Solo yesterday, and took the boys to the San Diego Zoo. They’re getting to be easier and easier to manage solo. Only on two occasions did I have to repeat myself when asking Ollie to stop or slow down. That was astonishing for me. We saw giant tortoises (Reid could have camped out there, but Ollie’s attention is difficult to keep focused on anything, especially something so slow as a giant tortoise), crocodiles and some other reptiles, then went to the Kid’s Zoo area.
At the kids Zoo, we found a somewhat secluded spot where the boys were able to spend a long time running around in circles chasing each other. The only animals disturbed by this were the ducks in the nearby enclosure. Then we spent a very long time watching a mouse in the Kid’s Zoo “Mouse House” rearrange the furniture in an enormous loaf of over-baked bread. Luckily, the mouse-house is built over a tunnel large enough for kids to crawl through, so this kept Ollie busy while Reid studied the nesting behaviors of mice.
After that, we attempted to attend a show. Though the boys sat for a while, too much time was wasted on jibber-jabber, and not enough time on action, so they lost interest just as the Australian stick-bug was -really- starting to freak out the little girl the zoo-keeper had placed it on.
After that, we went to the tree-house area for “yunch,” wolfed down our meal and then headed home for a nap. They slept on the way home and then slept another hour or so at the house, daddy’s nap was much shorter and less effective. Then we met up with mommy and some other friends for dinner. At dinner, Reid and I spent some time working on his fork-techniques, and he seems to have improved a lot (I think we was laboring under the assumption that he could only use his fork for stabbing food, and not for scooping — recent investigation online suggests that even by strict standards, this is not the case). He still leans way over his plate while he eats (or else vaults onto the floor most of the food he manages to herd onto his fork), but we can work on that later.
Ollie spent a good portion of the meal interrupting his mommy’s conversations with the other people at the table. And once he acquired her attention (after a flurry of “mommy, mommy, mommy” and some impatient shirt-tugging), the only conversation he had to offer was, “Hi!” We left without desert when the boys started stuffing old rags into the necks of beer bottles and lighting them on fire.
Today, we took the boys to Disneyland to meet up with some more friends. Ollie was in a really contemplative mood for the first hour or so of our time there, and it was interesting seeing him actually stop to look at things. On our way down Main Street, we performed the usual ritual, which goes like this (linked images are from a past trip, but it looks the same every time):
- Run past shops until we find one of the many decorative doorways lining Main Street, climb the steps to the doorway and knock (sometimes on the door, sometimes on the air near the door).
- Say “meh mah meh muh men?” which translates from two-year-old to English as “may I please come in?”
- Immediately decide the house we’re visiting is unoccupied and announce it by…
- … turning around and loudly saying, “nobody home!”
Ollie then decided he wanted to go to the Castle (Reid had muttered something about wanting to ride the Rocketships, as we were walking past that ride, but it looked like a very long line, and he forgot about it quickly), so we we went for the castle, where many photos were taken. On the other side of the castle, we rode on carousel, then angled for Toontown. After Toontown, we headed for New Orleans Square for lunch, where Reid and I fell back from the group to watch ducks and boats, then joined up for lunch. This detail is, to be fair, entirely unrelated to being a daddy: I found a large, heat-blackened insect (maybe a wasp or a bee) in the grapes that were served with my Monte Cristo.
Toward the end of lunch, the boys started assembling molotov cocktails again, so we high-tailed it outta there. They napped well, and woke up significantly less belligerent. As I write this, they are again sleeping peacefully.