I’m Not a Slacker

Today I woke up wanting to do something different and I decided on taking Gavin to The Magic House. 
He’s never been there before so I looked up their website and
discovered they have a special play area for toddlers and infants and I
glanced at their hours and saw that they open at 9:30 am on
Fridays.  We show up around 10:30 and the place is vacant and then
I see that the hours I was looking at were Summer hours, during school
they open at noon.

Not wanting to sit in the parking lot for 2 hours I try to think of
somewhere else to go in the meantime.  I settled on visiting Powder Valley Nature Area
which is just  10 minutes away.  We go through the nature
center but there isn’t much for Gavin to do there so he head out for a
hike in the woods.  I picked a 1/3 mile paved nature trail for us
to take and Gavin did superb!  He walked the whole way by himself,
I didn’t even have to hold his hand.  He did stop a lot, which is
good, but most of the stops were so he could put acorns in his mouth,
which is bad.  After a while he seemed to get bored of trying to
eat the acorns but he wanted to carry them all.  He would have one
in each hand and then he would see more so he would drop the two he had
and pick up two more.

After hiking the trail we went back to The Magic House and saw our
friends Mae and Narnia leaving.  She said that during the week
they open at 10:30 for toddlers only.  In other words, we could
have stayed there and played but I’m kinda glad we went to the nature
area since it was too nice a day to play inside all day anyway. 

We said our goodbyes and went inside to play.  The first thing
Gavin does is run to the sand table and eats a handful of sand. 
After getting most of it out of his mouth we moved onto other
things.  We played for over two hours running around and opening
doors and climbing stairs. I think he really liked climbing the stairs
and walking over a narrow beam which led to some bumpy stairs that he
would scoot down and then crawl over some big holes in the floor. 
He did that around 3-4 times.  After a bit I wanted to explore
some other areas and went to the giant electrostatic generator
they have.  I hold Gavin with one arm and touch the machine with
the other and it builds up a static charge that will make your hair
stand up.  I was trying to get Gavin’s hair to stand up but he
just got a haircut the other day so there wasn’t much to work
with.  While this was going on, Gavin squirms a bit and my hand
slips off the generator causing a huge spark to discharge all the
electric at once into my hand.  I could not believe how much it
HURT, when we left about 30 minutes later, my wrist was still hurting!

It was a pretty good time and I was glad he could find some stuff to
keep himself occupied.  Of course his  favorite thing was the
car mockup where he could sit and turn a steering wheel and press
buttons on the dash.   He actually started crying when I told
him we had to leave and eat lunch. (more…)

Well I went to my first hockey game in almost two years.  Was the
wait worth it, I’m not so sure.  I know it was just an exhibition
game but I wasn’t too impressed with the quality  of play the
Blues put on the ice.

Some of the new rules seem pretty good.  I’m starting to like the
idea of keping the goalies out of the corners and I really like the new
icing rule where the team penalized can’t make a line change, that
should speed up the flow since most times teams ice the puck just to
get a chance to swap tired players.  One rule change I hate is the
dumb shootout to settle tie games.  I love the excitment of a
penalty shot in regulation but shootouts are a horrible way to settle a
game thats been played for 60 minutes. it takes about 10 minutes to do
a quick shootout so just let them play hockey.

I bought Gavin a hockey puck while I was there and I can’t wait until
he is able to sit in one place for an hour so I can take him to a game,
I know he will love it.  We went to The Mills the other day to
watch them practice and he seemed to have a fun time watching them
skate and shoot the puck, for about 15 minutes and the he wanted to run
around.

In other news I’ve had some computer repair work coming my way. 
It takes me much longer to turn them around than I would like since I
can only work on them while Gavin is asleep, but at least its
something.  I’m actually thinking about taking a part-time call
center tech job for a few months for extra cash, (gotta get me a new
projector TV)  just trying to figure out how I could work it into
my schedule. (more…)

Gavin and I went to a Parents as Teachers playgroup yesterday and he
seemed to have a lot of fun, and of course, I was the only adult male
there. Gavin seemed to have a lot of fun, especially with the rocker
boat.  It was a tiny speedboat with a steering wheel, throttle
lever and other things.  He probably sat in there rocking back and
forth for 20 minutes.

