Archive for the ‘Oz’ Category
December 1st, 2009
it’s going to be an interesting december around here. miles is really excited about christmas because he remembers some of the highlights from last year. but he doesn’t really understand everything he remembers so we’ve been trying to explain why santa didn’t come on thanksgiving and why he hasn’t come every night since. why we had to wait until today to start the advent calendar. why some places had christmas lights up but some places didn’t.
we put up the tree on sunday. the boys helped with the ornament hanging and were fully engaged the entire time. the front bottom third of the tree looks ridiculous, but they did such a good job coming to me to get an ornament and then taking it over to the tree and finding a spot for it. miles would stop and ask about different ornaments and where they came from and ozzie would stop and pluck ornaments off the tree and try to hit vixen with them.
i waited until this year to put up christmas lights outside. i wanted to wait until someone besides me would appreciate it and in past years erica’s been a little grinchy about stuff like that. miles was pretty oblivious to lights last year but i knew when i saw how excited he was when he saw the christmas lights on the starbucks in september, that this year would be the year. i finally finished the job today and had the house all lit up when i brought the boys home from daycare. miles said, “daddy, the house is so BOO-dee-ful!”
the cutest thing so far though is miles singing “jingle bells.” his best bit is the part that goes “oh what fun it is to ride in a one horse open sleigh, HEY!” in miles-speak it goes “oh what fun it is to ride and what, What, WHAT YOU SAY? HEY!!”
before i get in more trouble, i have to say that erica isn’t grinching this year. she was supportive of my idea of starting a “snowy village” she says that like everyone knows what that is. she also said she wanted to start collecting snowmen which prompted our friend to say, “when did you turn so middle-aged?” which i think is what erica always wants to say to me at christmas time. i’ve been planning our future christmas traditions for the past three years and obviously that makes so much sense to erica because “planning” is her middle name. hopefully we’ll have plenty of traditions that develop organically, but the years fly by and without a little planning, before we know it the boys will be teenagers and i’ll be all, “where’s my snowy village?”
Posted in Aaron, Erica, Miles, Oz, family | 1 Comment »
November 8th, 2009
since they could walk, both boys were very interested in my coffee on weekend mornings. thinking they’d lose interest once they had a taste, I let them try it. I could not have been more wrong. I could have tried, but I would not have succeeded.
miles’ interest has waned a bit in the last year but oz loves a strong cup of cah-PEE.
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June 22nd, 2009
it’s been quite a while since i’ve had a chance to update my blog. i’ve been working quite a bit and spending the remaining time playing with the kids or working in the yard.
i have just been enjoying the heck out of our kids. miles has kept me laughing since day one, but he continues to up his game. in addition to being accidentally funny, he uses a growly fake yell to signal “this is a joke.” the past few days instead of taking his morning milk on the couch, he joins me in my bed for ‘nuggles under the sheets in our ‘tent’.
this morning i was having a hard time waking up and had started to nod off again. suddenly miles was fake-yelling and i realized that the tent had been filled with a noxious smell. then i realized what miles had been saying, “DADDY, YOUR BUTT IS DIS! GUSS! TING!!”
oscar is growing into his personality more every day. miles’ favorite song is “another believer” from meet the robinsons. we listen to it over and over again in the car and at home. every time i put ozzie in his car seat his starts singing the song.
we’ve started instituting a binky in bed only policy. removing the plug has resulted in a constant stream of sing-songy babbling. he has a few words: more, cracker, puppy, ball. mostly he just babbles with lots of inflection.
he does sometimes manage to make his way back into the bedroom to grab the binky. he then slowly walks out of the room and makes constant eye contact while sucking vigorously on the binky. it’s somehow obvious that this is him asking if he can have his binky. we then tell him to go put the binky back to bed. he slowly turns around and ambles back to the bedroom and then reemerges after a few seconds. then he comes back out more slowly again with the binky and the asking eyes. he knows what we’re saying but he just can’t quite bring himself to put it down.
i just can’t believe i have such wonderful kids. i hadn’t planned to be a parent, in fact i had specifically planned not to be a parent. part of that is because in my unmedicated state i can only make the con side of pro/con lists. i didn’t want to have to deal with discipline and teenagers who hated me and my own inevitable failings and second-guessings.
