Yeah, it really is about the kids.

Every Tuesday is a day where the whole class attempts to remember to wear the same colour in James' Junior Kindergarten.  After the Purple Day  a few weeks back I have a suspicion that it's done by popular vote, but that's a different story. Today was Yellow Day .  So Christine got both boys dressed in yellow shirts for the day.  Thinks I to myself:   I have a yellow shirt, I should wear it.  Y'know, solidarity.   So I went to the closet and got out my yellow Eddie Bauer shirt with the long sleeves and collar.  It's a nice shirt, if a little big for me — it was purchased during a different era, but the sleeves and body are long enough so I'm loath to throw it out — but really my only excuse for choosing it was it was still early and my brain wasn't really braining yet. I actually had it half-way on when I remembered, I have a much  better yellow shirt to wear for yellow day if I wanted to impress my boys. Aw yeah, highbrow. Chr...

Yeah, I'll get to that. First off, last night Daniel asked me to read a book he and I haven't read in a while. One of many, many, many  of those five-page board books we have around the house and despite being mostly below even Daniel's age now, we keep around because we still pretty regularly get asked to read them and because Daniel will pick them up occasionally and "read" one to himself.  Which is very cool. Of course, in an effort to retain the few shreds of sanity I have left, I frequently ad-lib bits to, y'know, punch up  the story a bit.  For example on this page: I added an "Oh, bother." to the end.  This would prove to be my undoing. The first read-through resulted in the very common request, "again! Do it again!" and occasionally, "read it again, please!"  So I did.  Sticking to the same flow as the last time, because even when I'm augmenting the story I try to keep them consist...

This past weekend we were at the War Amps CHAMPS Seminar here in Ottawa.  James is still young enough that both Christine and I can attend, so her mom came to stay with us for the weekend and look after Daniel while we were at the seminar.  I was staying at the hotel with James and Christine would return home in the evening to help out (though mostly Daniel was asleep by the time she got home, I guess). Anyway, on Saturday I got this message filling me in on the day's activities with Mamoo and Daniel: It doesn't get much better than hearing that I'm Daniel's best friend. More on the weekend later. Unrelated to the above, yesterday was James' first trip to the school library.  So last night he came home for the first time with a book he picked out completely on his own .  I know, it's probably not a big deal, but it's a big deal to me.  Every one of these little steps of growing up are the reason I'm wanting to write this stuff down. An...

There's a number of posts I have half composed that I'll put up later on, mostly about James at school.  Mainly the reason why I haven't shared these already is that I haven't been able to complete and post them from my phone, where it is most convenient to write one of these up.  The Blogger app is an unutterably loathsome piece of software for which I think it would be reasonable to ask the lead developer to be locked in a pillory in the town square.  It will crash 100% of the time when I attempt to publish a post.  And, of course, the "send report" button appears to be connected here: Enough of that for now. The summer is rapidly drawing to a close and after a few hair-cuts using my clippers, it's finally time to start growing my hair out again.  Also, for the last week or so I've really been noticing James' hair getting out of control and him scratching it more.  So it's definitely time to try heading over to our local hair stylist. ...

Immediately before I took this photo Daniel had finished off two whole pancakes and, as you can see, was well on his way to finishing a third.  It's just the two of us this morning, it was kind of a rough night and Daniel needed to get up pretty early, so we let everyone else sleep in. Anyway, he's pretty pleased with himself now, so he decided it was time to play a bit.  He grabbed his two busses and then played out this exchange all on his own: School Bus:   Hey City Bus?  Do you want to play? City Bus:   Yes!  And then they started zooming around the plate and occasionally crashing into each other while Daniel narrated "Oh NO!" This is the first time I've noticed him playing this way, having his toys communicate amongst themselves with a cooperative dialogue.  It's pretty cool.  I mean, he's done this before, but only when he sees James doing it first, then he'll mimic (as well as he is able) whatever story James is telling with his...

