Update

Sorry, been pretty busy lately, but here are some things which are going on:

• I’ve been periodically checking out drool.icio.us on Babble.com. It is many of the same folk who spew forth anything child-related on Strollerdeby, but this time with products both new and newly discovered. The good thing is that they cover a lot of Green Baby, Natural and Organic. I’d give you links to the tags, but they haven’t yet been consistantly applying these tagbs. Still interesting to check it out now and then.
• Stroller decision has been put off in favor of Getting Our Daughter’s New Room Ready and Finding a Name For The Boy.
• So far, the strawberry cage is holding up. And we’re getting zucchini ready to be picked in the garden.
• Oh, and my daughter’s turning 3 pretty soon. Holy crap!

Long, Crazy Weekend

We survived the rushed weekend back home for my nephew’s graduation party. Although, not without some excitement.

My car was leaking some reddish/pinkish liquid. I took it in to the Toyota dealer (fortunately, there is one not far from my mother’s house), and it turns out it was leaking transmission fluid. Not good. They dug a little deeper and discovered that when my local dealer did the 30k mile service, they overfilled the transmission fluid. I guess it could have been worse. The dealer drained and refilled while I sat and watched CNN and consumed their free popcorn and coffee.

Oh, and a woman taking a test drive drove one of the dealer’s cars into the side of the building, knocking down part of the wall. At least I got some entertainment.

Other than that, my daughter had fun playing with her almost-6-year-old cousin and being more of a social butterfly at the party than I’ve ever seen her be before.

Some quick highlights from the ride home:

• My daughter wore her Big Girl Underwear on the car ride there and back for the first time. And no accidents!
• My daughter also named all her toes on the way home. One was named after her, the rest after kids in her Big Girl School. It was interesting to note that the older kids were the bigger toes, and the babies were the littler toes.
• I taught my daughter to say, “Ev’nin’ Guvnuh!” (yeah, I don’t know why), and she was saying to people at the rest stops. It cracked me up.

I am sure I have More Important Things I Learned to discuss, but I wanted to post to let y’all know I am still here…

One more quickie

I’m sure most of you have seen it, but this Dramatic Prarie Dog/Chipmunk/Guinnea Pig video just cracks me up every time.

For some reason, the humor appears to be lost on almost-three-year-olds.

Where does the time go..?

Good lord, where does the time go?

My nephew was 5 years old when Ms. Kaz first met him. He was just a little kid who would giggle when Ms. Kaz tickled him and would yell, “Missed me! Missed me! Now you gotta kiss me!” and after Ms. Kaz kissed his head, he’d say, “No! On the lips!” which I remember totally shocked Ms. Kaz at the time.

Now, he’s going to be going off to college. His graduation was last night. He’ll be living on his own for the first time. And soon he’ll be voting. Yowza.

And I look at my daughter, and am still amazed at how I can have conversations with her. I look at her laying in bed in the morning when I go to wake her up, and I am amazed at how tall she looks. I look at pictures from just last fall, and she still looks a bit like a baby. I look at her now, and she looks more like a big girl. I can only imagine how big she will look compared to the baby.

I am amazed by the things she can do; change her clothes, go potty by herself, help with cooking, etc. I find it funny how she tells me, before going on the potty, that I need to leave, because she “need[s] some privacy, please.”

And it has been almost a year since I started the blog.

Of course, none of this makes me feel old. No, what makes me feel old is the fact that I am still sore on Friday from playing hockey on Wednesday.

We’re off to my nephew’s graduation party this weekend. Have a good one, everyone!

Just a quickie…

Sorry, I’ve been kind of busy, between work and thinking about setting up one of our bedrooms to be our daughter’s new room when the baby comes.

She wants to paint the walls purple. Okay, no problem. “Dark purple!” she tells me. Uhh… I think we’ll go with a lighter purple.

I’m also thinking of getting some of those sweet Blik wall decals for her wall — I’m thinking the flowers and the alphabet ones are the ones we’ll go for. Ironically, the flower ones are shown on a purple wall.

We have a dresser in there already, which was Ms. Kaz’s when she was a kid. The drawers do not open easily, and we’re having a bit of a debate about whether we want that, or if we want drawers she can open easily. Currently, she uses the drawers on the changing table for her clothes. She likes to pick out her own clothes (especially her Big Girl Underwear), so I’m leaning toward getting something she can easily open. Something like this from IKEA. Perhaps the yellow version would look nice with the purple walls.

Unless someone has experience in adding glide rails to drawers which don’t have any…?

Oh, and a quick quote from dinner last night (names have been changed):

Daughter: Stephen likes girls!
Ms. Kaz: Really?
Daughter: He likes to dance with girls!

Ms. Kaz later relayed to me that our daycare provider told her that this same Stephen, all of 1 year old or so, was trying to hug my daughter and she kept yelling, “get him off me! get him off me!”

Good girl.

DIY Project Update

So, I finally had a chance to work on that $4 tag sale special plastic picnic table I mentioned previously. I had to wait for conditions to be just right — a warm, sunny, not-too-humid, not-too-windy day (according to the instructions on the paint can), and a weekend where my daughter took naps (my instructions), and I could get away with working on whatever I wanted (Father’s Day).

As I mentioned, Krylon makes a spray paint which is designed to adhere to plastic outdoor crap. Blue and Red weren’t my first choice for colors, but the selection was limited. It turned out pretty nice looking anyway.

Of course, I forgot to take a Before picture, but I got a half-way-through picture. Just picture faded, cracked yellow where the red is in the first picture.

