onvural.net – melih – family man

On the walk to school today, I found a worm on the sidewalk. I figured it was a goner anyway, and so I picked it up, and handed it to Luka.

The poor guy survived a full day of school, and we released him into the wild when we got home. I don’t think he’s going to do very well though…

Update (4/5/14): This post was written in the future anyway, but today we discovered what happened… he got eaten by a colony of ants. They were finishing him off just as we got there. It wasn’t pretty 🙁

We went to go see Frozen today with the babies.

They’ve both been learning the songs on YouTube, and they recognize the various characters. So after gym (given it was raining like crazy), we decided to book tickets, and make a go of it. The Greens came with us.

They both loved it!

Amelia sang along to the songs. She kept asking about where her favorite characters were, and why they were sad, or happy, or scared. Luka sat in Micky’s lap, and just watched the whole thing. He was so focused. I don’t know if he blinked once in the 90 minutes.

I’m so glad that this was their first movie theater experience.

A wonderful movie. A wonderful time. I even saved the ticket stubs so that they can throw it into a memento book one day. Really, we should start it for them… that’s a cool idea.

Amelia’s favorite was Anna and “Let it go”.

Luka was unable to articulate 🙂

I hope Disney keeps cranking them out at this level because it was really great, and I’m really excited to see more like it.

We’re at the Boat Playground today (45th & Lincoln) hanging out with Mat, Mary, and Baby Reece. It’s quite fun to just jaunt around the Sunset with folks. We can pretty much walk anywhere (as long as it’s a San Francisco crowd) because nothing is more than a mile away.

So off we went to the beach, but all of the babies fell asleep 🙂

We ended up going to Trouble Coffee (cool spot, with a wacky staff), and then headed to the Boat Playground when the babies woke up.

Everyone was doing their thing – Reece was eating (or maybe the Eltings had just left), Luka was flirting with older women in the sand, and Amelia went off into the grassy bit in the back.

Then all of a sudden, Micky screams, “What’s Amelia doing? Quick. Stop her!”

I was stuck with Luka in a high up place, and off Micky ran. When we all got back together I found out that she’d pulled her pants down, squatted in the grass, and successfully peed. She then (since there are no bathrooms there) did it again right before we left (but this time in a less obvious spot).

What a rock star she is!

We went and had pizza for dinner, and then took the train home.

Great family (& friends) day 🙂

So it turns out that having a yard, and being by the park, has inspired a whole new activity for the kids… bug hikes!

The kids went out yesterday, and found a mole in the woods. They look for spiders, ants, bees, and anything else that crawls. Genevieve is totally into it too which is great. Amelia is the one requesting it, but they’re both really into it.

And that’s where my dilemma begins…

Amelia is asking to go on bug hikes. I’m really excited that she’s into nature & biology. Hopefully this turns into a life long love for the sciences. It’s too early to say, but it’s definitely a start. And yet, I don’t want to be excited just because my daughter is into bugs. I want to be excited absolutely.

And so if I celebrate her pushing for bug hikes… am I exacerbating stereotypes about girls not being into science? Does chasing bugs count as science? Is the fact that a girl is into dirt busting a stereotype?

Maybe I’m just thinking about it too much…

Forget it, let’s just go on a bug hike, and we’ll worry about the social implications when the time comes 🙂

Here’s a million dollar question…

Should we tell Amelia that she has now been rejected by every school to which we’ve applied?

She’s visited a bunch of them, and is very aware that she visited a bunch of new schools. She has even asked about going back to them when she doesn’t want to go to school. Now we’re scrambling to figure out what to do next. We’ve got one option open that I love, but may be too complicated to pull off from a logistics point of view.

I’m also going to have to scramble and find some schools in the Sunset.

Between it all though, the big question is whether she’s supposed to know. And I don’t know why, but it’s a hard one to figure out 🙁

We were in the locker room getting dressed after swimming tonight. Amelia & Luka noticed that another baby from their class was using the hair dryer. They asked to use it, and then this conversation happened:

Amelia: Daddy, you do it first

Me: Amelia, I don’t have any hair to dry

Amelia: No daddy, on your back

Yeah… that just happened.

