It's been a while, here's some thoughts

Tyler is right here on my lap watching me type.  So I have to be a little careful about what I say about him.  He is is really good kid and I love to give him kisses and he is very nice when he is patient and works hard. 

Now he is slipping and falling off my lap, so I can tell you that as a 2 year old, he's kind of a jerk. 

When you learn about what kids are going through in their 'Terrible twos', their behavior makes a lot of sense.  They have essentially been living in a world that, as near as they can tell, they are in complete control of.  When they want things, they get them, and any perturbations from this norm are probably just forgotten.  A two year old, on the other hand, is slowly learning that he is an entity, and the world around him spins with its own rules, rules he is often not going to enjoy.  It would bum me out, too. 

I consider it my duty to frustrate Tyler at least once a day, if not many more. I figure denying him something he wants is just part of the process of teaching him things.  I figure when he gets old and reads this, he'll probably be really frustrated with me, but tough noogies, kid.  If I didn't teach you these things, you'd be completely insufferable, as opposed to the regularly insufferable that I'm sure you've achieved at whatever age you find this.  It's part of the learning process.  Deal. 

Anyway, I figure that whatever I'm doing has to be working pretty well so far, because he's turning into a pretty great kid.  He's super curious about things, fussy, but certainly not insufferably so, and is quickly becoming a candidate for those great one-liners they always got from 'kids say the darnedest things.'  Lets try a few:

How old is daddy?:  One
How old is mommy?: Two
How old is Tyler?:  Four...um, Two!
Where does our food come from?: Ummm...the Pizza man!

That last one isn't true, by the way.  We cook. 

My recent favorite has been from last night.  I was singing him a random song I had been listening to during the day.  Obedear by Purity Ring.  The chorus goes like this:

Oh, but dear the sky is low.
Gather up your harm and gods
with grateful arms. 
Oh, but dear the sky is low...

Well as I was singing, he sits bolt upright from laying on my chest and says to me, with wide eyes: "Sky is low!  We were on the plane with the clouds!  Sky is low!"  He had evidently just figured out how the clouds had been so close to the plane window.  I did my best to explain how the plane goes up near the clouds, and he settled back down, but that's some pretty inspired science from a kid who was about to go to sleep. 

Tyler is in the 'transition' classroom now, which is theoretically a transition between the 'day care' of the younger kids and the 'almost kindergarten' of the older classes.  He seems to be fitting in pretty well, being a fan of running around, playing with sand, and sitting and reading books, some of the primary activities of his class.  I've gotten to join a couple of times.  I got to hang out in his classroom one morning and started reading him a book.  Before too long I had gathered an impromptu circle of all the kids in the class and was reading to them about things that go. 

I also got to visit for 'splash day', which has started up again during the heat of the summer.  The difference between splash day for toddlers and two year olds is primarily that the two year olds don't want to stay on the splash pad.  There is a big playground out there, one they don't often get to visit, and they have as much desire to explore as they do to get hosed down by the teachers.  Though the hosing is also a pretty big draw. 

I 'got' to travel last week, which Jessie always considers a vacation for me (and she's not entirely wrong) but Tyler is old enough to start missing people and telling us about it, which means that I got a couple of videos sent to me of Tyler saying he was sad because he misses his daddy, which breaks your heart right in two, let me tell you. 

We got to spend the fourth of July in Florida with the Florida family, and Tyler thought the fireworks were pretty neat, though he did manage to burn himself on a sparkler.  Does that sound familiar to any parents here?  First son burning fingers on hot sparkler?  Maybe it's genetic.  Anyway, we at a lot of food (Tyler liked the beans) and also got to go to the Miami Zoo, which was pretty horrible.  Oh, the zoo was fine, but it was really, really hot, and we couldn't get Tyler to take a nap while we were there, so he got pretty grumped up.  He thought the giraffes and elephants were pretty neat, but we had to head home in the early afternoon because of excessive grumpitude.  He napped on the way home and was much more personable after that. 

