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 Wherein Niklas Devoured Some Pumpkin Guts. |
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Pictures News |
2008-10-01:
Niklas and I have gone to the pool the last couple of days. He's really, really into dumping cups of water on my head.
Really. Other than that, we've been up to the usual with trips to the playground and zoo. We also took the bus into
town today which gave Niklas many, many chances to flirt with many, many women which he took full advantage of. On the
schedule (spelled the same but pronounced funny, locally) for tomorrow is a trip to the barber shop. There was only
moderate screaming when we went in today to make the appointment, so I've got high hopes for this one. 2008-10-05: So after a successful start, Niklas decided that he hated the potty. "Niklas," I would say, "do you want to use your potty?" "No", Niklas would reply. "No potty." This was inconvenient for my dream of not changing diapers anymore, let me tell you. Please note that this did not curtail his love of the Elmo's Potty Time dvd he got for his birthday. Note further that I've now seen that piece of cinematic genius about twenty times. Anyway, Andrya used her impressive musical skills to compose a song that convinced Niklas that using the potty is really the way to go. It goes like this: Come out, pee-pee, pee-pee in the potty. It's proven to be shockingly effective and it isn't painfully annoying like all of the songs on a certain dvd that I may have seen a few more times than I would enjoy.  Pictures? Tomorrow. I'm watching the Steelers game. Niklas approves. (Sadly, we had to retire that jersey this week as somebody is getting big. That was his first ever piece of clothing. We got it for him when he looked like this.) 2008-10-06: Niklas had a good day. We went to the playground and the zoo, plus there were chicken nuggets for lunch. Also, there was pee-pee in the potty. Anyway, here are some new pictures. 2008-10-07: Here are a couple of fun quotes from today: Andrya: Niklas, can you say your name? Niklas: Niklas Wayne Fish Niklas: Niklas drive the wheel in the car? Niklas: Watch Elmo's Potty Time? Jay (incredulous): Watch Elmo's Potty Time? Niklas: OK Niklas: That's it! 2008-10-09: Niklas and I went for a walk today. This consisted of ten minutes or so of pleasantness followed by fifteen minutes of Niklas screaming "Carry! Carry! Carry!" Good times. On the plus side, we were walking to the playground, so once we got there a good time was had by all. Niklas drove the wheel, hung from some thing that you hang on, went on the slide and then buried the end of the slide with sand. Also, there were ducks. Here are some pictures of all that. 2008-10-12: So Niklas has been getting up early. Really early. Much, much too early. Yesterday, he got up at 5:30. Today, he slept in until 5:45. I could do with some more sleep, let me tell you. Other than that, things have been going well except for Niklas's battle royale with the hallway door, which he lost today in spectacular fashion. I don't have any pictures of the results of this defeat, but here's an artist's conception:  Also, on Friday he busted his lip after a swan dive off of the couch. There was an hilarious (or, according to Andrya, awful) amount of swelling, so much so that he looked a bit like a parrotfish. He's much better now, though. Well, except for his forehead. So to sum up, other than various head traumas, Niklas has had a pretty good weekend. He went to story time at the zoo on Friday and kept me and Andrya from getting any sleep on Saturday and Sunday. Tomorrow is a holiday here tomorrow (it's National Heroes Day, this year honoring Dame Lois Browne-Evans) so we'll see what kind of antics he comes up with for that. 2008-10-15: Niklas can say pretty much anything these days. Whether or not he knows what it means is a separate issue. For instance, after two years of me trying to get him to leave my stuff alone, he now thinks that anything belonging to me should be described as "mine". For instance, when I'm drinking a soda, it's "mine soda". I also wear mine boots. So that's what we're working on these days. Other stuff, though, he has a pretty good handle on. He'll say something like "I see hibiscus", to which I'll wittily respond "you do?" He follows that up with "oh yes", which is notable particulary for the inflection he uses when he says it. He sounds like Dwight Schrute confirming that Mose has nightmares in that one episode of the Office, which is kind of like some crazy scientist confirming some sort of planet collision or something. Like this: Scientist: Centauri Twelve will impact the eastern coast of North America at approximately 6:32 am local time. Reporter: So life as we know it is doomed? Scientist: Oh yes. Except we're talking about how he saw a flower or maybe a lizard. 2008-10-20: So Niklas had a lovely breakfast today of cereal (Special K Red Berry, which he loves), mandarin oranges and milk. Then, in a not so lovely turn, he vomited that stuff all over himself, his high chair and the kitchen floor. He's not sick or anything, so I really don't know what caused this horrible display. Our best guess is that he was shoving oranges down his throat with gag reflex inducing velocity. Anyway, it's been a while since I've had to deal with any type of vomit from him, so I've lost a bit of my desensitization... or I've been resensitized... either way, I was fairly dismayed by the stuff I had to clean up. How did the clean up go? Well, I got puke in his hair when I took off his bib and his shirt and there was so much stuff stuck to his pants and bib that the most sanitary method I could think of for cleaning them up was to put them in the toilet and scrub them with my hands for several minutes. In retrospect, this may have not been the best plan, but the