Yeah, it really is about the kids.

I've been collecting very simple computer projects to do with James.  I don't want him to "follow in my footsteps" or anything, but I want to make sure both boys grow up knowing how computers work and how you can make them do what you want.  The first one of these that I would consider actually successful was our Arduino-based aquarium temperature monitor.  I've never gotten around to stepping it up to making it wifi connected, even though I have a wifi shield that I know works well, mostly because it's working well enough already and the wifi connectivity is less visually exciting than the monitor changing LED colours based on the tank temperature, so I can see James losing interest in the project partway through. Yesterday's project, though was amazingly successful.  A while back I picked up an AIY Voice Kit .  I broke my own rule for these projects, though, and did literally  no preparation before we started,  all I read was to make sure I wasn't

No pictures. Daniel was not himself at dinner time so we let him just hang out in the family room while the rest of us ate. Toward he end of the meal we heard Daniel barf as he made his way to the bathroom.  In retrospect it was obvious this was coming but hindsight, I guess. Christine was first on the scene by virtue of being at that end of the table but James was intent on being there second. As I was coming around the table I told him twice to stay where he was. Before I could get to either of them he was at the bathroom then shouting "Ah! Ah!" and started hopping back to the table. Me :  What happened bud?  Did you step in some barf?  James : Uh huh.  Me :  Yeah. Did you hear me telling you to stay at the table?  James : Uh huh.  Me :  Maybe you should listen to me next time, eh?  Believe it or not I'm full of good advice.  James :  But I wanted to see what colour it was! Kinda tough to argue that. We were going to clean it up before he saw it,

This one makes me a little sad in the "inevitability of time" sense of things.  It made me want to watch Interstellar again because for all of great science in it (and there is a LOT, and what isn't great stands up to considerable scrutiny ), I could tell from the trailers what it was really all about and the story is basically laid out for the audience very early on when Matthew McConaughey's character says "Once you're a parent, you're the ghost of your children's future." So, I picked James up the other day at school and he was not  thrilled to see me.  This is pretty normal, though.  If we pick him up before all of his closest friends are already gone, he flips out.  Usually groaning dramatically, sometimes hitting the floor with his fists, sometimes grunting in frustration, just generally carrying on and making us feel bad for being "too early". For the record, I have a pretty good idea where that comes from.  There's

We have a lot of stuff come home from school and daycare.  Every parent does, of course, and we save most of it.  A lot of it lands on the walls of my office at home and at work, occasionally getting rotated out for something new, but most of it is never seen by anyone except us and quickly finds its way into the totes where we're keeping the stuff.  That doesn't feel like the right thing to do with these pieces of art.  Particularly since most of them, as the title suggests, are pretty delicate and if they're particularly attractive to the boys, they don't last long. So I think I'm going to start taking photos of some of them, get the stories associated with them when they come home, and post them here.  I wish I'd done that with James' robot he made last year.  It's still downstairs by the bar, but I'm sure I've forgotten a lot of what he's told me about it.  Part 2 might have it and whatever I can recall about it. Part one, though.

Got an idea last week to try something different with breakfast this weekend and it turns out to have been a bit of a hit.  Waffle-cakes.  Literally, cupcakes smashed into waffles.  I shouldn't need to explain myself. Here's the results. And here's what the critics had to say about them:

I forgot to share this sooner.  Daniel doesn't care a lot for the hockey game itself, but he does like one aspect of it when we watch it on TV. He did that on Thursday as well but I wasn't able to catch him singing, if he sees us videoing him, he gets distracted right away, so this was a real treat.

That.  Shouted from upstairs as soon as James came in the door from school today.  He knew were to find me, of course, I was in the office - in a meeting, but everyone heard me being called and I'd already warned them I was going to drop off the call as soon as the kids got home - but then he came in to show me the news of the day: When we talked about his plans for his tooth tonight he said he was going to put it under his pillow and the Tooth Fairy would give him two dollars. I think he's been comparing notes with his friends at school.

During our summer vacation, one of the throw-away ideas I had for us to do while in PEI was to go to Brackley and watch a movie at one of the few remaining Drive-Ins.  Seemed like something that'd be exciting for the boys and kind of nostalgic for me. Jumping tracks for a moment here, Daniel is settling in well at school.  He's pretty social, so after the first week of adjustment he's been generally enjoying his time there.  Though he does love being at home, I think he's really getting an itch scratched by the opportunities for dramatic play at school, where he can pretend to be a character from his books and act out the stories. Lately I've been having a difficult time telling, honestly, if he's getting to watch videos on Youtube of some of his favourite stories (like  this, maybe ) or if he's just thinking that reading books can also be something you watch movies of, since we have so many books at home that are based on movies (like our vast array of

James is learning the value of money. A bit. He's figured out if he's got his own money he can buy some things he wants that we aren't buying for him now.  That part, I'm sure, he had some help from Mama, but he's already put it to work when obtaining his spinner, so it's working out. Now he's found out, also from Mama, that he can earn money by helping out with the chores.  So last night he asked  to do the dishes.  And he asked for me to take a video of it. He also asked for me to show it to his teacher.  Mama might take care of that, too, when she's volunteering one of these days.  I just work the camera and conduct interviews.  :-)

