NINE-ty to Nothing - A Birthday Blog

Here we are at nine years old.  The last year of single digit age! 50% into the legally mandated period of parental responsibility! The end of Tennessee booster seats! And sure, while most of 2020 has been a complete dumpster fire, there are still plenty of things to look back on and smile about.

    1) Water Adventures! Back in the fall he went on his first canoe trip and this summer he went on his first kayak trip.  He definitely likes it as much as hiking, but honestly, who wouldn’t like it when you don’t have to paddle?

    2) I am now a driving DJ! If we are in the truck for more than five minutes, he will usually make a song request. The artist vary widely, but right now his favorite band is Metallica. That’s all him, zero encouragement from me. He just heard it on one of my Pandora stations one day and decided he liked it.  So for some songs I am now an expert at doing parental edits with the volume knob. 

3) He loves some YouTube! He can watch YouTube channels on video game walkthroughs for hours. I don’t really understand them but when I was his age I would look at the same 30 pages of the most recent Nintendo Power every single day for a month.

The YouTube influence is powerful. One day he took a box of cereal out of the pantry and said “Today, I am going to unbox these Coco Puffs.” 

4)  Pandemic Follies! Oh yeah, what else happened this year?  Wasn’t there something where the whole world ended and we stayed inside for a couple of months and cooked 3 meals a day and rationed toilet paper? Almost slipped my mind, but usually I would put something here about sports, but soccer was canceled after one game and city baseball never happened. What all kinds of activities did we do in the spring?

- Walking around and around and around and around Union, campus and trails – Because all the parks were closed, these were also great opportunities to talk about the difference between public and private land.

-Wandering around parking lots looking for interesting cars. Our greatest find of the pandemic was a Honda Del Sol in really good condition.

-Using the hill at Union to launch kites, gliders, and remote aircraft – It really is a great place for experimental flight, like the Kitty Hawk/Kill Devil Hills of West TN. One time we got a kite all the way the end of the 300 foot string. I was only slightly concerned about causing a 20 car pile up on the 45 Bypass if the wind died.

 5)  Him still a genius!!! For a kid that doesn’t “like math”, he sure loves to talk about numbers. He can add and subtract years and dates super quickly in his head. When we are watching TV and there is a year mentioned, he will state some random fact about how it happened ____ years before my grandfather was drafted for WWII and ___ years after the Alamo. And of course I need to use my phone calculator to check him but he is always right!

The Playful Eight : A Birthday Blog

Another birthday has arrived, the big 8, and second grade is just around the corner.  And what can I say, it just keeps getting more fun! This past year has been full of new cool stuff, but here are some of the highlights: 

1) Buckling the seat belt, consistently and correctly! After thousands and thousands of times loading and unloading out of car seats and boosters, he is now totally independent in both vehicle ingress and egress. He had been good getting out for a while, but only recently has he demonstrated the resolve to correctly buckle his seat belt every time, which is HUGE! Of course, you have to cut kids a little slack these days because they are in booster seats until they are 17.

2) Swimming strong! He did more swim lessons with the Jackson Swim Team last fall and this summer he can chase me across the deep end and almost catch me.

3) Tying shoes! We have special lessons and camps for everything else; swimming,  music, every sport imaginable, art, video games, etc., but why no camp for shoe tying? After years of talking through how the "rabbit goes around tree and through the hole" he can finally do it. Of course his shoes still stay untied half the time!

4) Reading, lots! Pretty much a collection of books follows him around and he falls asleep every night with one in his hand.

He even has his favorite author, Dav Pilkey

5) More adventures in fishing and hiking! Of course we have kept up our outdoor adventures and had several milestones over the past year:

A few weeks ago he reeled in his first fish from a boat.....

In the spring he did his first hike on the Cumberland Plateau and even got to go into a cave.....

He also made it through 6 miles of pretty hard trail at Natchez Trace with only one little bag of chocolate chip cookies!

The sign was for a birthday party but was super appropriate!

5)  We survived another season of baseball! This was the first year of coach pitch with no tee. In the field he stopped several grounders.  As a batter, he got a hit most games and scored several runs. As a pitcher, I only hit one kid hard enough with the ball to make them cry....It was just his hand!!! He was fine!!!!

And this he is getting good at the sports picture, which is almost the most important part!

6)  Him still a genius! Not only does he read...he makes his own comic books!

This is the 8th Epic Novel by Brody Parnell

Also, this past year he massively improved his math scores, got student of the month, and honor roll!

Bringin' home the hardware!

The Magnificent Seven! - A Daddy Blog

First Hike on the AT

Year six has been a lot of fun!  It is crazy to think that at this time last year he was getting ready for Kindergarten, and we were so worried how he would ever get out of the car by himself and walk to his class. Yeah, that took about two days of adjustment and he was running inside the school. So here are some other highlights from the past year:

1)  Swimming! -We have been doing swim lessons all summer and watching it "click" has been like watching him take his first steps. Just this past week he has been able to jump into the deep end and swim the whole width of the pool. It's like a super proud moment that is also kind of terrifying.

2)  Sports for him and coaching for me! - Over the past year he has played baseball and soccer. Coaching soccer last fall was a very new experience for me. I had my first whistle! I had a binder with plays and formations drawn out. I had these checklists and schedules to run our practices by. Maybe I took it a little too serious, but my team was really good! Coach pitch baseball this summer was a more laid back affair. I did pitch several games and was pretty proud of myself. I never hit more than three kids with the ball (per game) and none of them cried.

And not one of my pitches hit a kid in the face

3) Video Games - Back in the fall I did something really ridiculous, standing in line outside a Toys R Us, in the rain, to get one of the 11 SNES classics they had in stock.  So we have been partying like it is 1992 since.

