The Pip
drorzel | May 2, 2016As mentioned in passing a little while ago, we spent last week on a Disney cruise in the Caribbean, with the kids and my parents. We had sort of wondered for a while what those trips are like, and since the first reaction of most parents I've mentioned it to has been "Oh, we've thought about that-- let us know how it is," I figure it's worth a blog post to say a bit about the trip, which the kids enjoyed just a little bit:
SteelyKid swimming with a dolphin, The Pip on a waterslide.
The ship we were on was the Disney Magic, which is the smallest of the Disney ships, and had something like…
drorzel | April 17, 2016As promised in the last catch-up post, a set of pictures less devoted to cute-kid shots.
213/366: Zone Defense
The superhero-themed "zones" of our house, as defined by the Pip.
The Pip has been making one of his preschool teachers draw superheroes for him. At some point, he cut these out with scissors (or possibly made Kate cut them out), and hung them up in different rooms. So the living room is now the Captain America Zone, the kitchen is the Flash Zone, and the library is the Spider-Man Zone. I'm not sure what exactly that means, but it's a thing.
214/366: Red In Tooth And Claw
A hawk…
drorzel | April 14, 2016A bunch of stuff happened that knocked me out of the habit of editing and posting photos-- computer issues, travel, catching up on work missed because of travel, and a couple of bouts with a stomach bug the kids brought home. I have been taking pictures, though, and will make an attempt to catch up. Given the huge delay, though, I'm going to drop the pretense of doing one photo a day, and do the right number, but grouped more thematically.
This span included Easter, which meant a lot of family time, which means photos of the kids doing stuff. So here's a big group of those.
The Sillyheads…
drorzel | March 6, 2016Thursday was a travel day, the less said about which the better. So, while I do have a couple of cell-phone snaps from the day, I'm just going to ignore it, and give you two better photos from Friday and Saturday. These go nicely together, as you can see in the composite that's the "featured image" for this post.
182/366: Dunking Dude:
The Pip hanging on the rim at the Girl Scout carnival.
Friday night, the local Girl Scouts had a "nickel carnival" as a fundraiser for... something or another. SteelyKid is a scout, and Kate's helping lead her Brownie troop, so they had to go, and I brought…
drorzel | February 28, 2016I've included at least two photos of the Nott Memorial in this series, so I'm a little hesitant to do another. But here's an angle on it that doesn't show up as much:
SteelyKid and The Pip looking down from the third floor railing inside the Nott Memorial,
We went over to campus yesterday looking for a bigger open space in which to fly SteelyKid's RC helicopter, which turned into something of a quixotic quest-- most of the big open spaces I had access to had students in them studying. But this did get us inside the Nott, where the kids enjoyed the view from the third floor down into the…
drorzel | February 24, 2016The Pip is in pre-school these days, and we have a running joke when I drop him off where I tell him to work hard, and he responds "No, grown-ups do work. You go to work. I'm going to the JCC to play with my friends!"
Of course, his playing does involve a bit of work, in that they do a lot of arts and crafts stuff. And while there was a long period where he wasn't really into drawing on paper, in recent weeks, he's gotten very fired up about drawing, and every day we get a few scibbled-on sheets of paper sent home. Put this together with the steady flow of homework from SteelyKid, and the kid…
drorzel | February 23, 2016I feel a little bad sometimes that I don't really give the Pip his due on the blog. Back when SteelyKid was a toddler and pre-schooler, I had a lot more free time in which to transcribe the various conversations I had with her into super-cute blog posts. The Pip is in the same sort of stage now, and tells some amazing stories, but I have much less time, and by the time I do get free to get to the computer, I usually forget about it.
However, while cleaning up and photographing the Giant Shelf of Kid Art, I ran across a book that he made with... One of his preschool teachers, I guess, because…
drorzel | February 22, 2016Another long photo-a-day gap, because the last week was crazy in a bunch of ways. The weather has slewed wildly between winter and spring; Kate had to go to The City to argue a case leaving me solo-parenting the sillyheads; and I've been fighting the onset of a rotten cold. That last has involved a bunch of frantic work in anticipation of not being able to do much for a couple of days at some point, and today that caught up to me and I decided it was an official recovery day. Which gave me time to sort and GIMP the various pictures I took.
167/366: Brief Winter
We got a bit of an ice storm…
drorzel | February 15, 2016This weekend's photos were mostly of the kids, and mostly had other people's kids in them, as they did a double play-date on Saturday afternoon. I'm going to lump two days together, because they're really just repeating previous themes. Here are the kids eating dinner at the Union women's basketball game Friday night:
SteelyKid and The Pip eating dinner at a basketball game.
(They went absolutely bonkers after this-- it's hard to describe how hyped up they were Friday.)
And here's yet another fort:
SteelyKid watching tv from inside the tunnel fort she built on the couch.
This one was…
drorzel | February 7, 2016A few days ago, The Pip came home with a "present" for me and Kate, wrapped up in construction paper. This turned out to be another sheet of paper, which is actually a launch control panel:
The Pip's rocket control panel. (One of his teachers wrote the words for him...)
The layout of the "buttons" is all him, but he got one of his teachers to do the labels. On the other side, it says "The missle will launch in one minute," which I assume he also dictated.
