Because Charles got a Nintendo DS for his birthday, Mom got a couple of Nintendo Gameboy games for Alice, who inherited the Gameboy from Charles (who got it from Corwin). This happened just before the trip to the Big City, so Alice got her first chance to really play in the van driving up. Unfortunately, both games required basic literacy in that key elements of the game would be explained by text messages that popped up the first time that element was required. At first this made Alice upset, until Dad tried to help. That was enough to convince Alice that just watching the introduction and running around on the first section was sufficient fun. She ended up spending several hours at it on the trip without, as far as we know, getting much past that. I suspect that she’s motivated more by imitating her brothers than actual enjoyment. Still, she has formed a strong emotional attachment to the Gameboy and will become very distressed if she thinks it has been misplaced.
We woke up sort of early and headed out for the museum. We got there about 9:30, so we were set for a full day (as the museum was open till 7 PM instead of just 5 PM). Mom had gotten tickets over the Inter-Tubes so we could get in quickly, but there was no line anyway. We hit various exhibits, including a special one (“Nature Unleashed”) that required tickets but we were so early they sent us through before our time.
Corwin had a good time. Alice had some fun too, but Charles claimed he didn’t like anything, even though he tagged along without much complaint. We went through the Evolving Planet section and ended up in the room with the dinosaur skeletons. I was a bit tired by then so I sat down and told the boys they could look around for a while. Charles, though, sat down next to me and said “there’s nothing to look at here!”.
After some more touring there was a discussion about going to the aquarium. Charles was very eager to go, until Mom said that no plush fish would be purchased. Charles lost interest at that point. Mom pointed out that Charles already had a lot of plush fish, Charles countered with “I only have one!” — that is, Sharky. All the rest are cetaceans, not fish. But he still didn’t get another plush fish.
Eventually Mom and I wore out and we headed over to IKEA, the real reason for the trip. Mom wanted to get a new chaise chair to replace the crib in the media room, since everyone sits on it anyway. Of course, we had to do a full shopping run through the store and naturally we all had to do so, no waiting in a comfortable chair with a nice book. That would be wrong. Still, it worked out for the younger set as Mom decided that Alice and Charles could get a plush animal from the big bin of them in the kids’ section. The only downside was the lack of fish, so Charles got a gerbil and Alice got a rat. Mom wanted someone to get the mother and child hedge hog pair, but was denied.
At the end, we measured the size of the box for the chaise and it didn’t quite fit, but we decided to chance it and ended up pulling everything out of the box to make it fit. The kids were a bit cramped but hey — Mom wanted the chaise so sacrifices had to be made.
What do you think?
In the afternoon we girded our van and headed out for the Big City. Mom had become fixated on visiting the IKEA store there and decided that she could justify it if she also took the kids to one of the museum institutions near by, specificly the Field Museum and / or the Aquarium. I had to go along as well, primarily to handle large IKEA items.
The trip did not start well. For Christmas, Mom got me an FM transmitter for my iPod so that I could listen to it while in the car or van (oddly, for such a fancy sound system, no external jack input in the van). So naturally I wanted to load up the iPod and take it along. Naturally nothing in the experience went well. The previous computer on which I had installed things had long since been rebuilt so I had to re-install iTunes and get that working, and then try to load up the iPod. After multiple hours of effort which succeeded only in erasing what music had been on the iPod, making us all late to depart, I finally gave up and left it behind.
About half way there, we noticed that the van had suddenly started making a loud flapping sound. We stopped and noticed that one of the rear tires had failed near catastrophically, with a flap an inch wide and 4 inches long in the side. We put on the spare with the big trucks whizzing by — at least it wasn’t dark yet. Mom wasn’t amused when I told here where I keep my passwords “just in case”.
