Flynano

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Hold on to your socks kids! It’s time for personal flight.

There’s a company I would like to bring to your attention by the name of Flynano. What do they make, you ask? Flying jet skis:

Basically, it’s a one seater plane that is just light enough that it doesn’t legally qualify as an aircraft, which means you don’t need a pilot’s license. So anybody could climb into one of these and reach heights around 2 miles and topping out at around 93 mph.

Prices start around $36k, which some people might say is a lot of cash, but I have to disagree. Personal flight for slightly more than a car? This is basically the flying car we’ve been waiting for! Seriously, is this so much different than a jet-pack? A little bulkier, I’ll grant you, but not so different. And even though I couldn’t pay $36k for one, I could probably pay to rent one for an hour at a resort or something.

Flying jet skis my friend, the future is now!

Bold Declarations

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I mentioned yesterday that Evie has her own fun little personality quirks. So now its her turn.

Right now, Evie is all about drawing lines in the sand. Every issue is immediately escalated to some sort of standoff, her vs. the world. Everything is eminently dire.

“If you don’t ___, I’m never EVER going to ___!”

She gets this intensely angry look on her face and you know she has every intention of hurting you (or at least trying). Sometimes this can be funny, because you can see how serious she is, and how seriously angry, but the thing she is angry about is so trivial.

You never really know what is going to set her off. She routinely gets upset about things such as not being able to have “baby moses” and his basket sitting on her chair with her for dinner. And you know she really means business when she says, “I’m going to poke you if you don’t ___” and extends one finger toward you in pure rage. It’s hard to keep a straight face.

These are sort of occasional though, most of the time it is plenty easy to keep a straight face, like when she is having a screaming meltdown in a restaurant because her water wasn’t placed in the proper location. No, then it is plenty easy to keep from laughing.

Sometimes I start to wonder if she’s going to have any good memories of me at all, because it seems like all we do is fight and struggle with each other.

The funny thing is, if you didn’t know how old she was, you’d think maybe I was describing a teenager, with all the constant power struggles and bold declarations. So god help us when we get to that stage, because if she is this difficult except with more power to actually do anything about her situation in life, I can only imagine how impossible that will be.

As far as Evie and Oliver go, we are now starting to see some heavy competition over toys. Oliver now has an interest in what Evie is doing (after all, she does seem to always have the best toys). Oliver doesn’t understand things like sharing, and Evie understands them well enough to know that she doesn’t want anything to do with it. All toys are hers (even Oliver’s toys) and she’s ALWAYS using them, even when she’s not.

For his part, Oliver has taken the only road left to him: appealing to the judges. As soon as she grabs something he has, he *immediately* cries and looks at Sara or I with an imploring look that says, “Do you see how I am being wronged here?” He does this even when he is doing the wronging. And hey, who can blame him? It’s about the only possibility he has of winning the fight, and it works most of the time. I’d like to let them settle things between themselves for the long run, but at the moment it is pretty hard to ignore that imploring look, especially when I know that Evie is not yet quite old enough to understand that Oliver is a person too.

Mr. Mischief

/ Shane / 2 Comments

Oliver is starting to be that age.

It’s not just that he’s getting into more things, it’s that he is actively TRYING to get into more things. He gets that glimmer in his eye that says, “I’m going to get into trouble” and then he does it. He doesn’t stop when you say no, in fact, he does it BECAUSE you’re saying no. He stops to look back at you first to make sure that you see him getting into trouble. He just has non-stop busy hands. He hasn’t met a book he can’t pull off the shelf, or an item that can be left on the coffee table.

The other day I took him to the grocery store. Well, first off, he figured out how to take off his shoes, so of course he does that whenever possible. Also, he now has the facilities to turn around and reach into the cart and grab things. Of course I know this, so I do my best to keep things out of reach, but even still he threw the lettuce on the floor three times, and one time a stranger had to pick it up because I didn’t notice. He grabbed a block of cheese and bit it hard enough on the corner to leave a big round mouth-mark. Finally, the coup de grâce, he opened a big container of cherry tomatoes and dumped them into the cart. There were tomatoes everywhere, and I was still finding them as I went through the checkout.

It was like Hurricane Oliver passed through my shopping cart.

I remember Evie going through this phase, so it’s not abnormal or anything, but that doesn’t mean I have to like it. Our house has reached all new levels of destruction, after all, it’s not like Evie doesn’t get up to her own share of mischief. That’s another story unto itself.

Oliver’s still not walking yet, but he clearly could be walking if he so chose. He stands up without holding on (usually to clap for himself), he moves seamlessly from furniture to furniture,  walks up and down the hall holding onto the wall, and has even taken a half step here or there. However, if you ever try to get him to actually walk, he just says, “Hey, I already know how to crawl to get to where I’m going, why bother with this walking thing.”

However, the increased capacity for mischief he could achieve by walking might be just the motivation he needs to finally take those first steps.

