p&hc, part 2

proud and happy cousins!

Our first visit to Sequim. Nice to meet you, Gavin!

yes! we have a baby book.

Okay, all right, it's been something like 4 & 1/2 years, but we finally have a baby book. Well, almost; it's on order. Thank you, Shutterfly, for special deals. In our defense, we have had a physical book since pregnancy. There are even a couple of pages on the shower and birth information. But the rest has been sitting in a bag waiting for couple cooperation (time, energy, artistic agreement) for a lllooooonnngg time. Surprising how much you can do in a limited amount of time when the word "free" is involved. So we're pleased. I've posted a flashback photo to celebrate. This was taken July 2004 on our back patio.

knight of the pizza [box]

Oliver's most enduring obsession to date is with knights. Whilst with Nana and Grandad in Colchester, our collective brain fostered the synergy necessary to sustain Oli's obsession and fuel it with exciting twists and turns. One of the most fun projects came out of a pizza box. Knights need things like swords and shields, but 9 out of 10 parents and grandparents do not want them to actually be weapons. (Have you ever been struck with one of those plastic swords? Have you fallen on a wooden shield? Watch out vampires!) So, on the second day in Colchester we toured round Colchester castle. We walked out with two foam swords (Who could have just one? It would have been swordmaster and his family, the bloody pulp.) Our budding knight was happy with this situation until he realized he had no shield. For a couple of days he carried around papa's backpack or his neck pillow from the plane. Then we hit upon it: how about using some empty pizza boxes? Grandad made fantastic shields whilst we were away in London. And he bravely fenced with Oliver for hours during the rest of the trip.
Alas, said shields could neither travel nor be shipped, so we set our sights on a duplicate, albeit inferior, set to be made with boxes from Goleta pizza (not so inferior!). We learned a few lessons from grandad: rounded bottom and brad fasteners plus packing tape for handles. The end products are nowhere near as cool as grandad's but they sure do get used a lot.
Whilst in Germany, Krista and Oliver told a three hour story about "The Knight of the Pizza." Though neither remembers more than vague details at this point, it entertained them both through dinner, metro-ing, walking, and hang-out time at home. I'm pretty sure there was a lot of traveling, some meeting up with friends, quite a bit of eating or sampling food, and not very much use of the swords and shields after all. Just the way we like it!

loosen up

My love of the dictionary should come as no surprise. It's my favored object whenever I have to play that game about the desert island. Think about it: word games, spelling games, learning new words; the possibilities are almost endless. But I don't need a desert island to have fun with and benefit from my friend, the dictionary. For instance, and please excuse me if you know this already, but the word "analysis" means "loosen up." Isn't that great? I'm not quite sure what I've been assuming it meant this whole time, but I'm pretty sure it included a magnifying glass, tiny tweezers, and a whole lot of nits--you know, so you could nit-pick? At any rate, I'm quite high and free on this new knowledge--loosened up, as it were--and I think I'm gonna have a good day. I hope you do, too.

winning attitude

Oliver had his first AYSO game yesterday. It's hard to believe he's that old already. Of course, it's not like these guys are hard-core pros yet. No one plays goalie, though somehow they find lots of excuses to stand around--often near the net. At one point Oliver and his friend, Mathias, were clawing on the net with their backs to the game. As he explained later, "We were pretending to be saber-toothed cats caught in the net." It's good to know that the Ice Age is still rattling around there somewhere with current obsessions of knights and soccer. (Conveniently, his team wears orange and goes by the name "Orange Knights.) Also rather conveniently, the field where they play is about a 15 minute walk from where we live. So they had fun, even though the other team "must have had some kindergartners." They were bigger and they kicked the ball--often in the goal. But our Knights never lost their good spirits against the Dragons.

...and then the night fell upon the three unicorns

Yesterday Oliver brought home a story he had authored whilst at school. Here it is:

One unicorn was up and out of his home. Then two other unicorns came. And then the night fell upon the three unicorns. The unicorns went back to their homes. The two unicorns that came to the one unicorn got to live with him.

This gem came on the heels of a particularly interesting session of textual exegesis that Oliver and I had performed together that morning on the way to school. "Mama," he said, "what does 'bruised limbs' mean?" It turns out that this relatively easy to exegete phrase was buried within a sentence that went something like this: "When he came to himself he found himself lying in a firelit room, aware of his bruised limbs and suffering from a bad headache." Yep, we had to exegete every phrase in the sentence. Gotta love it!