Two Wheelin'

The last of the kids had his maiden two wheeled voyage this morning. He was very excited and wanted to make sure that I shared it with everyone. He was a bit wobbly and his turns leave something to be desired, but he's well on his way to multi mile biking adventures. The longest journey starts with a wobbly trip down the driveway as they say.

Brother?

When we went to the rodeo we stopped at the petting zoo. My son found a long lost brother. At least that's what we think happened.They bonded.

Fragile

My wife went up into the attic to get out the Easter stuff. In retrospect, she may have employed gravity a bit too aggressively. Although, she did accomplish the task she set out to accomplish. Full points for that.

The Eraser King

I picked my son up from school the other day and asked him how things were going. "Good", he said. I asked him to expand on that general thought. He went into a long explanation about how he was selling things in class for tokens and told me about the things he had been selling. Selling? It seems that his teacher has let a secondary market for school supplies develop in her class. Kids in her class earn tokens by being good or getting work in on time. They can use those tokens to buy pencils or erasers or some small toys or a day without shoes. Really, a day without shoes is a thing you can buy. Anyway, my son decided that since he had some extra pencils and some small toys that he had bought earlier that he could make a tidy profit by selling them. He asked his teacher if this was ok, he even wrote up a contract outlining his honest business practices, and she approved. Due to some supply issues in the teachers supply box he was doing pretty well. Well enough, in fact, that other kids took notice and decided to copy him. One girl in particular noticed that since the teacher was out of erasers, my son was able to sell them for 10 tokens each. She had a handful of erasers herself, and decided to undercut him at two tokens. Now, if it was me, I would have taken this as a sign that my price was too high and lowered it to be competitive. Not him. He walked over to her desk with a handful of tokens and bought every last eraser she had. He then walked back to his desk and declared that the price for erasers in the class was back up to 10 tokens. My elementary age son managed to corner the secondary market on erasers and pull in a tidy profit. I'm not entirely sure this is the kind of thing you can teach. I'm both extremely proud and slightly fearful. He is truly the Eraser King.

We Won!

Well, we took the kids to Rodeo Houston again. They're all big now so we did the petting zoo and the farm stuff and then we went to the midway. I know that everyone in the family (except me) likes to play games. They spend money like it's free and have fun. I do not have fun. One of the first games we walked past was the ring toss where you're trying to get little plastic rings to land on one of about 500 glass Coke bottles. It's basically impossible. You can stand there for an hour and watch people throw thousands of rings and never make one. The kids wanted to play so I said "fine, let's get it over with". My wife said "no, if we win then we have to carry the giant prize all day". We'll never win. Nobody wins. Fine we'll wait. I'm already grumpy.
On the way out, we stop to burn through the last of our dwindling life savings. Baskets of rings are purchased. Rings are tossed. I'm rolling my eyes at the silliness of it all. Of course you know where this ends up. Of the several million rings tossed that day that sailed helplessly to the ground, somehow my younger daughter managed to throw one perfectly. She's happy. My wife is happy. The carnies are happy. Everyone is happy. Even I'm a little happy. But only a little.

Spring Biking

So it's spring break. Rather, spring break is almost done. You'd think that as a stay at home dad I'd have more time to post by not having to drive the kids back and forth to school. While theoretically right, it's not really right in practice. I find that I'm simultaneously trying to get projects done while at the same time my presence is needed every 3 to 5 minutes to solve some dispute between the children. Couple that with the lack of structure that my days now have, and it seems like every evening I find myself getting ready for bed and realizing that I haven't posted. Come next week and a return to normalcy and my posting schedule should get better. 

One thing we have been doing this week is enjoying the weather. I've been working on the cars and the yard and the kids have been playing outside and riding bikes. My youngest finally convinced himself that he could handle riding with training wheels. He went from unsteady to tearing around the driveway like his butt was on fire in about 20 minutes. It won't be long and I'll have the last of them riding a two wheeler. Bikes are fun.

Adventure!

I've been a little delinquent in my posting, but I have a good reason. Adventure! My oldest son and I flew to Pennsylvania to pick up a car. It was a three day trip that included 4 hours in flight delays, 1400 miles of driving, having to diagnose and fix the car in a parking lot, and some really incredible roads. I didn't have to take my son. I could have done it myself and saved money on a plane ticket. I wanted to though. I like spending time with my kids, whether all together or one on one. Anything fun becomes more fun when you're sharing the world with someone you love.

Checker Head

Today was wacky hair day at preschool. In the usual fashion of our family, we took things one level farther than intended. The idea behind crazy hair day is to style your hair in a crazy fashion, so of course my son decided that he needed to cut his in a crazy fashion. I, of course, agreed.
The plan was to make his head into a hair/not hair checker board. It turns out that this is quite hard to do. In hindsight, it would be pretty hard to draw a checker board accurately on a basketball. Trying to cut one into the hair of a five year old is more like trying to draw a checker board on a basketball while someone is dribbling it. I did not do a great job.
His haircut was well received though. Lots of compliments, lots of smiles, lots of shock by the preschool moms that someone would actually do that to their child. It was fun. Tonight we broke out the clippers again and turned it into a normal haircut. We had fun. He looks good. It was a success.

Man In Charge

Last week my older son received his award for reading. In his school they use the Accelerated Reader program to encourage kids to read, test them, and reward them. In his school you get awards for 10, 25, 50, 75, 100, 150, and 200 points. If you make it that far and wish to push on, you can get to 250 points for the big prize, Principal for the Day.
It's a pretty big deal. You get announced on the televised morning announcements and then you get to hang out with the principal for almost the whole day. You go from class to class and monitor the teachers and their students and get to hang out and play computer games while the principal does real work. You get to be the center of attention for the whole day, and there's nothing that makes my son happier than that. He worked hard to have his day, and I'm proud of him.

Clearly Now......

The first of my children has a pair of glasses. At his five year old checkup the pediatrician figured that he might need to be checked by an optometrist. The optometrist agreed that the boy can't quite see as well as the rest of us and had a pair of glasses made up for him. This really shouldn't surprise any of us. All of my siblings have glasses. My brother in law has glasses. All of the grandparents involved have glasses. In fact, my wife and I are the only ones in our immediate family not to need glasses. It figures that eventually the world would turn blurry for at least one of the kids.
He's had his glasses for about two hours now and hasn't managed to break or lose them yet. Minor miracle there. We'll see how long that lasts. We are going to head out to Super Cheap Discount Eyewear and buy him a pair of beater glasses with the prescription that we picked up from the optometrist. We figure that they should be good for the days when he can't find his glasses or he breaks them or when we go on hikes in cliff country. I'll let everyone know how this whole glasses thing works out. Having never had them myself, it's a new adventure.