The best Easter egg hunt ever

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On Saturday we signed up for an Easter egg hunt over at the community garden. We thought Evie would have a good time. We had no idea.

So it turned out that only one other kid showed up for the Easter egg hunt, besides Evie. There were 50 eggs hidden around the neighborhood park. For those of you following around at home, that’s 25 eggs per kid. This is WAY more eggs than you usually get to grab at a thing like this. There were eggs everywhere, and Evie could hardly pick them up fast enough. And there was no competition for the eggs, no egg tug-of-wars, no big kids abusing little kids, more eggs than a 3 year old could imagine.

Another kid showed up about 30 minutes later, and I’m not sure if  he was there for the egg hunt or not, but we felt bad for him watching Evie gloating over her hoard of colored eggs like a dragon over treasure. When Evie wasn’t looking, we would take them out of her basket and re-hide them for this other little boy to find. However, this boy was not prepared for the egg-finding force that was Evie. We would practically hide the egg in his pocket and he would miss it, but not Evie. Her usual focus and determination apparently applies to egg hunts as well. She would re-find them as fast as we re-hid them. So she probably found at least 40 eggs when all was said and done.

After this we had to play Easter egg hunt for the rest of the day at our house. Alternately either hiding eggs from her, or finding eggs that she hid. The eggs contained such treasures as rubber bands or candy that you weren’t allowed to eat. After playing this game with her for a while I discovered A) she’s better at finding eggs than I am, and B) she has a pretty sophisticated idea about where to hide eggs.

An interesting side note, the other kid that showed up for the egg hunt is actually going to be in her class at her new school next year. So that was interesting, and I’m glad to see they got along well.

You can contrast this with the other Easter egg hunt of the weekend, which I think was a pretty typical egg hunt experience. In other words, it was pretty crummy. This egg hunt was after church on Sunday, so first off, Evie is forced to sit through the entire service looking at eggs hiding all around her, but not able to touch them. Naturally, she spent the entire time cataloging every coordinate of every egg in range of our position.

Here’s where the trouble really starts.

Afterwards, the directions were for kids to come to the front and get instructions before looking for eggs. Poor Evie, who’s the most perfect, mature child on the planet who also has terribly mean parents that make her follow the rules, had to go to the front to get the instructions as the rest of the children raped and pillaged all of the eggs in the rest of the church. Second off, people can’t stop trying to hand her eggs during church, which she knows is wrong but is quite a temptation to offer a 3 year old. And might I add that the fun of getting the eggs is finding them, not having them handed to you by and adult.

I know this is something on me, because it’s one of my personal pet peeves, but FOLLOW THE RULES! Who are you that are so important that YOUR precious little monster doesn’t need to follow the rules? Go ahead little Timmy, you’ve waited long enough, you can start a little early. Here little girl, it’s just one egg, what could it hurt. Yes, I understand that it’s just an egg hunt and who really cares, but it is a series of these little things over the course of the lifetime of your child that teaches her that rules don’t matter because she is special and above the rules for some reason.

So naturally, Evie follows the rules and is devastated to find out that all of  her carefully cataloged eggs are gone before she gets back (except for the one I was sitting on and another one I was defending through sheer intimidation). She ends up finding 3 eggs (so one other one that I wasn’t personally defending), even though they planned about a dozen per kid. And kids are walking by taunting her with their piles of 20+ eggs. Most of this stuff went over her head, and she was actually somewhat happy with the ones she found, but she was a little disappointed and it’s only going to get worse as she gets older and becomes more aware of what is going on.

You can see why I liked the first one much better.

As a side note, is there some kind of inflation of candy hidden in Easter eggs? Everywhere we went, the eggs had 2 or 3 pieces of candy in them, basically as much candy as could fit in the eggs. I only remember there being one piece of candy per egg! I had to sneakily go through Evie’s found eggs as quick as I could and remove a bunch of the candy, so she wouldn’t have candy overload (total she had something like 30 eggs with 2 or 3 pieces of candy per egg…I think that’s a little excessive for a kid her age).

Aw man, I just realized, the reason I only remember one piece of candy per egg was that MY parents probably dug through my eggs and removed extra pieces. Oh well, I guess I’m just part of the parenting circle of life.

Quote Monday turns conventions on their ear

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Sara: “I am not sending her to Jewish school in a bacon shirt!”

Evie: “Give me the jelly beans or nobody goes inside!” – She was holding us hostage.

Evie: “I’m not shy. I like to make friends.” – Ain’t that the truth!

::Evie staring at me with a funny look on her face::
Me: “Are you okay?”
Evie: “I was just looking at you, I didn’t do anything naughty.” – Now there’s a guilty conscious!

Evie: “I like storms at night.”
Me: “You do?”
Evie: “Yes. When the lightning flashes I can see the whole room, and the thunder…well, monsters are afraid of loud noises.”