firetruck museum

Last month (yes, I am behind on posts) the three of us - Will, Erin, and I - took a special day to have some fun together after I finished a major marathon of research. We let Will choose what he wanted to do from a few options and his overwhelming favorite was to visit the Michigan Firehouse Museum in nearby Ypsilanti. I wasn't expecting much - the website doesn't do the museum much justice - but since Will likes fire engines (there's a firehouse right next to a park by our house that we visit frequently) we were excited to go. It was much cooler than I thought it would be - they had a warehouse with several historical fire engines and firefighting equipment up to 200 years old or older. Somehow we were so intrigued by the firetrucks we forgot to take Will's picture with any of them, but we got several from when we first got to the museum that are worth sharing.

sliding down the firehouse pole

meeting the firehouse animals

I guess we did have some pictures of Will with firetrucks...

Since we visited the "firetruck museum" it is clear that this would be a fun place for Will to revisit. He talks about it a lot (bragged to all his friends and teachers at school), and he has been much more interested when we see fire engines when we're out and about. One of the most popular library books we've been reading lately is about a little boy pretending to be a firefighter and driving the fire engine.

Uncle Jeff's birthday song

We have a string of family birthdays so continuing Will's repertoire of birthday songs, here's one for Uncle Jeff (his Bday was last Friday).
You can tell he's really enthusiastic about singing this time: "happy birthday to you..... ... ...uncle jeff"
I posted anyway because I thought it was funny how much of a chore it seems to have become for Will to sing the song. Anyway - Jeff, I hope these birthday wishes came true for you.

AJ's awesome visit

I must apologize to Will's page readers and Aunt Jenna in particular - I have been very busy lately and am several weeks behind on blog posts. So these pictures should have been posted weeks ago, when AJ came to visit for a week during her Spring Break. It was a great time and couldn't have been nicer that she came then because Will needed some attention and Erin and I needed to have some fun.

Jenna flew in late on a Tuesday night and even though we had been talking with much excitement about her visit, we could not wake Will when she arrived. But he was very excited to see her the next morning. Erin and I needed to be at work but I managed to switch Will's daycare days so he and AJ got to play together by themselves Wednesday morning. AJ quickly picked up on the rules of Roarball (hence, the baseball caps in the picture above), and as I left for the day they were already familiar buddies - happily reading books together. It is my understanding that they also played quite a bit of Mario Race, with Will nearly beating AJ (she is used to getting whomped on by me in Mariokart so it was nice that Jenna got to win against somebody...)

At some point during the day one of the games they played was "wrap Will up like a present" or like a slug, I'm not entirely sure. But it was fun. When I got home Erin and AJ had wrapped Will up for me to open. He was quiet and kept his eyes closed so that I couldn't tell what the present was until I unwrapped it...

More on AJ's visit coming soon...

making his tourney picks

I had forgotten that we actually captured video of Will making his NCAA tournament bracket picks. Maybe this helps people see how he chose West Virginia over American in the title game.

bracket update

After the opening weekend, Will's NCAA Tournament bracket isn't going so well...



He can still get a couple more points but I think Erin and I can safely assume that we won't have to watch Little Einsteins and eat pretzels and candy for dinner. Will's score is 32 with a best possible score of 54. My current score is 59 (best possible: 187), Erin's is 60 (194). Yes, Erin is currently beating me, but the question is: will it last????

Will's NCAA tournament picks

I'm sure it's clear from many blog posts that Will is a sports fan. He has really been getting caught up in "hoop ball" lately - now that the sun is finally coming out, one of his favorite outdoor activities is to play on his 3-foot basketball hoop that we got him for his birthday.