After putting on the spare we limped in to a nearby WalMart for repairs. Naturally they didn’t have the same size tire so we ended buying two new rear tires. Expensive, but we would have had to buy at least one anyway and we weren’t confident of getting back home on the spare. Unfortunately this loss of time meant that we were unable to visit various stores that the kids had wanted to go to (even though they promised to not buy anything, or bug the parents to buy stuff). Still we made it to the hotel and settled in for the night. At which point we discovered that just as on our trip to Florida, we had no clean underwear for Alice (nor clean socks). At least Charles had Sharky and Timmy. But that meant that since Corwin grabbed the fold out couch, Alice and Charles had to share a bed even though Sharky hadn’t had supper. I pointed this out to Alice but she wasn’t worried — she claimed that if she put her head under the covers, Sharky couldn’t find her.
[Mom and Dad are very busy on house maintenance chores. Alice is on the couch]
Alice: Mom!
[no answer]
Alice: MOM!
[no answer]
Alice: MOM!
[no answer]
Dad: [finishing up] Alice, Mom is very busy today. What do you want?
Alice: I just wanted to know if we are warm blooded or cold blooded.
Charles was melty this evening. I got him started on writing thank you notes for his birthday presents, which caused him to realize that one of those presents (a Lego™ kit) had met with an accident and not been repaired. When asked, Charles said that he couldn’t find some of the pieces, but was unable to state what those pieces might be or whether he had looked for them. Eventually, after much sniveling and rebuffed offers to help with repairs, Mom sent him up to his room. A bit later Mom says, “where’s Charles?” and when I say “up in his room” Mom looks at me blankly wondering why Charles would be up there.
But eventually the Charles mind moved on to other things, such as planning for a potential trip to the Big City.
Mom: What would you like to do in the Big City?
Charles: Visit the Lego™ store!
Alice: Visit the Disney store!
Charles: Visit both every hour for 24 hours.
Dad: You’ll get bored of the Lego™ store in less than an hour.
Charles: That’s why we need to go every hour.
Dad: And how long would we spend each visit?
Charles: As long as we want!
Dad: We need a planning number.
Charles: Hmmm. 45 minutes!
Dad: You’ll only need 15 minutes to recharge your interest?
Charles. Yes. [silence for a minute or so] Maybe 40 minutes.
The garage door fix apparently just whet her appetite - now Mom’s patching all the walls where pets have damaged them and repainting the bathroom.
Right before Christms we had a mini-ice storm which coated the trees for a night but melted by morning. The roads were still slick, though. Here’s one tree with Christmas lights and ice.
Uncle Craig got us a Wii Fit for Christmas and it arrived late on the 26th. While Mom was working on the mechanicals I was doing stuff to promote family harmony and good health. That is, setting up the Wii Fit.
Alice was the first to try it out. She was immediately hooked. Oddly (to me) she liked the running game, which consists basically of running in place while holding a Wii remote. But Alice did at least one 10 minute run the first day and more on other days. She’s spent at least an hour every day working with it and would do more if her siblings would let her.
Corwin liked it from the start as well, especially when he was able to beat Dad’s initial attempts. Corwin liked the running as well, which will be a big surprise to his soccer coach.
Charles was very tired that first day and put himself to bed around 5 and didn’t wake back up until the next morning. Then he refused to try it, until he watched Alice and Corwin fighting over access, at which point he decided he should be fighting too. Now he’s a regular player as well.
Mom and I like it too, although perhaps not quite as much as the children. One of Mom’s motivations is once again to crush my records on any event where I am first. However, bwahahaha, she tried to beat me on Hula-Hoop and didn’t even come close. “How did you do that?”, she asks. As if I would tell her. Burn! (It’s extra funny when Alice runs in to my office to rat on Mom with “Daddy! Mom is trying to beat your record!”)
The best part is that Alice has the record on ski jump (173 meters) for a single jump. This is just burning Corwin who struggles to get over 100 meters while Alice regularly gets over 120m. Currently I have the second longest (171 m) with Charles in third (168 m), although none of these are recorded. The event is like the real one, two jumps with the score being the total of the two. I think Corwin is still ahead of Alice on the official records (but still behind me). Still, Corwin has probably spent the most time on the game and has many firsts because he’s the only person to have unlocked the event.
