Blog posts are scarce, but all is not lost. I’ve started a real job at Microsoft and have been a busy geek lately. More to come for sure, dear readers. Bear with me!
A new year
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Category Archives: Family News
The Year Kenny Loggins Ruined Christmas
Well it seems that we just might have a Christmas after all, despite my best efforts to let the children see all of their gifts ahead of time. In the spirit of the season, I think we should all realize that it IS possible to have a worse Christmas. Witness the tragedy of Hyperbole and a Half’s childhood re-enactment of the story of baby Jesus. Trust me, you won’t regret it.
My god, Kenny Loggins? I was crying by that point….
Xmasleaks
It seems that after a very successful run in the parenting game Nikki and I have had our first breach of security. It’s a huge embarrassment for our organization as you can imagine. A debriefing on this incident follows:
I did some almost last-minute shopping last night and returned home late. The lads were still up with Nikki, so I left the parcels in the van and went inside. After we finally wound the night down, Nikki and I were so tired we decided to leave the gifts in the van for the night. (you can easily see where this is going)
This morning Nik stayed home from work to take Jordy to an appointment, and was taking the boys to daycare for the duration so they wouldn’t be bored. She got their coats on, and told them to get into the van ahead of her. Needless to say when she got to the van the boys’ eyeballs were practically popping out of their heads from ogling the skateboards and video games that didn’t even have shopping bags to conceal their very identifiable shapes.
Nikki realized what had happened, and bowed her head in defeat. The only thing that really has saved us so far is as far as we know they haven’t put it together that one of these things was actually on their Santa list. Incredibly Quinn still believes, which for a kid as logical and rational as him is rather a surprise.
We went to Bayshore a few days ago and Cael wanted to go and see the mall Santa there. Quinn would have none of it, and went so far as to call him a “fake Santa”, and mentioning that he would not be tricked this year. I bent down and mentioned that while he may not believe, other kids in the line (including his brother, somehow) probably still did believe, and that maybe he could keep his opinions to himself for a time. His muttered response?
“That guy isn’t the real Santa. The real Santa lives on the North Pole, this is just a guy in a suit.”
So, Quinn is for the moment still hanging on to it. Cael as you already know believes with the clear-eyed conviction of a zealot.
Time will tell if this morning’s discovery will disturb this faith.
Cael’s Christmas List for Santa
It seems that our youngest child has been on a roll lately, thought I would share some of the fun with you.
Cael on eating pizza:
I would like one piece of pizza because I am fit and thin
Cael on receiving his new hockey team toque (which he hasn’t taken off his head in the three days since):
Mmmm, it still has that new toque smell.
Cael giving a mall Santa his modest list of Christmas gift wishes:
An EXACT mannequin of himself
A jetpack
A skateboard half-pipe
The ability to levitate.
Yes, of course, Santa has a whole WHACK of extra Cael mannequins just LAYING (literally) around. These don’t sound like normal 6 year old demands, do they? What does a new toque smell like? Will I look back on these things later and hit myself in the forehead and say “It was all right there, why didn’t I see the signs he was starting to display super-villain tendencies?”.
LEGO, Star Wars, and Christmas
LEGO, Star Wars and Christmas, easily the holy trinity for me and the boys, this fits into my geek psyche like magic: The LEGO Death Star Christmas Tree ornament. Fantastic, and since we are decorating the tree tonight, maybe I can talk Quinn into finding these pieces to make one. Way cool.
Via Boing Boing
Kids Hockey Update
While Jordy is busy working out and practicing for her role on the biathlon team for her Cadet Corps (I’m fairly sure I might eventually regret training a teenager how to ski and shoot a gun at the same time, but that’s another story altogether), the boys spend their weekends playing hockey. Lots of hockey. I might have mentioned this before, but it’s something you have to really experience to understand how much time this all takes. The best part of it is that it’s a really fun thing to do, and the boys frigging love it.
This is Quinn’s second year in hockey and he’s doing fantastically well for a kid that learned to skate at the beginning of last year. Really well. So well in fact that the coach recently contacted me to ask if I was interested in Quinn being “affiliated” with a Novice C team. Affiliated in this sense means “we noticed that you aren’t spending enough time at a hockey rink every weekend and are going to fix that”. We are Novice C Development at the moment, and it seems that the reward for doing really well in hockey is: much more hockey. Wow. Needless to say, I’m pretty much bursting with pride over this. We haven’t started the extra practices yet, but stay tuned for further posts about this to come. Still haven’t figured out just how the heck we are going to physically and mentally get to do all of this hockey, but we will figure it out somehow.
As for Cael, well you could say that he is, ah, uniquely positioned to have a fairly bright future in minor hockey if he decides to pursue it. He is in Initiation-level hockey, the age of the kids is in the 5 to 6 range. Cael of course has two things going for him in this situation. First, his birthday places him as one of the oldest kids on the team. As for the second advantage, I will leave it to you to see if you can figure out what it is from this blurry iPhone pic.
Yes. It’s the fact that he has orange skate laces. Never mind the kid beside him with the red laces, those won’t help.
Also, it seems that there might be another advantage in the fact that the entire team EXCEPT for Cael was caught in a gamma ray that has caused them to shrink a little more each week. Very tragic, as you can see Cael is the only normal-sized child on the whole team. He regularly packs the entire team into his hockey bag for fun and carries them out of the dressing room, to everyone’s amusement.
Seriously, what the heck am I going to do with this kid? I can literally see other hockey dads look at him and cringe a little as they mentally imagine what might happen when these kids manage to develop some speed on their skates and they accidentally tangle with the Caelstrom. It’s not going to be pretty.