I went into the weekend with moderate plans. Tidy up the bedrooms, the kids’ play area, and my own desk.
For once I made it.
There was plenty more to be done, but I did play a lot with the kids.
Once in a while, I will guess “enough” correctly.
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A piano in the dark
About eight months ago, a woman broke into our house while we stayed with our in-laws.
She got to live out of the cold for about a week before I found her sleeping on some sofa cushions in the living room.
Aside from breaking into the back door, she did no damage to the place, and was quite good at making sure the neighbors on both sides had no idea she was there.
However, she did take the risk to hook up our little casio keyboard and presumably played it a little.
I can’t say I’m fond of the incident, but it’s odd what your memory will latch onto months after an event. I hope she will get a handle on whatever demons are keeping her on the streets.
We all should have a little music in our lives.
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Lefty?
Our boy has started using a spoon to eat.
And that’s when I realized how much I was hoping he would be a lefty.
Cause every time he uses his right hand I feel sad.
My wife says there is still hope, that he occasionally uses his left hand.
That’s easy for her to say, she already got one kid following her footsteps.
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Disney on the Cheap
While our girl still prefers to go to Disneyland, I’ve noticed that she and her brother seem to get quite a bit of joy playing around the house or in our small excursions around town.
If my eyes aren’t lying to me, rolling around the backyard in a plastic wagon garnered as many laughs and giggles as hanging around the magic kingdom.
Going to a neighborhood park is not an all encompassing “total experience” like going to an amusement park, but in the moment, I don’t think it’s that much of a dropoff for the kids.
Not that I plan on shortchanging the kiddos on resort experiences that we can afford, but I don’t think the marginal ROI is nearly as much as the marketing hype would like us to believe.
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To the New Jersey Nets
At the end of the night, my daughter insisted on one last painting session.
As I clumsily tried to paint a rose, I started to slip in and out of the world of dream.
In one snippet, I dreamt she was traded to the New Jersey Nets. After all, I had spent much of this year following all the crazy transactions in the NBA.
I felt quite sad. She seemed quite a bit too young to leave the house.
Fortunately, there was a misshapen rose that needed to be painted welcoming me back to reality.
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Buzz Cut
A few weeks ago, my wife got tired of the boy’s sweaty head after every nap so she cut his hair.
She used my clippers and just buzzed it with the second shortest extension.
Apparently, he had fun, and I was told that when he looked in the mirror, he called out “ba ba”.
But I miss his long hair, even if he doesn’t.
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Exercise or Daily blogging
I’ve decided to reassess the daily blog every solar event this year and this solstice I realized that if I had to pick one item every morning, I really need to pick exercise over blogging.
So who knows if this gets more sporadic going forward, but I thought I’d put it out there.
Daily blogging has been a good route for self expression over the past nine months – I’ve noticed a lot of ideas getting stuck in the noggin over the past week where I stopped sitting down and typing first thing in the morning.
Returning to the theme of tradeoffs, the only way I can do both blogging and exercise in the morning is to go to sleep early, and that makes for a pretty dull nightlife, if not outright going to sleep before the kids. And that really isn’t a great scenario either.
So we’ll see where this goes, but seriously, I need to do a minimal amount of exercise, this bag ‘o’ meat ain’t getting younger!
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Sorting out our library
After half a decade of buying cheap books at the friends of the library store, we now have enough volumes to fill up six slots of the Ikea Kallax shelves. So the girl and I sorted out our own private library this weekend.
The first division we made was fiction and non-fiction, which were then sorted the rest out by author’s last name. Apart from confusing the illustrators and authors, and a child’s tendency to get distracted it went really smoothly. Some highlights from the exercise included:
- She immediately decided talking animals were unreal and they all went into the fiction pile.
- Human slice of life books generally ended up in the non-fiction pile.
- ABC books ended up in the non-fiction pile, except for one which had talking animals. I guess she takes linguistics pretty seriously.
- Maurice Sendak’s In the Night Kitchen also ended up in the non-fiction pile. Even though most of the contents are quite fantastical, my daughter pointed out the book is a dream sequence, thus for real. Somehow, Where the Wild Things Are did not get the same treatment and went into fiction.
- A book on Noah’s Ark ended up in the non-fiction pile. I thought about discussing the myth of Gilgamesh but thought better of it.
- An illustrated copy of the Night Before Christmas also ended up in non-fiction. I pointed out the drawing of flying reindeer, but she responded that they must have flown in the past. We have never pushed the Santa myth (all our Christmas presents come from humans) but I decided this was not the time to do a hard debunk of old Saint Nick.
In all, it was a fun exercise. It was quite interesting to go through all the books we’ve collected over the past few years, and even better to plumb the depths of a five year old mind.
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Until it doesn’t
You take technology for granted until it doesn’t work. Or in this case, when Hostgator is suddenly not loading up and you’re wondering if your blog post will upload.
Then you’re get frustrated. After which, you take a deep breath and remind yourself that this is the first time its glitched like this.
Unfortunately for them, that means the next time this happens, it isn’t the “first time”. But if their second chance is a long time from now, well that’s technology.
We’d like it to be perfect all the time – as it should be – but the real world is a little messier than that.
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HEMA Youtube
For the past week, I’ve gotten sucked into a corner of educational youtube that is focused on european medieval arms and martial arts, also called HEMA (historical european martial arts).
The channels are all quite fun to watch, some favorites being scholagladiatoria, Modern History TV, Lindybeige, Skallagrim, Shadiversity, and Tod’s Workshop.
But then, I just realized that I haven’t practiced my tai chi for the past week. I’ve traded real life for the much easier (and amusing) point and click universe of internet television.
In a world before children, I had the free time to have it all. Now, life really is zero sum game. If I’m living vicariously, that means I’m not living in reality.