then my sister had her son and my mother-in-law couldn’t believe how comfortable i was holding a baby and our parents and a few other people started mentioning that we would be great parents. this coincided with me beginning to take an amazing medication called effexor that allowed me to begin to imagine the positive outcomes of a particular course of action and to stop living in mortal fear of my own failure.
i’m not any kind of evangelist for parenthood, i have no energy invested in whether anyone else does or does not have kids. i will say that i have realized that there is something amazing about being a parent that you just can’t grasp if you haven’t been a parent. i’m not necessarily claiming that it’s something everyone should experience, but my own life is certainly richer for it.
it’s incredible to be one of the few people my kids feel completely unembarrassed around all the time. i get to be right there when miles says from the backseat of the car, “hey aaron, what you doing, aaron?” to open the door to a room and have miles so excited to see me that he comes running across the room and leaps into my arms. to have oz raise his arms to me and when i lift him up he stops crying and pushes his cheek into mine.
i can’t believe i get to be ‘that guy’ for, as far as i’m concerned, the two most amazing kids in the world. they’re so full of energy, humor, surprises, love and sweetness and i’m so excited to get to know them as they grow. i hope i don’t forget to help them get to know me so that in twenty years on father’s day 2029, they don’t have to call erica from the bookstore to ask her what kind of books i like, they’ll know that what i’d like a million times more is for them to read one of the books that i like, come and sit in my backyard and talk to me about it all afternoon and tell me that my butt is still disgusting.
Posted in Aaron, Miles, Oz, family | 2 Comments »
May 18th, 2009
it is with utmost affection for our friend brandon that i tell this story. britta and brandon came over for a few hours on sunday afternoon. miles had been really excited because he adores britta and brandon and oz got very excited once they arrived. unfortunately miles was pretty loony and had to take numerous trips to timeout before he was able to develop some impulse control.
after we took the boys in and gave them a bath and i got miles down for bed (and then came back outside to find that erica had oz outside in his pajamas) i was finally catching my breath. brandon, who will be a dad by the end of the year, said, “so, do you find that weekends are less restful than weekdays?” my response, “are you kidding?” i love my life, but we left the realm of the restful years ago. we no longer have a position relative to the state of restfulness.
Posted in Miles, Oz | 6 Comments »
April 12th, 2009
oz is finally back to himself which is really good news. i can’t speak for erica but i was just hanging on by fingernails. another day of worrying about my kiddo on top of non-stop laundry and puking and a three year-old trying to gawk at all the puking would have been one too many for me.
seeing good old ozzie smiling and eating this morning was about the best thing i could have woken up to. unfortunately for me it was one of those situations where the adrenaline or absence of a known ending just keeps me trucking. then having the end in sight takes the edge off enough for me to realize how exhausted i am.
we decided to take the boys to church since the weather was crummy and we wanted to get them out of the house a little bit and get a little break ourselves. after church we made egg salad with our colorful eggs. we put the boys down for their naps and erica hid easter eggs in the front rooms. then we tried to catch a bit of a nap ourselves.
miles took a great nap on saturday so i was really hopeful that he’d sleep again. after about ten minutes i heard a thump and got up to tell miles to lay down and turn off the light. i opened my bedroom door and saw his light on and bedroom door wide open. i found him out in the living room with all the eggs in a pile and half the candy eaten.
i had to march him straight back to his room and tell him all the things he did that were not cool and try to convince him that it would be best for him to have a nice little nap and not continue acting like a crazy monkey. i must have been convincing because we didn’t hear from him for two and a half hours.
once he was awake we had to talk to him about how he had played our special game without us. i didn’t want him to have bad easter memories so we had him apologize to erica and ask nicely if we could play the game again (with reduced candy content).
the discipline thing is a bummer but i’m trusting that small unpleasantness in the present is likely to prevent larger future unpleasantnesses. and since no one can prove otherwise i’m going to keep believing it because it makes me feel better.
