All posts tagged with "young-ruski"

Through most of my adult years, we've done destination Thanksgiving. It coincides with our wedding anniversary, so we've had a mix of family trips and friend meetups. We've never had friends come here -- where it's pleasant, but several times we've frozen our asses off at their homes or at some neutral location.

It didn't seem like an eventful weekend, but here I am with a post of full of words and pictures from Friday and Saturday.

My sweet son V likes nothing more than shopping for trucks. He apparently took his inquiry a little further this week, and entered his contact information into a form. As soon as he started getting messages from the dealer, he got a little nervous.

Ko just turned 8. He thinks he can drive.

Young kids love the vulgarities. Ours get to hear plenty of them.

It's really cold, and earlier this winter, it even snowed in Baton Rouge!

I was helping V with a book report, and there's a giant picture of an old ship with six thousand little labels for every line and sail. Boat geeks and readers of parent blogs alike with rejoice in this internet content.

I wonder whose job it is to come up with new neighborhood street names. I'm thinking that this might be the job for me. Here's how I get to that idea.

Someone pulled off a good one on the whole skinnyonbenny family, and we don't even know who did it.

I hate to break it to you, but you have to keep hanging that shit forever. Look at all the shitty Christmas decorations I put on the tree this year.

It's been like a year and a half since I got photos posted to this web site in any sort of manner that is timely enough to share. Until now. We kicked off spooky weekend number one with a visit to a "haunted corn maze" out in the middle of nowhere. It ended up being a really big corn maze that I suspect looked very little like its map picture:

K is always quiet on his way to school, and it often freaks me out, since he's never quiet. This morning was his second full day of school -- and his first where I wasn't planning to walk him in, and I was afraid that he was nervous about finding his way around. At a stop light, I turned back to him and asked, "Are you sure you know where to go when I drop you off?"

We spent the week of Easter on the sailboat. Almost entirely, we were tied up at Pontchartrain Landing on the lakeshore. It's an almost unknown RV Park and Marina, and not at all a bad place to hole up for a week.

This is just three totally unrelated short little posts about what's been happening around the theskinnyonbenny house.

After being mostly away the past two weeks, our kids started camps this week. Vanya is doing dance, arts, and music at a camp that he seems to be enjoying quite a bit. Kolya is going to one that seems pretty similar to preschool. Let's face it, though. Preschool is a day-long session of dicking around in fun ways that also happen to be educational for little kids. Drawing, Play-doh, songs. It's a pretty good day compared to yours and mine.

Today is Vanya's gotcha day, so happy day to a wonderful, kind-hearted, enthusiastic kid who has an amazing ability to make people smile. Our tradition is that the kids get to do pretty much what they choose...

A double post, first going into how I'm older than shit, and then followed by some cute daddy-blog crap.

In preschool a couple of weeks ago, Kolya's class made gingerbread men. When they went out to play, the teachers hid them, and they told the kids that the cookies came to life, ran around the classroom, and dared the kids to find them. The kids looked all over, inside and out, and they couldn't find the runaway gingers.

For a number of weeks, three-year-old Kolya has insisted that Anna from Frozen has a line in a song where she sings, "Pain in the Ass." I found that to be a highly dubious claim, and when I caught him watching it after work yesterday, I asked him to give me a call when the "Pain in the Ass" part comes on.

Vanya's school had a Thanksgiving thing where we all go eat with the class. V served himself a typical little kid lunch: chicken nuggets, mashed potatoes, and a roll. While he was eating, the mom who brought the potatoes stopped and asked him how he liked them.

There's no one of my age -- at least no one whose family hails from the rural South -- who hasn't heard, "When I was bad, Daddy made me go outside and pick my own switch." I always dismissed this as old person hyperbole. In my mind it belongs with, "I walked fourteen miles to school barefoot every day, and it was uphill in both directions."

Before I start my story, let me say to all of my Facebook friends that I've really enjoyed everyone's first day of school pictures. At least one of you has extremely cute kids. Go ahead and keep thinking it's you.

There's a certain segment of my family that has earned some notariety with the rest of the family for their propensity for making snacks out of other snacks.