We’ll see how long the popularity lasts.
A month or two ago, Corwin decided that he wanted to switch beds with Charles so that Corwin would have the lower bunk. His primary motivation was apparently to be able to have Polynomial sleep on his bed (which is not really feasible in the upper bunk). I had thought that this was just a plan but it turns out that since we’ve ungated Poly she has been sneaking up to sleep on the lower bunk.
Corwin asked us about it and we said it was up to him and Charles to come to a mutual agreement. Charles for his own inscrutable reasons declared that it was fine with him but not until Christmas.
The kids were up late on Christmas eve so they forgot about the switch and awoke in their old beds, to Corwin’s disappointment.
Christmas night the kids were up late again and Corwin refused to switch if it meant sleeping in bed sheets contaminated by Charles.
The next night was when Charles went to sleep very early.
Finally, the next day, Mom reminded the boys about it and had them strip the beds. I was sent up to do Charles’ bed since it was now on top and too high for Charles to work on. But finally it was done and that evening I saw Poly curled up on the end of the bunk with Corwin.
Then, last night (the night after the switch) Corwin was invited to a sleep over at Colin’s house. As I checked on Charles I noticed that Poly was curled up on the lower bunk, conveniently on the undersheet as Corwin had not straightened up his bed from the morning leaving the top covers pulled back. Apparently Corwin does not find Poly cooties as off putting as Charles cooties.
It’s been many hours since Christmas, so it’s time for a look back at the best and worst of Christmas 2008.
For Corwin, he probably liked his new Lego™ Star Wars™ starship kit. Second would be a utility card, which is about the size of two credit cards stacked with a toothpick, knife, sharp pin, screw driver / file, and the two things which were must haves for Corwin — scissors and tweezers. I can still hear him, sitting on the couch with it, going “tweezers!”.
Charles’ clear favorite was this huge crane vehicle kit. As noted Charles became obsessed with completing the kit to the exclusion of opening his last present. He had a couple of melt downs when things didn’t work out. Charles, in contrast to his normal fanaticism did not follow the instructions precisely and in one case had skipped an entire page of instructions. But Dad, clever, helpful, compassionate Dad, was there to fix things for his little Sparky.
Charles also liked his new Nintendo DS but didn’t actually spend that much time playing on it.
Alice liked all her stuff, which had a strong Sleeping Beauty theme. She got a DVD, and a big drawing activity pad, and a stationary kit. She liked all of it, except for the movie which was “too scary”.
Dad has been trying to grab some holiday spirit by taking it easy, but Mom decided to get in to big project for the day. Today was putting in the new garage door opener which took her most of the day. Dad helped out when Mom need some mobile scaffolding. Getting the door to close properly was quite difficult as the sensor positioning was very sensitive. I think that the main bar was a bit low so that if the sensor was too far forward it would be tripped by the last panel going vertical. That point was almost exactly the same place as the proper position for having the door all the way down so just a fraction of an inch in position would mean success or failure.
But Mom persevered and we now have a working garage door opener again. She programmed the remotes and the van so we can access the door from everywhere. The new opener has a security code, as opposed to a few DIP switches and it can be turned off from inside so none of the remotes work. It’s all very exciting and we’re proud of Mom, even if she was a bit greasy afterwards.
All the presents are opened and the kids almost sated in their consumerist lust. Even Mom got some presents, the best one of which was a locating device. It has a couple of tags that can be attached to an object, and a locater that provides a direction and (rough) distance to the tag so she can find her keys faster next time (they’ve been missing for a couple of months this time).
Everyone was up very late last night so the kids weren’t out of bed until 8 or so. The presents were opened shortly after that, although Charles became so involved in a big Lego™ building project that he left one present unopened until he hit a good stopping point. As a very special thing, I bought Pop-Tarts yesterday and the kids had them for breakfast, which may have been what they liked most for the day.
