KUNG FU YANDAS

PRATT REPLY

Make sure The Curious Case of Benjamin Button never wins an Oscar!  Reclaim 3 wasted hours of your life!

Tonight, though, Cedar decided to mix it up a bit.  She wanted to renegotiate the standing agreement with the Tooth Fairy, feeling the standard ‘I take your tooth and give you money’ deal was no longer in her best interest.  She wrote the following letter:

Dear Tooth Fairy,

I would like to keep my tooth.  Please do not take it.

Thanks, Cedar

(I still want the money)

Seriously.

And THEN she told us that because she’s now 6 years old, the tooth fairy should bring her more money than when she was 5.

This is a scary sign - she’s now arguing with creativity and in the second case, REAL logic.  I’m doomed.

An odd headline for someone living in Vancouver, where ‘fall’ generally means torrential rain and bone-chilling temperatures.

Yesterday, however, was spectacular.  I took full advantage and went to the beach with Cedar, Dawson, and Sandy and took some great photos…

Lisa had her 35th birthday this week, and despite being an INSANE week (with school assignments, a P.A.C. auction to organize, a craft fair booth to manage, and me being out of town for most of the week), it ended with a great night out with friends.

We had dinner at Grub (an amazing new restaurant on Main St), followed by bowling, and then poker.  As usual, Maggot The Robot Bowler destroyed the competition in both 5 and 10 pin bowling.

The highlight of the birthday for me, though, was what the kids did.  They were SO excited for Lisa’s birthday, that for the entire week leading up to it, they wrapped up almost everything in the entire house with whatever they could find for wrapping paper - in the picture, it’s an old Rubik’s cube wrapped in a dinner napkin and held together with a hair tie.  They hid the presents all over the house and brought them all down for Lisa on the morning of her big day.  Very funny to see the kids giving her insane things like a Cribbage board (they don’t even know what it is).

Spiderman and Little Red Riding Hood went out with their friends (Ben - Spiderman #2, and Bella - Fairy Princess) and canvassed the Main St. neighbourhood for sugar, salt, and fat last night.  The horrid forecast was totally wrong - it was actually pretty great - warm temperatures, no rain, and LOTS of candy.

Today, however, is another story.  The Day After has so far been a wee bit of a disaster. Sugar-addled maniacs with short attention spans, wound up like a top, fighting with each other, and all with the volume turned up to 11.

So to burn some of the crazy energy, I took the kids out to the beach for a bike ride / dog walk this morning and it was LITERALLY over two hours of non-stop, stream-of-consciousness babbling and an endless loop of annoying children’s songs blended together into the most annoying audio experience I’ve ever had…

B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O, and Bingo was his name-o…
A doe, a deer, a female dear…
Trick or treat, smell my feet, give me something good to eat.  If you don’t, I don’t care, I’ll pull down your underwear…
Little boxes, on the hillside, and they’re all made out of ticky-tacky and they all look just the same (we’ve been watching Weeds!)
Hush little lovebug, don’t say a word - the moon’s in the sky and the nighthawk is heard…
B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O…
A doe, a deer, a female deer…
There’s pink one, and a yellow one, and…
I’ll pull down your underwear.

AND ON AND ON AND ON…

AAAAAAH! It’s like having an insane person standing on your shoulder talking into your ear ALL THE TIME.

You know how sometimes evil things are described as “The Perfect Killing Machine?” (Terminator, Dick Cheney, etc)

On days like this, I think of small children as the universe’s “Perfect Annoying Machine“- efficient, effective, and completely focused on their mission to drive their elders bonkers.

I just wish that for special occassions like The Day After Halloween that the wee ones came with a mute button.  (Yes, I know I’m a heartless, horrible father…)

So Cedar turned 6 yesterday.  6!!!  She got loads of great presents, including a watch, a kids camera, and a “Canadian Girl’ doll that she has been desperately craving for close to a year.

Another perk of birthdays in our household is that Sandy always helps to unwrap the gifts…

But the highlight of the big day was her birthday party.  She invited 14 girls, all 5 or 6 years old, to our house for a “Ruby The Red Fairy” party.  For those not in the know, this is a reference to the Rainbow Fairy collection of books about a vast variety of fairies who are constantly being plagued by the dastardly efforts of Jack Frost and his army of half-witted Goblins.