I know no two babies develop the same but Gavin seems to play a lot
different than most other kids in these groups, and I don’t mean in a
“my kid is sooo smart and advanced” way either.  Most of the other
kids are running around with each other taking balls and putting them
in hoops, stacking blocks and laying on the floor screaming and
crying.  Gavin runs around flirting with the moms and ignoring the
kids, shouting out the name of everything in the room and never ever
(knock on wood) throws a tantrum.  I play with him to try and get
him to stack blocks but he just doesn’t feel like it.  He will
take the second block, place it on top of the first but before he lets
go he says “NO!” and throws the second block on the floor.  It
seems so funny to me because it seems like he is saying, “look here
buddy, both you and I know that I can stack this block if I really
wanted to, now leave me alone”  I also work with him on a toy we
have where you take the balls and drop them in a hole in the top and
the balls turn on lights and come out the bottom to do it again. 
Gavin doesn’t seem interested in playing the ball game.  He just
figured out where the switches are that turn the lights and noises on,
so he sticks his arm down the hole and presses the switches.

Another thing that bothers me is that he still hasn’t grown out of the
“everything goes in the mouth” phase.  I can’t let him play in the
yard because every 5 minutes I have to empty his mouth of acorns and
whatever else he finds in the grass.  I’ve sat him in the yard
with cars to play with so I could try to do a bit of cleaning on the
patio and I have to keep stopping because he is eating the mulch. 
I cannot wait until he gets over this, it will make my job sooo much
easier.

One more thing.  Gavin loves my iPod.  IPOD IPOD IPOD! 
He keeps trying to take it off the table I keep it on so I bought him
his own.  I’ve never seen him happier.

(more…)

For some reason Gavin has refused to sleep the last two nights. 
He falls alseep at the usual time and wakes up hollering “mama dada”
for 15 minutes or so, he goes back to sleep and the cycle repeats at
20-30 minute intervals.  I hope this isn’t a trend because I don’t
know how many more sleepless nights I can take.  I got my only
solid sleep from around 7 to 8:45am.  Its 9:00 now so after I get
some coffee in me I’m going to wake him up so he doesn’t sleep all day. (more…)

Dumbass Parent of the Day has been updated. (more…)

A lot of kids are named after fictious characters like Bob the Builder, Pokemon, and Star Wars.  But not all at the same time! (more…)

I think Gavin has cured me of my fear that he will fall down and hurt
himself.  Yesterday we were sitting on the couch and I got up to
put more water in his cup.  I walk out of the room to the kitchen
and hear a big *THUMP* I rush back into the room and see his legs
sticking up in the air between the couch and the the table.  after
what seemed like an eternity he falls on his back, twisting his head
around.  I was sure something was going to be wrong but after a
few seconds of “WTF was that” type crying he was fine and resumed to
climb back up on the couch. For a while I felt it was somehow my fault
for walking out of the room but today he showed me that wasn’t the
case. 

I change his diaper in his bed and leave him in there to play while I
sit at the side of it and start going through the laundry basket with
his clean clothes.  I am looking for a shirt that goes with some
shorts when I hear a  *BAM* and see him laying flat on his back
right next to me.  Apparently he was leaning over his crib rail
that I didn’t raise and does a 180 off the high dive.  Just as
before he lays there, looks around and cries a bit so I pick him up to
make sure he’s OK.  He squirms out of my grip and does a little
dance all around the room.

What a little boy. (more…)

Yesterday Gavin and I went to the Science Center for something
different to do.  I wasn’t sure how the day would go since I know
its for older kids and as I expected Gavin ran around like a
spaz.  During one of my many marathon chases we came across The
Discovery Zone, which is a play area for smaller kids.  After
buying our tickets and listening to 15 minutes of instruction of what
NOT to do we went inside and starting playing.

The way I play with Gavin when he has something new is to leave him
alone to try and figure it out himself,  If he wants to push a car
across the floor upside down that’s fine with me because after a while
he might realize its easier to use the wheels.  For some reason,
either because I wan’t playing actively enough with Gavin or because I
was a dad who couldn’t possibly know how to play with a baby, the woman
who runs the play area came over and insisted on showing me how to play
with Gavin, which really annoyed me.

Later, Gavin starts playing with an alphabet puzzle and I ask him whats
on the piece he has,  he looks at the wrong side so I tell him to
look on the other side, he follows my instructions and says “A”. 
The nosy woman looks at me and says “Wow, he knows some letters
already, how old is he?”  I tell her he’s 16 months and can say
his numbers up to 10 and can count up to 4.

She left us alone to play our way. (more…)