skin rash AGAIN!

Seems like every god damn week there is some new innocuous but in need of attention illness going on with my kids and it is becoming a huge fucking pain in the ass, my little guy has some rash on his face and body to a lesser extent, he doesn't have pre-school today, but he does have soccer with his brother, I'm sure the little guy is going to be fine, but I probably can have him participating in sports with other kids with a big assed rash, BUT, then his brother has to miss soccer too, ALSO we need to go to soccer to give one of their team mates an invitation to the big guys birthday party, ALSO AGAIN, the big guy's ankle has been bothering him, I think he just needs new sneakers, they did not have any in his size a few weeks ago when we went to the kid's shoe store, we don't have time to go to the shoe store between school and soccer, nor do I have time to take the toddler to the doctor for him to say what they say every time, "it's nothing," and waste some money and time ...

Donations please

I got my 5 year-old to agree to have the guests at his "kids" birthday party to donate to charity rather than buy him some more unneeded gifts.
In the note I put in the invitations I forgot to put that I wanted people to write out checks to the organizations so we could mail them in with a letter and a picture of my boy, so people may just donate online, which is cool for the charities, but may not give my son the satisfaction of collecting and sending the contributions.
So goes it when working on projects after midnight when you haven't gotten the minimum requirement of sleep in months.

Can you say bidding war / housing market still hot in my town

We just bid $38,500 over asking for a house in the nicer part of our town and were still out bid, we did come in second out of five offers, that's a nice consolation though, yeah right.

Metal bats vs. Wood bats

Family of boy hit by baseball holds onto hope

Not feeling too good

Hey ya'll, I've been packing up my house for sale, three weekends and 3 Big Boxes later, (big boxes are like PODS, I'm not sure if city dwellers will know what they are, basically a truck drops off a big assed storage box, about the size of a college town bedroom, you fill it up, then they take it away, and deliver it to where ever you wind up moving too), serious neck and shoulder problems, and some nausea yesterday to top it off, basically I'm physically falling apart, and we didn't get the house we bid on even though we bid 30Gs over asking because we had a contingency, which means that if we were unable to sell our house then the deal would fall through, so now we will hopefully sell our place before finding a new house that we like, but that will potentially put us in a position of having to settle for a not perfect new home, or renting for awhile while we look for a new place to buy. One shitty thing is that in my town, there are only year long rentals, no month to month opportunities, at least not any place to I'm willing to move my family into.

cedar ball snacks

The other day my five year-old saw a cedar ball and asked my wife what it was and what does it do? She told him that bugs do not like cedar so people use it to keep them away from clothes.
The next day at snack time my son complained about a bug flying around in the kitchen, I told him with the weather getting warmer that the bugs are starting to come out. I looked at his snack bowl and there was some brown chocolate looking ball in it that I had not put there. At closer inspection it was of course a cedar ball, when I asked why the heck did you put that in your food he said, "To keep the bugs out."

Bear on a Leash

My oldest son is terrified of bears ever since he learned that they are one of the few animals that eat humans and that there are some in the northern part of our state. Recently we were in a town square and he started freaking out saying, "Daddy is that a bear?" I assured him there were no bears around and then saw this huge fucking brown bear devouring some toddler's entrails ... well not really, I saw some one walking this huge assed dog that was devouring the dismembered leg of an elderly gentleman ... okay it was just a huge black dog* that looked like a cross between Cujo, the shaggy D.A., and an Afghan, but it had to be close to 175 - 200 hundred pounds. So I then told him that bears usually are not walked on leashes and he had nothing to worry about.

* I just read something about pounds being full of big black dogs because they scare people, they said some crap about people not being able to read their facial expressions because they are so dark, man racism even extends to people's views on dogs.

Savoir-Faire Update

http://stayathomedadbdc.blogspot.com/2007/09/savoir-faire.html
In an older posting (link above) I mentioned my son trying to communicate with what he thought was a french girl in his class who did not speak English very well. I told him some french phrases to say to her, he said he tried but she would just stare at him weirdly when he tried to use the phrases I taught him.

It turns out he later learned the girl is Chinese and not French.

I've got to start taping this show ...

