Since drivers ed a month ago, I have been working extra extra hard on work/life balance.
A lot of that balance involves leaving work at a reasonable time to either pick up the kids or get home to play with the kids.
The girl is at just about the funnest age that I can imagine. She is up for any adventure, any challenge, any meltdown that she can find. I had read in a blog about a concept called
horizontal parenting and found it to be interesting. So I will go in to Kat's room, lay down and play games with both kids... Roll the ball, hide the toys, let them cover me with blankets and read to them.
I hope they remember the fun we have together when I ground them in high school.
Wife cooked up a diabolical plan, I helped execute it. We are awful parents, trying to cope with Pink Blanky. Kat has her favorite blanky. There are times that she absolutely won't let that thing out of her sight. I swear, her arm could fall off and as long as she had Pink, she would be comforted. Anyway, Pink was gross. So Jill had me look online to Amana Woolen Mills to see if they still made this particular model of child blanket. They DID! So one Sunday, we made a road trip with our new Garmin to the Amanas and bought a decoy blanket. And we are VERY careful to not let both of them out of the cupboard at the same time. Now we can have one washed and clean for when we need to wash the other.
A couple of pictures here of what I call a playstation. I went to my brother's house and helped finish taking it apart. A buddy came over with his car hauler and we loaded it up and brought it home. It isn't where it is supposed to be, yet. It has a footprint of about 15' x 28' when it is all assembled. But I do have the climbing wall and the slide screwed together. I wasn't going to put up the climbing wall b/c I didn't think it was safe for a 33mo old. However, after I picked her up and put her on a platform 4.5' off the ground, I decided we needed to burn off her energy more than mine. Before I had it completely screwed in, she was climbing it and sliding down. She played on it for over an hour last night.
In addition to her playing on her PlayStation One, I took her to look for antler sheds along the fenced in pasture next door. It was fun for about 400 yards of fence. Then she was all, "HOME daddy, HOME!" So we took the diagonal across the field back to the house. After about 50' of rough pasture, she stopped and said, "UP!" So I carried her the rest of the way home. Pretty tiring and hard on the back to have 30+ pounds carried right in front of me. When we got back to the house, I put her down and she immediately wanted to race. So she took off running down the driveway, down the lane a ways. Until she found some PURPLE flowers. She examined them for a while, then wanted me to race her home.
All in all, last night was a great night for playing outside with the little girl.