Anyway, Erin and I also get pretty excited for the NCAA tournament each year - THE TOURNEY STARTS TODAY - and there's usually some pretty serious competition between the two of us with the brackets we fill out. Usually we bet a "night out" - where the person with the winning bracket gets to choose every activity for an evening, without argument from the losing party. This can be dangerous for me, as it might mean having to watch High School Musical. Fortunately I always win :)

Last year Will got in on the excitement of the tournament as well, and so this year we had him fill out his own tournament bracket. This was done via two methods which we alternated between rounds: 1) asking him who he thought would win and verbally announcing the team names, or 2) showing him the teams on paper, without reading them, and asking him who he thought would win. For method 1, he almost always picked the team names that he recognized (Michigan, Wisconsin) or could pronounce more easily. If they were about equally difficult for him to pronounce, he would usually just take a stab at saying the second team we read to him (so he had to randomize the order). For method 2, he would usually pick the team that had more capital letters in the name, and schools that "have a double" - had a 'W' in them - always trumped the other schools. Anyway, here is Will's bracket below. If he beats Erin or I (which would be hilarious), or BOTH of us - we'll probably end up eating candy for dinner and playing 3 straight hours of Mario Race. I'll sure to keep everyone updated with his score.



PS Will beating Erin or I is not that far-fetched. As I'm sure many of you are aware, these tournaments can go completely crazy sometimes, and you never know - 14-seed American could conceivably end up in the championship game. We have done similar bracket picks with our cat Duke in the past (put a toy or treat on each team name, see which one he goes for and write in that team) - and there have been some very close calls with Duke almost beating Erin!

this one's for Grandma Brenda

Grandma Brenda's birthday was this last weekend and since Will has been on a roll with the birthday song, he wanted to sing to her as well. Since he was already primed to sing happy birthday to Grandpa Mike, he had to practice a few times so he didn't accidentally sing "grandpa". The video below is a couple practice sessions before we went live and he sang to her on the phone.



Hope you had a nice birthday, Grandma!

shavin'

Here are some pictures we took a few weeks ago while Will and I shaved our "shatchy" [scratchy] faces. I would usually put a little shaving cream on Will's nose if he was hanging around me when I was shaving, but recently he has wanted to shave right along with me. So I help him put shaving cream on his face and taught him how he can use his finger to wipe it off and rinse it in the sink. Afterward we always make sure to check each other's faces to make sure they're "shoothe" - not shatchy anymore.

Will sings to Grandpa Mike

Grandpa's birthday was yesterday, and Will wanted to wish him a happy birthday (plus he just likes singing the birthday song). He starts off by singing the first line, then frantically "I fishing, I love you!" - which was the line we practiced doing very quickly so we could send gramps a recorded message on one of those singing cards (it only allowed about 10 seconds of recorded message). Actually, he has usually been saying "I fish on the Wii" - since Grandpa got him a fishing game for the Wii and they like to play it together. Unfortunately, the card broke in the mail, so now we'll send an even better message. Will still has to be prodded to sing the whole song, as you can see. Anyway, I think this is a much better birthday blog greeting than the one Will did for Grandpa Mike a few years ago.

pockr pockr

This strange game is an invention of Will's - he's been doing it, and talking about "paying pockr pockrrr" or various other similar pronunciations for a month or so. The game is played by holding either socks or shoes or slippers in your hands and shaking them around to do a dance like in the video below. He often decides to play when we are trying to get him to put on the shoes/socks, delaying the process significantly.



For awhile, Erin and I thought he was talking about playing ping pong, and mimicking the moves of swinging at a ping pong ball. This would have made sense because the rec center where he and Erin go swimming on fridays has a ping pong table right outside the locker room and he is very interested in watching people play on it. But no, he can clearly say 'ping pong' - and we also talk about playing that fairly often - so pockr pockr is something different. We asked his teachers at school and nobody seems to know how he came up with this game, so the game and it's name apparently originated entirely from Will's imagination.

sorry mama

I mentioned recently that Will has been saying some words we'd rather he didn't. Well, this video kind of demonstrates my weakness in discouraging this type of language. I'm usually pretty good at enforcing the rules of the house but when Will says "fart" and laughs, I can't help myself but join in the fun.

To be clear, I did not introduce this behavior. I had left him by himself to put his pants on and heard him mumbling something, then laughing hysterically over and over. When I snuck up closer to the room I heard what he was saying and tried to get the camera and record it. But I got caught so had to let him keep being naughty for the sake of this video clip.



PS - since this video, Will now has switched to saying "poop" and laughing. This is because he knows "poop" is an acceptable word in our house (and potty poops earn Will a donut) so he can't get in trouble, but it sometimes still makes dad laugh.
Sometimes it will go like this: "Poop!" [straight face from daddy], then: "mommy say no fart."