MichaelandChrissy.com

We had planned to take the kids to Navy Pier for the day, starting with the Chicago Children’s Museum and then heading towards the end of the pier for the Winter Wonder Fest.  We spent about two hours at the Children’s Museum, and there was a lot for Aiden to see and do.  He really enjoyed the interactive exhibits, especially the Waterways and Treehouse Trails.  There was also a kid-sized supermarket attached to a huge pretend kitchen that we had to drag him away from.  Once it past noon, we went to lunch at McDonald’s.

McDonald’s was a madhouse.  They really need ropes or something to designate lines, as there was just a sea of people in front of the registers.  I soon discovered that the line that I was in was not a line at all, and ended up cutting in front of some people to get to the register that was only a foot away.  I felt bad for doing it, but I was already aggravated because some guy jut his elbow in front of me to keep me from cutting in his line (while I thought he was cutting in front of me in my line that wasn’t a line).

Chrissy had similar problems looking for a table.  I know that Navy Pier has ample outdoor seating, but it was about ten degrees outside that day.  So the inadequate indoor seating was full and Chrissy had to wait with the boys for a table to open up.  The first table that she had scoped out was stolen by some lady who just walked past her and plopped her kid down.  Chrissy then waited for another table, and was lucky to get it before anyone else stole it.  I got back from my line ordeal just as she had sat down.

After lunch, we decided to call it a day.  We’ve been to the Winter Wonderfest a couple of times already, and thought it might not be targeted towards toddlers and babies.  There are plenty of inflatable attractions and a skating rink, so maybe we’ll come back when the kids are a little older.  We tried some inflatables at the last Popcorn Festival, and Aiden didn’t like it so much (he likes giant slides though).  It was nap time for Aiden, so it was a good time to get in the car and drive home.  Both Aiden and Gavin slept the whole way.

We’ll definitely be going back to the Children’s Museum.  We only spent a short amount of time in each area because we wanted to see as much of the place as possible before moving on to the Wonderfest (even though we didn’t).  We were talking about buying a membership on the way home.  It would pay for itself in just a few visits, and I could see us going once a month or so.  We saw a lot of other families entering through the “member’s” entrance, so apparently other people have the same idea.  Might be worth it.

We did send out a Christmas letter this year, but I wanted to post it to the web site anyway.  Who knows, maybe somebody who isn’t on our holiday mailing list would like to know what we were up to this year?  If you’re not on our Christmas card list, and would like to be, please let me know!  The “online version” is now enhanced with links back to blog posts that give more details.  Click “Continue Reading” to read the 2008 Christmas Letter.

Chrissy likes to have professional pictures taken of the boys every three months or so.  We’ve been to a lot of places for photos, but I think that we have settled on the studio in our local Wal-Mart.   The photographers there always manage to make Aiden smile and they’re very accommodating with our requests.  Also, they are willing to sell us all the images on a CD with copyright permissions.

Chrissy had a number of poses in mind for this year (and a change of clothes for both of the boys), so we hit each one in turn.  Our photographer was very helpful, and took care of everything that Chrissy wanted.  We went with a split theme of Christmas and “Indiana University” (we seem to collect IU-branded clothes) this time.  The pictures turned out fantastic, and many of them will go out with this year’s Christmas cards.

We took the boys to the George Carden Circus at the Hammond Civic Center on the weekend after Thanksgiving.  It was a pretty good show for such a small venue (it was literally the size of a high school basketball gymnasium).  Aiden had never been to a circus before, and he was captivated.  I forgot how much circuses smell like, um, animals.  There were lots of animals there.

Aiden and I got to ride an elephant before the show started.  There was a number of good circus acts.  We saw a lion tamer, and he had a white tiger in his pride.  The clown was pretty good.  The highlight for me was the motorcycles speeding in the steel sphere.  I’ve never seen that up close before.  Then again, I’m used to circuses of the Soleil variety.

The boys were very well behaved: Aiden switched often between my lap, Chrissy’s lap, and the bleachers; Gavin cried a bit, but we couldn’t hear him over the various acts, he mostly just took the bottle and looked around.  We had a pretty good time, but it leads me to wonder how much better the (much more expensive) Ringling Brothers Circus would be.

Chrissy recently found some time to take some Halloween photos of Aiden and Gavin.  Yes, Halloween was two weeks ago, but it’s hard to find time for these things when you’ve got two kids!  She could have easily blown it off, but Halloween photos are an important family tradition in our house.  We’ve got fabric backdrops and props and everything!

Aiden (2006)

Gavin (2008)

An unintended part of this tradition has been the choice of clothing.  Gavin gets all of Aiden’s baby clothes, which have been in storage for two years, including the Halloween-themed clothes.  So what we end up with is a photo of Gavin in the same clothes and almost the same pose as the one that was taken of Aiden two Halloweens ago.

Aiden (2006)

Gavin (2008)

This brings us an interesting opportunity to compare and contrast our two boys.  When they were only a few months old, they looked pretty much the same.  Gavin has more hair, and Aiden was almost a month younger at his first Halloween, but they still look remarkably alike.  Unfortunately, Gavin didn’t get as many outfits or backdrops as Aiden did, but remember, Chrissy has two kids to manage now!

Aiden (2006)

Aiden (2008)

But then there are also the differences between then and now!  Although Aiden still has the ceramic pumpkin that sports his name across the front, that is where the similarities end!  He’s gotten to be such a big boy over the last two years.  We’ll have to see what memories next Halloween brings us!

Aiden is a smart little boy.  He shows good problem solving ability and is able to follow multi-step directions.  He has an easy-going nature and is very loving to his baby brother.  But Chrissy and I are worried because Aiden has a speaking problem.  He used to babble a lot as a baby, but he never quite grew out of that; the sounds never formed into coherent words.  We’ve come up with some ways to cope, but his language skills are barely past single syllables.

