Guitar hero

Last night Will and I were playing billiards, darts, and Neil Diamond in the basement of Uncle John and Aunt Mavis's house. Will found Jana's old guitar behind the darts machine, took it out, and started to play with it.

As I turned my back on Will and attended to the skipping Diamond disc, Will said, "Daddy, listen, I'm telling a story!"

Hmm, he's telling a story on the guitar, letting the notes write the words. Should be interesting. "What's it about buddy?"

"It's about a lizard in the desert ... and it's snowing."

Whoa, trippy story, dude. We'll look for the rest of the story on VH1.

Laugh-a-Roo

I've started to detect a direct relationship between how annoying Scott and I find Will's antics and how funny Charlie finds them.

Here's an example: Charlie and Will and the jump-a-roo. If there had been a pair of ear plugs in front of us, there's a reasonable chance Scott and I would have scratched each other's eyes out to claim them first.

For some reason, this nails-on-a-chalkboard moment was comedy gold to Charlie. Here's a video:

Happy Thanksgiving

Will has been super busy with Thanksgiving projects at school and at daycare. Here are a few of our favorites.

Oh, there's also one from Charlie ... he had a little help from his teachers at daycare.

West Bend Weekend

The most amazing thing happened on Saturday night.

I slept for EIGHT hours ... in a ROW!

When I did wake up, it wasn't because a baby was crying or there had been an "accident" or someone was hungry, thirsty, squirmy or dreaming about a dinosaur staring in the window.

Nope. I woke up after eight blissful hours because, well, I needed to use the bathroom.

I felt so human again.

Many thanks to my in-laws who made it all possible.

Here are a few pictures from our weekend in West Bend. I put quite a few of Charlie because I just couldn't narrow them down ... his expressions are just so cute! There are also a couple of Will doing what was either an impression of Michael Phelps or perhaps the Incredible Hulk. Enjoy!

Our floor model

I'll take that twenty, if you don't mind

The other night after work I needed to stop by an ATM to pick up some cash for my quick trip to Baltimore. Will insisted on coming inside with me, something he never gets to do. He watched in amazement as I made money magically appear from the machine, two $20 bills.

Will grabbed one of them, walked away slowly, and said "Hey Daddy, what if you took one and I took one?"

Yeah, great idea dude. Work on a better line.

After that ...

... I feigned disbelief -- "What Will, you don't think I'm cute?" -- and got him backpedaling. After trying to dig himself out of a hole -- how dare he imply that Jana loves the baby more than me? -- Will says:

"Daddy ... do you know what this means?

"What?"

"It's time to wrestle!"

Changing The Subject 101, that's my boy! So we wrestled for awhile, with Will's new ring name being Escape Man. I asked Will what my new name should be.

"Wrestle Man."

This drew big laughs from his parents, especially his mother, who told Will "Maybe your new name can be Captain Obvious!"

"Yes, Daddy can be Captain Obvious," said Will, distorting things as he often does. "That's perfect!"

We really should have sent him back the drawing board, but the name stood.

Charlie or Daddy?

"Mommy?"

"Yes Will?"

"Who do you love more ... Charlie or Daddy?"

Hmmm ... I'd braced myself for the "Do you love me or Charlie more" question, but Will sort of changed things up on me.

"Why do you ask?" I said, using my favorite stalling technique.

"Well, Charlie is just so cute and soft and his skin is so shiny," he said, patting Charlie on his chubby little cheek.

"All true."

"And Daddy ... well, his skin is just so hairy."

Whistle while you work

Charlie has learned a new skill ... he can whistle. No kidding.

We discovered this at about 2 a.m. and we were both so giddy about it we stayed up and practiced for a good 30 minutes. I'm trying to teach him the intro to Guns N Roses "Patience."

When you combine this with his ability to touch his head to his toes, that makes two things Charlie can do that his Daddy can't.

You've got to be kidding me

Will has a funny way of showing that he misses me. I was away from him for almost five days, for three days on a work trip, then while he was in Michigan with Jana's grandma.

Tonight, I read Will a Magic School Bus book focused on ... rocks. You know, sedimentary, igneous, shale, slate. Good stuff.

Afterward, Will was asking about what things were made of, like coins. (Will brought home plenty of coins from Michigan. He said he got them from his grandma for "having fun.")

Then he asked what glass was made of. Not entirely sure, but later proven somewhat correct by Wikipedia, I said "sand."

"You've got to be kidding me," Will said. That made me giggle.

Will couldn't stop asking me questions, which I interpreted as making up for lost time together. After a few more minutes of this, he said "Daddy, let's just lay down in bed, relax, and look at the stars," referring to the glow-in-the-dark stars I hung on his ceiling a few months ago. "Someday, we should lay outside and count all the stars in the sky."

Sounds like a plan.

Come fly with us

Will has really been into paper airplanes lately, making a bunch of them at day care and kindergarten, then stashing them in his backpack. So yesterday when we are at Barnes & Noble, and he saw a paper airplane kit, it made perfect sense to take it home with us. Will paid for the $10 kit with his own money, and was very excited to get change back.

Upon returning home, Will opened up the kit and was excited by the different types of paper in the box. I was overwhelmed by the 10 or so different blueprints, each requiring 20-plus steps and extensive use of fractions.

Still, we plunged forward, gathering materials and equipment to make the plane. Will asked for a glider. The first step called for cutting the paper -- and I realized that the paper included in the kit was 1/2-inch too small for these plans. Nice.

So I made the plane's fuselage (Will had a fun time with that word) out of plain, heavy white paper. Over the course of the next hour or so, I measured, folded, cut, cursed, and glued my hand to the kitchen table. Will did a great job bringing me what we needed to keep it going. At one point, I muttered to Jana, "This better be the best paper airplane we've ever seen."

