Hijinx

We have had a lot of hijinx around here lately, some including the absence of pants.
Ellis found this hula hoop at the park and latched on to it as though it were a magic lamp that produced bacon (rub hard for crispy, soft for chewy). We have done many things with it, including trying to get it to work right as in this picture and tossing it with back spin so it will come back. He never did succeed in getting it to make more than one revolution. I suspect the lack of hips doomed him to failure.
I took this picture for you, first girlfriend. I don't know who you are or where you are, but we will enjoy showing you this slightly arty well shadowed photo filled with embarrassment potential.
Twice now, Ellis has configured himself a nap-nest on the floor and zonked out. This was the second time and he slept for a solid four hours like this on Sunday. At first I imagined him making himself more comfortable as he struggled to play on despite the terrible sleepiness. But, Rachel says he had his body and head covered completely with the blanket when she found him and that leads me to believe he was playing tent when the sand man nabbed him.


Finally, Ellis is taking great joy in wearing dads giant shirts. He even came downstairs having put the red one on completely on his own. I guess I can get myself a brown hoody this fall and he can borrow it for Halloween to be a Jawa.

A day in the life

Ellis started his day at 3:30 this morning with a nice banana. The last few days, he comes into our room when he wakes up, pounces on mom, demands his banana and then says, "daddy, awanna nuggle." (Daddy, I want to snuggle.) Then he smooshes himself up against me. Miraculously he fell back asleep and stayed that way until 7:45 when I had to wake him.

Then he had his cake and we were off to school with lunch box and a pair of "spare pants". For some reason he really goes through the spare pants, coming home in different clothes than he went to school in 3 of 5 days. Anyway, after he got over Coxsackie, he pretty much regressed to his initial state regarding school: mentioning school resulted in crying, he had to be carried in and nearly pried away by the teacher. When we arrived to pick him up, he often was crying and always looked as though he had been crying recently. Today, he gave me a hug and a kiss, stashed his lunch box, moved his picture to the "I'm here" spot on the wall and shot off to put his spare pants in his cubby, smiling all the way.

As I was heading down to work, I found myself behind a cyclist who was taking up quite a bit of the lane. It was a really busy road, and I didn't begrudge him the space so I kept a good following distance. I couldn't get around him because of heavy traffic. As a result we were going about 18 mph in a 45 zone and there was a long line of vehicles accumulating behind this guy. I happened to glance in my mirror and see a woman behind me apoplectic in her car. She was clapping her hands and pounding the steering wheel and generally making impatient gestures and mouthing obscenities. I will never understand why, after such a performance, someone would pull up along side someone and roll down their window to deliver an additional message, especially when they are in such a g-d hurry. Not to mention that the person they are seeking to accost and might be a bigger, jerkier, butthead than they are. But, this woman did just that. All I could think was, "ma'am, you are such a good mime that I really don't need to talk to you. Your silent performance made it very clear that you are an asshole."

Then this evening, following our dinner, Ellis ran around naked for quite a long time, bouncing on the bed, terrorizing the dog. He is peeing in the potty much better, but he is insisting on peeing on the white potty (guest bathroom) and the blue potty (master bathroom) every time he goes. And, he insists that he must, "keen ma bum, daddy" at each stop. Following one trip to the potty, he returned to the bed and performed a dance commemorating the trip that resembled something you would see a stereotypical Indian doing in a movie from the 1950s. While doing the dance, he chanted the story of the trip as well, "ahh pee in da white potty and den in da boo potty and ah keen my butt." Charming.

Next, he snuck off and streamed off most of a roll of toliet paper, then, sticking to form, he headed to the other bathroom and got that roll too. As you might guess, this all worked up quite a sweat and he was just showing signs of settling down when I slipped away to squeeze in an hour of fishing.

