Category: Fatherhood

And she’s up and on her scooter. What a star!

Today, I told Luka on my way to work, “Luka, I love you” and he says back to me, “Thanks”.

🙂

They’re just goofballs. Long may it last.

There’s a place called Slide Ranch by Muir Beach in the North Bay… and it’s amazing!

It’s a working farm, and today they held an open house for kids. They were showing folks how to make pickles, milk goats, sheer a sheep, and a bunch more. We went to gym, hooked up with the Greens, and then made our way over to Muir Beach.

I get so nauseas going north on CA1. It’s just too windy for me. But we were only on it for 10 miles or so to get to the farm. We got our stickers, and headed straight for the goat milking. I tried to get the kids to do it, but they wouldn’t. I jumped in, and it didn’t go so well 🙂

The babies got face paint done. Amelia got a black sheep and a bee. Luka a tiger!

We had a picnic lunch, checked out the bee hives & chicken coop, and then ended our adventure by trying to felt a cat. That went awfully 🙂

It was tons of fun though!

Now for the pictures…

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 🙂