He's got a rich inner life...
drorzel | January 31, 2016I've been neglecting the photo-a-day thing for the last week-and-a-bit, but for a good reason: I had a deadline of, well, today, to finish a chapter I was asked to contribute to an academic book. And while I fully realize that actually hitting that deadline is not typical academic behavior, I have A Thing about that, and was going to make damn sure I finished by the end of the month, as I had promised. So a lot of stuff got neglected, to the point where there were a few days in that stretch where I didn't take any pictures at all.
So, you get another catch-up post. I owe nine photos, but I…
drorzel | January 21, 2016When I arrived to pick SteelyKid up the other night, she and her friends were light-saber fighting with long balloons, which is fairly typical of that bunch. While I gathered her stuff up, though, she stopped and twisted her balloon into an animal shape:
SteelyKid's balloon dog, and The Pip's clay volcano.
She got a "How to Make Balloon Animals" kit a few years ago, but she doesn't often do anything with it. So I was pretty impressed that she did this completely from memory. (Of course, I'm easily impressed when it comes to my own kids doing stuff...)
The balloon dog (we'll call it a dog…
drorzel | January 19, 2016This past weekend, Kate went to Arisia, and in order to get a change of scenery and a bit of adult backup, I took the kids up to visit friends in northern Vermont. They have two boys, the younger of whom is just a few months older than SteelyKid, and I was pretty sure the kids would hit it off. I turned out to be right about that, as SteelyKid and C. spent hours engrossed in the construction of an elaborate pillow fort:
SteelyKid is really happy to be making a pillow fort.
This is a very early stage of the construction, from Friday night. They continued working on it all weekend, and at…
drorzel | January 15, 2016SteelyKid is in second grade, and The Pip goes to full-day day care at the JCC, so we get a LOT of kid work sent home-- various homework assignments and class worksheets for her, and assorted art for him. A lot of the art is just a few random crayon scribbles on paper, but some of it's pretty good. Like this robot that came home the other day:
The Pip's construction-paper robot.
(The shiny thing at the bottom is one of the cut-glass "jewels" that Kate got for the kids at the Corning Museum of Glass...)
Huge piles of this stuff build up, and every couple of months I'll go through and…
drorzel | January 14, 2016This one's a bit of a cheat, but the only pictures I got Tuesday that turned out well had other people's kids in them, and I won't post those. So here, instead, is a picture from over the weekend, mostly because I want to tell the cute-kid story that goes with it.
On Sundays, I take the kids to the Schenectady Greenmarket, then to lunch at Panera, then to the grocery store, which gets our various errands taken care of and gives Kate a little quiet time. Depending on how they behave, I sometimes require a bit of quiet time of my own after this, and this past Sunday was One of Those Days. So, I…
drorzel | January 10, 2016I try not to have this be Cute Kid Photo of the Day, but really, when these are the subjects, how can I avoid it?
SteelyKid blowing a bubble toward The Pip, at MiSci.
This is from yesterday's morning excursion to MiSci, where they have added a soap bubble area. This, of course, led to the kids battling with each other by blowing huge bubbles across the table and each popping the other's bubbles. Here's the early stage of a bubble offensive by SteelyKid, shortly to be popped by The Pip.
Another highlight of the visit was the "put yourself inside a bubble" thing, which is a perennial…
drorzel | December 23, 2015It's been a couple of weeks since my last photo-a-day post, for a variety of reasons. First we were in Florida, then Emmy died, then I had some disk space issues that kept me from getting photos off my camera. That's all sorted at last, just in time for me to leave town again...
In an effort to catch up a bit, I'm going to dump several photos at a time into a couple of posts. This one will be a total of eight days' worth of pictures, covering our trip and a few days after. I've got several gigabytes of trip pictures, but almost all of those include the kids, and again, I'm trying not to have…
drorzel | December 7, 2015It's a big week in Chateau Steelypips for martial arts and cute-kid photos. On the heels of SteelyKid's first competition this past weekend, we have the Pip's first belt test tonight (and SteelyKid is testing for her brown belt Wednesday, so you should probably expect one more kid-martial-arts photo before all's said and done...).
Tonight's test was for the "Little Dragons" class for 3-4-5-year olds, and was kind of hilarious. There was a lot of enthusiasm, but also a good deal of fuzziness on the difference between "right" and "left," and their interpretation of push-ups was simply…
drorzel | November 30, 2015We had our usual tv time on Sunday morning at my parents', with the kids alternating picking what they watched. When it came around to SteelyKid's turn, she opted for MythBusters, which wasn't available on demand, but she has several episodes on her tablet. Of course, if SteelyKid was going to watch video on her tablet, then The Pip had to watch video on his, which led to this shot:
SteelyKid and The Pip watching video on their tablets.
And also blissful, blessed quiet, a gigantic improvement over the sounds of "Paw Patrol," which was The Pip's cartoon of choice on this trip. And, well,…
drorzel | November 27, 2015So, today, we engaged in the traditional Black Friday activity of, um, going to the park and chasing birds:
SteelyKid and The Pip scaring geese with their swords at the park on the day after Thanksgiving.
It was an unbelievably warm day for late November-- if you look closely, you can see that SteelyKid is wearing shorts and a T-shirt-- so we couldn't very well sit inside. So we went across to the other side of Whitney Point Lake to Dorchester Park to let the kids run around. We hiked up the stream, played on the playground, and chased the big flocks of Canada geese into the lake.
This did…