Stop!
I've been on parental leave since the start of January and on the whole it's been going really well. Yesterday was awful, but that's because I finally caught the stomach bug that Daniel had last week. It laid him up for almost three days. It only did me in for a day but it was easily the worst bug I've had in years. Probably the worst I've had in more than a decade. Bad.
But before that I spent the better part of the weekend hanging out with James. I've seen so little of him lately that Christine thought it'd be nice if we could have some time alone together. So Saturday morning we went to the Science and Tech museum. We couldn't really fit everything in that we would've liked, but we visited the major areas. The trains. The big clock. The Automoblox table. One pass thorugh the Crazy Kitchen. Then home for lunch and back out again to do some errands. On the way home we were listening to one of the music CDs that happened to have instrumentals on it. I was singing "nonsense lyrics" (as I've heard Randy Bachman term them, doo-de-doo-de-doo ...) to one of the tracks and from the back seat I heard a very clear "Stop!".
I laughed and said "Okay". A few minutes closer to home and I forgot myself and started in on another track only to be told, "Daddy! Stop singing!"
Sunday morning I packed James up again and this time we went off to see the "Yellow Car". (That's the Museum of Nature for the uninitiated.) We were later getting there than I used to like, but it was still deserted up on the fourth floor of the museum when we got there, so James and I got to spend a lot of time carrying the cardinal (called alternatively "seagull" or "signal" until we were ready to leave) back and forth and pressing the horn on the car before anyone else showed up. At one point James just kind of leaned on the button for so long a security guard came along to see what was wrong. She laughed as soon as she saw what was happening (probably at least a bit amused at how I had wedged my bulk into the front seat of a car that would be under-sized for a seven-year-old) and told me she had thought the sound was one of the emergency doors beeping.
Eventually people did show up and I was talking with one of the other fathers who told me that we should check out the frog exhibit if we had time. His daughter is five, so a bit different in priorities than James, but I still thought it'd be worth checking out because all James could talk about coming in to the museum was "Daddy, see the frog?" The billboard outside the museum certainly caught his interest.
Well, we didn't quite make it to the actual frogs because in the foyer of the special exhibits section they had set up a miniature golf course:
Soon after this he found a putter one of the other kids had put down and started trying to use it to push the ball around. He had a pretty good idea of how to play the game after he had watched the other kids playing it. In one way I wish I'd gotten video of him when he finally managed to putt the ball into the hole, but really, I'm glad I was watching him myself when it happened and he dropped the putter than ran over to me. "Daddy! I did it!"
But before that I spent the better part of the weekend hanging out with James. I've seen so little of him lately that Christine thought it'd be nice if we could have some time alone together. So Saturday morning we went to the Science and Tech museum. We couldn't really fit everything in that we would've liked, but we visited the major areas. The trains. The big clock. The Automoblox table. One pass thorugh the Crazy Kitchen. Then home for lunch and back out again to do some errands. On the way home we were listening to one of the music CDs that happened to have instrumentals on it. I was singing "nonsense lyrics" (as I've heard Randy Bachman term them, doo-de-doo-de-doo ...) to one of the tracks and from the back seat I heard a very clear "Stop!".
I laughed and said "Okay". A few minutes closer to home and I forgot myself and started in on another track only to be told, "Daddy! Stop singing!"
Sunday morning I packed James up again and this time we went off to see the "Yellow Car". (That's the Museum of Nature for the uninitiated.) We were later getting there than I used to like, but it was still deserted up on the fourth floor of the museum when we got there, so James and I got to spend a lot of time carrying the cardinal (called alternatively "seagull" or "signal" until we were ready to leave) back and forth and pressing the horn on the car before anyone else showed up. At one point James just kind of leaned on the button for so long a security guard came along to see what was wrong. She laughed as soon as she saw what was happening (probably at least a bit amused at how I had wedged my bulk into the front seat of a car that would be under-sized for a seven-year-old) and told me she had thought the sound was one of the emergency doors beeping.
Eventually people did show up and I was talking with one of the other fathers who told me that we should check out the frog exhibit if we had time. His daughter is five, so a bit different in priorities than James, but I still thought it'd be worth checking out because all James could talk about coming in to the museum was "Daddy, see the frog?" The billboard outside the museum certainly caught his interest.
Well, we didn't quite make it to the actual frogs because in the foyer of the special exhibits section they had set up a miniature golf course:
Soon after this he found a putter one of the other kids had put down and started trying to use it to push the ball around. He had a pretty good idea of how to play the game after he had watched the other kids playing it. In one way I wish I'd gotten video of him when he finally managed to putt the ball into the hole, but really, I'm glad I was watching him myself when it happened and he dropped the putter than ran over to me. "Daddy! I did it!"
It sound like when Nicole was telling George not to sing in church when she was young. Then he started to hum and she said. Daddy, don't hum...
ReplyDeleteI enjoyed watching James gulf game.
Hugs,
Mamoo