Mom made the kids down some straightening up in the morning. The evening was taken up with church related activities. Mom had volunteered to usher for the early (kids) worship which meant I got to be an usher. Corwin had several speaking parts and did very well, with clear diction, proper pronunciation, and only a moderate amount of rapidity. Mom had made him practice before hand, especially on the “it’s not about getting through as fast as you can, but communicating with the audience” concept. Corwin also played violin during the offering for the early and main services, so he got to stay behind while I took the younger ones back to the house.
The best part of the evening for me was having Corwin ask if we couldn’t open just a few presents and then holding him in front of the pile and saying “Look, Corwin, at all those presents, none of which you can open”. Corwin didn’t find this nearly as fun as I did.
P.S. A local TV news channel was there and both Corwin and Alice managed to get on local TV. Alice just for a brief glimpse but Corwin was featured because of his superior reading skills. Several people noticed him, which means he used up one or two of his fifteen minutes.
This morning Mom decided it was time to put icing on the mounds of cookies she has been baking over the last week or so (“it’s good to do the marathon cookie baking because afterwards I do not even want to so much as look at a cookie”).
Getting the icing consistency right is always a tricky issue. We tried having Charles and Alice do the actual icing, but the icing was setting too quickly and they ended up breaking the cookies (especially Charles, who decided that whacking the icing when it wouldn’t behave was a good idea). In the end, Mom and I iced the cookies and Charles and Alice put the decorations on. Corwin popped in for a bit to do some but became “bored bored bored” in short order.
Not much today, I was very unfocused the entire day. All the menfolk got haircuts, though, so we’d look nice for Christmas.
Charles’ birthday party is over. It was a sleep over with three friends (Josie, Mason, and Colin). The party was basically unstructured play time. They alternated between the Wii and fighting in the basement. Corwin let them borrow his light saber and they had a lot of fun in the basement with that while the lights were turned out (that thing is so bright that it lit up the basement all by itself).
We fed them pizza and cake. Charles made them wait for the cake by taking a long time to blow out the candle. His friends offered to help when I said “nobody is getting any cake until Charles blows out the candle” but this seemed to be enough to push Charles over the edge.
All of the guests came with hand made cards for Charles, in honor of the special invitations he made. There was even one from Josie’s sister Kennis, even though she wasn’t invited. It read, in part, “Dear Kennis; Sorry I wrote my own name but I don’t know how to spell ‘Charles’”. The other cards were entertaining as well.
Oddly, there were some complaints from the boys about staying up too late, so we put them to bed at 10. Except that Colin and Mason came back down after a while demanding a snack (and because the dishwasher noise was keeping them up).
The morning after was basically the same. I took some video of the boys which they thought were cool, especially Colin. He made me do another take in the morning which turned out a little better because enough light came through the window that you could see things other than the light saber.
We had some fun with static electricity and balloons, rubbing them in hair and then sticking them to the ceiling. I showed Charles that his sister had some utility in that her longer hair was much better at generating static electricity. At one point I let the boys do the William Tell thing with nerf darts and a balloon statically stuck to the top of my head.
Charles admitted later that he had a good time.
Star Wars — Super Horsey Prince Alice Special Edition
TV: Force of Evil!
Dad: What about the Force of Corwin?
Corwin: Are you saying I rule evil?
Dad: No. A Force of Evil is nasty, but a Force of Corwin — that’s true horror.
Mom: Depends on how recently he showered.
Charles is eight years old today. His big present was a Nintendo DS, which we got because he is apparently the only boy in his class who did not yet have one.
Send money!
Alice: I’m cold!
Dad: Hi Cold, I’m Dad.
Alice: [laughs] My name is Alice!
Dad: Are sure your middle isn’t “Monkey” and your last name “Girl”?
Alice: No! My middle name is “Girl”.
Dad: Alice “Girl” C———?
Alice: No, that’s not my name!
Dad: But that’s what you just told me.
Alice: Oh. OK!
