Laughing

How do you teach your children to laugh at themselves? The line between embarrassing and funny is razor thin.  Without going into all the details, I'll just let you know Amelia fell into the toilet tonight. She wasn't hurt. She ended up splashed down in the water, folded like a taco, with her legs straight up in the air...and it was hilarious. Well, it was hilarious to us. She cried because she was embarrassed.  It wasn't that she didn't see the humor in the situation. She admitted it would have been sooo funny if it happened to me.  She simply didn't like being laughed at and there was no way she was going to laugh with us about it.  We tried and tried to explain that life is much better when you can laugh at the silly things.  In the end, she calmed down, but she she never accepted the comedy of it all. I'm wondering if this is something that comes with age or just something you're born with.  To me, I think being able to laugh at yourself is one of most singularly important virtues to a happy existence. To her, I was just her jerk dad laughing at her misfortune.

Shopper

Ev is mesmerized by all the holiday decorations. We have to take him to the store regularly so he can look at them. He and I went this weekend and spent at least 20 minutes staring at them...

Judo Chop

I think we are enrolling Amelia in karate in the spring. She got a little taste of it this weekend....she can clearly use a little work on her punching...

Helper

When you're a parent, you will find that your kids love to read, watch, and listen to the dumbest things over and over and over again. Luckily for me, I found out this morning my nightly efforts with teaching Amelia to read are finally paying off. Sure, I'm proud of her and she's doing great in school. However, the payoff I'm talking about is the fact that she now happily reads all those terrible books to Everett instead of me. This is the early stages of my master plan to have children so they can perform all the tasks in life that I want to avoid. Phase two includes teaching her Microsoft Excel so she can go to work for me too.

Message

When you come home from working late and you are bummed out from missing the evening with your kids, there are very few things that can cheer you up like stumbling upon this sidewalk chalk message...

Artist

Here is Amelia's drawing from school. It is a great rendition of our house. We actually do have a green chimney, red door, and a red and blue bounce house on the side.. However, I would like to know who the person lounging in a lawn chair in my front yard is...that's just silly...

Verbal

A few months ago, Everett was a man of few words and Amelia could only read books she was familiar with. Last night, Everett had a 15 minute phone conversation and Amelia read me over 20 pages of a chapter book. It's amazing to me how quickly children grow, how ferociously they learn, and how massively they change over a short time.  As a parent, all you can do is sit back and watch them in amazement.  I feel very lucky to have a front row seat to their show.