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  Wherein Niklas Takes Poop Disasters To The Next Level. |
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Pictures News |
2008-05-05:
Niklas has been more and more insistent on feeding himself with a spoon lately. I've been resistant to this,
mostly because I do not enjoy having to clean him off with a hose. However, being as how I'm the guy who's
responsible for this, I guess I'm in no position to say who should have access to
tools of facial messitude. So far, he does the best with his cereal in the morning
because its paste-like consistency makes it less likely to fall off of the spoon when he inevitably turns
it upside down. Peas are ok, they fall off the spoon in spectacular fashion only about half of the time. Squash
is right out. In other news, last week the weather was slightly unbeach-like, so we headed to the zoo. Niklas had a fabulous time playing on this deal and battling royale with large fowl. Also, monkeys!  Here are some new pictures that will shock and amaze... wait, that's something else. Still, new pictures! 2008-05-07: Niklas's love of food has worked overtime to overcome his love of dumping stuff off of a spoon. This morning, he ate all of his cereal by himself. Since he's still new to the process, this took him a while, so I was able to sit down and quietly bemoan the fact that Niklas is still most opposed to sleeping in to even 6:30. We spent the rest of the morning in the bathroom playing with his shape sorter. Why in the bathroom? It turns out that when I'm forced to wake up super early for several days in a row that I care very little about where Niklas wants to play. Anyway, after a much need nap (for me, anyway... probably Niklas, too), we hit the playground, ran a few errands and went to the beach. And now, an unrelated list of things that I have caught Niklas standing on lately:
2008-05-10: Niklas no longer has any use for his toys. Instead, he's all about whatever he can pull out of the kitchen drawers, making measuring spoons his new favorite play things. They're followed closely by measuring cups with scotch tape also being quite popular. In other "things that are mysteriously missing although the cause of their disapperance is not at all mysterious" news, Andrya and I spent twenty minutes today looking for some of her eye shadow that somebody thought belonged in an underwear drawer. Thankfully, it hasn't been all drawer rearranging here in Bermuda. Niklas and I have also been frequenting the local playgrounds. Here he is at the Warwick playground after stealing my sunglasses (or, if you will, guckey)  and here he is showing Flyers fans what's what at Shelly Bay:  There are a few new pictures that weren't taken with a cell phone that been in a toilet here. 2008-05-14: Niklas wishes everyone (to whom it applies, anyway) a belated Happy Mother's Day. He was actually on time with his wishes, but the guy who's in charge of transmitting his thoughts to the public has been slacking with a vengeance. Anyway, Niklas and Andrya had a lot of fun on Sunday. Niklas got his mommy a CD by her favorite singer (I think she's ok, but I prefer songs with more yelling, distortion and profanity) and a tiny blue purse. Just to prove that Niklas is secure with his masculinity, he then proceded to run around the house with said purse for the majority of the afternoon. For dinner, Niklas had some pasta with homemade marinara sauce. "Mmmmm" said Niklas. I was pretty pleased with my ability to make food that the boy enjoys until this afternoon when he said "Mmmmm" while trying to eat a wrought iron fence in the park. Niklas's word of the moment is "jeez". 2008-05-17: Now that doors are no longer an effective Niklas deterrent, he's been taking advantage of my easily-distractuity and running amok in Andrya's and my bedroom. His favorite discovery has been Andrya's makeup drawer which facilitated his very first drawing experience. Sadly, he used lipstick as a medium and the bedroom carpet as his canvas. Still, I think he really captured his mood with this piece, that mood being "it would be cool to jab at the carpet with this lipstick". His longstanding love of throwing things into the washing machine has also been on display. A couple days ago he decided that his clean clothes were not, in fact, clean enough and through a much greater than desirable percentage of them into the washer before I could break away from fixing whatever he had been busting up previously to stop him. Also, when she was finishing up a load of laundry the other day, Andrya found a can opener in amongst my collection of Clutch t-shirts. Andrya made cookies today. It's probably not a coincidence that Niklas's word of the day was "cookie", uttered either with delirious joy when he had one or terrible, terrible anguish once the cookies were gone. I put some pictures up the other day, but failed to mention it. Yeah, I'm unreliable. 2008-05-18: So Niklas has a piggy bank (you can sort of see it here) that is both not shaped like a pig (it's Noah's ark, which is ok, but I would prefer this if we're going the ark route) and now within the reach of grabby little hands. This is how I came to see a sight very much like this:  but with much more hysterical laughter. If I had any money, I'd be concerned about his recent heistyness. 