The reason Alice was cold was that she wasn’t wearing pants. While eating dinner she dropped a big wad of rice and fought with Poly for possession of it. Her pants lost. I made her take them off rather than ending up with rice all over the floor, thinking having to run around in underwear would be discouraging. Hahaha. Alice was strongly energized by the freedom and bounced about in joyous release. She spent the rest of the evening sans pants. Perhaps a different approach in the future.
As long as we’re doing building stuff, here are some pictures of a tower Alice built from a while back that I had neglected to upload.
Poor Corwin was tortured by his teachers. Apparently they told him to watch the news in case an ice storm caused school to close tomorrow. This would be even better than a normal day off because it’s the last day before Christmas break and Corwin has homework, which would then not be due for two weeks. Corwin kept asking all evening about the weather, and wanting to watch the TV carefully just in case. But, sadly, so far no bad weather at all.
According to Charles, this is a fish. Charles designed and built it all himself. It’s not an ordinary fish, though, as it comes with a restriction field
We were out looking at toys for Christmas and Charles was taken a small finger puppet of a blue whale.
Charles: This is a cool baleen whale.
Dad: But it says “blue whale” on the tag.
Charles: [condescendingly] Blue whales are a kind of baleen whale.
I checked it out later and Charles was correct. I should never have doubted his superior knowledge of cetaceans.
Charles and cetacean specimen
She eventually took it off for the black twirly dress because the sash was tied too tightly.
Christmas always brings new opportunities for the kids to irritate Mom but this season has brought a whole new level. Last year we considered buying the Wii game Cooking Mama but passed. This year there’s a sequel Cooking Mama Cookoff which has been advertising heavily on the kids channels. The tagline is “Cooking Mama is not intended to replace your real Mama. She just cooks better”. The kids found this utterly hilarious and took to bugging Mom with it at dinner which I think put paid to any chance that Mom would purchase it in the near future. Birthday present, I’m thinking.
While we were in Florida, Polynomial was at a dog boarding house and only POset was home, so we took out the gate from the main floor to upstairs. When we returned, we decided to try life without it, because Poly had gotten much better about not peeing in inappropriate places. It’s been most of two weeks and Poly hasn’t made a mess upstairs yet. It’s definitely nice to not have to deal with the gate while going between floors. Poly only woke us up once and apparently that was a learning experience for her courtesy of Mom. I am waiting for the interaction of Poly and child baths, although perhaps Poly’s experiences in the kids bathroom with Mom will serve as a sufficient barrier.
Mom: Charles, if you want to have a birthday party, you need to sit down at the table and write out your invitations.
Charles: OK.
[time passes]
Charles: How do you spell “howitzer”?
This morning was the annual kids’ Christmas program at church, so along we all went to see Charles and Alice on stage. Charles was a shepherd this year and Alice an angel. It all went about as expected, Charles managing to avoid speaking or even showing his face to the audience. Alice sang a bit, I think or at least made her mouth move when the music was playing. Most of the other kids weren’t a lot better but the kid playing John the Baptist had a good voice that he used effectively. He did most of the narration and had clearly been selected on merit.
I can’t remember what we did in the afternoon, except go shopping for a new garage door opener motor. We found one, plus removable hooks for the fireplace stockings. We also dropped by a grocery store just to pick up salt for cooking and half&half for my coffee but ended up spending almost $100 on various things that we really needed. Just had to have them, life would have been impossible without them (including a Christmas present for our darling little Alice, which I had to sneak off and purchase).
Mom, Corwin, and Charles, had to get up very early this morning to head out to a nearby town to help with a string concert at a nursing home. Alice and I slept in and then rushed over to barely make it in time to hear the brothers play. Grandma drove down attend, and then came back with us afterwards.
At home, Mom was in tree mode. She got the tree in and set up, with some help from Charles (I was fiddling unsuccessfully with the garage door motor). Mom set up the lights on the tree and the kids did most of the ornament hanging. For whatever reason (faster, less distracted) the kids kept on until the tree was basically done, which I think is a first for them. And nothing was broken!
The rest of the evening was dinner and baking cookies. The important thing is that we Mom packs in as much activity per day as possible.