We just got back from swimming. We’ve changed from our Saturday afternoon slot to a Tuesday evening slot, and it’s totally changed how the kids engage. I feel like we’ve finally found their swimming sweet spot.

Our Saturday teacher was a woman named Simone who is a fantastic swimming teacher. Amelia bloomed under her, and grew by leaps and bounds. Unfortunately, Luka just couldn’t get into it. Worse… we were always late, and they were always waking up early from their naps to go.

It was just way too hard to make it all happen, and so even though leaving Simone was a hard choice, we decided to try out a new night.

I think Jenny is going to be a good teacher as well, but, more than anything else, I think we’re finally not stressing out their sleep cycle, it’s much easier to get there (and so we get the full lesson), and the class size is slightly smaller. It’s meant that Luka is finally putting his head under water, and Amelia just keeps getting better and better.

It also gives us our Saturday afternoon’s back, and we don’t feel like we lose an entire day of the weekend to having to do kid’s activity.

I just don’t get why the pool would have their 1 – 2 year old classes at THE primo nap time for that age group. It just doesn’t make sense :-/

We’re really sad we’ve lost Simone, but we’re really excited about the kids being into swimming. We’ve found their swimming sweet spot 🙂

In case you missed it, Dale Earnhardt Jr. won this year’s Daytona 500.

My driver is Kasey Kahne (a choice I made by saying whoever won Rookie of the Year the first year I watched NASCAR would be my guy). It’s been a good choice (even though there have been some rough years), and while the Daytona 500 wasn’t good to him, I have a good feeling about this year… but I digress.

Junior has the fortune/misfortune of being the son of the greatest (or maybe #2) stock car driver of all time. He’s ridden that to some great highs (twice winning the Busch series driving for his dad’s team), and some incredibly lows (two multiple year winless streaks that have haunted him). I think personally though that he’s handled it all well, and this win is I think the beginning of him coming out of his father’s shadow.

The thing is, I really get what it’s like to be Junior.

My dad started and sold a company during the first bubble at first bubble valuations. My aunt got him a t-shirt that translated the price to Turkish lira, and given the ratio was $1:1mil TL at the time, it was a huge number.

All I knew growing up was science and technology were going to open the doors for me to do the same thing. I never considered anything else except computer science/electrical engineering as a profession. I loved economics, french, and the film class I used to sneak into with Jordan, but those were never going to be a profession. At most, they’d be a hobby.

And there has been a really long lull where I felt like this was an awful choice. I would never find a way out of that shadow. And I don’t know that I’m out yet, but it’s really starting to feel like the possibility is there. And it’s really uplifting. And it’s really terrifying. But mainly, it’s exciting.

It’s a long and lonely thing a father’s shadow. But the other side is a story of a journey well traveled, and a life well lived.

Tonight we took the babies to the beach after their naps. This is my first new favorite thing about our location. We haven’t really had the chance to urban hike Golden Gate park, and that would be next I think. Biking as a family third, but I digress.

When we were in the UK winter of 2012, we ended up at this awesome hotel outside Bath whose name I forget. It was targeted at families, and had kids stuff, menus, a daycare area, and indoor pool. It was amazing.

The best part was that everyone else had kids. So when your kids were screaming at dinner, you were just one in a crowd. It was incredibly liberating.

After the beach, we went to the Park Chalet. Kids played outside as we waited. We sat down, ordered and ate. They were amazing. We all played silly games. They ate their dinner. We all had dessert. They were genuinely easy, and the evening was fantastically wonderful. Amelia even threw down a rendition of “Say Something” for all to enjoy.

From that hotel outside Bath to the Park Chalet we went from being in the screaming masses to a lovely family dinner for 4.

We’re on our way to swimming today, when Amelia decides to drop a big first – her first song request. When she asked for it, I was really surprised, and didn’t actually believe her at first. Then… she started singing the lyrics, and I had no choice.

What was you ask?

None other than:

It’s a really pretty song, and Miss Amelia can belt it like no other. She got her dad’s voice 🙂 and love for top 40 music.