Hippity, Hoppity

A couple of “Won’t Grandma and Grandpa like to see these pictures?” pictures. The first set is from Sam’s school where they had the 423rd annual Spring hat parade. Ironically Sam had chosen to have plastic slinkies on his hat and everyone thought he was just the cleverest kid because he made a “Spring” hat. Get it? SPRING? – look at the slinkies mom, it will come to you in a minute. Anyhow…here are some Easter related photos.

Easter egg hunt in the common area of our subdivision. One of the local churches sponsored an Easter egg hunt for the kids. Sam found the money egg and raked in a cool $5.00. Now we are off to another 20 egg hunts so we can find more cash. (just kidding)

2010 Airfest

Sam and I had the BEST day yesterday with one exception (scroll down to the next entry for details). We attended the MacDill 2010 Airfest and spent the entire day together wandering around the tarmac checking out airplanes, eating junk food, and staring into the sky. Reading about it this morning in the paper it seems that there were approximately 100,000 people there with us, but it was so huge there wasn’t that crush of people usually associated with other 100K events. It was basically a 6 years olds dream. We rode the bus there, climbed in and out of planes of all shapes and sizes, saw men in uniform with weapons and had hot dogs for lunch. What’s not to love? Oh, did I mention the Blue Angels were there? About ten minutes into the Blue Angels show Sam observed that having them fly overhead was simply making the other lines really short, so we missed some of the Blue Angels appearance. This event is best described in pictures. Here ya go.

Good morning Captain!

 

I’m sure a lot of conversations or, in this case, blog posts start with “I love my son but…” Well.

I love Sam but…

His timing is killing me. Every morning I get up before everyone else and try to get my day going. You probably don’t need the details, but it only includes a shower, some breakfast and coffee. I don’t know how many times I have made the coffee, gathered up some food and sat down only to hear the shuffle of his little feet coming to find me. What can you do? You can’t look at him and say “Oh shit, you’re awake!” I always just give him a hug and ask him how he slept. Sometimes I get a story about one of his dreams or the usual “Great!” Some day I’ll realize that this was obviously the right thing to do and miss it when he’s off to college or just not interested in a morning hug. Right now I’m going to scarf down these cheerios and finish typing. Shhh.

This is not how Sendak got his start

It started innocently enough. Sam was trying to get to sleep in a new room, new bed, new country and he wanted me to tell him a story. I made up some goofy story about a couple of strange characters named Ted and Scooter. This was fine for a few days, a week even. Pretty soon the plots had to become more elaborate and it became harder and harder to remember all the stuff I had made up about them. Don’t worry…Sam had me covered. Every slip I made about their history he jumped all over. “Dad…Scooter can’t read! Don’t you remember?” Fast forward 5 months and I now have a whole cast of characters and I’m on the verge of either killing them all off in a major bedtime story disaster or writing my own children’s story line. How do I get out of this? I start to get nervous about an hour before bedtime. What if I don’t have a good enough story? Is Scooter’s best friend Tiny or Bug? What else could they possibly do? I’ve sent them on cruises, airplanes, to a pancake eating contest (Ted won by the way), argh! I’m telling you it doesn’t look good for Ted or Scooter. This kid has to learn to read…and soon!

If it ain’t broken….

It was quite a show of drama here last night. Sam was playing his beloved Nintendo DS before bed and as I left the room I told him to quit doing X to it or it would break. Five minutes later I hear shrieking from upstairs. As I started the obligatory “Dad run” to where ever the fire is, I was met by Sara and Sam and two pieces of what used to be a one piece toy. The Nintendo DS. I’ve never felt so bad about being right. Sam was beside himself and Sara was sad because her brother was crying…you would have thought they were watching old Yeller. I only bring up this story for a few reasons. The first is…boy is it hard to get the logistics worked out with a call center as soon as they hear you aren’t in the U.S. The girl kept telling me I needed a U.S. address, a U.S. phone number, she would be sending me a mailing label only good in the U.S. I get it. Ironically she was probably answering the phone in the Philippines or India. The second, and most interesting note to come out of it is that Sara kept telling Sam that she would ask people to replace the DS for her birthday. She has a birthday coming up in June and she wanted to give up her birthday gift to make him happy. I don’t think I’ve ever been so proud of her. Sam, missing the point of the whole conversation, wanted to take the DS to the guy at the bike store. The guy at the bike store??? I quickly slipped in the “Guy who can fix anything” rankings into second place behind the bike store guy. I think I will take the game to the bike store guy. It’s the only way to get back my #1 ranking.