It's another wickedly humid day here, so while Daniel is,  it is to be hoped, napping I thought I'd take James back to the Trampoline Museum. I had expected it to be really busy but it's not too terribly crazy.   Completely unexpected was running into Valrica and her family in the lobby. It's their first time here so they're trapped in the waiver-filling-out line, probably for the next hour, if memory serves. At least that is how it felt the first time we were here and James just wanted to get jumping. I've had a few Daniel-isms I intended to write about and there is a lot I should say about the trip to Saunders' Farm last week,  but I'll keep this short since I still need to be watching James in all his adventuresome bouncing. Several weeks back this started and it's probably the way of things from now on.  Each time a song starts that Daniel knows he will tell me: "Daddy? It's the Itsy Bitsy Spider!" "Daddy? It's the AB...

James and I had the day together today. Last Monday we had a trip to CHEO because he woke up having significant respiratory distress.  He had very shallow, rapid breathing when I went in to check on him in the morning before he woke up.  We thought he'd been sick with a cold on Saturday and Sunday (but that is now somewhat in question again) but this wasn't normal by any means. Anyway, as with our other trips to CHEO, it was handled exceptionally  well (I guess that means it's no longer an exception...) and even though we were there for almost five hours, most of that time was waiting to ensure he was responding well to the medication and not relapsing.  His breathing has been fine ever since, so right now the working theory is he has cough-variant asthma and either a cold or an allergic response to something in the air on Saturday escalated from "asthma" to " asthma ".  We'll see. So the first part of the day was our follow-up with our fa...

The title could honestly apply to nearly anything Daniel sees these days, particularly anything James has or is looking at or that Daniel thinks James is thinking about, but in this particular case it refers to the near total meltdown that happened at the start of dessert after supper tonight. But we need to back up a bit first. The week before last Daniel came down with an utterly MISERABLE flu.  The kind of bad that on Sunday morning Christine took him to CHEO because he was significantly dehydrated.  (I originally wrote "severely" in there, but that's not true.  Erin's son Alex had the same flu and he became severely dehydrated, Daniel wasn't nearly that bad.)  By Tuesday he was over it and by Thursday he was back to eating a bigger breakfast than James and I put together, but on Friday of last week the other shoe dropped.  Around four on Friday morning James barfed and was down for the weekend and the bulk of this week. I stayed home with him on Monda...

This one is from a few weeks ago. I'm back to golfing again on Thursday nights (or that's the way I'm spinning it, I've only made it to slightly more than 50% of my games and of those only one of them did I actually do something approximating golf, but it's nice to get out anyway), so Christine has been putting the boys to bed on her own and this almost always means both boys are sleeping in Daniel's room because that is, currently, the preferred room.  No explanation on that one. This particular night we got started very early, wrapped up early and nobody wanted to stick around for drinks or food after the round, so I was home exceptionally early.  Probably about 8:10pm.  I stopped for a moment in the driveway to talk to Tony and Anick, then went inside. At the top of the stairs were two little boys.  Daniel yelled "Daddy!" and ran into his room.  James was shouting "Mama!  Daddy's home!" It turns out that both boys had "gon...

Christine sent me a link to plans for a sandbox several weeks back.  I didn't plan to build it over the long weekend, but it turns out to have been a great weekend for it and even though I only placed the order for the materials online on Thursday night, everything was ready Friday, so Saturday I picked up everything and set to work. There's always a few set-backs, of course, but once completed and loaded up with 16 (!) 20kg bags of sand, it was an instant success.  I made it 6'x6' thinking (foolishly) that it would be large enough for two boys to play in without fighting.  Of course that's not the case, but both of the guys are too happy about it to get too caught up in fighting over toys, so I'm calling that a win too. The sand we bought was really nice, it was quite wet right out of the bags, so it worked really well for making castles.  At one point we had a respectably high pile built, too, so then I started tunneling underneath it with a curiously...

Hilarious observations. James has recently rediscovered his sunglasses and he is very impressed with them. James :  Daddy? Sharks don't wear sunglasses. Me : Nope, they don't. James : They just wear ... seawater glasses.