combination of ultraslow American League playoff baseball and the Atlantic time zone kept me up until one in the morning and I wasn't exactly at the top of my game. On the plus side, Niklas really enjoyed having a morning bath. The downside was there was a bit of regurgitated milk, cereal and orange floating about the tub. Note that Niklas had no problem with the. Here are some new pictures, including one from July that I haven't imported from the camera until now. I'm on top of things, let me tell you. 2008-10-21: When Niklas was real little, there was nothing in his crib on account of how in parenting classes they repeatedly reminded you that if you put anything in a baby's crib, there was a chance that they would smother themselves with it. Babies are not clever in this respect. Anyway, once he got to the point where he wouldn't kill himself with a blanket, we gave him a blanket. A while later, he insisted that he be allowed to sleep with his teddy bear, Cuddles. Lately, he's added three other stuffed animals (Bangles, Sketchy and Bunny) and two more blankets. Why would he want this much stuff in his crib? Well, when Niklas is in his crib and he's angry, he expresses his displeasure in two ways. First, he does a bunch of yelling. Sometimes, he gives up after a bit of this and goes to sleep. Other (worse) times, he follows this up by throwing his stuff out of his crib. Today, he was apparently very angry, as when I finally went into his room to inquires as to why he was screaming ad infinitum in lieu of taking a nap, his floor was covered with his three blankets and his four stuffed animals. To really drive the point home, he had also taken off his pants and threw them out. What was he mad about? Beats me. Here are some new pictures. Sadly there are none of pantless, screaming Niklas. 2008-10-23: At some point over the past year, I'm sure I've mentioned that Niklas stuffed a golf ball into my subwoofer and that there was no way short of disassembly of said subwoofer to get it out. (note: according to Google, I haven't mentioned this, so please consider it mentioned... now) As the golf ball didn't really rattle around or anything and it wasn't somenting Niklas would miss, I was ok with this arrangement. Yesterday, Niklas upped the stakes a bit. Recently, he's taken to putting his blanket on top of the subwoofer and drumming on it with his hands. It's pretty well built, so this doesn't bother me and I didn't think much when he started in on this yesterday. He had been playing with his little people zoo and its infinite (or about 30) animals, zookeepers and whatnot, so they were strewn about over by the subwoorer as well. Since everything was apparently under control, I decided to take advantage of the fact that Niklas wasn't insisting on watching Sesame Street for the two billionth time to watch some SportsCenter. Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed that he had stopped his drumming and resumed his frightening enactment of some sort of zoo riot. No problems there. This is where I was wrong. He wasn't just playing with the animals, he was shoving them one by one into the subwoofer. By the time I realized what was going on, there were about twenty animals crammed into the bass port and three others (and the zookeeper's car) had fallen down into the bowels of the subwoofer. This led to a half hour or so of subwoofer disassembly and deanimalization which Niklas really, really enjoyed helping with. Need somebody to run off with your screwdriver or try to shove a giraffe through a speaker cone? I've got the guy for you. On the plus side, I was able to rescue the quail, mountain goat and hippo from the terrifying caverns of Bose. I got the car and golf ball out, too, but they weren't nearly as afraid of the dark. 2008-10-26: So usually, when Niklas takes a bath, things go like this: 1) Andrya fills the tub up with water 2) While this is happening, Niklas either sits on his potty or just runs about crazily 3) When the tub is full, we take Niklas's clothes off and he gets into the bath So, it's pretty straight forward. Yesterday, Niklas decided to combine steps two (not the potty part, thankfully) and three and fell into the tub while fully clothed. Soaking wet Niklas is always an hilarious sight. Not "take a picture" hilarious, apparently, but a good time for me and Andrya, anyway.  2008-10-29: This is Niklas's third Halloween, but today was the first time that he helped with the pumpking carving. Actually, I think he's a couple weeks away from being allowed to use a knife, but he did help with the gutting once I had performed the topofpumpkinectomy. I have video of the whole process, but since a two year old Sony handycam isn't compatible with Windows Vista, nobody outside of my house can see it. Also, since the cable that connects the camera to the TV is apparently in a Chicago storage unit, anybody inside my house who wants to watch it has to do so using the cameras viewfinder. Anyway, Niklas was less than enthused about digging out the pumpkin guts which isn't terribly surprising seeing as how he doesn't even like getting sand on his hands at the beach. He spent about ten minutes using a spoon to scoop out one or two pumpkin seeds at a time before finally breaking down and taking a couple handfuls of guts out. Also, this happened: after taking several spoonfuls of pumpkin out of the... pumpkin, Niklas looked down at his spoon, then looked at me and said "eat?" As far as I know, there's nothing wrong with that, so I told him to go ahead. He took a little bite of the orange innards and chomped on about half of a seed. He said "mmmmm!", but he didn't really eat any more after that. Anyway, this is the result of our efforts:  There are a few new pictures up. Mostly, they feature Niklas wearing his Elmo pelt.  
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