Month: October 2009

Ollie Part 1

Since it seems that cold weather has arrived in New England as well as in Manitoba, I thought that you might like to curl up with a story. Ollie by Olivier Dunrea is part of a series of books that L and I enjoy. We have read them before but this time Ollie took on a new meaning for me.

Outing to the Children’s Museum

L and I had a great time at the Children’s Museum with some of my co-workers. He enjoyed driving the ambulance and crawling into The Darkness. “The Darkness” was a curvy tunnel that led into a climbing structure. L and 2 boys that he was playing with there were having fun until L pretended he was a tiger and stalked them out of the tunnel; one boy was still laughing but the other started crying. L and I had to talk about being scary. L also enjoys putting things together. We spent a fair bit of time in the magnetic shape section and with dinosaur bones that clipped together.


A Few Quick Updates

It’s amazing what L can do with a mouse and an online game that presupposes a relatively sophisticated knowledge of the alphabet. He can move characters through alphabet mazes and he can recognize an object on the screen and identify the letter “it begins with”. If his Mom and Dad let him, he’d be at it all day.

L is tall, really tall.

L had a welcome-to-the-real-world moment yesterday. A few weeks ago, when I picked him up from the nursery, I was told by one of the staffers that L had had some trouble sharing that day. This prompted a “lecture” from his parents. L took it to heart, and he did a better job of sharing his toys the next few weeks. Yesterday, when I went to pick him up from the nursery, he wasn’t there. He was playing by himself–accompanied by a staffer, of course–in a room across the hall. Even though he had done his best to apply the sharing concept, asking other children if they would be willing to share their toys with him instead of just taking their toys without asking, another boy hadn’t done the same; he had come up to L and taken his toy away from him. Apparently, L had promptly left the room, gone across the hall, and collapsed crying into the arms of one of the staffers who had followed him there. Life’s tough. You do your best to abide by the rules and someone else comes along and takes advantage of you. Welcome to the real world.

Did I mention this? L is tall.

Even though I’m away during the day, I often have work to do in the evening. L gets a bit of Dad-time in after supper, but eventually I pull out a paper or my computer and sit down to do some reading, writing, or lecture prep. If it were up to L, this would never happen; we would wrestle or play hide and seek till well past his bedtime. So what does he do? He’ll stop by occasionally to tickle feet, crawl up on the couch and stick a finger in an ear, or land a really wet kiss on the nose. This makes him kind of hard to ignore and, if he persists long enough, he usually gets exactly the reaction he’s looking for. I think I’m being manipulated…though I’m not sure I mind that much.

Tricycle

In the towns around here people will frequently put good used items that they no longer want beside the curb. I picked up a tricycle for L across the street yesterday. I have tried to pick something up in the past but L kept telling me that it wasn’t mine and he carried it back. So being a little wiser I picked it up while he was watching TV.

He doesn’t quite have the hang of pedaling yet, it is a little hit and miss if he will get the coordination right.

What would learning to ride a bike be without a few spills. He was so busy concentrating on his feet that right after I took this picture he bit the dust.


After awhile he gave up concentrating on pedaling and got excited about how fast he could make the tricycle go if he pushed it.