Probably Daniel's two favourite phrases right now are I found a ...  and I need the ... , depending on the context.  They're adorable, of course, in as much of the context as the delivery.  Daddy!  I found a fire truck!  Daddy, I found the garbage truck! The last few days, though, have been laugh-out-loud funny as he now focuses on the pickle-truck .  Make no mistake, this is most definitely what he is saying, he's even corrected me on it.  "You found a pick-up truck?"  "NO!  I found a pickle-truck!"

Been a while since I wrote anything.  We had a break for a while for reasons some of you know but we're just going to leave as a blank spot here.  Doesn't really stand out all that much anyway. But coming back on a high note, we received the latest batch of books from Amazon today and one of them , I guess the guys already knew, must be from Valrica's.  So we started reading it and I tried making it a bit more fun than just reading, so I thumped my foot on the wall for the stair-travelling-parts. Yup.  Nice, soothing stories before bed-time so everyone is ready to settle for the night  Totally nailed it.

Christine took the boys to see me curl tonight.  They arrived about the third end and stayed almost to the end of the game.  We played okay, but it's my rec league and I've really been struggling with the game there this year, so it was nice to see some super-happy faces behind the glass. Then, when I got home, she was already reading to them in Daniel's room.  I went upstairs to see them.  Whatever they were reading, I interrupted, but when I lay down on the bed with them James gave me a hug and said "Daddy, you made a good shot.  You deserve a special treat." I hope they'll be coming out again before the end of the season.

Last weekend James and I were out running errands on Saturday morning since we're now between classes for him.  He was being particularly helpful and particularly adorable, so one time when we were getting back in the car and he had finished buckling himself in, I gave him a kiss on the tip of his nose. James:  BOY KISS!  YUCK! I blame Robert Munsch for this. Also, this is a really short entry, but that's because it's almost impossible to type anything legibly with my current crop of assistants. Daniel: There's Daddy!  There's Daddy! I don't mind at all, though.  It's always good to have help.

This morning around three Daniel woke up.  I know this because I heard him cough, cry and then get out of his bed on the monitor.  I still sleep pretty lightly when it comes to hearing stuff on the monitor.  Always will, I suspect, because I haven't had what you might call good sleep patterns since I was in my early twenties. That's all neither here nor there, though.  The point is, soon after three in the morning Daniel strode purposefully into our room and climbed into bed with us.  He ended up between Christine and I and proceeded to turn circles, stand up, bounce, jabber, the whole bit. Christine let this carry on for a while.  Maybe as much as ten minutes, before she said firmly, "Daniel, go to sleep." That's when the incredible happened. He stopped.  He crawled to the edge of the bed.  He climbed down.  He walked back to his bed, climbed in and went to sleep . Who knew?

It was a rough night.  James had a bad dream about something and when he came into our room he was extremely upset about there being "missing pieces".  We told him we would find them in the morning and that was a no-go, so I asked him if he wanted me to go find the missing pieces now and that wasn't a good option either.  Eventually he did fall asleep again, but only after Christine ceded her side of the bed to him and went to sleep in his room. But at 4am Daniel woke up very upset.  He made enough noise that he woke me up and I met him in the hallway before he got into our room.  I'd forgotten it was only James and I in bed at the time, but I remembered James was there and I wasn't thinking four of us would make for a good few more hours of sleep. It didn't take very long to get Daniel settled again, he was asleep again by about quarter past, but then I remembered that now James was the only one sleeping in a room with actual alarm clocks set.  So back...

Two weeks ago was James' birthday. One of the things we did for the party was get helium-filled balloons for each of the kids.  That included James and Daniel.  James mostly didn't care which one he got, I let him pick them all, so he only selected ones he liked. Daniel, on the other hand, was impressed beyond measure with the "present balloon". Pictured left: BLOON! Actually, both of them are impressed with the cube-loon, James asked me to draw a man with a "present balloon" the other day when we were playing with crayons, but Daniel is far more enamored with it. For the last two weeks he will periodically, happily announce "BLOON!" when he is carrying it around, or occasionally call out plaintively "Bloon!"  when he's suffering withdrawal and he can't reach the ribbon himself.  I've taken to giving it to him when I'm changing his diaper because it's the only thing pretty much guaranteed to keep him still....

