Gametes In Love

We had a quiet Christmas at home. My sister and L came up to visit and stayed a few days.

The “want/need/wear/read” approach to gift giving is still showing me it’s awesomeness. It’s seriously a lot easier to do 4 gifts for the kids and not have to stress a whole bunch of toys. And I feel like what they got is very measured. Doesn’t prevent them from being spoiled by the rest of the family, but I don’t feel like I’m stressing for toy storage either.

S2 pretty much has spent the days following building his new Lego sets. I think he’s done with the primary instruction builds and is now onto making his own creations with the same pieces. This is my favorite part of his Lego play.

We used the GoPro this year to track our mayhem, but I haven’t even looked at that footage yet. I’ll enrich this post when I do.

Christmas breakfast was cinnamon rolls straight up from a package. Turns out little man loved those and has asked for them again today. This is amusing since he looked at them innitially, turned up his nose declaring he doesn’t like them, and then a minute later was biting in like a vampire. Not sure what turned him around, but at least now I have an example of “some food he tried saying he doesn’t like when in fact he really does”.

I’m pretty stoked with how my ribbon work came out this year. I tried something new, and it paid off.

[in trying to get his brother some cats in Minecraft]

G: Look! Now we have to get them to kiss. That’s how you make a kitten.
Look! They’re doing it! They’re kissing!
And here’s the kitten.
…
Want 5 kittens?

I think it may be time to bring out the “It’s Not the Stork” book again.
Also… why is he trying to turn his brother into the Crazy Cat Dude?

S doesn’t travel for work often (Thank God!!!), but when he does being home alone with the kids isn’t me at my best. I won’t lie. It’s stressful. I feel like I jump into planning/prep over-drive because the unexpected ALWAYS happens, and anything I defer to tomorrow, becomes mission critical due to something invariably pops up. A routine helps a ton, and thankfully we have a flow in the morning and a flow in the evening. That keeps things doing, but the kids in the past few weeks have been turning into puddles of silly after dinner. It’s nice they are silly with one another (it’s kind of sweet), but when you’re trying to keep the train moving it’s irritating.

After dinner I need them to get their jammies on, pick out clothes for the next day and get their teeth brushed. Then it can be free time until stories… unless there’s other stuff they haven’t done from earlier in the evening. Case in point: homework. G gets a homework packet every week. He usually finishes it within a day of bringing it home, but this time it had two assignments which involved computer access at home. i.e. = me! I told him we’d do it as soon as he was ready for bed. He didn’t get ready in time the first night… or the second night… or the third. On the fourth, S2 and G were running around like someone had spiked their dinner w/ meth. THEN they decided they wanted to play a game of barnacle. What’s that you ask? Lesse – they each attach themselves to my legs and hope they’ll go on a ride. Guess how that one makes me feel? If you guessed stabby, give yourself a pat on the back. I’m not sure how I escaped, but I went and locked myself into my bathroom. It’s the only place w/ a door lock they can’t pick. So I spent some quality time in there.

It took the two of them some time, but they finally got in gear and got dressed. They passed me a note under the door. It looked something like this:

Let me write it out… and then translate
Original “We are rie jres. We are jres. We did got are james and we buzn are teth”
Translation “Wa are really dressed. We are dressed. We got our jammies and brushed our teeth”

G wrote it (if you couldn’t guess). It’s both terribly bad and terribly awesome. He’s trying so hard to figure out how to spell, and I admire that. I don’t have the heart to correct (just about) every word, so for now this stays.

THIS is the first letter from my sons. I will cherish this forever, and it’s hard to stay mad, when your insides are laughing this hard.

PS. If you’re curious what happened next, I opened the door. Only to see that they had tricked me, and were totally still goofing off. I went back to my sanctuary, and waited until they were really done. Sadly for G it was now bed-time, and he had to go to bed without the last bid of homework. But that’s another story for another day.

In an effort to try to keep the boys’ Christmas gift request down to something reasonable, I told them they can list 5 things. If they thought of a 6th item, they had to decide which of their previous 5 things they kicked to the curb.

Why 5? I figured that was plenty for S, myself and our families for them.

G, upon hearing the 5 limit rule started chuckling, and counting down his fingers

G: That’s easy! I want: a computer…. a phone…. an iPad.

Sure, kid! Want a car and a new mortgage while you’re at it?

Last week-end, by some unknown miracle I was able to talk both kids into doing a quick photo shoot with their Halloween costumes on. Now I can relax on Saturday and totally leave my camera behind.
G went on for weeks declaring he was too old to trick or treat. What?!?!?! I asked him several times and he held firm. No costumes. No candy loot. Ok! Only for S to approach me two weeks back asking “Did G tell you he wanted to be a bat this year?” There may have been an obscenity to leave my lips. Not Batman (which would actually be easy to get), but a Bat. *******!!!!! Staying true to form, G wanted a unique costume, with very limited time. I think the craft gods are still pitying me after caterpillar-gate and blessed me yet another year with the fortune of finding something online. And it fits! And it didn’t cost an arm and a leg! I was set to make it (let’s face it, a bat is SO much easier to do than a caterpillar), but I was glad not to have to.
As an “Aw!” side-note, I really dig G’s two front missing teeth. He looks a little vampire-ish, which makes his bat look so much better.
S2 is Darth Vader. His mind was made up months ago. Well, his mind was directed (and I’ve been holding firm on the “this is it, no changes!!!!”) as soon as the costume was acquired. He loves it! A Disney store trip this summer also yielded two kick-ass light-sabers, too. They only had the Sith variety in store, so he’s totally good to go.
Ready for photos? Of course you are!