Only took 52 lives to beat Ganon in Legend of Zelda - Link to the Past

4) Reading! - He loves to read. About halfway through Kindergarten, he just pretty much started to take over reading before bedtime. I can pretty much just turn the pages and help with words now and then. Over the past few months, he will occasionally read the campaign signs that are all over the place. Have you ever tried to explain elections and democracy to a little kid? When he asked if he gets to vote, I started to explain how it was just for adults because they are supposed to know best...ummm....let's just talk about Sponge Bob.

5) Learning kid culture and loving it!  When your kid is really little, yes the cartoons get to be super annoying. Disney Junior runs the same five episodes of each of their shows pretty much every day. But now we are finally getting into the cool stuff. I have had to do some research on the super heroes, but all in all, a lot of it is just a reboot of the same things I watched/played in the 80's and 90's.  Even the video game stuff is pretty much the same, with Mario and Zelda.  The water guns are still Super Soakers. The TV and movies include Transformers, Ninja Turtles, Sponge Bob, and even a remake of Inspector Gadget. It actually makes me have some sympathy for my parents because all of that stuff was foreign and new to them.  Right now, one of his "favorite movies", is the 1990 Ninja Turtles movie. I like to tell him that his Granddaddy took me to see it at the theater was I was nine. And there is some new stuff, Like Captain Underpants, which I think is hilarious. I am probably a bigger Captain Underpants fan than he is.

So we are looking forward to another year of great adventures. Somebody has got to help Captain Underpants foil the evil plots of Professor Poopypants.....remember kids, "The emphasis is on the Poop!"

Tra - La - La!!!!!

I Got Your Six! - A Daddy Blog

Birthday time once again!  The Big Six. I will have to admit, year Five was a pretty exciting time with some pretty exciting stuff.

1) Hiking!  I am not talking about just little walks in the woods, but full on, carry lots of water and spend half the day in the woods adventures.  After one particular fall trip to Pinson Mounds, he kept telling people how we "fought a snake and he fell down a hill and I saved his life".  It wasn't quite that dramatic but it was a lot of fun.

2) Camping!  Yeah, it is backyard stuff right now, but he is incredibly tough.  The night we went in the fall it got down in the 30's.  He slept in a $10 kids mummy bag from Academy Sports (I did add a fleece liner) and on an old Therma-rest pad.  I had a 30 degree Mountain Hardware bag and a super thick sleeping pad.  I woke up every hour.  He slept through the night.  I had to wake him up to make him go inside for breakfast.  

3) Video games!  He has always like to watch me play, but this spring and summer he has really gotten into playing Mario.  The first time he really played original Super Mario, I recorded his first true video game kill!

 

4) Movies! He went to his first movie and loved everything about it, especially the gigantic portions of popcorn.

5) Him still a genius!  There is this puzzle game he plays on his Leap Pad called Scaredy Cat in the Spooky Woods.  He can beat all 30 levels.  I can get past about 10.

And there are a lot of big days coming!  Oh yeah, the big K is coming and I ain't talking 'bout no blue light special!  Kindergarten starts next week.  And in two weeks soccer is going to start, and I am going to help coach.  It will be Brody's first time playing soccer and my first time coaching anything.  Possible disaster? Sure.  Possible great experience to treasure for life?  Sure.  With parenting, that is what makes it fun. 

I Got Fives On It! - A Daddy Blog

Wow, the big FIVE.  I have always thought of five as a big milestone, but being on the parent side of stuff has really given me some good insight into what makes this age range such a fun time.  Here is my short list:

1) The kid forks and plates are used less and less.

Actually, we really don't need to use them at all, but we still do really mainly to keep up the supply of clean adult plates (as conversely I have been known to eat with the Mickey Mouse fork when it was the only clean fork in drawer).  He does completely fine with the salad forks and small spoons as well as normal plates.  Although, he isn't totally eating off the fine china yet, we are still die hard Take N Toss cup users.  There are probably four under the seats of my car right now.

2) You have to turn sideways through doorways.

He got big.  As I am writing this he is laying on the couch beside me and kicking me because he is now longer than half the couch.  It wasn't too long ago when I used to sit with him on the couch and he wasn't as long as the couch cushion was wide.  Now when I scoop him up and take him to bed, I have to turn at doorways to get his head or feet to clear.

3) He isn't fooled by ridiculously healthy food.

Pretty much since he started eating solid food, pancakes and waffles have always been our reliable breakfast go-to.  And partly because it isn't healthy and partly because it results in sticky hands, we purposefully did not introduce syrup.  He didn't complain for years.  But at some point recently he discovered it (I might be to blame).  And once you have gone syrup, there is no going back.

4) The stroller is really gone.

I know there isn't some magic age where riding in a stroller is against the law or something, but when the legs start dragging the ground, it is time to take it in consideration.  We got a lot of good miles out of the old umbrella stroller, but its time is done.  He can walk a long way now and doesn't complain.  When we go out to the Union trails, he can actually trail run with me for a ridiculous long time. He still gets plenty of rides in grocery carts though!

5) The camera is rolling.

This is probably the most exciting and unnerving thing about this age.  This is where your real memory starts.  We have some memories from when we are younger, but they are typically more feelings and images.  From five on, the camera is rolling.  Repressed memories make good Oprah shows, but rarely happen in real life.  Sure there might be a few nights in young adulthood with some alcohol induced amnesia, but for the most part, everything you see and hear past five years old will stay with you for the rest of your life.  So all the fun and good times will stick with him, but we have to be extra careful as well.  Which might mean only watching the TV version of Friday for a while (even though it really isn't funny at all when it is clean).