It's been a while. It's been eventful since we got back from vacation, Daniel has been basically wiped out every night now that he's started at the extended day program at what will soon be his school.  Next week is going to be even harder on the little guy with actual school (well, Junior Kindergarten) starting up. But this is another in the  "James says the most hilarious stuff" category. I was golfing today (it was insanely cold for it being the end of August, by the way, I don't think it go above 20 all day) and didn't get home until just before 9pm.  I went upstairs and saw James was still awake, so I went in to see him.  This is what followed. James:  Dad?  Let me tell you about my day.  Me:  Okay, bud, tell me about your day.  James:  Well first it was excellent, then it was passable, then it was good, then it was great. At this point I'm already starting to laugh (I'm sure he gets "passable" from playing Cut the Ro

So I think Daniel is pranking us. He's got a pretty good command of the language right now, including some of the subtleties you might expect, growing up in a house with me.  One that caught me by surprise, though, was the way he plays out a line expecting a specific response in order to kick off a routine. Specifically, this is the (incorrect, from his point of view) exchange: Daniel : I love you, Dad!  Me : Aw, thank you buddy, I love you. Why is this the incorrect response from me?  Because this is what he wants  to start: Daniel : I love you, Dad!  Me : I love you too!  Daniel : I love you three! I know the routine now and I almost always am aware enough to actually follow the pattern he wants on the first try.  He most often wants to do it when I'm dropping him off at daycare in the morning, and if I indulge him, he usually won't tire until we hit "I love you thirty-eight" or "fourty" or so. So, this is certainly adorable, but why

The resolution to the above was something that amused the other parents around me to no end.  One guy actually laughed out loud.  Because what do you do when your kid gets a boo-boo?  You kiss it better. The trip to Skyzone today was generally good.  Getting in to the place was an absolute disaster due to a combination of environmental issues, my own poor planning and the staff at Skyzone having technical issues and not just dropping the ball, but digging a damned grave for the ball and burying it under a mound of concrete.  That said, once we were in and the boys were jumping, all was fine. Until Daniel slipped on the trampoline and said he hurt his thumb when he landed.  He probably did, it looked kind of red and he clearly did land on his hand.  So I kissed it better. That set off what I swear to God was a fifteen minute game where he would jump five or six times, then flop down on his belly and claim he had hurt some other part of his body and I needed to kiss it better.  

James was not  ready for bed tonight when bed-time came.  What else is new?  That's such a common occurrence that I often tell him as long as he's quiet and doesn't come out of his room except for the bathroom, he's welcome to take a book to bed with him and keep a dim light on. He always takes me up on the offer. Kind of like a gateway drug, I know, but I often saw 3am on school nights because I was caught up in a book, Christine was much the same, we could certainly be giving him worse habits, I think. He also absolutely adores his books.  Joe's Comics has started printing a title called "Disney-Pixar's Cars", which is as you would expect, but it's perfect for James.  He can read lots of the words, the stories are between one and four pages each and so far they're all set between and soon after Cars and Cars 2, so none of this  heavier  stuff to deal with yet that might turn him off.  The other thing we did was sign him up for a subscri

It's still just us guys and today I decided the plan would be go to SkyZone, grab some lunch, come home, have some dinner, watch a movie then watch the hockey game.  A laid-back late-winter Saturday. Oh, and in the gap between lunch and dinner?  Make chocolate-covered mini-doughnuts. That was a huge hit with the guys. Well, to be fair, SkyZone was also a huge hit if the crying, screaming and broken hearts on the way out were any indication, but honestly I'm amazed they had the energy left to protest since I caught both of them lying nearly motionless on trampolines by the end of their hours. Anyway, I picked up what is basically a waffle-iron mini-doughnut maker because I have some (possibly irrational) aversion to actually having a deep-fryer, no matter how badly I want one.  Today was the first trial of it, but I'd tried out the recipe for the chocolate covering earlier in the week on some chocolate chips we had left over that we probably won't use for anythin

... maybe I will take Juliette's dad up on that offer to have a talk next time I see him. And James, being a boy, didn't even mention this when I asked him about his day at school.  I didn't know about it until after everyone was in bed and I'd finished cleaning up after our pizza party watching Thomas & Friends: The Great Race (thanks for the pointer, Rob).

It's a really small one, but it made me smile again when I thought of it a few minutes ago. We were outside, the boys were playing in the snow after I'd finished shovelling the walk and James somehow got on to asking about the size of our house.  I said it was two stories tall.  To which James replied, "Or maybe three  stories!"  I responded that, well, there was a layer above our upstairs but it was the attic and since it wasn't liveable space we don't count it. James :  What's liveable space?  Me :  Parts of the house that we live in.  James :  What lives in the attic?  Me :  Nothing, bud.  Well, probably some spiders, but that's about it.  James :  AH! My favourite animal! I feel like for all my mistakes I'm doing at least something right. Finally, here's a decoration he made in school that I've hung up over my desk.  The spider part never stops moving, thanks to the air currents in the office.  It's awesome.

Christine picked up the boys today and took them to their swimming lessons.  As usual for a Friday, I had dinner on the table when everyone got home and I started asking James about his day.  I don't yet ask Daniel about his day because he usually doesn't have anything in mind to tell and since last weekend the only thing he's been talking about is Day of the Diesels , so that's that. James didn't really have a lot to say about his day but then Christine remembered the big news of the day.  The exchange went something like this: Christine :  Oh!  James!  What happened at school today?  James (brightly): We did science! (Science is frequently the highlight of his day.) Christine : No, what else happened?  When I came to pick you up?  James (serious now, fixing his gaze on me): I don't want to tell you. This usually denotes something bad, but since Christine was kind of laughing about it, I figured it wasn't too serious.  Turns out it was very