MichaelandChrissy.com

Gavin was baptised on Sunday, October 19th, 2008.  We now have two Catholic boys in the family!  Gavin was very good: he slept through most of his first mass, but woke up just before receiving his baptism.  It was a very nice ceremony.  Aiden was very good throughout the mass as well.  Our family members took lots of photos for us.

Afterwards, we had a family gathering at our house.  It was still early in the Fall, so we had the tents up in the backyard while the weather was nice.  Everyone had a good time.  We’re looking forward to spending more time with Gavin’s new godparents, Cassie and Nick.

Chrissy is the best Mom ever, so of course she deserved to take a day off for a twelve-hour scrapbooking event.  I’ve been at home alone with Aiden before, but so far I haven’t had both kids at the same time by myself.  Chrissy’s mom took pity on me and borrowed Aiden for the morning.  That left me with Gavin, who refused to sleep, and he was cranky all morning.  When Aiden came home, he went straight down for his nap.  I only had one kid to keep track of, but I was still feeling overwhelmed.

Then Gavin dozed off, finally, just before Aiden was supposed to wake up from his nap.  Unfortunately, I dozed off as well (worst Dad ever).  Aiden woke up from his nap and, unsupervised in his room, inexplicably dumped half a jar of Vaseline on his head.  He just reached in and grabbed huge handfuls of petroleum jelly and smashed them into his hair.  Consequently, all of his bedding, stuffed animals and books (that he first dragged into bed with him) were coated in a layer of greasy goop.

I woke up about an hour after Aiden’s nap should have ended.  When I ran in to check on him, he was still in bed, surrounded by the oily carnage.  The first thing I did was to call Chrissy’s Mom (and take pictures).  She was busy, but said that Katie would come over to help me.  I put Gavin down in his crib so that I could clear off Aiden’s bed.  I made a pile of ruined bedding (including Ellie, Aiden’s favorite elephant) to take downstairs, and then put a fresh fitted sheet and pillowcase on the bed.

Katie came in and put Aiden in the bath while I took the bedding downstairs to be washed.  Unfortunately, the Vaseline wouldn’t come out of his hair, even after three tries with baby shampoo.  Katie then tried to wash his hair again with Dawn dish soap.  That helped, but he still had a mohawk.  Gavin was starting to wake up at this point, so Katie fed him while I tried something else.  A quick Google search showed that corn starch or baking powder would soak up the Vaseline from Aiden’s hair.  I covered his entire head with baking powder, then washed his hair twice.  It worked!

Now that Aiden was taken care of, I needed to clean his sheets.  There’s lots of advice online about getting Vaseline out of hair, but not bedding.  I had put everything in the washer on the delicate setting with hot water and extra rinse time.  That seemed to work on most of it, but the comforter and fitted sheet were still a mess.  So I pre-treated the splotches with Dawn dish soap, let it sit for half an hour, and then washed them again in hot water.  Still no luck, but at least the majority of the crisis had been contained.

Aiden played for a while until dinner time.  Katie stuck around for awhile to help me with Gavin, since he still refused to go to sleep.  I was very grateful for the help.  But I still had to talk to Chrissy when she got home.  Chrissy wasn’t happy about the sheets and the comforter, and tried to clean them again with Spray N’ Wash.  This was more than the comforter could handle, and it split open, sending stuffing all over the washer.  Those are now in the garbage, as is the jar of Vaseline.

Aiden got a wood shelf with his name on it for his birthday.  Aunt Paula has been having these made for the grandbabies in the family, and I was hoping that Aiden would get one because they’re very well done.  The shelves come “naked” though, so I decided to finish the shelf before putting it in Aiden’s room.   It took a while to find some free time (Aiden got the shelf in August), but I finally got around to it.

There’s a fine art to finishing wood. I started last weekend by removing the letters and sanding each individual part.  I then stained the shelf and the letters in two different colors.  I went with a dark stain for the shelf, and a lighter stain for the letters.  This turned out pretty nicely, but the shelf didn’t stain as nicely as the letters.  This usually cleans up once you apply a coat of polyurethane.

Everything got two coats of polyurethane, with a light steel wool sanding in between coats. Drying takes the most time out of the whole process. After the pieces dried for the last time, I put all the shelf back together.  I finished a lot of wood for our oak baseboard, window and door trim, so this was a fun little exercise.  The shelf turned out very nicely for Aiden, and we’ll hang it in his room soon.