The fishing wasn't very good but interesting things happened none the less. I met a guy who is a guide up north and a professional fly-tyer. I didn't think it was possible to make a living doing this anymore when you compete with 12 year olds in Malaysia. He did admit that he doesn't have to pay the bills with tying. I also saw some wildlife and caught one fish. The river is unusually high for this time of year which is allowing the fish to stay deep making fishing harder. Oh, and I was hit by a kayak. Yes, you heard me, hit by a kayak in a river that was 100 feet wide. Admittedly, I was in the middle of the river, but that still means he had two fifty-foot wide channels that he could have hit. I was in deep water (chest deep) and couldn't maneuver very well and after all his useless attempts to miss me he was sideways and going over. Ironically, the drag I caused on the kayak probably kept him from flipping it. I was tempted to flip him myself, but kayak paddle vs. 5 weight fly-rod seemed like a pretty uneven fight. Discretion is the better part of valor. Time to start designing a quick-connect bayonet for the fly-rod I guess. I can just hear myself now, shouting upstream, "I am just going to stand right here pointing my fly-rod upstream while you canoe toward me, and if you get stabbed it is your own damn fault." That is what I call a line in the sand.

I know what you are talking about

Yesterday I introduced Ellis to Pat-a-cake or Patty Cake as I thought it was when I was little. I am pretty sure that I thought Patty Cake was the name of the baker and when my family said "and mark it with a 'T'", I heard, "and market with a tee" and envisioned a store selling golf tees next to the bakery. And you think I am a weirdo now....

I guess while we are in disclosure mode, I will also admit that until I was corrected by someone at school, I thought that the last little piggy (the little toe) didn't just go wee wee wee all the way home, but rather, drank a six pack and went wee wee wee all the way home. It was slightly embarrassing when I was corrected but it seemed a plausible part of the story. I mean, who would need to go wee wee wee all the way home if they didn't drink a whole six pack. I am sure he just thought the walk would be more comfortable so he made the classic mistake of relieving himself too early and, with the seal having been broken, had to make frequent pit stops.

Continuing in this spirit, my sister one time needed something for show and tell in kindergarten and snuck out of the house with a little bric-brac beer stein about the size of a shot glass. On it was the following poem:

I have a few good reasons for drinking
and one has just enter my head.
If a man can't drink when he is livin',
how the hell can he drink when he is dead.

I believe there was a phone call.

Anyway, I am getting distracted from my story about Ellis:

Ellis: Daddy, daddiiieeieie. Pat-a-cake agin.
Me: How do you ask nicely?
Ellis: Peeze, Daddy?
Me: Ok, Pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake, baker's man,
Bake me a cake as fast as you can.
Pat it and roll it and mark it with an 'E'
And put it in the oven for Ellis and me.
Ellis: An den, I eat it, Daddy, I eat it.

His part of the pat-clap routine needs work. I think perhaps he isn't concentrating, because he is envisioning the cake.

___________________________________________________________

This morning we had the following conversation:

Me: Ellis, what are you going to do today?
Ellis: No, goool.
Me: Are you going to see Mrs. Dona?
Ellis: No I see a cake in my mouth.

Ann Arbor Ecology

This year the weather was hot as ever for Art Fair and the migration of the North American land whale arrived right on time.

Many of us who live here have often said that the Art Fair brings the hot weather. I am suspicious that the shortening days of midsummer and the atmospheric changes that precede a heat wave by a day or two, cause the booths to spring from the Ann Arbor streets. Much like a mushroom, the booths are simply the fruiting bodies of a much larger, underground organism that has spread across town, their spores being adapted to travel on festival litter such as hot dog wrappers. Sensing the atmospheric changes, the land whales leave their solitary dens and form small social groups called "wanders" which travel to their Ann Arbor mating grounds. When these wanders arrive in Ann Arbor they spread out 4-6 abreast and move slowly through the streets, poking their heads in an out of the fruiting bodies, spending an average of $32. A surprising number of land whales choose to purchase a copper hummingbird on a long stick early on and then poke other patrons with it all day. This has long puzzled me until this year when I realized that the long copper garden doodad must be an external sign that the females are ready to be bred.

Breeding is rarely observed, but happens frequently as the wanders from different regions intermingle, maintaining genetic diversity. Observations lead me to believe that implantation of the embryo in the uterine wall requires a meal rich in carbohydrates and fat, such as a funnel cake or an elephant ear. As a result, mating that occurs far from a Midwestern fair or festival does not produce viable young and is very rare due to the land whale's general lethargy. The aroma of hot fry oil acts as an aphrodisiac, overcoming this lethargy. This mechanism has evolved to allow the land whale to avoid unproductive mating and conserve energy.

I think by now you can see the important symbiosis occurring in our streets each year: the booth fruiting bodies create shelter for the organisms that make the hummingbirds on sticks that signal to the male land whales that the females are ready to breed. The larger accumulation of people with money to spend bring in the food vendors, carrying the hot oil aphrodisiac and necessary nutrients to launch a good land whale pregnancy. The pregnant and sated land whales move on carrying the oil-damp tissues that formerly blanketed their funnel cakes stuckto their bodies. As these tissues drop to the streets they distribute the booth spores and expand the booth organism. As a result, the booth-like fruiting bodies have spread from South University down past Main Street since their first observation in 1960.

This is a truly unique ecosystem here in our town and I need your help to fully understand it so we can protect it. I am currently taking names of volunteers to aid in next year's land whale count. We also hope to film the actual mating and tag a few land whales with radio collars. If you are interested and have sharp eyes or other special skills you feel could aid us in understanding this interesting phenomenon, please leave a comment with your name and phone number. As soon as I get good enough at JavaScript, I will launch a website where you can sign a petition to have the Land Whale-Art Fair symbiotic system declared an Urban Coral and protected under U.N. charter. Keep clicking back here for future news.

In his own words

Ellis's vocabulary continues to expand, while his diction still needs some work.

Rachel: What did you do at school today?
Ellis: I poe-ah da be-ans.
Rachel: What else?
Ellis: I poe-ah da sannana pay in da waaannnaaaaaah!
Rachel: Did you have anything to eat?
Ellis: Eine muffin cake.

Perhaps this should be a contest to see who provides the first correct translation into standard English. But what for a prize....hmmm...no one would play if Ellis was the prize. What else do we have laying around here...hmmmm....If I only had ever won a contest on NPR, I would have a lapel pin to give away, no dice there. Ah, I know. I just arranged for a one time gift certificate to this site: For Sale by a Mental Patient. Just scroll down and you will surely be enticed to play our little game.

Strange Brew

As many of you know, despite my competence in many kitchen related things, I generally don't do doughs or batters, with the exception of some things that are fried. Example: I don't make corn bread but I do make corn dogs.

Anyway, this weekend we started a batch of beer and used the spent grain in a bread. This is a darker Belgian Wit beer. Apparently it was common historically, but is currently not made by any breweries. This takes the pressure off, since I can just imagine that mine tastes right. One advantage of brewing this style is the lighter hopping, since hops are very expensive right now. Even so, I really under did it with the hops and had to brew up a little additional extra hoppy batch to blend in. After doing this, the yeast population went nuts with the new sugar and the fermentation was so crazy that I had what is known as a blow out. The outside of the carboy had a thick brown sludge on it, the airlock was totally plugged and the neck of the carboy was plugged. The beer seems unscathed despite its potential exposure to other microbes. The rehopping has seemed to work beautifully though.

The bread, which I made entirely myself, but with some hand holding from Rachel, was pretty good and especially convincing looking. It was made from a rustic hearth bread recipe with some flour replaced with the grains. Now that I know I can do it, sourdough here I come. I new I needed another hobby and another thing to care for.

Wine and sharp stuff

This weekend my assistant tree trimmer and his wife came over. Sorry, couldn't resist after the indignation in the comment section of this recent post. Darryl and Katherine did indeed come over and help with tree trimming. When they showed up, Ellis was in his jammies on his way to bed, but he did demand to know where their cat, Diego, was at the moment.
Darryl brought over a cable saw for the trimming. While this thing doesn't have the screaming power and two-cycle smell of a chainsaw, it does give an adult the opportunity to participate in a bean bag toss. Basically, this tool is a chain blade with a long rope on each end. A sand bag on one end is spun around and tossed over the target. Then you and a partner grab the ends and pull back and forth until the branch falls off. In practice there are plenty of pitfalls: the blade lands upside down, misses completely, slips, or the wood binds on the chain as you cut. Darryl and Katherine actually cut down a whole tree this way. They can put a mini-post in the comments if they desire to tell you just how big it was or how long it actually took or why someone who owns an actual chainsaw and a ladder used a cable saw instead. (Hmm....I better be careful lest you start to envision my boss as some eccentric.) Anyway, we did succeed in taking down a few annoying branches. Strangely, in the days following we had a large number of "trash birds" (redwing blackbirds, starlings and grackles) show-up at our feeders.

Following the tree trimming we had some wine and got chased from the backyard by mosquitoes. Embarrassingly, my wine chilling method (that is the frozen bowl of our ice cream maker) back fired and the bottle was hopelessly frozen in. The wine was nice and cold though and the ice didn't slow us down. Not even for a minute.

Pockledick and Coxsackie

Even though the vast majority of our readership was in attendance, I would be remiss if I didn't mention that we attended a family reunion in Jefferson PA this past weekend and had a very nice time. Among other activities that have already been noted on this blog, we visited a winery, camped out, smoked brisket and sat around on the porch. Ellis and his cousins all had a pretty nice time as well.

Ellis learned some new words while we were there and was astoundingly sharp with names. "Digger" was definitely solidified as the word for any excavator/backhoe type thing. And, Grandma Lise got a couple bags of prenotched popsicle sticks for building things. Ellis mostly carried them around announcing that he had a "pockledick", sometimes going so far as to also announce the color "yellow pockledick". I couldn't help but chuckle each time he said this because it just sounded like a jungle disease, "I never did get malaria working on the Panama Canal, but I did have three bouts of yellow pockledick."

So after joking around about nasty jungle diseases with funny names, Ellis went and came down with Coxsackie virus. Since one of you will go look that up on Wikipedia (I am discouraging you by not linking to it) I feel obligated to tell you that he has a common and not so scary version that results in fever and some painful sores in his mouth and NOT one that causes hemorrhagic conjunctivitis. Many kids at his school have been sick with it as well.

He spent quite a lot of the week walking around and moaning while pointing into his open mouth and occasionally adding, "my hurts." He also spent a lot of the week like this:


watching PBS cartoons via Netflix and eating ice cream. The ridiculous ice cream consumption (it is one of the few things he can eat) led to him teaching me a new word "keemdigger" which is ice cream scoop. One of my favorite things about watching him learn is seeing him transfer concepts learned in one area to another, so I was pretty impressed when I realized what he was trying to ask for.

He is feeling much better tonight and we hope he will be at school tomorrow.

"i thought the kids would like trying these"

That's what my Aunt Emily said as she passed us a book containing "body crayons" and some sample ideas. Well, okay, so the definition of "kids" was more expansive than she thought....

Bridget (aka "scary shark hand") sketches a not-to-scale solar system on Rachel's arm:

Jessica makes a 4-H'er perform a demonstration (that's a 4H joke):

Ellis sports a tiny turtle:

Catherine shows off a ballerina while holding Vaughn:

After many threats, Lindy finally agrees to a buggy masterpiece:

Silas eventually gets into the act:

Finally, here's a picture of Emmett, but Bridget wouldn't let us try any crayon art on him:

dispatch from PA

Yesterday we bravely loaded three kids under three and 4 adults into a minivan and headed from Ann Arbor to western Pennsylvania (note: thanks to John and Jessica for preventing the head count from being 3 kids, 4 adults, and 1 pooch). The 6 hour trip went pretty well all things considered, with the exception of one 25 minute Ellis-Emmet "scream-off", during which Silas nodded off to sleep (how?). Here are two of our little angels having a blast with a balloon:

We arrived at my great-aunt Carol's around 11 pm and finally got to meet the newest member of the family- baby Vaughn. There wasn't much time for visiting before we all hit the sack.

Morning proved that Aunt Carol and Anne had puts lots of thought into making things nice for us and the babies...preparing a yummy egg casserole and even calling their Grandpa back in Indiana to see what kind of juice they like! Since Anne is a mother of 4 boys, she was well aware of the "I want what he has" style of whining and so had not 1, but 2 trikes waiting for us. Somehow, I don't think this was quite what she had in mind:

The weather has been rainy, which is a bit of a bummer, but at least it hasn't been hot. We had a huge, delicious lunch and even managed to occupy ourselves in a semi-constructive manner during the afternoon, but that's for the next post....
Happy July 4th everyone!