Evan’s day care had an Easter Egg hunt on Friday, though it was held indoors since we had nasty storms blow through on Thursday night (of which more in a bit). What a haul! And what the heck is some of this stuff? Eggs with little cars in them? Eggs with Play-Doh in them? Man. It’s almost becoming a cliche at this point, but they didn’t have stuff like that when I was his age – at least not in Easter Egg form! … Read more
I really miss my best friend. And by that, I mean the little guy I’ve been hanging out with for much of the past two years. Somewhere, and I missed the memo that outlined exactly when this was going to happen, I have ceased to be Evan’s best buddy and have become the Oppressor. I am the chief sayer of NO, the prime minister of Don’t Do That, the executive vice president of Get Down From There, and the man in charge of Put That Back Right Now. I always suffix these things with a “please,” and reward them with a “thank you!” and a “good boy!”, but that doesn’t change anything. I am now the primary setter of limits. I have become Authority incarnate. I’m no longer lovable Dad: I’m a barrier to be rebelled against. … Read more
Here’s someone who’s ready to go to day care!
Evan got up at 5 o’ clock this morning. I tried to buy his silence (so he wouldn’t wake mom) with bananas and oatmeal. I was partially successful. I got him dressed and cleaned up by 6, and then we sat in my room and played with Noah’s Ark critters for a little bit. By 6:15 or so, he got up and started wandering around, clearly a little bit restless. He grabbed his own diaper bag and dragged it to my by the strap. I asked him if he was trying to tell me he wanted to go to day care early – really early, i.e. just after they opened – and he said “Yeah!” I got his coat on him and he started waving and saying “BYE!” to the kitties. 😆
When we got there, Evan’s buddy Jonathan brought him a toy giraffe. Not the same kind of giraffe that hangs out in Evan’s Noah’s Ark, but that’s okay – only Evan did what he does with his own giraffes: he walked up and offered it to me. (He’s sharing like that.) I swear to God, Jonathan just about came unglued, and you could just read his thoughts on his face: I GAVE YOU THAT GIRAFFE. YOU CANNOT JUST GO AND GIVE IT TO A GROWN-UP. WHAT ARE YOU THINKING!!?
I gave Evan the giraffe back so he could give it to Jonathan, and tried to sneak out while he was distracted; even now, Evan still gets upset sometimes when I leave him at day care. I turned around to look behind me as I made my way down the hall – and there he was, watching me go without a problem. He waved and said “BYE DADDY!” – in a tone of voice that was kind of like “You’re dismissed!”
Guess he showed me. Thanks for the giraffe, buddy.… Read more
As part of the fun going on for theLogBook.com’s 20th anniversary, virtually the entire site has gotten a nice little facelift. The code’s a little tighter, and so help me, the look might just be a little cleaner. There are still some minor tweaks to be made, so if you find anything broken, let me know.
Looks like we get an extra smidgeon of the Whoniverse next month: there’s a Sarah Jane Adventures skit planned as part of Red Nose Day (the same charity telethon that brought us The Curse Of Fatal Death ten years ago) in March, guest starring K-9 and none other than Ronnie Corbett. An “old enemy” is also promised. Fun times.
Evan made out like a bandit at his day care’s Valentine’s Day – he came home with heaps of goodies (including some chocolates addressed from Evan to mom!), including some additions to the stuffed horsie collection. I guess that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that we set in motion: Evan gets a blankie horse, he takes it with him to day care, and therefore the assumption is “Evan loves horses!” Well, if he doesn’t now, he probably will before too long…not to fear, there’ll probably still be plenty for him to hang out with at the farm. Sundays will probably become a day that Evan wants me to wake up ASAP so he can go watch me feed horses. Oh boy!
But Evan doesn’t have to leave home to get his four-legged lovin’. … Read more
Blurgh. Evan’s been barfing again, much more explosively than his last bout of the barfies at the beginning of the year. I’m hoping that maybe this is just a recurrence of the same stomach bug, but it worries me that I haven’t been hit yet (and believe me, I’ve been up to my ankles in it, cleaning it up, and all but field-stripping the crib to clean it all up, so I’ve been in physical contact). Evan and I have spent so much of the past three months being sick with one thing or another that I worry that his immune system just hasn’t quit reeling from the punches. Such are the joys of day care: interesting new social situations for Evan and his immune system! 😛
Other than that, day care is going well for Evan; he’s the biggest kid in his “class” – which is the 3-18 month category – so he’s kinda like the king of the babies. (He rotates to a new “class” in March when he turns 18 months.) A few times when I’ve gotten him in the door late enough for it to be morning snack time, I’ve literally seen all the other little ones stop and wait for him to get seated before they resume eating: the boss is here! But he doesn’t seem to be using his size to lord over everyone. If anything, he’s very encouraging and sympathetic: if one of the little ones is crying, Evan can be found patting them on the back, kinda like “Hey buddy, it’s okay.” Where he learned that behavior, unless it was from me picking him up and patting him on the back, I have no idea.