Posted in Aaron, Erica, Miles, Oz | No Comments »
April 2nd, 2009
when ozzie woke up this morning i took one look at his face and knew that he couldn’t go to school. his left eye was puffy and purple and he looked like he had a tiny shiner.
we’ve been playing guitar together and having lots of tickles but he’s down for a nap now. he’s got so many teeth coming in right now i don’t even know how he can deal with life.
on the subject of not dealing with life, miles has been having a rough time in his new class at day care. he’s stopped napping. there are enough kids in this room that he can get away with monkeying around a little bit more and not letting himself relax.
consequently by the time i pick him up in the afternoon, his self-control has pretty much evaporated. by the time i get the boys in the van he has a hard time asking for anything without crying or fake crying.
after we get home and he has some quiet time on the couch he does a little better. unfortunately concurrent with the class change, we were moving oz out of his crib and into a bed. miles is such a pro at bedtime that we got a little lax with his routine. i thought if we kept him up a little later he’d be more likely to nap at school. not so much. bedtimes were getting rougher and rougher and he was having harder days at school.
we ended up deciding that it was too much change at once. we’ve gone back to his earlier bedtime and eased up on the potty training a tiny bit. drop=offs at daycare have been better for the past two days and bedtimes have gotten easier although he still isn’t napping at school.
i’m fine with him not napping, i was never able to nap at daycare either, as long as i’m able to pick him up without the teacher saying that he was very “emotional” (with airquotes).
Posted in Miles, Oz | 1 Comment »
April 1st, 2009
over the weekend erica decided that ozzie’s terry bradshaw hairdo had to be dealt with. we talked about taking him to the barber shop for a little work but after his bath erica decided that she wanted to have a go at it.
i held oz while erica tried to get the scissors close to his head. of course, every time he caught a glimpse of the scissors out of the corner of his eye he’d jerk his head around so she had the scissors wide open by the side of his head trying to decide when she should swoop in for a snip.
once she did get in her first snip it was clear that we did not possess the qualifications for this project. i guess more clear to me than to erica because she wanted to continue but i wanted to stop the madness while there was still hair left to save.
i made a comment about the not-a-haircut on facebook and in response erica posted the first picture and claimed that it showed the haircut. everyone was like, “looks great to me!”
then erica posted the bottom picture and people seemed to understand a little more. it’s not even that what was done was so bad, it was just going to be a little more here, a little more here until there wasn’t anything left. and it took him so long to grow it i didn’t want him to end up rebald due to a couple amateurs.
we still haven’t gotten it together enough to take him to get it fixed so he’s still working the impact crater look. maybe we’ll just let it go and he can be credited as the inventor of the anti-rattail.
Posted in Oz | 4 Comments »
March 31st, 2009
i had my first definite communication with ozzie on sunday. he was saying “mew, mew, mew, new” which i wasn’t really paying attention to because he does lots of noise-making. when i looked at him he made an absolutely perfect “more” sign. i said, “more?” and he started saying “mew! mew! mew! mew!”
that just left me to figure out what he wanted more of since he didn’t have anything. but it was so cute that he wanted to tell me something and just kept at it until i understood.
he’s doing great in the wobbler room. no further progress on the walking yet but he loves getting to go outside and eating at the table and sleeping on his little cot at naptime.
he’s got such a funny sense of humor. tonight while he was eating he did something that made erica and i laugh. he got this look on his face that said, “how did i do that? and more importantly, how can i use it to my benefit?”
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March 16th, 2009
erica is out getting her hairs did right now. she’s been gone for a while so i’m expecting something really fancy. the boys haven’t made a peep since they went down. school is really wearing them out now that they’ve moved into their new classes.
the boys in miles’ new class get much more wound up and i think he has a hard time settling down and falling asleep during naptime. he had a complete meltdown during pickup today. like to the point that the director came rushing out of her office asking what happened. i was like, “nothing. life.” and she held the door open for me while i staggered out with a boy in each arm. at least the weigh the same so i was balanced.
once we got home he just kept asking me to hold him. i just kept tossing cheerios to oz like he was a seagull. once miles had gotten some attention and soaked up a little bit of love he was back to normal and wanted to color.
Posted in Miles, Oz | 1 Comment »
