Hair

Day 1 of my wife in Disneyland and me getting my daughter ready all alone this morning. I get her ready every morning actually, but after she's dressed, I'll send her to her mom for a hair fixing. And this morning I learned something that I already knew. I don't know how to do things with a little girls hair. Actually, I don't know how to do things with grown girls hair either, but that's not the point. The point is that this morning, I learned that I can't turn my little girls hair into pigtails, nor can i make a simple top-of-head ponytail that my wife usually favors.

Of course, this took me a few extra minutes this morning while my lovely daughter patiently waited with her head down for me to try to do something useful with her hair to keep it out of her eyes. Luckily for me, there was a little headband gizmo that I found to push her hair back, Of course by the time I got her to my parents house, she'd turned it from a headband for hair into a Greek style leaf headband. Or for you fellow geekers out there, Geordi La Forge style pink sunglasses. I don't know why I bothered putting that in her hair, as she'll take both hands, and push her hair back and tell me, "I got it, Daddy." She's only two and she's better at fixing her hair than I am. It must be a girl thing. 'Cause it sure ain't a Daddy thing.

Hakuna Matata

Today these two are leaving for Disneyland as I type this. Their tickets were bought by her parents, and the room is paid for by them also. It's the only way my in-laws can get my son to go with them. Pay the way for him and his mother.

He has decided that he will be riding, in an order that keeps changing. Pirates, Matterhorn, Nemo, Big Thunder (which he used to call FAST choo-choo, I liked that), and the race cars. I'm sure there's going to be a lot of running back and forth, and I hope my in-laws can keep up with him, or they're gonna miss a lot. I know I'm gonna miss a lot. But I do have our daughter, who is ever so adorable.

Plus, awesome bonus, she's tons-o-fun until about 7:30 when she gets tired and wants to go to bed. So she'll be asleep by 8 tonight, which means I'll get to enjoy all 3 hours of LOST tonight. That'll be very relaxing for me. Well, not to relaxing because I'm way to into that show.

Anyhoo, This marks his fourth trip to the Happiest Place on Earth. He's the same kid that just turned 5 at the beginning of this month. I think that I've only been 6 or 7 times total. At the rate he's going, he'll pass that mark sometime in second grade. I just want to go to the A's game today, it's a beautiful day for a ball game. But duty calls. Gotta work...bummer.

Pomp and Circumstance

Well, my son is now a graduate. It's pre-school, but still a graduate. It was an interesting ceremony where they wore little mortarboards that they made themselves, of course it was extra windy outside when they were trying to get them on, so they came marching in holding their hats on their heads.They were in two lines and the teacher had all their diplomas in a little basket and she would pull one out, read the name on it, have the kid come over to her so the parents could take pictures, then send them back in line. Our little guy was the last to be called, but not because we come so late in the alphabet. What supposedly happened is the teacher forgot to put our sons diploma in the correct basket, so they thought they were all done, and we informed her that T hadn't received his yet. She was very sorry that this happened, so we took his picture with some other kids diploma in his hand and she found later that what happened is that she had placed his diploma in with another class. He didn't get the same color as the rest of his classmates. But he did graduate, which I was slightly concerned about when his name wasn't called.
So next year is Kindergarten. We're not sure where he'll be going, as we have an inter-district transfer and that means that we won't be learning which school he's going into until the second week of August or so. That's gonna be kind of rough. We hope to get our first choice, obviously, but if that doesn't happen we have about 5 backups all around the same area.

He only has a couple weeks of T-Ball left also, then it's a open and free summer. We have no plans as a family for any vacations until August when we're going to be going to Yosemite again. That should be fun. Of course, my wife's taking T down to Disneyland with her parents again. This marks the fourth time that T has been to Disneyland. I've only been like 6 times myself. He's going to have more trips than I do and he's only going to be about 7 when he does it. But while their gone, I might take E to the County Fair. That'll be right up there with Disneyland for fun times. Llamas, sheep, crocheted stuff. Yup, it's gonna be a wild party atmosphere.

The Birthday Party

T had his first b-day party with other littluns on Saturday. We took them to the local bowling alley and that was a brilliant idea. Not only because it was 100 degrees outside and air conditioned inside. Not only because there was hardly any setup and practically no cleanup after. Not only because we didn't really have to supervise most of the kids. And not only because we got an extra pizza for free out of it.

It was because of the bowling skillz of the 5 year olds. They were awesome. There was also a little almost 3 year old girl there who is a family friend that did really well. T, by the way, shot an 81 in his first ever game bowling. For those of you keeping score, that's basically as well as I did my first game back playing with my wife a couple months ago. One of my Tballers bowled exactly like Fred Flinstone, except he wasn't barefoot. He would hold the ball behind him with one hand and just run up to the line and roll it down the lane. He did pretty well. Some of the kids had their parents help them bowl, as they weren't totally sure how to do it. The Birthday Boy? He didn't need any help. His form wasn't what you'd call fundamental, but he got the job done. His method of bowling was to take the ball in both hands and hold it at his chest. He then ran towards the lane and right before he would cross the line, he'd do a double handed shot put of the ball out into the lane. A couple feet later the ball would come crashing down and head at the pins. After the second time through the people, he found that the scoreboard would play little animation clips to show what was happening down at the end of the lane. His favorite one was when a jet flew overhead and dropped bombs down onto the pins and destroyed all but two. The two left were a split. So it wasn't the ideal bowling situation, but he loved watching that jet drop the bombs. Maybe we could watch reruns of Desert Storm.