We also spent a lot of time in Aunt Shannon's pool, where Tyler mostly just tried to kill himself over and over.  He was better than he has been, and was a champion at shimmying along the wall, but he was still a little too squirmy for his own good while we were holding him.  He was a big fan of sitting on floaty things and getting pushed around, as well as getting surprised by Johnny and William.  Also enjoyed doing big daddy-assisted slam dunks in the floating basketball hoop.  But since he was still not holding his breath or being safe, Jess signed him up for some basic swim lessons.  It's not super-critical for us, because we don't have a pool, but it would be nice to let him learn more about holding his breath and being safe around water.  It would at least make it easier to hold him. 

I've been playing more video games recently.  Which is odd, because for a while I wasn't playing them at all.  I was practicing painting, or piano, or drawing, or something else 'productive'.  It's become frustrating, though, to spend all my time on things that are essentially just practice.  I'm not yet good enough at those things to have fun just sitting down and playing piano, or drawing, or something like that.  Every once in a while I want to just have some fun.  Ergo, video games. 

I'm trying to loose weight.  Well, that's not true.  Not really.  I've long held that the scale is not my best metric for monitoring my health, after I stared doing more exercise and lost size but gained weight, presumably in these massive guns of mine (kiss, kiss).  Regardless, I measured at 236 at the end of the 4th of July vacation, and that is too much.  I've started monitoring my food intake in an attempt to see where my weaknesses are, and so far I think I'm doing pretty good, with the monitoring, if not with the weight loss, that takes time.  I don't think of it as a diet, though, those end.  I'm trying to create a formula for selecting the things that I eat that will keep me healthy and satisfied over the long term.  That's also called a 'diet', but it's the version of the word that botanists use.  I like that one better.  The main problem so far has been that I'm still pretty hungry a lot.  If anyone has any suggestions for food that keeps you full with a low number of calories, I'm all ears.  I'm eating a lot of tuna, though. 

I mostly did this because I realized my favorite thing about the blog is going back and reading my old entries.  So this is an entry that will, someday, be old, and I'll read it and enjoy it.  Hopefully the rest of you do as well. 

-N

Summer Fun

Yes. We have been busy. Blogging is feeling more like a winter sport, more like watching tv, play video games and cooking in doors. But let you think I've forgotten to blog, or that I might be working too hard to blog (ha!), a brief photo update.

In no particular order, we have:
Taken Mom and Dad to their first Mariners game.
Been to the Olympic National Forest to visit friends from Pittsburgh
Gone camping in the Cascades
Not killed everything in the garden
Gone hiking- even once with Mom and Dad
Gotten a lot of sunshine.

It's good.

A little update from the Boonies..

Seems like this blog has lost some attention since the principle participants are now nearly neighbors.  I just wanted to make a note about our current circumstances before it totally dries up.

As you know, we live near but definitely not in Seattle.  We are actually in the officially rural part of both King and Snohomish Counties.  Our closest community, Duvall, is clearly a Redmond/Microsoft commuting complex but we live across the old 2-lane road from a dairy farm. We all have a couple of acres, we have 4, 2 of which are dedicated to a stream run-off protected area.  Some of the neighbors raise chickens, one keeps bees, we're very much in the country.

It has been a habit of mine to wake before Connie and walk down to the road for my morning newspaper (you know: sheets of paper with stories and pictures new everyday...).  I always keep an eye out for 4 legged neighbors.  I'm never disappointed in that I almost always see some bunnies, often some deer and rarely, the coyote family.  This morning was special.

I started down the driveway just below the house on the relatively long straight-away.  Around the distant corner came something smoothly running right up the middle of the road, straight at me.  Seemed about the size of a dog and for a moment I began to fear I was going to confront a coyote with a grudge about recent fireworks or something.  Still coming, I'm hard to miss. At about 50 feet I speak up loudly, "Who are you?". Ears flick forward, I recognize a small deer! Still trotting along, it comes right to me and stops. A fawn, big eyes, wet fur, nothing but legs, I am close enough to pet it. I sort of bend or bow to it, it gives me another moment of regard, then continues its trot up the hill to go past the greenhouse and the kitchen. I search for a worried or possible hostile parent, but see nothing on the rest of my walk save the usual collection of morning feeding rabbits. 

I know most of us have heard that deer are sort of a modern plague but they charm us here and haven't done any apparent garden damage to change my opinion yet.

Today I got my personalized Washington license plate for the Soobie: XAK IMD.  Feels like we're really settling in.  If only the Mariners could get it together....