Urination Regression / Protecting Mine

I've been jotting down blog ideas in my pda rather than online lately, I'll be posting them on the next few weeks.
2/27/08
My kindergartner has wet the bed with semi-regularity, like once every week for about a month now and there was one episode where I had to take him home early from school because he did not make it to the bathroom in time, we must be doing something wrong, with us being really busy, there has been more TV, more yelling, more timeouts, less mommy time and more pee problems.

update 3/27/08
Still really busy trying to get the house ready for sale, but I've cut out the before bed beverages, made sure that he's gone the bathroom right before going to bed, and my wife hasn't had many late nights at work lately, not sure if it is a coincidence or not but he has not wet the bed lately, I think only once in the last month, which is better than the one to two times a week it was happening in February.
I hope I haven't jinxed myself, he and his brother are asleep in my bed right now with my wife and I have to move them to their own bed, not in the mood for changing my sheets and waking him up to give him a quick midnight bath.
The problem at school surprised me, I was told that all of the Kindergartner class rooms had bathrooms in the class, but my son's class does not. Apparently they send the kids to the bathroom in pairs, one kid is like a look out I guess, anyway a couple of weeks ago two boys in my son's class were harassed by a pair of fourth graders in the bathroom.
I've got no problem with beating the living shit out of a fourth grader if the fuck with my son, be on notice fourth graders of America, be on notice.

My three year old is now taking soccer with his older brother, probably the only time they will be involved in organized sports together, unless the little guy is super kick ass at some sport when he's a freshman in high school and gets to play with his brother while he is a senior.
Anyway, he's the youngest kid in the class and some bigger kid took the ball from him, which wasn't a big deal but then he realized it was easy to take the ball from him and kept doing it, then pulled the ball from underneath him as he was sitting on it, which made me jump up as if I was going to do something about it. I then proceeded to stare the kid down, which he did not seem to understand.
My kindergartner was completely oblivious to this, and therefore was negligent in performing his god given duty of protecting his little brother. I called over and told him to protect his baby brother, to tell that kid to stay away from him. My big guy ran straight over to the bad kid and wrestled his soccer ball away from him and kicked it away, and continued to do so through out the session. My little guy thought this was some kind of game and then began to interact more with the "bad" kid.
After class it dawned on me that my older son may not have verbally communicated our family message to this kid, so I asked him and he said, "No I didn't tell him anything, I just kept trying to take his ball."
That night I contemplated teaching the preschooler about how there are no fair fights, and the "You fight one of us, you fight all of us" family credo, but decided he is probably too young for that information at this time.

The Kaboom!

Caillou is for "reals"

For parents of newborns or people thinking about having kids, the most accurate depiction of children in the toddler / preschool age range that I have encountered is the cartoon Caillou.

Besides being educational for children, the parents serve as a positive example of calm, though not permissive, parenting.
As parents we may expect our children, particularly our firstborns, to understand more than they actually do, and Caillou does a good job of showing how the world and it's workings are really still new and mysterious to young children, even if they seem like little teenagers when compared to their young siblings still in diapers.

Materialistic society is 'damaging' children: poll

Commenting on the results of the poll, chief executive of the Childrens Society Bob Reitemeier said: "As adults we have to take responsibility for the current level of marketing to children. To accuse children of being materialistic in such a culture is a cop out. Unless we question our own behaviour as a society we risk creating a generation who are left unfulfilled through chasing unattainable lifestyles." click here for the whole article

My Boys Favorite Things 2007

Sports Teams:
5yr-old
Indianapolis Colts
Tampa Bay Buccaneers
NY Jets
Rutgers University Scarlet Knights - all sports
NJ Devils
2yr-old
NY Jets
Rutgers University Scarlet Knights - all sports

Music:
bands
5yr-old
Arctic Monkeys
Monster Magnet
White Stripes
Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
2yr-old
Arctic Monkeys
Led Zeppelin
White Stripes
"Jazz"

Foods:
5yr-old
Mac and Cheese
Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich
Cheddar Cheese
2yr-old
Mac and Cheese
Cake
Sliced Strawberry and Cream Cheese Sandwich

Friends:
5yr-old
Taj
Mossimo
Finn
Anil
Michael
Luke
2yr-old
Mikey
Justin

Sports:
5yr-old
football
hockey
basketball
soccer
sword fighting
martial arts
2yr-old
football
soccer
basketball

TV Shows:
5yr-old
SpongeBob SquarePants
Backyardigans
Curious George
Danger Rangers
Zula Patrol
2yr-old
Curious George
SpongeBob SquarePants
Peanuts / Charlie Brown

Superheroes / Villians:
5yr-old
Black Spiderman / Spiderman
Venom
Sandman
New Goblin
Human Torch
2yr-old
Spiderman
Venom
Mary Jane
Green Goblin


Colors:
5yr-old
black
red
blue
brown
2yr-old
Yellow
Green

Drama King

My five year-old is a bit of a drama queen, or king, or more exactly drama prince, anyway one day every situation we found ourselves wound up with him either whining or crying, so at some point I asked him, "How do you turn every thing you do today into a crying fit?" To which he answered red faced and teary-eyed, "Daddy, I'm just like that!"
Well okay then.