He's graduating from Pre-School on Thursday, so I'll be back with updates after that one. I'm not sure exactly what's going to happen, as the teacher is being pretty secretive about the whole thing. But it's supposed to last an hour or so, then there's going to be activities that one of the parents has to stay and help with. It won't be me. I'd like to, because it gets me out of my office for a while, and my office isn't very impressive at all, more like a glorified 60's era classroom. Complete with sea foam green bookshelves. Seriously, they're right in front of me. It's awful.

Hurt

She finally drew blood. Last night Little E was destroying T's train setup. This wasn't sitting well with him and he was trying to collect enough pieces to move forward with it. In his haste he didn't notice his little sister pick up a fairly heavy train and, from no more than 2 feet away, throw it with all her might and that thing got him square in the top of the head. He started screaming, I swear I saw her smile, and so the discipline started. I took her to her room and sat her in her crib while her brother ran to his mom. We got his Little Miss Helpful (thanks Loeffler's!!) and he started to feel better.

It wasn't until later that night when he and I were going out to get the mail that I noticed that he had some jelly like substance in his hair. I thought it was from his Little Miss Helpful cold pack, because we keep that in the fridge to maintain it's coolness, but it turned out to be a pretty nasty cut on his head. After the tub it is fine, and there are no issues to worry about, but man, didn't expect her to be the first to draw blood. Never saw that one coming.

Disease

About a week ago, my son came home from T-ball practice doing fine and loving life, but complaining that his tummy hurt. He claimed off and on to be fine, so I had him take it easy. Later that night we were playing out in the front yard and it came time to go into the house. T didn't make it more than about 6 steps inside before unloading most of his dinner and lunch all over the Pergo. Luckily for us, most of it hit the Pergo, and not the carpet, as that would have been disastrous to clean up. He said that he felt better, and we assumed that he'd eaten to much or it was a result of an incident earlier that day when he ran behind his sister while she was swinging and got plowed in the stomach.

Turns out, that was wrong. As he was laying in bed that night we learned that he hadn't lost all his food earlier, as it started coming out again. We got him to the toilet almost in time to save a portion of our carpet and he spent the rest of the night up and down in bed requesting fresh wet washcloths to help soothe his sickness. I felt horrible for him, as he'd never had the stomach flu before that he could remember. There was a time when he was almost 2 that he caught some type of horrible 12 hour plague and passed it around to all members of the family, I got it, my wife got it, our parents all got it, even my Aunt got it. But other than that, we've been blessed with good stomach health. He's had his colds, but who hasn't? So this was his first real run in with that bug.

The morning after found me at home with him and his sister, I gave him the loveseat to use as the 'sick couch' and he just laid there all day with his trash can next to him and his blankets and dogs. We just watched TV that day, there was 3 Handy Manny's, some Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, a few Dirty Jobs, a Mythbusters, Go, Diego, Go!, and The Little Mermaid 1 & 2. Then I went in to work for a couple hours and my wife came home and there were more Handy Manny's, and a new cartoon he discovered called Krypto, about Krypto the Superdog. There's also a cat that can fly and I don't know what was really going on there, but really after the first 8 minutes or so, I fell asleep.

Thankfully the next day found him better, his fever was gone, and he wanted to play again. Sunday he was completely recovered and ready to go out and run around. Of course, he seemed to miss the sympathy a lot because there were a few times when he ran up to me asking for the washcloth on his face, with which I countered, "Just go into the bathroom and splash water on your face in the sink." This wasn't the best idea, because his aim isn't always that great. Although it was nice to have the wetness on the bathroom floor just be water.

But a week removed from this, no one else got sick and we're all thankful and healthy. Of course, lost in this was another concert that was missed. I had tickets for Glen Phillips and my wife has her gallbladder out, I have tickets for Jerry Douglas and T gets sick. The lesson I'm learning is not to buy tickets for concerts again, because if I do? Someone's gonna get something bad.

Like a Surgeon

Two things, one, I just found that when I deleted a draft of another post, my count went down, so that last one was number 62, this is 63 here. It's also unspectacular.

Two, holy crap.

When I'm Sixty-Four

Well, this is going to be a bit of a self-congratulatory post for me. It's number 63, which is an odd number. That's a delicious pun there, folks. But not because of that, but it marks a number far past 50, which is honestly something I didn't think I'd make. This whole thing started as a way to keep myself occupied for a few minutes during the day and not much more. I'm discovering that I'm not as open as some others are, but that's probably because I'm just a guy. There may be inner-conflict between the old id and ego, but they have that super-ego to keep them in check and buffer those types of things from the world wide webs.

I don't know what the special material is for number 63. I know that gold is the 50th or something, and there's paper in there and one that's silver. Maybe I'll make it something spectacular, like Nylon. So happy 63rd post to me! I'm gonna buy myself a poly-blend t-shirt. Maybe with a zippy saying on it. Like, "63! That's Neat-O Fun!" ... or maybe not. Of course the more complicate thing for this is to keep finding songs that have applicable titles. Well song titles that aren't extremely obscure. So look forward to no. 64 baby. It's gonna be a goodun.