The Spring festival season is a great, great time of year. I was channel flipping last night, and one station had clips from last year's Jazz Fest. I stuck around for a few songs, and they flipped to the end of Trombone Shorty's set that closed it out last year. I called the kids in there to look for themselves, even though we were so far back when he played that our images had to have been reduced to a mere pixel or two even on the rare occasions that the camera zoomed out far enough to see the approximiate location where we sat.

This morning, K woke up with a loud, "HEY!" Scared the shit out of me, even though I was already awake. Before I reacted, he continued. "WHO MESSED WITH MY PANKAKES?"

Way back in August, when filling out paperwork for preschool, one of the forms asked about any parental talents that might be fun for the class to know about. Mrs. theskinnyonbenny considered our talents, and decided that my consistent ability to pull my pants ALL the way up above my butt crack wasn't impressive enough, so she listed me as a ukulele player.

On the way to school this morning, V got all excited. He was talking 100 miles per hour. "I forgot to tell you what we had at school! REAL. ICE. Not like a cube or one of those things that hangs down, but it was round and really was ice!"

That was my biggest smile this week. Not that I thought I would be seeing something that was unbelievable -- far from it, in fact. But it was great to see V working hard at something and being so proud of what he was making.

A little while back, I sent this pic to some of my family and asked them to guess what's happening, and what events lead to this pose. All of the necessary information is right there in the picture.

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"Why on Earth did I want a boy?" I never thought I would hear that come from Mrs. theskinnyonbenny's mouth, but sure enough, we had the nastiest, dirtiest kid in Baton Rouge last Sunday, and it got to that point.

My initials are downright trifling.

Yesterday, we went to a dumb little Valentines day party at Vanya's preschool. All the toddlers danced around while their teacher sang, and then we watched them eat their lunch. Then we watched them get grouchy as it came close to nap time.

It's been a half-year of firsts for us: First Halloween with a kid, first Thanksgiving, first Christmas and New Years, first day of preschool. Perhaps the most fun has been in the past week, which featured both the first Mardi Gras as well as Vanya's first birthday with us (and second overall).

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Instead of blogging, I've spent a lot of time installing trim around windows, crown molding, light fixtures, and putting up paint. It's unfortunate for my site, because I really had a lot to say in the past month that didn't get posted. Here's a partial list of posts that I thought about doing but never got to in the past few weeks:

As you might have guessed, we did our first kid-Halloween this past Wednesday. Since our house gets about six groups a year -- and all of those are teenagers without costume -- we drove over to our friends' neighborhood.

I was cleaning the kitchen last night while listening to a radio show. As the show came back from break, they played that one chord that everyone can immediately identify as the first note of The Beatles' Hard Days Night. This single bit of music in a universe of unintelligible talk immediately caught Vanya's attention. He stopped what he was doing, looked toward the source of the music, and prepared himself to jam a little bit if the music was to continue.

Last night, I was ready to walk the dogs, but I couldn't find my keys. I looked in all of the normal places that I leave them, and no dice. So I just grabbed a spare house key and went on my way.

When Vanya cries, his face changes its entire shape. His features flatten a bit, and his mouth squares off and opens so the noise and tears can cascade together. Usually, this is about a bunch of nothing, and his little anguished face very often makes me laugh.

I'm not interested in being the writer of a "daddy blog," describing the daily doeses of puke, projectile urine, and spinach-looking poop just to ruin your lunches. But I haven't read another father's post where poor old dad's dogs figured out about the poop diaper first.

"For God's sake, get rid of the plug!" That was pretty much the first thing that a friend of mine said when I picked up the ringing phone yesterday evening.

The long absence of new content lately is almost entirely related to preparations for and then actual travel to Russia. I've been asked if the purpose of the trip was business or pleasure, and it was certainly pleasure, but not quite a vacation. And at this point, I don't think there's anyone that I know well who hasn't heard, overheard, or just figured out what's going on. So here it is, officially and in writing: we're trying to add a human to the group of creatures that we already feed, bathe, and act as poop handlers.

Brent and Crystal have raised good kids so far. Annika and Jake are tough, active little ones. No one ever stops to whine over a bruise; they just pick themselves up and keep moving, no matter what happens. On the other hand, I've heard Jake scream loud enough to blast paint off of a wall when he was put to bed. And I've heard him keep this up for 30 minutes or more. So keeping them for a weekend was certain to be an adventure.