Charles E. Ost

Just as I was all set to lash out at the service industry here, some lady goes and ruins it for me. I had run across enough instances of bad service that damn it, I was gonna tell them about it. Then I run into, let’s call her Lisa. Why? Because I have no idea what her name was and it’s short and easy to type.

Yesterday we made a mistake. We took Sam to a nearby play area that we had heard about 20 times, but for whatever reason we never made it over there. This place is a giant warehouse type building with the super deluxe McDonalds playland sets in it and a bunch of tables for the parents to hang out. They had a counter to serve food, ice cream, candy, soda, you name it. Think of a super clean, well run, well lit, not crowded Chuck E. Cheese, then make it even a little nicer in your head. Here we come to the mistake part. Sam had a blast. We should have tried this much earlier than only a few days prior to leaving. It’s not the type of place you want to rely on to entertain your kids all the time, but a great place to go when you just can’t climb the rocks in the backyard that day.

Here are some pictures and then I’ll tell the Lisa story.

Now, this is where Lisa comes in. We’ve never had ANY issue using our ATM card or credit cards wherever we’ve been, even with the shady London tour company. Today none of our cards worked. We had ordered some food from Lisa and just received it when this happened. No big deal for her, she tells us to go ahead and eat, figure out the money later. I end up going to the ATM where the card works just fine, return and pay Lisa. The kicker to this whole story is that Lisa doesn’t speak a word of English. Maybe we have it backwards…maybe that’s the trick. That way both sides have to work a little harder at communicating.

Ferry Toll taker man and Hurti-rude-en ticket taker could learn from Lisa.

A Sam upside down cake

Kids are funny. Sam was sitting around wondering what to do yesterday when his kid sense picked something up. He stood up, listened intently and exclaimed…”The kids are outside!” He got Sara to help him with his shoes and coat and off he went. The next thing I know I see him outside the kitchen window, up on the hill, being held upside down by one of the neighborhood boys. Sam has adopted two of the older boys in the neighborhood as his buddies. I’m not sure what they think of the little guy who comes running to play with them every chance he gets, but they seem to have taken him under their wing and let him join in. Yesterday he teamed up with one of the younger boys hanging around and they played for a couple of hours, neither one speaking the others language. Hopefully being held upside down on the side of a small cliff face translates into toughness or strength in the face of adversity when we get home. I guess it could affect him differently and he could start crying whenever he hears the Norwegian language, but I doubt it. He’s having a great time.

Larry Note

I talked with mom and dad yesterday and everything seems good. Every time I talk to my dad he is reading the paper. Now either the Moline Dispatch has expanded their coverage, or my dad spends too much time reading the paper. If anyone wants a good joke to play on Larry, just replace his newspaper with something crazy, or put an old one in its place…like from 1972 or something. There is nothing very new on the medical front, just getting through the remaining chemo treatments and spending a couple of months after that trying to gain some weight and energy.

Energy shortage

I tell you all the happy, fun, adventurous stories, but here is a glance at the flipside of that tale.

Remember our wonderous trip to Lillehammer last weekend? Crazily enough the Olympic park is situated at the top of a mountain....even funnier is that our hotel was situated halfway up that mountain. Sam and I did not agree on the amount of energy he had to arrive at either location. This is the same kid that smoked us climbing the 4.8 million stairs in Alesund. There was a point where he had tried every 4 year old trick in the book. "Mine leg is broken." "I need my energy to come back." I tried the old threat that we were gonna leave him there....you veteran parents know how that turned out. He was fine with that and sat down in the snow. We eventually made it up the mountain and miraculously Sam regained his lost energy enough to go sledding for 2+ hours.

Here are a couple of pictures from next to the hotel. They had loaner sleds and skates that you could use on the large hill nearby also. This one only had ONE tool to get sleds to the top. Daddy.

One staged photo for fun...the other is Sam as a speck to show how far up the hill I had to drag the sled.