Children are supposed to learn a dozen words by eighteen months, and should be able to string two or more words together to make simple sentences by the age of two.  Aiden started off with a couple of sounds by eighteen months, but words never followed.  It’s hard when you take him someplace to play with other kids his own age, and he’s the only one in the room that isn’t speaking.  We still strive to put him into social settings, but we tell people that he’s “shy”.

Chrissy started to be concerned when Aiden was only a year old.  She picked up a book on the subject, “The Late Talker: What to Do If Your Child Isn’t Talking Yet“.  The book deals mostly with Apraxia, a particular speech disorder, and what to do if you child has it.  We don’t think that Aiden is Apraxic, but we did find out how to get help for him.  At the very least, we took away from the book the need to have your child tested early to rule out bigger health problems.

We contacted “First Steps“, a child health group, and they came to do an evaluation on Aiden when he was seventeen months old.  They claimed that Aiden had excelled on all counts except for speech, but he wasn’t far enough behind to warrant therapy.  Aiden’s pediatrician then recommended that we test his hearing at the local hospital, and he passed those tests as well (we knew his hearing was fine, but did it just in case).

Aiden’s vocabulary didn’t progress farther than “mom”, “dad”, “eat”, “uh-oh”, “ball” and “bye”.  First Steps came out again for a re-evaluation when he was twenty-three months old, and this time he qualified for speech therapy at home.  He currently gets one hour of “play therapy” with a therapist per week.  We think that this is helping, but the results are slow in coming.  He now makes car noises and some animal sounds, which is good since mimicry is an important step towards speech.

Aiden has augmented his communication skills with sign language.  He loves the “Baby Einstein” sign language videos, and he recently got “Baby Signing Time“.  He has gotten pretty good at it, and can sign “car”, “ball”, “mom”, “dad”, “eat”, “cereal”, “cracker”, “cookie”, “candy”, “drink”, “milk”, “juice”, “water”, “baby”, “bath”, “bedtime”, “I love you”, “kiss”, “more”, “open”, “book”, “cat”, “dog”, “please”, and “thank you”.  He has even started using multiple signs to put together ideas (”eat cracker”, “drink milk”, “more please”).

Although the sign language is a big help, we would prefer that he talk out loud.  Chrissy has enrolled Aiden in speech therapy at St. Xavier University, where they teach speech therapists.  This is a little pricey, but we’re serious about helping him speak properly.  We’re hoping that Aiden will get better with more therapy and eventually catch up to other kids his age.

Halloween is a pretty big deal in our house, and this year marks Aiden’s first real “Trick or Treat” experience.  I was really looking forward to it.  When I first heard that Barack Obama was holding a political rally at nearby Wicker Park on the same night, I wondered why he would overlap with a holiday.  The rally even started right in the middle of Treating hours!  To paraphrase from the great works of Dr. Seuss:

Clearly Obama hates Halloween!  The whole Halloween season!  Now, please don’t ask why.  No one quite knows the reason.  It could be his head wasn’t screwed on just right.  It could be, perhaps, that his shoes were too tight.  But I think that the most likely reason of all, may have been that his heart was two sizes too small.

I understand that there is less than a week before the election, but at least give more than two days notice for such a huge rally.  My first reaction was to take the whole family to see it, but not during my favorite holiday.  Wicker Park seemed more than happy to pre-empt their own Halloween concert schedule, however, and many others ditched Halloween to go see Obama.  Our usual huge crowds of costumed revelers were severely stunted.

Some people stuck around for Halloween though.  We had about a dozen small groups stop by.  Just before Trick or Treating started (only from 5-7 PM in our town), we took the boys around the block to Grandma’s house for photos.  On the way back, Aiden got to try out Trick or Treating for the first time (in his adorable lion costume).  Then we hung back on the neighbor’s new front deck to pass out candy.  Due to the sparse turnout, we packed up early.  We still had fun though, and I’m looking forward to a better night next year!

Scheeringa Farms is a fresh produce vendor not far from where we live.  It’s a nice, family-owned place close to Cline Avenue and 45th in Highland, IN.  They have a petting zoo every year around Halloween, but we’ve never taken Aiden there before.  Chrissy’s Mom took Aiden last year, but Chrissy and I have never gone ourselves.  Well, today we took Aiden and Gavin.

Aiden enjoyed feeding the animals, but they were really hungry and sort of aggressive.  There was a vendor that sold animal food there, so we bought an ice cream cone full of seeds to feed the goats and llamas.  We didn’t get far with that cone!  One llama ate the entire cone right out of my hand!  I had Aiden in the other hand, so we both got mugged by that llama.  It was funny though.

We also fed carrots to some goats and donkeys.  Although the animals were hungry, they were very gentle, so no one was bitten while feeding them.  Aiden also got to pet the bunnies, his favorite animal.  He got to play the ubiquitous duck game as well.  Gavin slept the entire time in the Baby Bjorn, but he was under a blanket due to the chilly weather.  It was a nice little outing for a cold Saturday morning.

Erik Kastner put together a neat little tool called “Spell With Flickr” that accepts a word through any web browser and returns a set of pictures that spells that word.  The results are pretty awesome, and you have the option to re-select a letter image by clicking on the letter itself.

Aiden:

The script uses the images from a Flickr group called “One Letter“.   Who would have thunk that people take pictures of single letters in the street and then post them to Flickr?  You even have the option to use the images in their original size or square them off for uniformity (these have been squared off).

Gavin:

The tool also allows you options to do the same thing on your own site.  You can download the source code or just copy the relevant HTML code from the results page.  I was able to post Aiden and Gavin’s names by copying and pasting the code provided by the tool.   So check it out, and send random messages to your friends!

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.