We took the kids to the County Line Orchard last weekend for Pumpkin Days.  Aiden loved it last year, and he really enjoyed it this time too.  The trick is to get there early to avoid the crowds, especially on the weekends.  A tiny petting zoo is no fun when it’s packed with two hundred soccer moms, colliding double strollers and battalions of sugared-up children.  We were lucky, and the line for the Moo-Choo was miraculously short.

We have never been in the Moo-Choo before.  It’s basically a row of plastic drums, each with wheels and a cow head attached to it, tethered together and pulled by a tractor.  The tractor leads the fake cow cars along a path through the woods and part of the apple orchard.  The path was decorated with Halloween stuff and some of the trees were adorned with big happy faces.  I pointed things out for Aiden, and he craned to look at them.

Because we got there just as they opened, we got to talk one-on-one with some of the animal guides that were there.   There was a girl with a rabbit and some sort of fluffy baby bird.  She was nice enough to get down close to Aiden and let him pet the baby rabbit.   He loves rabbits, and always points them out in our yard.  He rarely gets to touch one, however.  There were plenty of animals for Aiden to interact with at the petting zoo though.

We even got to see Peter the Pumpkin Eater, a huge dragon with light-up eyes that talked (and sang!).  Peter is usually sleeping when we visit.  Speaking of sleeping, Gavin slept through most of the outing in the Baby Bjorn, but he did wake up long enough for Chrissy to feed him.  We didn’t want to be lost in the corn maze with a tiny baby, so we skipped that this year.  After the petting zoo, we bought a few dozen fresh pumpkin donuts (an annual tradition) and then headed home.

Tonight, we reached a milestone that we have long anticipated: Aiden has pee-peed in the potty for the first time.  We’ve been sitting Aiden on his little training potty for about six months now, just to get him used to it, but he has never done anything in it before.  Last week, Chrissy moved the training potty from his room to the bathroom so that the serious training could begin.

Aiden has an issue with warm bath water, in that he pees almost as soon as he hits it.  Gross, I know.  But tonight, Chrissy set Aiden down on the potty before she put him in the tub.  To get him “in the zone”, she splashed some warm water on him while he sat on the potty (like a sleeping college frat boy).  Sure enough, he started to pee.  We cheered.  He was so proud of his pee.

The next step will be to get him to come to us when he has to use the potty.  I’m not sure how quickly potty training is supposed to work, but it’ll be nice when I don’t have to change his diapers anymore.   I always tell him, “We wouldn’t have to do this if you would just pee-pee in the potty…”  But I shouldn’t get my hopes up completely, as we still have to tackle the poo-poo.  I’m so not looking forward to this.

Despite the flooding last weekend, Aiden and I tried to drive over to Target to visit the pharmacy.  We couldn’t take the normal way, since Main street was closed between Kennedy Avenue and Indianapolis Blvd due to flooding.  The second normal way was closed too, since 45th Street was also closed due to high water.  We went to the next intersection north, Hart Road, and crossed over to Indianapolis Blvd there, then turned back south towards Target.

Once we got there, we saw that the entire parking lot was under water.  We drove towards the stores, but had to turn back because there was literally nowhere to go but into the lake that had formed in the lot.  The road was dry along the mall itself, but I couldn’t get over there.  The water between me and the stores was at least two feet deep (you could tell from the half-submerged car).  I wasn’t going to chance it.

On the way home, we took some pictures of the flooding at Main Street and on 45th Avenue.  The flooding on 45th wasn’t evident from Kennedy Avenue, but you could plainly see it from Indianapolis.  There were work crews out with pumps and portable pipes to try to drain the water.  It was all pretty crazy.  Aiden watched it all from the copilot seat.  We made it home safe and sound though.  Maybe we’ll try again tomorrow.

Legend has it that Orville Redenbacher lived in the same subdivision in Valparaiso as my Aunt Linda, before he sold off the company and moved away, so the town has had a Popcorn Festival ever since.  The Festival is situated downtown, with the Courthouse at its center, and they close off a bunch of streets for the event.  There are booths with arts and crafts, an annual parade, and lots of food.  Everyone that I knew would be there every year, so it was always nice to catch up with people and talk downtown.

I actually saw Orville Redenbacher once during a Popcorn Festival.  I was about 15, and he came out from behind a building, flanked by a bunch of businessmen, on his way to give an opening speech or something.  I remember thinking how old he looked in real life, since I had only seen him on TV prior to that.  He walked right by me, but I was too stunned to say anything or even wave.  I mean, this was Orville Redenbacher, in the flesh, and being a boy from small-town Indiana, I had never seen a famous person before.