We won’t go into him coming home from day care last week having learned the word “howdy.”
I still seem to be a bit of an oddity in that I’m a dad who looks forward to showing up and picking the kiddo up. I’ve seen and observed other dads there, but some of them are real humdingers – you can tell they’re more eager to drop their child off than to pick them up. I know people have bad days and so on, but we’re talking every single day, there are a couple of guys who seem supremely irritated that they’re having to be involved at all. I go poke my head in the door, look for Evan, and make faces at him – maybe not the manliest thing in some people’s books, but hey, maybe it’s time to redefine that. There are few things I look forward to more than picking him up, because he’s my best buddy right now – which probably just means that daddy needs the kind of meaningful interaction with kids his own age that Evan is getting. 😆 I can’t figure some of these guys out. Sorry the kid’s harshing your buzz, dude, but hey, it’s all about the little ones now, so you might as well make the mental adjustment.
Anyway, hopefully he’ll be feeling better soon – he might be missing a day of day care tomorrow depending on how his tummy’s doing. Though given that the 2009 tornado season apparently begins tomorrow, maybe it’s a good day to hang out at home with dad…… Read more
Shortly before Christmas, my dad and his wife came into town to see Evan, something which really only happens 2-3 times a year for a variety of reasons I won’t go into. This was yet another case – they’re bad about this – where the meeting had been set up less than 24 hours before, and I just didn’t have a chance to pull together anything to give them. Really, though, my dad just wants to see Evan on any given day, so I had them meet me at a restaurant in Alma called the Red Rooster, which is my favorite place to eat (that’s right, as if I wasn’t already enough of a heel for not being ahead of the curve on my Christmas shopping, I made them buy me lunch). I took some food for Evan, including a banana which I fed to him on the spot: Evan and his grandfather both love bananas. I knew my dad would get a kick out of that.
As we were leaving, my dad said that he had some goodie bags, mainly for Evan, and it was some pretty good stuff – books about animals, books about telling time, all sorts of neat stuff which Evan loves (I guarantee I have to read at least one of these animal books a day to him – he demands it). But the biggie was something that I had already seen, and had never expected to see again.
That little red wagon actually used to be mine. I was probably all of 3, 4, maybe 5 years old. I don’t think I’ve seen it in nearly 20 years; I remember at some point spotting it stowed away on an upper shelf in the basement of the house I grew up in, sometime in the ’80s, and the thought never occurred to me at the time that I’d be seeing it again, or that I’d have a reason to. I hadn’t thought about it since then. In fact, I’d forgotten it until I laid eyes on it for the first time in nearly 30 years.
My dad apparently hung on to the little red wagon all these years, got it cleaned up – I don’t remember it ever being this clean, and I wouldn’t put it past him to have had it repainted – and now it belongs to my son. Evan, of course, being the neat freak that he is, keeps the wagon in his bedroom and stows his toys and other goodies away in it. It’s kind of like the mobile toy chest: he can drag it into any room in the house and deploy all kinds of fun all over the place! And yet he always puts it back in there when he’s done, and back to his room it goes. (Where Evan comes by these neat-freak tendencies, I have no idea – it must come from the same place as his height, which is now exactly half of mine.)
Someday I’ll fill my son in on the history behind his first (used) set of wheels. But until then, I just love knowing that he has this now.
Thanks, Dad.… Read more
When I was growing up in the 1970s and ’80s, there was one basic rule in the toy world: Star Wars was king, so if your toy line had to have a chance of success, it had to be in the same basic scale as the Star Wars figures. Things aren’t quite so unified in the modern toy-making or toy-buying world, but it’s neat when it does happen – mixing and matching characters and vehicles and whatnot kinda flexes a kid’s mental storytelling muscles (or at least it did mine). There was some justification for the smaller-scale G.I. Joe guys and the Micronauts and the crew from The Black Hole hanging out on the Death Star. You just had to use your imagination to figure out what that justification was.
