Thoughts On My Kids

Two kids now, and both doing things that I find interesting and worth writing about.

Oliver At Three-And-A-Half

A New Room

[Well, I wrote this nine years ago. And it’s now 2020, and Oliver is twelve, and he’s not fond of the fact this blog post comes up when you google his name, because of the first story I relate here. It’s a funny story and I love it, but he’s viewing his three-year-old behaviour through the lens of a twelve-year-old, and I get that. So here’s the edited version…not as good as the original.]

He gets out of bed tonight and walks over to the top of the stairs. “Dah-ee!” (He generally skips the second d in daddy, which I’m fond of.)

I go upstairs to ask him what the issue is and I notice that he’s damp all over. His hair is plastered to his head. His face is flushed. I ask him why he’s all wet.

“Because my room is jiggling [his window rattles when the wind blows hard]. It was bothering me. So I got all of the way underneath my blankets. But my room was still jiggling. My room is too old. I need a new room.”

Very Upset

I’ve been off work due to the Christmas holidays for over a week. Oliver and I were hanging out after I was off for a few days, and he said, out of the blue: “I’m very upset with you, daddy, because you go to work every day to make lots of bacon and you are there for a very long time.”

Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes, Yes

You’ll really only understand this anecdote if you’ve read the Robert Munsch story Angela’s Airplane, about a child who absconds with an airplane because she cannot resist pressing buttons.

Oliver’s favourite stuffed animal is this truly massive (it’s bigger than him) blue teddy bear that my buddy Wayne bought for him when he was first born. Oliver got me out of bed one night to examine an urgent issue with the bear, namely that he had extracted a large amount of stuffing from the bear by pulling it out of a hole in that had formed in its arm.

“Oliver, why are you picking out the stuffing?” I asked.

“Well,” he replied, “I was laying in bed and I asked myself, should I pick the stuffing out of the bear? Is that a good idea? And I said, ‘yes, yes, yes, yes, yes’. So I picked it.”

Sloane At Ten Months

She’s recently learned how to “crawl”, except that she can only go backwards, by pushing the floor in front of her with her hands. Because of this she often seems confused about where she ends up, since she can’t see where she is going.

She never fails to return a smile, and when she does, it’s amazing.

I feel guilty that this portion of my post is so much shorter than the portion devoted to Oliver, but she’s still a baby, doing baby things, and I don’t want to bore you. Besides, a picture is worth a thousand words: