Tuesday News & Notes

- We're still dealing with some behavior issues, enough that the Batcave is taking a vacation locked in the basement, but at least Jacob is feeling better.  It was still a pretty low-key weekend.  Jacob and I hit up Wegmans during a prime sample time on Saturday, then went to the Knighthawks game that night.  Sunday we went to church, I made a good dinner and the boys did movie night (complete with popcorn), and that was pretty much it. 

- I did the strangest thing on Sunday afternoon during Jacob's nap.  Well, two strange things.  I tried on skinny jeans at Old Navy, which was pretty awful.  I thought maybe I could pull them off with boots, and maybe I can...but perhaps not in the way I'd like myself to be seen.  So that folly is still a bit of a work in progress.  The weirder thing I did was go to a real estate open house.  No, I have no intention to move again any time soon.  I can probably read my blog from that period and be thoroughly convinced of that.  However, I still keep my eyes on the local real estate listings, simply because I'm curious.  It's an interesting opportunity to take a look inside houses you pass every day.  I've never gone to an open house just for fun, though...mostly I just look on the internet at the pictures. But this particular one intrigued me, and I had the time to go see it.  There are a lot of houses around here that look like our old one.  I saw one a couple neighborhoods over that was so similar, yet so different.  It had a family room off the kitchen and an unfinished basement.  I was just interested to see an "alternate reality".  In the end it made me grateful for our house now.  It wasn't a bad house, but the rooms looked so small and it had a lot of little issues with the way it had been updated that made me so happy we have our house now.  I think we made a very good choice!

- Today I got a call from daycare midday from the director.  I always cringe a bit because most calls either mean Jacob is sick or injured.  Well...today was his one teacher's birthday (not the one he "married" last week) and her boyfriend sent flowers and balloons to the center.  The director told me that when Jacob saw them come into the room, he started saying, "They're from me!  They're from me!"  Seriously?!  Everyone got a kick out of it, I guess!  Even when I asked him about it on the way home, he insisted they were from him.  Wow. 

- As I mentioned earlier, we went to the Knighthawks game Saturday night.  Here are some videos and pictures to give you an idea of the best 10 minutes of Jacob's night...first him taking a shot, then him doing a faceoff, and then what Jacob does most of the time...

 

He felt so cool in his big boy jersey.  We happened to be sitting in a section with a lot of real Greece Hurricanes, which was sort of funny.  Of course, we sat with a real lacrosse guy--Knighthawks Hall of Famer Tim Soudan, who used our other two tickets--and Jacob was beyond shy.  Silly boy.

- Recently at daycare I've been impressed by Jacob's puzzle prowess.  He's been doing this puzzle when I've come to pick him up, and he's really good at it.  It's a real puzzle with interlocking pieces,  not a baby puzzle.  It is only 24 pieces, and good-sized ones at that, but still...he does it well.  Years ago at a baseball game, we saw a puzzle that we thought would be fun, and it was so cheap that we couldn't pass it up.  It was made up of cartoon images of minor league baseball mascots, including the Rochester Red Wings mascot and three Buffalo Bisons mascots.  The puzzle was 150 pieces, with bigger pieces than your standard adult puzzle but far smaller than what Jacob is used to.  And this morning I brought it out and told Jacob we could do it tonight.  And when he was still talking about it at pickup, I knew he'd be up for the challenge.  I definitely did most of it--mostly because we wanted to finish before bedtime--but I took the opportunity to teach him the technique of finding the flat pieces first and doing the frame, then asking him to find pieces that fit certain criteria.  And you know what, he got a lot of pieces all by himself!  The kid is apparently a puzzler.  It suits his attention to detail well, I guess.  It was really fun to see!

Putting in the last piece!

All done!

The finished product.  Spikes is fourth from the left on the bottom, Buster is the lower right corner, and Chip is a couple up and over from Buster.  Well worth the five bucks or so that we spent on it!  I pulled out all of the white writing pieces at the top, but Jacob put that whole section together by himself!

- Tonight Jacob wanted to sleep on his floor.  I decided it wasn't worth a battle and he'd probably figure out quickly that it wasn't comfortable.  I'll be interested to see if he's still there when I go up to check on him.  Then I need to decide if we should move him or risk him waking up uncomfortable in the middle of the night.  Ahhh, parenthood.