It was SOOooo funny...

Went skating with the kids this weekend for Family Day. Daigoro was frustrated at first and obstinately ignored instructions from his mother, auntie A., ba-chan and gi-chan, but was starting to get it by the end.

We visited the " 'Chans" this weekend. They have a large exercise ball, about 700mm in diameter. The kids love playing with it - bouncing on it, rolling it around, running at it and bouncing off... you get the drift. I've never been a skater, really. I can stand up and make decent speed (for a newbie) but I can't stop except by a very shaky snowplow or what I call the "rapid deceleration by collision" method.

Anyway, at one point I heard gales of laughter from the other room - Daigoro was having an absolute blast with Kenshin. Daigoro came in completely out of breath. When he had recovered somewhat, I asked him what was so funny.

He replied, "I was bouncing the ball and den [sic] I rolled the ball at Kenshin and he bounced off it and den he fell down and the ball rolled on him and den I was laughing so hard even my germs were laughing."

That's descriptive gold right there.

I love to hear children laugh. I've said it elsewhere in this blog and I'm sure I'll say it again. Innocent, unforced, devoid of pretence or malice - it is a balm for my heart in troubling times.

Milestones

Last week, Daigoro successfully read about fifteen different words independently of prompting after Marli wrote them down for him. We celebrated by taking him to the local library and getting him a library card.

This past weekend, Kenshin requested to sit on the toilet (seat) and peed on his own.

Daigoro has become very interested in Pokemon after I bought him a video game (Pokemon: Colosseum) which features them. I had tried to sell him on Animal Crossing or a few other less competitive games, but he was very interested and I figured that I couldn't just buy completely innocuous kids' games forever.

Daigoro is expanding his eating tolerances, but Kenshin remains firmly in the starch and meat category.

Kenshin and Daigoro have been invited to a few birthday parties at a local playground/party room location - it's a lot of fun seeing them rip around having a grand old time.

Not much snow so far this year -making it hard to make snowmen, snowballs or go for sled runs. We'll see how the rest of February pans out.