So our house was quickly filled up with Fairies of all colours of the rainbow.  After the girls arrived, Lisa revealed a secret to me - that I had to pretend to be Jack Frost for the duration of the party and, at some point, steal all the presents the kids had brought for Cedar.

It was all VERY funny.  I wrote a note that was quickly discovered - it revealed Jack Frost’s plans to steal all the presents and sent the fairies into a hyperactive panic.  I sent several more notes during the next hour, each one increasingly odd, but getting the girls more and more riled up.

They went over the top when Jack Frost actually ’stole’ all the presents while they were out in the yard playing, although they quickly found them hidden on our front porch.  They TOTALLY lost it when the presents went missing a second time and it took almost half an hour to find them.

However, karma is a weird thing. After all the panic I caused, I got paid back big time.

After we recovered the presents for a second time, we hid them under a blanket so that Jack Frost wouldn’t be able to find them again.   When the kids were in the kitchen eating cake, I moved the presents yet again and hid MYSELF under the blanket.  The kids came roaring in after cake, extremely pumped for the present opening.  One of the kids ripped off the blanket, at which point I popped out and screamed that I was Jack Frost and scared the living hell out of them.

I hopped up in triumph, surveyed the screaming and mad psychosis I’d created, and enjoyed more than a small bit of satisfaction at a job well done.

And then… WHAMMO!

One of the girls ran up and HAMMERED me in the nuts.  HAMMERED.

Fairies win again.  Poor Jack Frost, who hobbled off to find an ice pack.

It is Cedar’s 6th birthday today and I have not yet put up pictures from Dawson’s 3rd birthday, which took place over  a MONTH ago.  Feeling veeeeery guilty.  In fact, now that I think about it, I’ve also forgotten to put up pics from his first day of preschool…

…and his recent SURGERY!  (What’s wrong with me???)

Since his birthday, he’s had surgery to repair a ‘hydrocele’, which, like a hernia, is basically a hole somewhere in his guts that was leaking into his body.

Fun.

I had a hernia when I was in my late teens and I was hunched over for a week, wincing in pain every time I coughed, sneezed, or laughed.  Dawson has a nice scar on his abdomen now, too, but on the afternoon he got home, he was dancing around acting like nothing had happened and within a day, was back to full activities.  He didn’t even need any pain medication!

Anyway, back to birthday time…

Last year, when Dawson turned 2, he still wasn’t eating solid food.  He stared at his cake, everyone around him ate like fiends, and never touched it.  Only weeks later, everything changed and he began eating - the reason for the change still bewilders us, but we’re certainly not complaining.

This year, he’s grown a ton, turned into sporting superstar (soccer, hockey, golf, frisbee, bike riding - you name it), started pre-school, and is kicking everyone’s butt at Memory Game.

The best part of the birthday (and the development of his personality over the last year) was his sense of humour.  He decided that for every present he opened, he’d make this ridiculous face and dance around the room in celebration.  Here’s the evidence…

Cedar has recently become obsessed with money.  I think it’s because she’s wanted several toys, including something called a Canadian girl that costs about $100 (!), and we’ve told her to wait until her birthday and Christmas.  She’s become frustrated that she can’t get what she wants exaclty when she wants it and has decided that getting lots and lots of money is the solution to all her problems.  (Scary how early that gets ingrained…).

Cedar and I began bargaining - she wanted me to give her $100 for doing nothing.  I told her that you don’t just get money for free because you want it - you have to earn it.  If she wants money, she has to do something of value, like chores.  I also told her that no matter how many chores she did, I would never give her $100.  Maybe $1.

After about 15 minutes of hard-core negotiations, we came up with a win-win solution yesterday.  Cedar rubbed my feet for 5 minutes and I gave her 65 cents.

The Maggot is infuriated. (She claims its horrible that I paid our daughter money to rub my feet, but I think she’s just jealous that she didn’t think of it first.)