Oh, also because I think this is adorable: S2 made a Lego version of himself… in costume. So S2 head, Darth body. Pretty sweet!

I was privy to overhearing this winner of a conversation this morning between S and G:

S: Do you know what people that don’t eat meat are called?
G: Meatees?
S: Meatees? No, they’re called vegetarians.
G: Oh?! I thought they are called “picky eaters”

Meanwhile I am in the living room cleaning our coffee table and chuckling into my shirt so he can’t hear my laughing.

We did it!

Ok, so NO designs came home, but we ended up drawing and talking through a couple of proposals after dinner. I present you with….

Design #1: Handles in vertical orientation and the rope over. Dismissed because the rope would get in the way of the ball.

Design #2: Handles in horizontal position and ropes to the sides. Dismissed because the ropes would only keep it stable left/right vs. front/back. Left/right movement wasn’t a problem: Back/front was.

Design #3: Handles in the horizontal position, and ropes to the front, and back. This one looks extra messy because we already had some revs to delete from before.

And the final result is….

G opted to build design #3 first. I feel like I lost on a teaching moment with the other 2 not doing what he wanted.

But now he’s a happy clam.

S and he are enjoying practicing his baseball pitching styles. I can see why he wanted to do this now: kid’s a jock. As long as he stays a brainy jock…

At home, we have two big-arse life-preserver-like things that the kids got for some sumo-wrestling-type games. You might have seen this fun video of them.
Luckily for us no injuries have happened yet… in big part because they tend not to battle in that manner much.
Instead G has created a game for himself, where he stands one donut up inside the cavity of the other, and then tries to throw a ball inside the standing circle. His contraption looks something like this:

Yes, this is where my formal art-instructed family can make fun of my terrible perspective. But you get the point, ya?

G’s main issue is that the donut standing up keeps falling when the ball hits it… or when it goes through. Today he threw a fit over it. Or more specifically threw a fit because his attempt to tie the two donuts together (through the handles) wasn’t working.

I challenged him! I told him that strings/rope would probably work. I told him to look at suspension bridges as inspiration for how, and I gave him homework to do during after-school in creating a design proposal of how that could look. I, honestly, can’t wait to see what he comes up with!

And if he doesn’t come up with anything, we’ll do a design together. Then we’ll build it.
Enter in nerdy project giddiness.

Last week, while surfing facebook I came across a friend’s post from a recent visit they did to a hay maze at Arata farms in Half Moon Bay. It looked awesome, so on a week-end that S needed some alone time to tackle his to-do list, I took the boys out. It took us an hour to get there (typical fall HMB traffic).
We drove past Bob’s pumpkin patch, which is where we’d been going for the past two years, and took a turn just a “block” past into Arata. I was super stoked to see that Arata was not only about the hay maze, but also had pumpkins. Two birds, one stone. I had brought my camera for our annual pumpkin picks, so score!!!!

I have a rule with the kids: “no pumpkin bigger than the size of your head”. This coincides with “no pumpkin heavier than you can carry”…. and “no pumpkin pricier than what I was to pay for”. S2’s approach to pumpkin shopping is to get the smallest pumpkin he can find. He thinks smallest = cutest, so every teenie pumpkin was cute. G’s a bit of the opposite — he goes for large, so the rule is especially helpful for him. We often compare: how big is your head next to that pumpkin? Also makes for good photo opp. This year I caved though and let him get one on the larger side. Sadly for me, though, I had to carry it most of the way, because it did get unwieldly for him.
We picked our pumpkins first. Good call. Got the kids to look over the maze — also good call. Then paid, and decided to drop the orange spheres back in the car before we went into the maze. THAT, on the other hand was a bad call. G tripped on the way back to the car, scraped his hand, and then just wanted to go home. Enter in sad mommy. Bummer. We went home. I went back to return the tickets, and we just drove home.

That was the maze that wasn’t.

However, after we got home and got to tell S about it, he got interested in going. This is a pleasant surprise, because the man hates driving to go to adventures like this. So we planned a second trip this past week-end. Next week-end is Pumpkin Fest in HMB, and you couldn’t pay me enough money to sit through THAT traffic, so it had to be either yesterday, or wait for another two weeks.

S2 literally ran the maze. This sucked, because we’re talking human adult sized maze, that takes 30 min to get through. Adults can’t see through the end (since the hay piles are taller than an adult), so it wasn’t exactly difficult to lose a child in there. And he wouldn’t stop running off. Thankfully most turns were dead ends, so he didn’t get too far, too quick, but still definitely a heart-racer there.

On the second trip, S2 found an even smaller pumpkin — it fit in his pocket, so it had to come home. Also G discovered the gourds and found one that looks like a perfect swan. It came home too. I’m a sucker!

The maze though was truly awesome! I’m hoping they’ll bring it back year after year, because I hope we can continue going every fall. They do evening maze runs too, which sounds evilishly fun.

G also had a fun run using my camera. I’m actually pretty proud of this kid. It took a bit of training, but he know knows how to back-button focus, take a photo, and zoom in and out. He was full on directing us what to do too. I might have to invest a bit more time teaching him how to work it more. Though admittedly, it IS a heavy combo, so it’s something I don’t completely trust him to run off with. Still — lookie!!!! I’m IN photos.

G brought this home on Friday. An activity they were working on in his after-school program (on account of the Spanish up top).

G wrote about his pet. This is our cat.

Can’t you see the resemblance?

I’m an especial fan of the chicken legs and lack of ears 🙂

If you need help figuring out the writing, it says:

Zoe (backwards Z)
It frie (meaning “It’s furry”)
It likes people

I genuinely love it!