Seeing as how I was going to paint over the orange on the sides anyhow, I didn’t care too much about getting red there when doing the top and benches. But I used some blue painters tape, using one of those things for applying spackle to push the tape in the cracks.

Happy Father’s Day

“Wake up, sweetie.”

My daughter did not want to wake up. She’d groan and stretch and close her eyes again.

“We need to wish daddy a Happy Father’s Day…”

This did the trick. My daughter’s eyes snapped open, she got a big grin on her face and ran into our bedroom. “Happy Father’s Day, daddy!” she yelled as she ran to where I was sleeping. She climbed up and gave me a big hug.

That was the only present I needed.

* * *

But it wasn’t the only present I got.

“I needed to check with your sister about your present”, cleaning an area of the kitchen counter we don’t normally clean, and being told not to go into the basement because my present was down there. These were all hints. But I never guessed that I would get a single-brew coffee maker for Father’s Day.

You see, Ms. Kaz doesn’t tries not to drink coffee (much) at home. During the week, I am happy with my tea in the morning at home, then (free) coffee at work. But on the weekends, my body yearns for a cup of coffee.

We never feel it is worth setting up and grinding and making the coffee on the weekends, so we never did. I always said we should get one of these, but I never thought Ms. Kaz would indulge me. She doesn’t want me drinking too much coffee. I promised to continue drinking tea on weekdays at home.

… And you can buy packets to have this thing make hot chocolate, too!

I never thought these videos were true, until the following happened to me…

Okay, we’ve seen those videos of little kids getting nailed in the face with a ball. “How can that possibly happen?” we all think. I mean, first of all, the odds of the kid and the ball being in the same place at the same time. Second of all, what kind of parent hits their kid in the face with a ball.

Well… it was an accident!

Like little boys, my neighbor and I were showing off our soccer skills, which consist mostly of kicking the ball up and hoping we can get another body part on it.

Well, I kicked the ball up a couple times, you know, like playing hacky-sack with a soccer ball, and it started to drift away from. This is the point you kick it over to another person. So I reach out with my leg to knock it, mid-air, over to my neighbor.

As if in slow motion, I watch the ball go as my daughter enters the picture. Smack. Right in the face.

Now, this was a very very soft and very very deflated ball. I honest don’t think it hurt her as much as startled her. And she was extremely tired, having skipped yet another nap. So, needless to say, she started bawling.

And I felt like a terrible father.

Because I didn’t have the video camera rolling.

Designs on a new nursery

Holy cow, the House & Garden website has some sweet kids’ room designs here. Of course, I have no single room large enough to accomplish anything shown there, but it sure is sweet to look at. I just gotta make sure my daughter doesn’t seem them, or she’ll want them.

Of course, the really nice thing about this section is the inclusion of eco-kid products, and an all too short Q&A with Amanda Moore, an “eco-conscious nursery expert” about creating a green nursery. Ms. Kaz taped a similar program from HGTV the other day (I’ll have to get the name of it), which, again, was way too short. But there are plenty of resources out there.

It is nice to see these topics hitting a little more mainstream media sources.

There’s a lot of other nice stuff in this Design For Kids section, so check it out (thanks to Daddytypes!).

Life, Death and Wildlife

The past few weeks, we’ve been learning a lot about wildlife, and particularly life and death. Although, we’ve tried to concentrate on the life part of it.

A few weeks ago, I told you about the baby bird which was raising a ruckus in our backyard. Then was just as suddenly gone.

Well, there may be some good news in that story… Ms. Kaz was talking to some of our neighbors, and they were talking about a baby bird, making a lot of noise in their backyard. Then, the next neighbor reported the same thing. Apparently, the bird was somehow making its way across our neighborhood.

I don’t know where it eventually wound up, but maybe there’s hope for the little guy.

Then this weekend, we had another Bird Incident.

Threats

My daughter is two. She is still learning how to “threaten” us when she is mad. In the past couple of days, she’s had a couple good threats that I really had to try hard not to laugh at…

“I want you to go! I want you to run around alllllll over the neighborhood!”

“I want you to knock yourself out, momma!”

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go run around the neighborhood.

Father’s Day is Coming Soon…

… and this year, my early present is — GUILT.

You see, Friday was Library Day. I didn’t get to go, so it was just Ms. Kaz and our daughter (and our son, but he has no choice but to go where Ms. Kaz goes). They made some great selections, but the one I want to focus on today is Because Your Daddy Loves You, by Andrew Clements, illustrated by R.W. Alley.

My daughter seems to be really attached to me lately. She loves her daddy. And so, Ms. Kaz thought this would be a great book for us to read together. And it is. The drawings are very nice, and the story is a nice story about how daddies love their little girls. The book is filled with incidents where the daddy could say ______, but instead does ______.

For example, the little girl’s beach ball floats away into the ocean. The daddy could say, “Didn’t I tell you not to play too close to the waves?”. But he doesn’t. Instead, he wades out into the cold water, hurting the little girl’s chances for a baby brother or sister, and retrieves the ball for her.

Or, when the girl wants a piggy-back ride up to bed. Instead of saying, “Oh, I can’t. I’m too sore because I am too old.” Oh, wait, that’s what I would say. Anyhow, you get the idea.

It is a very sweet book, but… It also builds up expectations in kids that their daddies will never say these things, and will always sacrifice for their kids. That’s just not realistic. Not without daddy having a breakdown.

But I do have to admit. A couple times since reading that book, when my instinct has been to tell my daughter, “not now,” or, “maybe some other time”… I’ve gone ahead and done what she’s asked.

(You can purchase Because Your Daddy Loves You at bn.com for just $16.00, hardcover. Guilt and Shipping are free.)