Daddy! Fix iiiiiiit! Seriously, I can't even guess how they get these slinkies in this kind of state in the first place. I might stand a better chance of unravelling it if I knew how it was created.

I'm spoiling the punch-line on this one because it's tied for the worst part of this story and we don't need both of them buried down below. Christine picked up some new books for James that, on my initial review, I thought were pretty good.  National Geographic Kids readers.  They were collections of four individual readers, all Level 1 and 2, bundled together in a square-bound book about the dimensions of a regular Nat-Geo magazine.  They're well beyond James' ability to read, but he gets engaged in lots of other L1/L2 stories in the bookshelf, and I liked the non-fiction stuff for him, too, so it seemed like a win. Last night she read him Sharks  and we both learned quite differently.  He was into the story while she was reading it but the section about Bethany Hamilton made more of an impression on him than it seemed at first.  After they finished the story I took him to the bathroom to sit on the potty and brush his teeth.  While he was there...

Yesterday was James' fourth birthday.  That's a pretty big milestone because now's about the age when he starts really thinking about other people as people and not just sources of stuff.  It's tough sometimes to remember that kids go through a (fairly long) period where they simply can't understand concepts like "that makes me sad" and why they wouldn't want to make someone else sad.  It's normal brain development, but once you have empathy, it's really, really difficult to understand that these little people who don't have it yet aren't being mean, they're just being themselves and almost every one of them will grow out of it. For James, there was a bit of a gradual development of empathy, he would periodically announce some fact that he understood  — I shouldn't hit Brazen-cat because she will be sad .  — but mostly it still seemed to be a collection of facts, not something he understood implicitly.  Then, over the holidays...

I love these awful things .  I'm tragically  —  yet apologetically  — addicted to these.  They are, in fact, the first thing my grandmother taught me how to make because they're both easy and something I couldn't get enough of. Daniel is an absolute fiend for marshmallows and word has it that he often steals Lynne's peanut-buttered toast in the mornings at daycare (frequently after having had a breakfast larger than his brother, so it's not like we're starving the boy), so when Christine made a pan of these on Sunday, it seemed safe to assume he was going to like these. He was actually a little bit lukewarm on them the on Sunday and Monday evening we finished up our box of Lindt chocolates for dessert, so it wasn't until last night he really got to give them his true assessment.  For the record, James liked them well enough.  Daniel, on the other hand, took one bite, then announced " Awesome! " and literally stuffed the rest of his into his mou...

James is making great progress with the whole trips-to-the-potty thing but the hand-washing side is still kind of hit-and-miss.  He does better than many , though, so we'll leave it at that. Today the two of us were hanging out colouring and he up and runs off to the bathroom.  I know what that means, so I followed him along.  By the time I caught up he was mostly finished (yes, I'm slow getting up from sitting cross-legged on the floor while colouring ...) but we're going to call it a 100% success.  So then he pulled up his pants and I said he should go wash his hands. This is where things went a bit off the rails. He walked over to the sink and placed his mouth firmly on the edge of it, then licked the rim.  I probably over-reacted, but whatever, you need to act quickly sometimes. "James, don't!  Don't lick the sink, it's not clean, buddy!" James stops and thinks about this for a moment.  "Because it's dirty! " I considered ...

Somehow -- and this is no doubt tempting fate by even acknowledging it -- I was the only one of the four of us to not get an awful, coughing cold during the holidays.  But everyone soldiered on through it, nobody went too insane, despite being sick and unable to get a decent sleep. That said, it's very nice to be home again.  And what should be waiting for us when we arrived, but presents from Aunt Trish and cousins Kelley, Kevin and Ryan.  Yay!  Thank you, guys.