Tonight's Dinner Entertainment

I'm gonna tell you a story. This story is about a made up story. About a fish. Once upon a time, there was a fish! And his name was Daddy. And there was a mommy fish and a baby fish. And they lived in a house called.... water! And they dived in and swam to their house, and then they played for a little bit and then go to bed.

And there were... bears running to them. And AAAAAAAAAHHH! And they said NO, no go away! And the bears want the house, but no, they have to find their own purple house!

And there were flowers going to gymnastics class. And they started growing and growing and growing and growing and growing until they were a giant flower!

The end.


I'm gonna tell you another story. This one is the LAST story. Once upon a time, there was a happy little lark named Peep. And it lived in a special place called the Country Inn. And the flower started growing... and growing and growing and growing! And there was a bub! (Daddy: what's a bub? Asher: it's a bee and it has little tiny ovals and not big ovals. Daddy: oh.) And he chased him (Daddy: the bub chased the flower, or chased Pete? Asher: PEEP. Daddy: Oh, he chased Peep. I see.) It didn't chase the flower, though, but it chased TWO flowers!

The end.

Flu

Kurtis has it.

I feel like I may be getting it, but I hold out hope.

Asher is well, so far. But I have less hope for him -- he is, after all, two.

Asher, Wii Bowler

I wanted to put in some clarification about Wii bowling in particular, because it's led to a whole new form of daddy son interaction.

First, let me start off with the fact that Wii bowling physics are awesome, by which I mean "not very realistic." It's like awesome martial arts, or awesome chinese food, not awesome TV (meaning, apparently, not understandable by the vast majority of Americans) or awesome music (meaning I like it.)

Anyway, Asher's figuring out bowling really means he's come up with some slightly spastic way of grabbing the remote with both hands, bending over and standing back up. About 50% of the time his random button pushing produces a forward going ball, though this number is improving rapidly (as are his scores) but in general means the ball travels down the lane about as fast as downtown Chicago rush hour traffic. At that speed, once his ball makes contact with the pins, it shifts quite a bit right to left, since it doesn't actually have enough momentum to keep going straight after contact with the enemy.

(This is, of course, in stark contrast to my Wii bowling style, which has evolved from a nuanced, practiced, carefully spun throw to a heave-the-ball-as-hard-as-I-possibly-can-in-the-hopes-of-accidentally- losing-control-of-the-remote-and-breaking-my-TV for reasons we'll discuss shortly.)

It also means that it takes him about eight minutes to bowl ten frames. Which leads to the following babysitting tactic:

1. start Wii bowling in power bowl practice mode
2. bowl first (takes about 80 seconds to do all ten frames)
3. sit down and blog about Wii bowling while waiting for son to bowl for eight minutes

Good times for all.

What I started to notice was that despite his lack of ball speed, my son is only about 10-30 pins behind me per game of power bowl (I usually score about 400-450, he scores 400-430). Very occasionally he beats me.

After watching, I see that it's because if you start your ball going (regardless of speed) it keeps going that direction. No friction loss, no curving of the lane.

After realizing this, I realized that if I basically just threw the ball as hard as I could, I could actually lift pins into the air. In power bowl mode, I basically now just try to get as many pins to ricochet around as possible, in hopes of knocking everything down. Plus, this maximizes blogging/surfing time.

Now, my son has tired of bowling and wants to play Wii baseball, which takes the same amount of time for both of us, so....

I'm out.

No, really, I mean it this time

In the last 3 days, Asher has done the following:

1)Figured out how to bowl on the Wii (this is pretty complicated, involving timing button pushes and releases with swinging the remote), as well as the batting part of baseball

2)Read the first 7 pages of Hop on Pop (with encouragement and finger pointing, but without us giving him words/sounds) -- He gets bored/tired easily with the reading, but he's getting it

3)After asking what that word spells (Triangle), says "but no, it's supposed to end with "LLLLL" (L-sound), but there's a E!" When told that it's a silent E, and makes no sound, seems satisfied. Then today, mentions that "circle" has a "silent E at the end" and that silent E's "make ANY sound!!!" (He still isn't great on negative sentence constructions, but that means they don't make any sound).

4)When asked what 2 turtles and 3 turtles would be all together, thinks HARD for about 10-15 seconds and then says "FIVE!!!!!"


Seriously, a stinkin' genius.

If we could only get him to apply himself to the whole pee-in-the-potty thing...