And it sort of was. Even after decorating it with the paper from the kit, it still didn't look like much.

But like the Millennium Falcon before it, our plane may have been short on style, but it was long on substance. Will's first throw, which I expected to result in an immediate nosedive and crash into the floor, actually resulted in a smooth, graceful flight.

Will has taken to calling this plane an "upper-case plane" because it is larger than the pre-made plane that came with the kit, which he calls the "lower-case plane."

The plane has since crashed several hundred times and been in and out of Charlie's mouth, so it's losing its structural integrity. But it will always hold a special place in our hearts.

Rasslin'

Will has been challenging me to wrestling matches a lot lately, feeling like his muscles are getting pretty darn big and ready to put a whuppin' on his old man. The other night I suggested that, like Andy and I did when we were younger, we adopt fake wrestling names to make things more interesting.

OK, Will said, he would be Muscle Man. (To drive the point home he went shirtless). I put on the pumpkin beanie Charlie had on in the Halloween pictures below and called myself The Great Pumpkin.

After several rounds of me dominating my 4-year-old son, Will declared "Daddy, your name makes you too strong, so you need to change your name." So I went with a moniker that used to bedevil my brother: Mr. Sock. When that made my hands too warm, I went with Bandito.

Will's other names: Band Man, Jumping Man, and Speeding Man. Those worked out better for him.

Halloween, U.P. style

As we were walking along on Will's perfect Halloween night, I couldn't help remembering the disasters that my cousins and I had when we went trick-or-treating in Upper Michigan.

More often than not, there was several feet of snow on the ground. Sidewalks? No such thing. We had to be driven from house to house by my Aunt Carol, who always seemed to draw the short straw among the parents on Halloween night.

As I got out of the car, I'd put on my little plastic mask that I thought made me look like Cinderella but really made me look like pint-size bank robber. At least half the time, that evil little elastic would break, sting my face and cause the mask to fall to the ground.

I remember frantically trying to hold my mask up to my face with one hand while taking my coat off with the other. Someone yelled "trick-or-treat" before all our coats were off and we'd all be yelling, "I'M NOT READY YET!"

It was horrifying ... disappointing ... and without a doubt one of those things that make me laugh until my stomach hurts whenever I get together with my family.

Hopefully, Will's perfect trick-or-treating experience is as memorable.

Rejected Halloween costumes

Halloween ended up being a lot of fun for us even though Will and Charlie had a hard time deciding what to be this year.


First, Charlie outgrew his Pea in the Pod costume. Well, I'm not sure if he outgrew it or if he just didn't want to "copy" Will (see picture of Will circa 2004).

Then he decided to go as Zorro but we wouldn't let him hold a sword and his mask was a little too colorful. He did try it on for Katy who thought he looked pretty cute.



He finally just settled on being a pumpkin since he's roughly that shape anyway.

Will didn't have it much easier. Grandma Clary got him a Spiderman costume but it didn't have a mask. He tried to add the Storm Trooper mask that Daddy got from Comic-Con, but we weren't buying the "Spider-Trooper" he was trying to sell.

He was thrilled when we found an actual Storm Trooper costume on clearance. Of course, there weren't a lot of sizes left and it ended up being a bit too "fitted." Doesn't matter, he had a blast and, he reports, all the kids thought his costume was the "coolest."

Halloween 2008

Will arrived home after about a week in the U.P. just in time for trick-or-treating. He had missed the Scandinavia hours on Sunday so we figured we'd head to Waupaca instead.

Turned out to be a great night. Will got only about a 10th of the candy but had about 10 times as much fun.

The weather was in the 60s and the atmosphere of the historic district was amazing. The houses were decorated and many of the people giving out candy were in costume and character. There were crowds ... actual crowds ... of trick-or-treaters.

Below are a few pictures from that night ... enjoy!

Will the pundit

On the eve of this historic presidential election, it's a good time to share the activism Will has been exhibiting lately.

Friday, as we drove to Waupaca for trick or treating, we were listening to POTUS '08, an XM satellite radio station focused on the presidential election. One of the commentators mentioned Barack Obama.

"I don't think Barack Obama should be president," Will declared.

"Then who do you think should be?" we asked him.

"John McCain," he said.

"Why's that Will?"

"Because Grandma Clary said McCain should be president."

Interesting, we thought, because just days earlier Clary had told us she was an Obama lean. Before we could press him further, Will revealed some of his own polling data.

"Everyone in the whole world wants McCain to be president," he said.

"Not Mommy and Daddy," Jana said.

"Then everyone other than you two wants McCain to be president."

Jana was getting pretty worked up so we changed the subject and it didn't come up again over the weekend. Then tonight, Will brought it up again. Jana called her mom looking for some insight; turns out Clary never did say anything to Will about McCain or Obama.

When confronted with this fact, Will confessed. "I was trying to trick you," he said. Ah, more Republican election dark arts! But then it was revealed that maybe Will wasn't a part of a vast right-wing conspiracy.

"Why do you support McCain, Will?" I asked. "Is it his leadership qualities, or the fact that Joe the Plumber says Obama wants to take away his hard-earned money and redistribute it?"

"What's a plumber?" Will asked indignantly. Not Joe (at least not a licensed plumber).

Will then went on to tell us that while he thinks McCain should be the next president, Obama was our last president -- as well as our first president. "I read it in a book ... see?" The book in question was actually the biography of Wisconsin basketball coach Bo Ryan.

This Family Ties-like situation has been fun, as our little Alex P. Keaton has flustered his mother and amused his father. I hope it leads to many years of productive political discourse in our family.