Manly Weekend (HOL 92)

House of Laughter 92

Nancy was in South Carolina last weekend to work on her national boards. That meant Isaac and I got to spend the weekend together doing “guy stuff”. I love spending time with Isaac, but it can be a little frustrating. I am grateful that he almost always wants to play or read books with me, and I try to accommodate him as much as possible. He got a Matchbox Car race track for Christmas, and we setup up his jungle, barn, and fire station play sets so the cars have a little scenery during their race.

He has also become a fan of Mo Willems books. We checked out “Don’t let the Pigeon Stay up late” from the library a couple of weeks ago, and Nancy brought home several others like “Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus”, and “Knuffle Bunny”. The books are very funny, and the illustrations are very simple, but expressive. On more than one night recently we’ve found him asleep in his chair with one of those books on his lap.

My frustration comes when he wants to play, and I have to do things like make breakfast, or put away laundry, or empty the dishwasher. I would rather play with him than whatever I am doing at the time, but our house would be waste high in dirty laundry, dishes, and garbage. My other frustration is that I get bored after the third or fourth game of Candy land, and want some time to myself. I try to find something to keep him occupied while I try to read or check e-mail. This rarely works, and I end up answering the same questions three or four times, I get frustrated, feel guilty for getting frustrated, and go back and play Candy land again. This doesn’t happen when Nancy is around, because if she needs time alone, I can watch him and vice versa.

We watched Clone Wars three times this weekend (He also watched it Monday as well.). I read through first viewing, and slept through most of the second and third viewings. I just can’t help but think that Ahsoka’s daddy must have a heart attack seeing how his daughter dresses to fight the droid army. I also can’t get used to the idea of the stormtroopers being the good guys.

We also watched some classic Looney Tunes as well, and we both agreed that they were excellent.

In a move that is sure to confound teachers for years to come, I have taught Isaac in the litany of animal sounds that a cow says, “moo”, a cat says “meow”, and a walrus says, “goo goo g'joob”. The recent trip to Sea World was a little disappointing since we didn’t see any walruses to verify this fact scientifically, but whenever one is on TV or in a book, Isaac will yell “goo goo g'joob!”.

Isaac is a fan of Mario Kart on Wii. I let him choose which character I race as. He usually picks the smaller gorilla, Diddy Kong (a.k.a Isaac Kong). The larger gorilla is Donkey Kong (a.k.a. Daddy Kong). He cheers for me as I play, and gets upset if I lose. It’s pretty great to have my own cheering section. When he gets bored, he climbs on back or asks to sit on my lap. I was in the middle of an online race, when he decided that he wanted to sit on my lap. I couldn’t pause the game, because there were 10 other people playing, so he just slid under my arms onto my lap. For those of you unfamiliar with WII, to play Mario Kart, you hold a remote in front of you in the air like a steering wheel. You occasionally jerk it up quickly to do tricks or get speed boosts, or in my case to clock my three year old right in the face.

Surprisingly, he didn’t cry. He got up and gave me this look like, “Okay dude, I won’t interrupt your game. You didn’t have to hit me in the face with the controller” That was even worse than crying. At least with crying, you could apologize and kiss him and be the good guy. He got a couple of rounds of Candyland out of me after that.

Isaac knows a pretty good joke that he likes to tell. “What is brown and sticky?” “A stick”. When we were down in Florida, my buddy Danny’s little girl told the joke, “What does a gay snake say?”…..”Hithh”. Yeah….we had to explain to Isaac that that although the joke was pretty good, we could not tell that one at school. (Church is another matter entirely).

There is a rumor of snow in Greensboro today, and this morning Nancy and I were discussing school/work/daycare closures/delays/and unexcused occurrences. Isaac overheard us, and then added his two cents, “The water starts on the ground, then it goes up into the sky, and then it comes down as rain and snow.” Nancy’s jaw hung open and she just stared at me. We can only take partial credit for him being so damned smart. A lot of it goes to his great teachers at daycare.

Strength and Honor.
Big Matt