Future Poltergeist

Me: Do you know what Leo's name means? Felix: No. Me: It means 'lion'. (pause) Do you know what Felix means? Felix: Yes. Me: What? Felix: (nothing) Me: It means 'lucky'. Felix: No! It means 'elephant'. It means 'elephant that scares baby lions'!

I'm watching Leo explore our house (again) as he does every day.  I just got hit with a wave of preemptive nostalgia for the days when he won't need to explore again.  You see, he goes from commonplace object to commonplace object trying to figure out a) what it is for and more importantly b) what fun thing he can do with it.  We also run into c) is it light enough to move around on his own.  Everything gets inspected closely until he is distracted into inspecting something else. The something else is usually Ozzie.  He loves that cat.  Whenever he sees Ozzie he lights up.  Goes over to him and tries to interact.  This means that Leo tips his head to one side to be adorable and holding out a finger for sniffing.  Well, waving a finger.  He knows to do that but he doesn't have the speed right yet.  Ozzie then gets some pats and fawning and shortly thereafter escapes.  (I should mention that Ozzie is better with kids than any o...

Yesterday I washed the van while the kids were in it.  I was doing my part to encourage it to rain.  Alas, no luck.  Before the wash, I gassed up and while I was doing that, I heard shouting from inside.  Someone was yelling something like 'daddy'.  I peered through the very dirty windows and put a finger over my lips to DF, in the 'quiet' sign.  Then I noticed LL's smiling face and gave him a smile in return and a wave.  After the pump was done I went inside and paid for the car wash.  When I got back to the van, both Relia and DF told me that it was LL who was shouting 'Da-da!'.  He did so again, just to convince me that it wasn't a fluke.  We're tough judgers of words here.  Before we credit a new word to one of our kids, we need it to be clear and in context.  No accidental ones for us!  This time he passed the test.  Da-da indeed. (Of course I could have done without the honor the middle of last night when he...

Some absolutely great stuff in here.  My favorite is: If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. Or, if proper usage gets in the way, it may have to go. I can't allow what we learned in English composition to disrupt the sound and rhythm of the narrative. It's my attempt to remain invisible, not distract the reader from the story with obvious writing.

I was going to write up our weekend out but the FP Gal did a great job so I'm just going to link .  There were many highlights, but getting a baseball was right up there. 

Watched a bit of a Felix the Cat cartoon this morning. A while later our DF quietly asked me "when was I a cat?".

Fascinating story from the last days of WW II.  I can't believe they weren't more careful with this stuff.

On Friday night we went to Frontenac State Park.  ('Frontenac' is French for 'daddy long legs', of which we saw at least a million.)  We got to the camp site just after lunch and we were lucky that the previous tenants had already checked out.  We could go right in.  We set up the new tent and another small tent that the FP Gal bought for the kids to play in.  We handed out whistles to the older kids in case they got lost in the woods.  Eventually we had take them back because they wouldn't stop 'practicing'.  LL got some jingle bells which we attached to his pants.  We were afraid that he'd hate them but he surprised us and loved them.  Right connected to the back of our site was a path to In Yan Teopa rock. This led us down to the a couple of spots overlooking Lake Peppin.  I took the bigger kids down there and within minutes we saw two different bald eagles soar past!  We saw the rock from above.  It wasn't very impressiv...

I don't remember when I stumbled upon this, but it's been something of a lifesaver.  A couple of years ago I came across a copy of Kipling's 'Just So Stories'.  You know, the one about how the camel got its humps and so on.  The kids enjoy them, but they have trouble staying awake through them. The stories are straight-forward but they have certain elements that bring on the drowsy.  Kipling has long phrases that he repeats several times.  For example, in the wonderful story about the Elephant's Child, he writes about 'the great grey-green greasy Limpopo river all set about with fever trees', again and again.  The phrase is wonderful but it has a certain lulling quality.  Anyway, it works.  Usually one story will do it.  On hard nights (like tonight) I pull out the big guns.  I just gave Relia twenty minutes of the wonderful story, 'Kim'.  We read about poor orphaned Kim and his meeting with the Tibetan lama.  We read about t...

Well, well, well.  Seek and ye shall find.  Yesterday I wondered if other full opening ceremonies were online.  I then found a bunch of them listed under ' Olympic Ceremony Database '.  Obviously, I haven't had a chance to look through all of them yet, but the more recent ones are complete.  Included is some footage from the very first modern Olympics, Athens 1896.  There is less than a minute of footage.  It looks verrrry 1896.  My guess is that the old ones are all just small clips.  Internet, you have delivered again!

I've taken to YouTube in the mornings to find things to show the kids.  Lately that's been Olympics heavy for various reasons.  The other day I ran across this: That's the full opening ceremony to the Vancouver Olympics.  In fact, it's the video that was given to various broadcasts.  Some three hours of it that the talking heads of NBC, Sky or whomever, would provide commentary for.  Which means that you, the viewer, can simply watch this on its own merits.  I know that the full thing is some three hours long, but do take a minute to watch the first couple of minutes.  There is a long establishing shot over the Vancouver harbor.  Eventually it comes to the BC Place, which looks like an exact clone of the Metrodome.  (Let's see, BC Place was built from '81-'83.  The Dome was built from '79 to '82.  Different architects but obviously the same design.) There are two musical highlights for me, the first about the 2:01:00 mark and ...

(I thought about blogging in the past week about, well, a bunch of stuff, but I noticed that I had four posts for July and that seemed nice somehow.  Anyway, I think regular blogging will resume now.) We took the older kids to a Twins game today.  Relia has been excited for this, literally counting the days.  When she heard that it was in August, she quickly connected it to her birthday.  She's been talking about fields and baseball for weeks now.  That excitement continued as we went into the park.  I think she was a little overwhelmed by the people and the noise.  DF, on the other hand was hungry, tired and cranky.  Some hot dogs fixed that problem. By the end of the second inning, the kids were completely ready to go home.  They didn't like sitting down.  They couldn't really follow what was going on.  And, worst of all, TC Bear was gone and there were no more mascots to watch.  We alternated going for walks with t...