Last weekend Corwin had a lock in with his Boy Scout troop. There were 15-20 boys at the event, which seemed near suicidal for the adults who would be staying over. The one smart thing they did was arrange to go over to the nearby indoor swimming center for a couple of hours to tire the boys out. I helped with the transport, but had to go back home because Corwin didn’t think to bring a towel with his swim trunks.
Corwin apparently stayed up till 3 or so and was totally inert the next morning. The rest of us headed off to see Santa at the local mall. We woke up Corwin enough to let him know to not expect anyone to be around when he woke up, which was around noon. It good practice for college.
We only let Alice take in one inanimate companion when she goes to school, although she will frequently request to take multiple along with the promise to leave all but one in the car after we arrive. Today, though, Alice tried sneaking an extra toy in. I noticed that she was being unusually slow and hesitant as we entered the building, refusing to go on ahead of me. I became very suspicious, though, when she went to hang up her coat without being prompted. She had hidden her contraband in her coat pocket. Unfortunately for her, Dad is not as oblivious as his children.
The new garage doors are in and tney’re very nice. But it looks like the installation guy may have burned out one of the motors due to what we think is a sensor wire fault. Naturally, the motors are so old that they have no date codes or modern equivalents so replacement should be fun.
[Alice is sent in to my office so she doesn’t bug Mom]
Dad: You’re in my office! That means I can pinch the biggest butt in the world1!
Alice: No!
Dad: That’s right, you told me that wasn’t true any more. You have the smallest butt in the world?
Alice: No! The mediumest butt in the world!
[Mom comes in later]
Mom: Alice! Get your feet off Daddy.
Dad: Yes, you need to be careful or you’re going to fall off my chair and bonk your head. You won’t find that a very pleasant experience.
Mom: Or you might break Daddy.
Dad: She’d just buy a new one.
Alice: No! Daddy is not breakable!
Mom: How do you know?
Alice: When I put my feet on him or jump on him, he doesn’t break.
1 Alice told me this a while back.
Alice really likes snow. We had a fight the other day because I put shoes on her before taking her in to school and she wanted boots so that she could stomp on the snow. Alice takes time when ever she can to interact with snow if we’re out walking with some around.
Charles likes snow too. We went out for lunch the other day and he complained that winter was just cold — it should be snowing too. Then the cold would be OK.
Today was Mom’s big day for getting ready for Christmas. After getting the tree yesterday, she decided that what was needed for a good Christmas was an initially clean house for the tree, apparently so she wouldn’t be embarrassed if the tree saw too much dust in a corner.
Meanwhile, Corwin and I were sent out to put lights on a tree. Gosh, it was cold! I tried some innovative ideas for Christmas lighting in the yard, based on the hours I have spent trying to hang out with Mom while she was mainlining HGTV but nooooo. “Couldn’t you get more of the upper branches or did you run out of lights?”. All my artistic expression crushed like delicate ditch ice under marauding kids’ boots. Still, no frostbite despite the extra hours I spent knuckling under Mom’s creative micro-management.
Corwin wasn’t much help, but he did manage to get the lighted Christmas tree up basically by himself. The picture is is from two years ago, the last time we had it up.
We went out on some errands today. One of them was a charity where you provide a credit limit and a volunteer takes your child away to pick presents for other people. It is expected that the child will pick presents for siblings and parents so that the presents are a bit of a surprise. Alice thought it was a great idea but Charles was very reluctant. Eventually Mom and I brow beat him in to going with Alice, using the threat of telling Grandma “Alice got you a present but Charles wouldn’t”. Afterwards, Charles said he did enjoy the experience but it was wrong of Mom and I to make him do it.
The final errand was to get a Christmas Tree. Normally Mom likes to wait until it’s windy, cold, and dark but today we ended up going later afternoon and only got 2 out of 3. The kids helped Mom pick out a very nice tree which we strapped to the roof and headed home. Unfortunately Mom forgot about the tree and tried to drive in to the garage with it. I had to work on the garage door for half an hour or so to get it sort of working again, although I think we’ll have to get a new one (it’s been having problems for a while and I think Mom’s tree-smack was the final straw).
When we got back from vacation, we found a message on the answering machine from Olivia asking if she could come over to play with Charles. Sadly, we didn’t answer her while we were gone. I presumed that Zina had mentioned our absence to her (which Zina knew of because she was taking care of POset). I asked Charles if he had spoken with Olivia at school —
Dad: Charles, did you tell Olivia that we had been on vacation?
Charles: No.
Dad: Don’t you talk to Olivia at school?
Charles: She’s not my girlfriend!
Dad: You only talk to girlfriends at school? But you talk to Josie and he’s not your girlfriend.
Mom: Definitely not.
Charles: I don’t talk to girls unless they are my girlfriend.
Corwin: But you talk to Mom and she’s a girl.
Charles: At school.
Nevertheless there was no school for Charles today, while Alice was away at day care and Corwin had a morning half day. I tried to have Charles call Olivia to come over but as per policy, Charles doesn’t talk to girls so I invited her over. She showed up a bit later and the two of them played together all morning, having enough fun that the Wii wasn’t turned on until after 11. Apparently the ban on girl based communication doesn’t apply in the house (which explains talking to Mom I suppose).
I was working on one of the many computers that have failed for us when Charles announced “I just don’t get how computers work”. Ah, maybe I’ll keep him.
I pulled apart the bits for one of the dead computers and showed Charles the CPU and memory, with all of the little electrical contacts. I thought he’d find the heat sink interesting but not so much. After showing him all that, I took him over to see the picture Mom has on the wall in the hallway of the CPU she used to work with, the Intel iWarp (if you look close, you can find Mom’s picture on a link from there). Charles was very impressed.
These are things I forgot to weave in to the narrative but dang it! I wrote these down in my little notebook and I won’t let that go to waste.
While cruising Florida we saw a Mickey Mouse shaped power line tower and a bald eagle. Mom spotted them because she doesn’t like to look at the road much while she’s driving.
Upon arrival at the Nickelodeon Hotel, the kids immediately had a foot race around the open air corridors around the rooms. Alice ended up sad because she fell behind and the boys hid from her as soon as they were out of sight. Personally, I would have been OK with more than one race.
Charles expressed his musical talents as well. We bought small personal pizzas for the boys for some meal and Charles kept his as a drum. He later acquired another one and some chop sticks and did some serious drumming. Here’s a video of Charles deciding to hide instead of drum when he noticed my camera.
Charles also made beeping noises to the tune of “Ode to Joy” while driving, until Bear couldn’t take it anymore.
In an effort at official music, Mom had packed Corwin’s violin and Charles’ cello along for the trip. For Thanksgiving, Mom declared that we would have child music or there would be no pie for the kids. This lead to much sadness, but then mostly acquiescence. Except for Charles who broke down in tears because he ended up going last. Still, we finally managed to get about 5 minutes worth of playing out of him, which is the only time the cello or violin was used the entire trip.
Charles and Alice got to see oranges in trees and cotton in the field, plus lizards in the wild —
First day back and all the kids were sent off to school. I had to drive out in the blowing snow and ice and fetch Polynomial who was, shall we say, somewhat pleased to see me. I was in the van and Poly came over to get in without any leash or even much direction beyond me walking. She sat in the middle seat and whimpered a bit at first but calmed down as she and the car warmed up. Her first task upon getting back in the house was to give POset a good sniff (which POset did not really appreciate) and only then, check for cat food. I began to wonder if Poly liked POset because any smell is a good smell or because POset usually smells like cat food.
P.S. When I picked up Poly, the dog lady said Poly’s food had run out the day before and they’d fed her whatever brand was at hand and hoped it didn’t upset Poly’s stomach. I laughed. I said “this dog watches out the window with intense longing whenever Mom throws moldy bread on the compost pile. Unless you’ve been feeding her ground glass, you can’t possibly have upset her digestion”.
