Two Monkeys

Mark said that buying lucha libre thumb wrestling masks was a waste of money, but I would have to disagree.

…or…What the Hell Happened to My Babies?!!

I took Julian to his first day of school today.  He’s going to Noah’s old school in Repulse Bay, which is a bit of a drive out from where we are but I’m familiar with the staff and pretty happy with them, and his teacher, Miss Bobo, is also one of Noah’s old teachers.  I was a bit unsure of how Julian was going to do since his class is the same time as his normal nap time.  As you can see, Julian was a bit unsure as well.

Of course, whenever you introduce your child to a new environment or break them out of their routine, you always end up learning a few new things too.  Like…

1. Julian can rock out to Lady Gaga like nobody’s business.

2. Snack time can make even the most irritable boy feel right at home.

3. The 3 and up age recommendation on Playdoh is really more of a suggestion rather than a strict rule.

4. There is more than one way to use a glue stick to apply glue to paper (you really don’t want to know how).

5. There is an awesome bakery next to the school that sells those old school Barnum’s Circus Animal crackers.

6. My Mandarin lessons are finally paying off as I can now sort of understand some of the songs they sing in class.

7. Julian’s favorite activities? Snack time (of course), washing his hands (weird), and ignoring the playground in order to figure out how the radio works (nerd!).

As out-of-it as Julian was for most of the class, I’m pretty confident that he’s really going to enjoy the class once he gets used to the routine of it.  (fingers crossed!)

When you have two boys, the older one will teach the younger one how to do things like this.

What happens when a baby is wracked with indecision on whether to go down a slide headfirst or feetfirst.

Brothers, out on a walk.

…or Why My Eardrums Are No Longer Fully Functioning…

Yesterday, Noah and I hosted a small get together at our house for some of our neighbor friends*.  For anyone who doesn’t have small kids, there is some law in the universe that states that whenever two young boys get together in the same room, they will immediately lose any ability they ever had of speaking in a normal tone of voice.  Naturally, the more boys there are, the faster your ears will start to bleed the merrier it is.  I had four boys over yesterday, plus one younger sister, plus one more preschooler, another younger sister and a baby that came over towards the very end.  It was very loud at my house.

I spent the weekend making gingerbread houses from scratch.  Yes, I know that these days you can buy prebaked kits that contain all the gingerbread, icing and candies you need, but some part of me (probably the crazy, masochistic part) insisted that no, these little cheater kits were simply not holiday-y enough.  And so I set to work baking and assembling five small gingerbread houses.  Me being me, and my math being what it is, I managed to make a slight house measurement fail which I discovered when I tried to fit the roofs on and found they were all about 1/2” too short.  So I disassembled the houses, recut the gingerbread, and reassembled them once more resulting in five incredibly lopsided houses (I had made six but one of the houses was so structurally unsound it suffered a cave in).  

Here’s another thing you may or may not have known about preschool boys.  When confronted with some less-than-perfect houses, they really could care less.  As long as there is enough icing and candy to go around.

And the really lovely bit was that their decorating was equally lopsided so afterwards, the houses actually looked…well, straight.

*Apparently if you’re a 5-year-old, putting things in appropriate categories is very important.  Thus we have Noah’s school friends, his neighbor friends, and his soccer buddies.  Oddly enough, putting things in their proper places does not apply to things like toys, books and clothes — most of which instead get tossed onto a heap in his room.

Julian and his iPhone antics

Julian knows that good oral hygiene is important if you ever plan on scoring with the ladies.

Indoor rides on a rainy day are for wusses…or smart people…

In case you haven’t noticed, I sort of kind of haven’t blogged in a really really long time. Naturally this would cause me to add “Blog more regularly” on my list of New Year’s Resolutions (which would, sadly, almost certainly guarantee that I wouldn’t do it) so I’m trying to preempt my list by blogging more now.

But because I tend to feel weird when I do non-sequential blogging, here’s a quick recap of what’s happened since my last post:

Mark and I celebrated our 8th anniversary with a no-kids weekend trip to Kawaguchiko to see Mt. Fuji.

Noah turned five.

We celebrated Noah turning five by throwing a birthday party during which he got to wear a tarantula on his head.

We had a visit from a Wolverine and a Wild Thing on Halloween.

We moved from a four bedroom apartment to a three bedroom apartment (ouch!).

And Mark took Noah camping with a group of his good friends.

Of course that’s not all that’s happened over the last three months, but that’s what we’ve got photographic proof of.  Julian, in the meantime, has been busy just been supercute as usual.