Daily Adventures

There's a pen, made by Pilot, where the ink is "erasable". You can buy it here at Jet Pens.

The funny thing is that the ink is actually erased by the heat of friction, and it reappears if you cool the paper down below 14° F (-10° C), which is pretty easily done in most freezers (or outside today... whew it's cold). So it kind of works as a disappearing ink that's the opposite of the usual kind of disappearing ink (most of which appear with heat or UV rays or... ).

Speaking of the Cold. It's been -10° F (-23° C) outside at night or in the early morning. Jet and I have been blowing bubbles outside, catching them on the blowing ring, and watching them freeze. It takes a little while, and you can also blow them onto a pan of water (so long as the water doesn't solidify on you). You can see the crystallization of the soap solution and then the whole bubble shrinks just a little before the film goes solid. Usually they just collapse, but occasionally you'll get a really strong bubble in which holes will appear and just stay and the rest of the structure remains stable. Jet's even poked his finger through the ring of the blower and held it there with the rest of the bubble all around it. It's really... cool. (or so she says as she's freezing her BUTT OFF... ahem)

Hope you're all doing well! Hope Thanksgiving was fun and that the shortening days are inspiring you instead of bringing you down. I managed to do Nanowrimo before I left for San Diego, but I'm sitting here with half a novel of my David finally finding his true love (and Afghanistani fissionables, Ukrainian nuclear power, and Russian politicians who were once Russian Bratva) and wondering if it's even what I really want to do to finish it, but I might as well just finish it so that it's done and David is finally settled down with the love of his life, and then get on with the 'real' one. *laughs* I may just finish it so that I can publish it as a weekly somewhere (including here, since I'll likely do it for free). Nanowrimo certainly made me realize that there's lots of ways to publish on-line content.

Thank you to Tom Gryn for watching the Boulder Camera articles.

I'd been told by the locals that the judge in the case with the woman with MS wouldn't render her verdict verbally, that she was going to write it down and hand it over to the lawyers in the case. Some of the local folks were pretty cynical about it...

but...

Here's the verdict.

For those that don't want to read it, the judge awarded the woman visitation rights and the $7k she needed to live in a decent group home near her family.

Wahooo! :-)

... of the week is when I get to walk Jet to the bus stop.

We always leave at 8:30 even though it's just a block's walk and the bus doesn't come until 8:45. We do this because of the day we had to RUN back to the house, and change Jet's shoes into sneakers so he could do PE. We also do it because it gives us time to talk and kick things and play at the playground where the stop is.

One morning we each had our own chunk of ice we got to kick and we'd giggle when we kicked each others, and we'd shift and switch when a chunk shattered and take the ones we really wanted. We'll talk about all kinds of things, from "what is global warming?" to "why do worms come on the sidewalk when it's wet?" to "blah de dah bah da" to "how to snap ones fingers in mittens" to...

You get the idea.

When we get there, Jet wanders off to play tag with the other kids, kick the snow, climb a tree, or, one morning, stand on a sheet of ice with three other kids and giggle every time someone fell down. The faller would giggle, too. Jet would try and run in place on the ice just for the fun of it.

Then the bus comes. All the kids scramble to get into line, get their packs on, and then Jet'll say, "Bye, Momma! Have a good day at work!" and I'll reply, "Bye, Jet, have a fun day at school!" and he'll nod and climb the steps bigger than he is up into the darkness of the bus. I'll wave and never know if he sees me, but it's okay as I know he doesn't expect me to. And then I'll either ride my bike into work or walk home and take the car and it's a good start to the day...

Jet loves his name. His pre-school teacher told us that every morning, when all the kids gather for Circle Time, they all sit on a rug that is bordered with pictures of alphabet blocks. Each block has a letter on it and Jet has to sit on the block with a 'J' on it. He'll even cry if someone else is sitting on it and won't move to let him sit on it, so the teachers have gotten very good at anticipating that, and getting the other kids off of Jet's block.

They've been going through about a letter a week, a little slower than that, but close enough, and today is 'J'.

I took Jet to his classroom, and saw his face light up when the teacher told him that this week we're doing "J as in Jet!" Hee. He's going to have fun this week.

Jet Meets Santa Claus 2005 This is right after Jet participated in his preschool's Holiday Program. I liked this picture better than the one of the two of them smiling at the camera because Jet, here, is explaining about his letter that he sent to Santa.

One of the many pictures of the season, but I liked this one the best. I think that Jet had no fear at all, much like the picture from last year, in Oregon, where the little tyke is just smiling away on Santa's lap.

One story the Jet told me this last week seems to emphasize the "good" Jet now is... he told John and I about a boy that had "punched him twice and hit him once" and we were pretty concerned. But then Jet said, "I didn't fight him back because he was just a preschool kid, not pre-K. I just told him to stop doing it and he did." Which translates to Jet realizing that the kid was younger than he was and he acted appropriately. We were very, very impressed and told Jet so in no uncertain terms. Jet kind of glowed with quiet pride for a while, too, which was very, very keen to see.

So it's been a pretty darned good holiday season.

After school, John did his usual thing of watching Jet while he played with the other kids and talked with the teacher a bit.

John said that Miss Teresa said that Jet was a funny guy. That Jet will go up to her, at random times and say, "You're doing a great job, Miss Teresa."

*giggles*

Hot hot hot... amazingly hot.

( But we still got a lot of stuff done today. )

So Jet's patented Leap of Joy is when he's got his feet on something, somewhere, usually in his exer-saucer, 'cause he can plant his feet on the bottom part. And he pushes hard with both legs, flings his arms out, and flings back his head, all with a wild grin of pure joy and usually a huge squawk as well. It's great in the saucer, and makes the whole thing swing wildly, which he loves.

It's a bit more problematic when I'm holding him and he does this wild gyration of joy. This morning, when he brought his head forward after flinging it back, he brought his skull directly against my lower lip. He looked duly dubious after the impact, but only dubious. I think I have a fat lip. When he looked up at me after he had absorbed the impact and I smiled at him, he gave me a big grin back and wiggled contentedly. He usually does the head banging against my chest or shoulder, and occassionally my chin, but it's a bit easier on both of us when he does that. I'm going to have to figure out how to hold him so he doesn't whack my mouth again.

Still, it's hard to be grumpy when he's just so happy to see me.

I'm glad it's today and not yesterday.

Yesterday was just one of those days that one is just glad to have survived, and be able to go on and live and do stuff like normal.

I am really grooving on normality this morning. Everything from feeding the baby at 5:50 in the morning to having my coffee maker spit grounds into my coffee. The sunrise was gorgeous this morning and all the better for the coo'ing, wriggling, happy bundle of boy, who promptly fell back asleep for another hour that I badly needed.

Whew.

Sometimes I think parenthood is all about getting reduced to ground zero myself, again. To take nothing for granted and to really enjoy, at a viceral level, all the things I started taking for granted when I was nothing but work and entertaining myself. Not an easy thing. Not always an enjoyable thing, no, but it is something wider than that.