried to extract was had been so terrible but Charles gone whiny and I couldn’t make out what he was saying. He didn’t get to play with his friend because his friend had a whole in his pants (it’s like an epidemic in that school), and then something happened to him twice and as a result he had to do some other unpleasant thing. When I asked for clarification Charles claimed I wasn’t listening to him, that the droning voice he gets when he’s whining couldn’t possibly interfere with comprehension. I think Mom got some more out of him later and he seemed mostly recovered after supper and a bit of Super Mario Galaxy.
After all of the massive loot delivered for Christmas and Charles’ birthday, we had a big fight between Charles and Alice over playthings. In this case, it was a few of pieces of PVC tubing rejects from padded sword construction that I hadn’t gotten around to throwing away. Unfortunately, it was an odd number of pieces so the two of them couldn’t have equal numbers. This lead to very harsh interactions between them that extended over a day or two, until I took matters in hand and disposed of the tubing permanently. It was all forgotten in a day or two, which counts as a success in my book.
One of the presents Charles got for Christmas was a backpack / sleeping back with flashlight and water bottle. It is, of course, camouflage. Charles didn’t seem initially much taken with it, but over the last few days he’s started playing with it more. It serves as either an arms depot for his military adventures, or it turns him in to a slug as he inches around on the floor in it. Sometimes when he does that, Alice finds a small blanket and becomes a “baby slug”. It’s very cute, but the trails left behind are driving Mom crazy.
After a week of Wii, how are we holding up? Well, Corwin and I have played a lot of a game Charles bought, Lego Star Wars. Corwin has played the original and sequel on the computer and his GameBoy, so he has a bit of an advantage. Corwin has also broken the tennis game from Wii Sports. When he plays the computer, it only puts up its two best players against him and he usually wins. What’s sad is that at first, I could crush him like the insect he is at the game, but now I can barely score against him. At least I am still a better virtual bowler than he is.
Charles, on the other hand, has become obsessed with getting a “pro” rating at a sports game. As one plays a game against the computer, one is reward with “skill” points depending on the outcome of the game. A rating of 1,000 makes one a “pro”. Corwin was very vocally proud when he made “pro” in tennis, so naturally Charles had to become a pro too. He didn’t find it as easy as Corwin and became very frustrated, to the extent that he declared he hated playing the game. After much comforting by Mom, Charles was reconciled to struggling for his pro rating, which he worked on for a couple days but has kind of faded off on. At least he’s not crying in abject misery about it anymore. He did have a 202 game, so there’s some hope.
Mom got Barbi, Island Princess for Alice, but she’s still too young to play it, so one of us has to play it for her (the boys, naturally, are constitutionally incapable of tolerating that much cuteness at a time). As a result, Alice hasn’t gotten much out of the Wii. She does, however, really like to walk in front of the TV or through the boys while they’re playing despite repeated and urgent warnings. I am completely amazed one of them hasn’t smacked her a good one yet. We have only had a couple of furniture impacts, although Corwin has been saved by the wrist strap at least twice.
Mom and Corwin have suffered from Wii-njuries, getting sore in the arms and elsewhere from playing too much. Luckily, I am in such great shape that I wasn’t affected.
We got a package from MimI yesterday. It had a collection of birthday and Christmas presents (a bit late, but I’m sure Uncle Evil was to blame).
Alice liked her presents, most of which were things she had always wanted.
Mom: Look, Alice, it’s a set of paper plates with pictures of princesses on them!
Alice: That’s just what I always wanted!
Dad: Look, Alice, napkins with pictures of princesses on them!
Alice: I always wanted some of those!
Alice spent quite a bit of time playing with her new princess paper bag and running around in her ballet slippers. Most of her loot we’re saving for her actual birthday. Among the not saved was a little padded bat. She decided that the best thing to do with that was hit Corwin. He, in turn, got one of the padded swords for defense, as I forbade him from harming his sister regardless of provocation. It was cute, though, to hear Alice yell at him “Come on, Corwin, let’s see what you’ve got!” just before attacking.
Charles got a coin sorting machine which was fortuitous as he had complained just a few days ago about having too many pennies and not enough nickels in his wallet.Sadly, Charles managed to trip over the power cord and smash it today. He was inconsolable for quite a while afterwards, but he really liked it while it worked.
All of the children got a large denomination bill, which was appreciated, except for Charles. He was ecstatic. He let out a scream that would have done a teenie-bopper meeting her rock idol backstage proud. It was his new best toy for the rest of the evening and most of today. He’d sit on the couch and hold it, then wave it back and forth, and then announce it in a loud voice. Eventually, of course, he lost it this afternoon. I made him look for it for about 20 minutes or so, without success, which was surprising even for Charles since he hadn’t left the room between having it and losing it. After that, I started looking and spotted it in short order, although I didn’t mention that to Charles. My plan for really grinding in the lesson was thwarted by Corwin spotting the bill as well and returning it to Charles’ loving embrace. This time, however, Charles gave in on putting it in his wallet and leaving it there.
Presumably in response to the rest of the family’s activities has been trying to play various games. However, in Wonderland games are pre-determined. As far as I can tell, there is only one legal move at any given time and Alice gets very upset if you don’t make that move. This can be challenging in that the allowed moved isn’t always obvious and if Alice becomes upset too quickly she can no longer enunciate sufficiently to explain. Mom has had quite a bit of experience with that over the break.
I was able to play a few games with Alice the other day. One was a penguin game with little penguins on posts (that Corwin got a few years back). One had to pick whether one was a boy penguin or a girl penguin, even if they looked the same. The girl penguins were named “Sweesha” and “Poza”. The goal was to move around in various ways if you won, you got to have a “penguin duck happy family”. Can’t beat that. The best part was since there only one legal move at any time, Alice could take all my turns for me while I grunted encouragingly. Eventually we arrived at the following conversation —
Alice: Do you want to win or lose?
Dad: Hmmm.
Alice: Chose only one [holds up a finger].
Dad: Lose.
Alice: [exasperated sigh] OK. I jump here and I win! [hands Dad a captured penguin]. Then I move here and win again!
Dad: That’s quite a winning streak you have going there.
Alice: I didn’t win yet!
Dad: But you just told me you won.
Alice: I was just being silly.
[Alice brings Dad a little toy chest for which the key has been lost]
Alice: Daddy, can you open this?
Dad: Yes.
Alice: How can you do that?
Dad: I have to use magic! Alice Alice Girly Pop - Open! [the chest opens]
Alice: [derisively] Ehhhh huh.
That from the girl who turned her brother in to a chicken with her magic wand to stop him from shooting at her earlier in the day (because chickens don’t have trigger fingers). Later she made me puppy and airplane soup for only $2 so she wasn’t permanently upset.