So generally speaking, when buying toys for Evan, I keep half an eye open on “compatibility.” It’s not a deal-breaker, but it’s kinda neat when stuff fits/works together. Right after Christmas, I was delighted to see that Evan discovered that the engineer, the monkey and/or the elephant from his little train set could also sit in the driver’s seat of the little jeep and the little truck that he got. Which is cool, you know – you can’t get everywhere by train. The Wonder Pets and their “Fly Boat” are vaguely compatible with all of the above too, though they’re slightly larger than everyone/everything else.
When one of my wife’s cousins sent a big belated Christmas package for Evan in January, I was pretty jazzed to see that the big wrapped gift inside was a big Fisher-Price Noah’s Ark set. All right! More critters! And they can sit on the train or in the driver’s seat too. Well, maybe not the train – it makes noise, and has no volume or mute switch, so mom kinda disappeared the batteries that kept the train running. It can still make its rounds manually via Evan power, though. But without the noises, the train seems to have lost some of its appeal for him.
But that’s okay! The engineer, the monkey, and the little elephant quickly joined the motley crew of Noah’s Ark. Or is it Noah’s? I’ve caught no end of grief for the fact that, as we untangled all of the critters and characters from the ocean of twist-ties that held them in place and handed the critters off to Evan, I told him “Here’s Moses!” Wait, what? Well, he looked a little more like a Moses than a Noah when I first saw him in my perpetually sleep-deprived state. I was quickly corrected on that account, but when Evan eagerly added the train characters to Noah’s Ark, it certainly raised some other questions: why are there suddenly three elephants and only one monkey? And who the heck is this engineer? (Well hello, doesn’t someone have to keep the boat running smoothly? I mean, if all the animal species on the planet are riding this thing…yeah, I want an engineer. Dare I say…a miracle worker.)
And of course Noah (Moses? Moses!?) and his buds can drive the little jeep or truck. Evan has already decided that since the pickup truck is the same color as Noah’s Ark, it’s Noah’s Truck. Well, he got the animals to the boat somehow…wait, I’ve got it. While we’re rewriting the entire Old Testament to include the combustion engine and the Wonder Pets, Moses can be the driver of the truck. Um…and the engineer…whoever he is…drives the jeep. With the monkey. And as for the Wonder Pets? This whole boat gig is all about saving animals. Well, if you’ve watched Wonder Pets at all, somebody’s gotta save the baby animals. See? Daddy’s got this whole thing worked out about how to mix and match the backstories of all of one’s toys.
Well, okay. Maybe this is one case where toy compatibility has caused a few more problems than it’s helped along. (Moses!!??!) In the meantime, Evan’s having a blast, and that’s all that counts.… Read more
Here’s the status report on everyone after a round of doctors’ visits yesterday:
Evan: has pneumonia. This is kind of scary, but the symptoms aren’t screaming worst-case scenario just yet. But it’s bad enough listening to the little guy being a heavy mouth-breather on the baby monitor. Obviously he’s out of day care for a while. He still has an appetite, however, so that’s a good sign; the moment he doesn’t feel like eating, we have a problem. We’re not looking at hospitalizing him…yet.
Evan’s daddy: has a big honkin’ sinus infection and an infection in the left eye. Something got into my eye on Sunday at the farm and I rubbed at it pretty relentlessly on Monday. By Tuesday night, the eye was almost swollen shut, and it still hurt like hell. Apparently these two things got together and made a big mess in the middle, so the infections are related. I’m a mouth breather too right now, a very dehydrated one, and I’m having to put antibiotic eyedrops in every two hours. The problem there: I can’t stand to have anything come into physical contact with my eyes. Opening my eyes underwater? Forget it. Contact lenses? No way. Getting to where I can routinely put these eye drops in has been a sheer-force-of-will thing, because, y’know, I’d like to keep the eye.
Evan’s mom: is pretty frazzled because we both keep getting/staying sick. Sorry, I don’t plan things this way. Given that a month ago I had an upper respiratory infection that threatened to turn into pneumonia, and Evan had a sinus infection, obviously we’re just trading illnesses at this point because he and I are usually all over each other when he gets home from his part days at day care. So I’m having to keep my distance from him, so my wife is having to stay home from work with both of our sick asses.
If there’s a silver lining to any of this, it’s the fact that apparently I haven’t put as much weight back on as I’ve thought – either that or I put it back on and lost it again. Yay me?
Hopefully things will start looking up soon. I hate hearing the little guy feeling bad; and despite that, he’s trying so hard to be his normal happy self. It makes me really self-conscious about feeling too bad about my own predicament. I want to be more like Evan when I grow up.… Read more
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