2008-05-21: Yesterday, Dr. Rock and I checked out some old timey forts we hadn't been to before. The appeal of forts is twofold. First, there are always plenty of things for Niklas to climb on, which is his favorite pastime these days. Second, they're already in ruins, so there's not much damage he can cause. Anyway, here's what we did. There are pictures if that sweetens the deal. So we actually started off with a trip to the Aquarium/Museum/Zoo megaplex. Niklas checked out the fish and the monkeys, but he was most interested in the playground. Here he is Captaining a ship that no doubt was only engaged in legal pursuits and was in no way involved in looting. After that, we went to Shelly Bay where I failed to take any pictures whatsoever. In my defense, I was busy chasing after Niklas while he climbed all over the stuff that's there for climby little boys to climb on. Once he was all climbed out, Niklas had some lunch, got a bunch of it on my pants and we were off to the Ferry Reach area. Ferry Reach is out on the east end of island and is several miles from the nearest ferry stop. Also, I've never seen a decapitated Turk on Turk's Head Lane. Such was the wit of whoever was in charge of naming things in Bermuda. Anyway, Ferry Reach more than makes up for its lack of ferries with dilapidated military installations. The first one we visited was Ferry Reach Magazine which combined celebrity news of the 1800's with gunpowder storage... or something like that. Niklas had a great time running about. Apparently, the Royal Navy was made up of some pretty short guys back in the day. Eventually, I was able to corral Niklas and we headed over to the nearby Martello tower. Note that this is a Martello tower, not the Martello tower. It seems the British couldn't be bothered to come up with names for everything they built. Anyway, it's currently undergoing renovations so despite Niklas's best efforts, we couldn't go inside. After Niklas finally accepted that fact that he couldn't break down a steel door, we walked over to Burnt Point Fort. Niklas used of one the fort's gun ports to work on his cannonball impression. He also stomped around on this deal for a while. To conclude Fort Tour '08, we crossed the in no way suspect looking Ferry Island Bridge to Ferry Island which is the home of Ferry Island Fort. There was some other neat stuff just down the Railway Trail from Ferry Reach. We saw this which was only made slightly less awesome by the fact that it was a kiln used to make lime for concrete mortar instead of something more interesting like a place to burn witches or a brewery. Niklas checked it out, but he decided that running about was more interesting than mid 19th century masonry. We also saw a cemetery that was necessitated by a yellow fever outbreak. By this point, Niklas was all excitemented out, so we packed up and headed home. 2008-05-23: So tomorrow, we're off for ten days of stateside excitement which will include a friend's wedding, me trying to figure out a way to watch game four of the Stanley Cup finals while at our friends wedding and a trip to Grandma's house for Niklas. Also, I'm going to get a burrito. Anyway, I hope to take more than the no pictures I took during our Christmas road trip and there'll be significant recappage when when we get back. In the meantime, here's a story. Yesterday, Niklas and I went to Hog Bay Park. It's pretty close to our house, but we hadn't been there before. It's made up of three old farm estates, complete with falling down old farmhouses and tons of nature trails. Niklas and I had a great time stomping around. We saw our second ever lime kiln (which was not nearly as elaborate as the one at Ferry Reach, it looked more like a gnome's hole in the ground instead of a dwarven castle), had lunch by the ocean and climbed up some big hills. During some perhaps ill-advised off trail hiking on the hills Niklas gave me the always hilarious what-were-you-thinking? "oh" which is different than his ahh!-surprise! "oh" and his you-caught-me-doing-something "oh". Once we were back on the trail, we hiked up to a big overlook deal and then headed back to the car. After a few steps (he was navigating at this point), Niklas stopped and insisted that I pick him up. This is nothing unusual, so I obliged him. As I typically do, I scooped him up with my left arm under his butt. This leaves his legs to dangle and often results in me getting muddy (or sandy or just wet, as the case may be) footprints on my shirt and pants, but that comes with the job. I first realized something was wrong when I noticed a leaf sticking to his shoe. What was causing that. Was it gum? I really wish it had been gum. It was dog poop. I set him down so I could wipe the bottom of his shoe off. That's when I noticed that he had somehow managed to smear the poop up the side of his shoe onto his sock and jeans. How could that have happened? My investigation revealed that it probably occurred after he tracked a massive amount of dog poop onto my shirt and ground it into my pants, Rick James style. It turns out that baby wipes are at best moderately effective at getting dog poop of of clothes. Anyway, covering me with poop must have wiped him out because he passed out while I was carrying him back to the car. He is less concerned with poop than me, I guess. Oh, I neglected to mention the smell. It smelled bad. In other news, here's Niklas's latest masterpiece:   
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