Every year, for as long as I can remember, I’ve gone to the Popcorn Festival towards the end of the summer.  So I can say from experience that it has been going downhill in recent years.  There used to be lots of arts and crafts, but now it’s mostly infomercial crap.  For example, I saw three booths for bedsheets, several for cheap sunglasses, and a couple for back massagers.  There were only about a half dozen for the crafty kitsch that we dig, but we had already seen those same vendors at the Blueberry Festival last week.

The upside was that they have a kids area a few blocks east of the Courthouse with face painting and the duck game and some other kiddie attractions.  There was a huge inflatable slide, and Aiden and I went down twice.  Getting up there was a chore though, since the ladder was very steep and Aiden had to go in front of me.  It would have been easier to toss him over my shoulder in a fireman’s carry.  It was a tough climb, but worth it because Aiden loved the slide down so much.

There are certain things, like plants, that die almost immediately upon being placed in our care. Chrissy has never met a houseplant that she hasn’t killed.  As it turns out, we can add fish to this list of doomed items.  Today, Aiden’s pet fish died.  I’m not sure if, at age two, he comprehends death, but he seemed pretty unhappy about his unmoving aquatic compadre.  We pulled it out of the tank, and bagged up the corpse.

Clearly, the betta was defective when we bought it.  Aiden picked it out himself, but it was white.  Chrissy wasn’t happy with the white color, saying that bettas turn white just before they die.  A red one, or a blue one, would have been better.  Aiden’s pet fish lasted about two weeks, just under the fifteen day return policy.  Petco was pretty good about letting us exchange the dead one for a new one.

We announced a “fish malfunction” to the girl at Petco, and she showed us to the “Wall o’ Bettas” to choose a replacement.  There were about twenty of them in their own little plastic containers, and they all looked healthy.  Aiden wanted to hold each container himself, so I let him peruse a bit before making a choice.  Eventually, he got distracted by a bunny and walked off with a nice red fish with a fanned tail.  Let’s wish this one luck!

We threw Aiden a birthday party this weekend, even though he doesn’t turn “2″ until next weekend (we had it early because next weekend is Labor Day and people might be out of town).  Aiden had a sports-themed party, complete with a White Sox baseball birthday cake, a basketball hoop in the yard, and decorative pennants for all sorts of sports.  Aiden’s favorite word (next to “Uh oh!”) is “Ball”, so sports seemed the way to go this year.

The weather channel said that it was going to rain on Saturday, so we had made alternate plans to pile everyone into the house.  Luckily, there was no rain.  The sky did darken a little bit, but that was kind of nice because it cooled things down (it had been muggy and powerfully hot all day).  Timely, that was when we let Aiden open his presents in the back yard.  He got plenty of birthday gifts, but he really wanted to run off and play towards the end.  Just a few more presents to open, buddy!

Everyone had a good time, especially Aiden.  The only ones who didn’t appreciate the party were the group of hornets that took up residence on our deck.  Chrissy noticed them in the morning and her dad “relocated” them (to hell).   Thankfully, they were gone before guests started to arrive.  There were a lot of little kids over that day, and bees would have complicated things.

Flickr is an online photo management and sharing site. I upload a lot of our family photos in the gallery on our web site, so I had never bought into the Flickr phenomenon before.  However, it turns out that I get a free Pro account because I use AT&T as my internet provider, so it was worth a look. I found that Flickr is also a social media site, allowing users to join photo groups, designate other users as buddies, and comment on interesting photos.

“Project 365” is a gimmick that PhotoJoJo introduced.  To participate, you upload a photo a day for an entire year. Aiden grew up so fast in his first year that I decided to document Gavin’s growth this way.  Aiden will be growing too, so he’s got his own 365 project. For fun, I also joined the “365 Toys” group, and I’m taking a picture of a Transformer a day (in six years, I might have photographed my whole collection if I stick with it). It’s hard to keep to this plan, since it requires taking pictures every day, uploading three of them to Flickr, then adding titles and comments to each one. Too much like work.

All of the Flickr photos are parts of larger photo shoots, but I only upload a single photo per day to Flickr.  I may upload some of the complete sets to our web site gallery, but there are many sets that never make it that far (we’ve got twelve gigabytes of photos of Gavin so far, and he’s only three weeks old).  It will be interesting to look back in a year and see all the changes that our boys have made in that time.  I’ve put a link to our Flickr page on the navigation bar (to the right), so check out our 365 Projects!