Nate's First Vote

Nate helped Daddy vote this morning. Best of all, our polling place was at a fire station, so we got to see a FIRE TRUCK.

You can't see it clearly in the photo, but Nate thinks it is important to bring along a helium balloon when one votes.

Walking home, I was thinking about how he's going to be the kid who keeps getting in trouble at school because he has a contrarian libertarian nut for a dad:

"Today we are going to learn about an important civic duty -- voting. When you all get older, you will have a sacred responsibility to participate in our democratic form of government. Yes, Nate?"

"My daddy says that each California voter gets roughly an 80-millionth share in the decision of who becomes President of the United States. And that the President in turn gets to exercise vast emperor-like powers that impact every one of those voters lives."

Yes, my wife agreed. He is going to be that kid. And she's going to be the one that gets all the phone calls from the principal.

Nate & Daddy's Weekend: Day Three: Undamaged Kid

Thing went pretty smoothly today. For the most part. At the start of Nate's meal last night, I kicked off my shoes under his high chair. This morning when I inserted my foot into my sneakers, big piece of squashy banana in the toe!

I'm getting more confident with his new bike seat. We went on an hour and a half bike ride from our house, through Palo Alto, just up to the point where we would have to cross the train tracks and El Camino Real to enter Stanford University. We'll leave that adventure for another day.

We were both so glad to see Mommy!

Nate & Daddy's Weekend: Day Two: A Walk in the Park

Nate is starting to miss his mommy. Right before his nap, when he was getting tired and fussy, he pointed at her picture on the mantle and shot me a look like, "What did you do to her?!" He calmed down after some cuddling. Every once in a while he would point to her picture or walk around the house looking for her.

Today's big fun was a walk at Shoreline Park with fellow Geek Scout, Oliver, and his daddy, Greg.

Here's a photo from our regular morning outing to the neighborhood play park:

And here's Nate reading all his books:

Nate & Daddy's Weekend: Day One: Fry's Made My Child Cry!

My wife is in Seattle for a long girl's weekend with my sisters, so it's just me and the boy for three days. Really makes me appreciate all she does to take care of him all day while I'm at work. He's in bed, and the last of the going-to-sleep noises have faded on the baby monitor, so it looks like I've survived the first day.

Today's only tantrum was at lunch time when I tried to put on his Baby Bjorn bib. He has been starting to rebel against the hard plastic collar that holds it around his neck. But it was resolved quickly by my giving him his way: we just bought a soft bib that goes over his entire upper body, but we hadn't had a chance to try it yet. I felt like a bad parent giving in to a tantrum, but I had to balance that against his actually having a legitimate grievance. And I don't think he has the communication skills at his age to complain about something like that without throwing a tantrum.

After his mid-day nap, we headed to Fry's. Nothing to buy, we were just geeking out. Nate used his special balloon-dar sense to immediately spot a bunch of balloons attached to a line of clearance sale bins. There was one sort of runt-of-the-litter balloon that was only half inflated. An employee was about to throw it away, so I asked if Nate could have it. By the time we had driven half way home it had completely shriveled.

(One could argue that I played some part in this tragedy by selecting a known defective balloon. But it's just too much fun to hate on Fry's. Did I mention that he didn't really cry. He just looked kinda disappointed.)

Finally, we went on a bike ride around the neighborhood. We just installed a Topeak carrier on my bike. We've only test ridden it a couple of times, so I'm still not comfortable doing anything other than a slow ride on quiet streets. It makes the bike very back heavy, so I have to be cautious not to let the bike get out of control when stopped, and I have to avoid sharp turns. Plus, right now, I stop every couple of minutes to make sure he hasn't figured out how to unbuckle the safety harness -- he's always trying to figure stuff like that out.

Playground Project

By keeping an eye on garage sales and mailing lists, we've accumulated a world-class collection of little tikes® play structures. We now have a table, a picnic table, a big slide and a little slide -- and the crown jewel of our collection: a blue octopus merry-go-round.



We decided that my big "stay-cation" project would be to build a playground in our backyard. The yard was thoroughly torn up when we remodeled our house, so there wasn't any good place for Nate to play outside. I spent every morning for the last two weeks working on this area just off of our living room and mommy and daddy's offices, where we will be able to keep an eye on him when he is old enough to play outside on his own.

Yesterday, Nate got his first chance to try out his playground. Although we're going to continue taking him to the playground at our local park, he enjoyed these smaller play structures. They are just the right size for him to learn how to climb all over them without getting hurt when he falls off. And he's already fallen off all of them, with daddy hovering nearby but restraining himself from coddling too much.

The hardest part of the project was prepping the 16' x 16' area. The scraggly remains of the old lawn were full of construction trash, roots and weeds, old sprinkler pipes, and that annoying green plastic netting that they use to strengthen rolls of turf. So, I decided to completely clear the topsoil. I think I found nearly a hundred old nails, many that must date back to when our house was built in 1954.

Here, Frances helps out by cutting a bunch of roots that were growing through one corner of the area:



I had originally drawn up plans to do a more elaborate frame around the area, with a bench built in along one side, but I scaled back the plans to fit the amount of time available (and then spent a week more than I thought it would take). The simplified redwood frame is lightweight, but should be stable since it is half-buried in our nearly-hard-as-brick clay soil. Getting the frame square was the hardest part, but the contractor working on our hall bath gave me some tips. (By the way, the hall bath remodel is the reason for all of the trash piled behind the playground.)

Once I had the frame built, I graded the ground, adding back about half the topsoil, carefully raking through it to get out all the crud mentioned above. If you look carefully, you can see that there's a shallow ditch running across the grade. After I had started removing the topsoil, I realized that one of our downspouts has a drain pipe that runs under the sidewalk and drains into the play area. I'm hoping that the ditch will help the water drain to the down-slope side of the frame.



The frame is filled with about four inches of "playground fiber", a mulch of soft wood that doesn't splinter. And is very good at being tracked into the house.

When we were about to try out the playground yesterday afternoon, it was getting hit with some strong sun. So, we decided to move the canopy that we bought for Nate's first birthday party over the play area. It cooled it down nicely.