Putting together the new play kitchen, and no plumber's crack in sight!

Kids being kids, they love to pretend to be superheroes or Vikings or anything fantastical you can imagine. Oddly enough, they also love to pretend to do mundane adult things like cooking and going to the DMV to renew their vehicle registration.  Frankly, I’ve never met any children who wanted to pretend to renew their vehicle registration, but I’m sure it must happen somewhere. Whenever our kids visit a children’s museum, we always see a mob scene at the play kitchen area.  I’m not sure what the deal is, but I suppose kids like to pretend to be grown-ups. My niece has a play kitchen, and all three kids love to pretend to cook eggs and boil potatoes.

For Christmas, my wife’s family got our kids the KidKraftplay Deluxe Let’s Cook play kitchen. It’s certainly been a while since Christmas, but I finally had a lengthy block of time to clear out some space and put it together early Sunday evening.  The instruction manual advised between 1 – 1.5 hours, but I knew that’s never accurate. From my experience, these projects often require you to tack on an additional 2 hours to any job. It took me close to four hours, as the kids constantly tried to “help” me. Still, I’ve realized that even though they aren’t actually helping, they need to feel like they are.

Josh and the new play kitchen assembled

The kitchen turned out rather nice, but I was a little surprised that no play food was included.  Luckily, my wife purchased some over a year ago from a KB Toys store that was closing up, and she held on them until she needed it. She’s good like that. Soon we’ll have to introduce the kids to diner lingo. That should be fun.

I saw two movies on one day.  The first movie I watched was Happy Feet, a 2006 animated children’s movie about an Emperor penguin.  According to the story, Emperor penguins sing popular soul, R&B, and rock tunes during the lives, including during mating season.  Hey, who doesn’t?  However, one penguin (voiced by Elijah Wood) can’t sing at all, but has been blessed with the tap-dancing skills of…, I don’t know, Gregory Hines comes to mind.  He’s outcast, finds more penguins, tries to find himself, tries to solve a mystery regarding where all the fish have gone, it’s man, saves the day, convinces everyone that being different is okay, lather, rinse, repeat.  Big all-star cast, including a lot of Robin Williams.

Anyone seen this movie before?

All jokes aside, it was a decent kid’s flick, but Josh was a little scared at specific times.  There’s a tinge more animal-on-animal hinted violence in this movie.  As he’s only 4-years old, he still thinks all bees make honey for the bears, because the bears would never steal the honey.  One day, he’s going to find out where the turkey and chicken, and beef he’s been eating comes from, and I don’t want to be in the room when someone explains it to him.

Happy Feet (2006)

Is Spring finally here? The weather seems to have picked up. Today, we hit 70 degrees, and I took the kids to the park to hang out at the playground. Lily had her experience on the swings, and Josh got to push her. Some of Josh’s classmates showed up, and I watched him run around with them.

It was a nice weekend overall. Did I mention it was Lily’s birthday on Saturday? Yeah, we kept it simple — a late breakfast at a nice restaurant Saturday morning, then just hanging out as a family, and we went to a church event in the evening. The actual birthday party will be next Saturday.

I can’t believe Lily is 1 years old now. Heck, we can’t believe we survived 12 rounds, er months, with her, but we did. We were spoiled with Josh — he was always so easy-going as a baby, and later, as a little guy. Lily has been the baby with a little attitude and a heavy need for attention. Luckily, she’s cute as can be, so I guess that makes up for it.

My wife and I played LittleBigPlanet together this weekend.  I played for a while by myself yesterday (got really far), but I hit a number of areas where you need a friend along in order to get special items like stickers and stuff.  She joined me today for 30 mins, and we had lots of fun.  Just like in real life, I really liked having her there for company. I have the best fun with her that way.

Born January 18, 2009 at 12:55 AM weighing in at 6 pounds and 6 ounces. Congrats to Jimboy, the proud father. I’m very happy for you kids.  Now you’ve joined the zombie parent club.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jimboy/3205224369/

Send me a nice pic for posting!

I forgot to mention it last week, but congratulations to our friends Sunil and Ligy on the birth of their first kid, Nicholas. Everyone is doing well. Welcome to the we-used-to-be-so-young-why-am-I-so-tired club. Seriously, kids are great.  Even more seriously, why won’t these kids sleep?

Baby Nicholas

Hey, it's a family

So, it’s official.  Our daughter Lily is crawling.  It’s been slow for her the past month — a lot of backwards movement, unable to figure out how to change from sitting to crawling, but she’s been figuring it out.  She has also done a lot of circling/spiralling instead of crawling.

No longer.  I’m excited and impressed, just as it was with Josh two years ago, to watch my daughter developing and figuring it all out.  Moving two feet on Saturday, a couple more feet last night.  It’s fun to watch and observe.

We found out today that Josh is the Preschool Student of the Month for November.  I know his day school started this program/initiative last month, and I don’t know the qualifications, but hey, sounds good to me.  They take a picture of the student, and note some of their favorites.  Reading his poster, I learned, among other things:

• His cat’s name is Nina.  (When did we get a cat?)
• His favorite food is noodles.  (I saw that one coming.)
• His favorite place to go is the beach. (Big surprise.)
• His favorite show is “Diego.”  (I think he means, “Go, Diego, Go!”)
• He is a basketball star. (I’m okay with that, but when did that happen?)
• His favorite color is red.  (Really?)

All in all, good for him.  He got a certificate, a toy, balloons, everyone clapped for him, etc. He was pretty proud.

I have had a very long week.  Issues getting to work on time in the morning (pouty kids, traffic, forgotten cell phones), people behaving badly, late nights, mental exhaustion, children who don’t sleep, the audit that never ends, catching up on work that actually never gets caught up on. I’m mentally out of it tonight, so I’m not even pretending to consider booting up the laptop.  Screw it, I’m chilling out tonight.

Tomorrow is Halloween, and the weekend is not too far beyond. My wife has been taking care of the Halloween preparations for the kids.  Josh is dressing up as a cowboy, and Lily is going to be a lamb.  I picked up cupcakes for Josh’s Halloween party in class tomorrow afternoon.  I probably wouldn’t have all the time and patience for all this planning for the kids, but my wife more than makes up for it.  God bless her.