o'side daddy raisin' younguns in socal

Ollie calls “Barnes and Noble” “bums and elbows”.  He’s three.

Wow, it’s been such a long time since I genuinely blogged about the boys, and a lot has changed.  It’s hard to get back into the swing of posting.

Did a divide-and-conquer day today, with Ollie.  He and Reid played soccer in the morning (Beth and uncle Andre coaching, so I got to cheer from the sidelines).  Reid wasn’t into it until the very end, and then he started chasing pretty hard, kicking the ball and flopping around a lot.  He had a great time.  Ollie, suffering from the same wasting disease (bird-flu, probably) that his mom and dad have, followed mommy around on the field with his index finger jammed in his mouth, and occasionally crying and begging to be picked up.

After the soccer-game, though, mellow-Ollie and I went shopping and came home.  I asked him if he wanted to go see “airplanes and helicopters” (by which I meant the MCAS Miramar aviation museum), and he said no, he’d rather play monorails.  There was some discussion of going to the zoo, but Ollie said he wanted to play monorails and then go to the zoo.  I tried to explain to him that that wasn’t really doable, but he would have none of it, so monorails it was.  Later, he cried when I denied him a trip to the zoo.  This is, I suppose, the risk of negotiating with a three-year-old over anything longer range than the next ten minutes or so.

He’s becoming a brilliant builder-of-Geotrax, is Ollie.  He now builds large, complicated track systems that stretch from his bedroom into the kitchen.  They aren’t ideal for remote-control trains yet, but he’s not into the few RC-trains he has anyway, and would rather line up all of his trains neatly near the tracks.  The fun for Ollie is in building “circles”, not so much in the actual management of trains.  Absent some friction, this works well, because Reid is more interested in the train management part.

After playing monorails for a while, I tucked Ollie in for a nap, and took one myself.  We both slept a ridiculous three-and-a-half hours.  If that isn’t proof that Ollie is fighting off the SARS, I don’t know what is.  The only reason either of us woke up at all was to greet Beth and Reid, since mommy was dropping off the boys to stay at daddy’s house for the night.  Reid and Ollie played trains some more, ate fish-sticks for dinner, and crashed out at about 8:00.  Late for bedtime, by their usual schedule, but I let them stay up a little later to play the Cars Demo game on my XBox 360.  They like to press the green button and crash Lightning McQueen into things.  They don’t care at all about winning the race or anything else, which means I never have to actually buy the whole game.  The free demo version will likely satisfy them for another several months, at least.

Hoping to do the aviation museum or zoo/wild-animal-park tomorrow.  We’ll see, Sundays often turn out to be the three of us sitting around in our PJsunderwear all day watching football, playing monorails, and generally being total slackers.