Tagged: Spider-Man
Boy Story
“Guess what, Daddy?” My son said matter-of-factly while putting on his shoes. “There’s another little boy at my school who has the same Spider-Man shoes as me.”
My son is a little on the shy side, so I was excited to hear about him connecting with another kid in his class.
“Cool, Buddy. What’s his name?”
“I don’t know.”
“Oh, well you should ask him. You could say, ‘Hey, look! We have the same shoes on. That’s pretty cool. What’s your name?'”
My son took in this information slowly. He’s a slightly socially awkward overthinker like his daddy (sorry about that, Son), and he appeared to be considering maybe possibly beginning to plan to perhaps think about introducing himself, which made me smile. This is how he warms up to ideas, and then later claims they were his. This is Daddy’s own special form of Inception.
My daughter rounded the corner and joined us, grabbing her own shoes. “His name is Sam.” [This is not their classmate’s actual name, but let’s be silly gooses and play pretend that it is.]
“Oh,” I replied. “I know who he is. I met him and his Mommy the other day when I was dropping you off. He seems like a nice little boy.”
My daughter squinted skeptically. “Well, he kind of hits people.”
“What? Do the teachers stop him?”
“Sometimes,” she shrugged.
I honestly couldn’t imagine this kid doing any real damage. The Twins’ school is fantastic, and it’s unlikely he’d get away with anything actually worth worrying about. It’s more likely that he’s just doing what many little boys do–tending to get excited and full of energy and accidentally being too rough with others. My son is the same way, as are many of our friends’ sons. Still, it was worth getting more information. Continue reading
The Potentially Perilous Piglet/Pluto Party Paint Predicament
I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. After a particularly long morning, the Twins’ 3rd Birthday Party was finally in full swing. Food was served, Piglet and Pluto cupcake towers were constructed, and while kids of all ages darted across the house hopped up on sugar, our adult friends and family tossed back a mimosa or two, occasionally craning their necks to check on their offspring.
Yep, it looked like we just might pull this thing off after all.
It figures that on a day meant to be all about them, my son and daughter decided to make the entire morning all about them with constant, unnecessarily melodramatic whining, thus hindering the actual preparation for their party. The plan had been for me to head to the grocery store for a few last-minute food items while my wife stayed home to get things ready, with help from her sister who had graciously volunteered her mad cupcaking skillz. My wife–an überplanner–had dutifully procured party game supplies to be assembled, festive popcorn boxes to be filled with Orville Redenbacher-y goodness, and goodie bags to be distributed to the under-ten crowd. However, as I witnessed the Twins’ heart-wrenching, Oscar-worthy disapproval of changing from their pajamas to their party clothes just before I left, I had a feeling my wife’s überplans had become an endangered species. Sure enough, the moment I re-entered the house with groceries in tow (30 minutes from Go Time), I was met with a frantic Honey-Do-all-of-this-before-I-Hulk-Smash-somebody’s-face List. Despite my deft popcorn-box filling and spirited backyard dog-poo extraction, our guests began to arrive way before we were able to accomplish Operation: Meet The Wife’s Unrealistic Pinterest-Fueled Expectations.
You Make Me Happy
I looked up from the kitchen island to check on the Dynamic Duo. My son sat enthralled on the floor, accenting his finger-pointing at the television screen with “Oohs” and “Aahs,” while my daughter reclined on the couch, wrapped in a blanket and cradling her stuffed Piglet.
Lately they’ve become completely obsessed with ocean life: ocean puzzles, ocean books, cheap-ass toy fishing poles with magnetic fish to “catch,” and anything involving Finding Nemo or The Little Mermaid. On this particular morning they’d begged me to put on one of their new favorite DVDs–the “Shallow Seas” episode of the Planet Earth series, which is now known in our house simply as “The Fishies.”
While they were caught up in the sheer awesomeness that is “The Fishies,” I had seized the opportunity to crack open my laptop and attend to PhD shenanigans.
Two brand new sets of lunch bags and Thermoses (Thermi?) on the far counter caught my eye as I penned a particularly riveting email. We recently registered the Twins to start “school” in July and my wife–ever the planner–has ALREADY secured rad new Hello Kitty and Spider-Man lunchtime gear in anticipation. No, this isn’t the parent-child class I’ve previously mentioned. Our children will soon be attending a new “big-kid” all-day school program a few days a week–one they’ll be attending without Daddy waiting in the wings (which works out well because Daddy’s about to start on his dissertation).
We’re also mere days from launching PottyTrainingFest 2013, an event we know the Twins are ready for, as my daughter now literally approaches me with a clean diaper in hand, saying, “Daddy, I pee-peed.” (Why couldn’t THAT have caught on sooner?) Although their new school helps with potty training and even does diapers, the idea is for us to do the bulk of the work at the Pseudonymous World Headquarters and send them out into the field with a License to Potty.
Toddler Parkour
The Pseudonymous Family is moving to a new house this week. Although our current residence has served us well, it leaves little space for my wife and me to chase our little Ewoks around and has an air conditioner that was installed around the time Return of the Jedi was released. This does not bode well in the 115-degree Arizona summer, as it runs constantly and sh!tily and still does not sufficiently cool the house.
Accordingly, we’re very much looking forward to our new place’s additional square footage, reduced electricity bill, and gargantuan master bedroom closet organizer (a feature my wife literally dances about at its mere mention).
As we’ve been packing up the house, the Twins have been in rare form, no doubt thrown off by the disturbance in The Force due to their constantly-changing surroundings. While my daughter has fully integrated the word “No” into her vocabulary (Yeah. I’m in trouble.), my son has begun to test physical boundaries, exploring the limits of both furniture he’s allowed on and his own body. In fact, once we’d emptied the bookshelf in his bedroom the other day, we discovered a new talent of his, as illustrated by the following footage:
Coyote Fugly: Part 1 – Your Friendly Neighborhood Predator
I was already mourning the morning walk.
Before we’d even traveled a block my dog had decided to lead the caravan, walking directly in front of the jogging stroller, her hindquarters mere inches from the front wheel. I don’t know why she insists upon this walking arrangement–maybe she likes to think she’s in charge–but(t) it never “ends” well for her, typically culminating in me literally running her ass over. It begins when she looks back at the stroller and decides she is terrified of it, so terrified that she freezes in place, causing the usually-taut leash to slack and wrap around the stroller’s back axle, putting us at a dead stop just after the tire bumps her square on the cheeks. I do my best to stop before the butt-bump, but she forces me to tailgate her at an unsafe following distance.
It would be a lot easier (and fun) if my dog could fly.
On this particular day, she had jumped to deer-in-headlights mode so abruptly and forcibly that it had pulled her harness clean off. (We attach the leash to her harness and not her collar because after years of scientific research, we have determined she would rather be choked to death than respond to leash tugs.) And because my dog just barely qualifies as obedient, I knew I had to act quickly on this leashless freedom unless I wanted to choose between:
1) chasing her around the neighborhood, loudly cussing her out while she thinks its a game, waking the Twins from their stroller catnaps and yielding a sterophonic meltdown; or
2) tritely employing the if-you-love-her-set-her-free-and-if-she-never-returns-she-was-never-yours axiom, which would most likely mean never seeing my beloved canine again, as she would surely make a grand exit from this life in Harry Houdini fashion while performing her famous freezing-in-front-of-an-oncoming vehicle trick.
It was in that moment that I remembered I am a ninja, as my keen, subconscious reflexes sprang into action, one-handedly snagging her by the tail, keeping the other hand firmly planted on the stroller.
She turned her head towards me, dumbly panting with glee, as if to say. “That was fun, Dad!”
Twinfamy 