For all my Asian friends and family

How long before he's taller than Mom?

He's four and she's....thirty something... 29! Ya, she's 29, that's it.

That's my boy

It all seemed like a good idea at the time. A local mall was having a display of dinosaurs. Connor loves dinosaurs. Let's take Connor and Liam to see the dinosaurs. Weee! Not only that, let's hype it up for Connor all week long, not telling him what it is, only that he's going to get a surprise. What could possibly go wrong?

It started out well with the usual Saturday morning gridlock and insanity of 3 Road traffic and RAV Line construction. Actually, it wasn't that bad. There was minimal profanity and once you let go of the basic rules of driving and any semblance of manners driving in downtown Richmond is quite fun. It's like a giant video game.

Anyway, we get to Aberdeen Centre, find parking and enter the mall. There's a big sign in the entrance talking about their Jurassic display, blah blah blah, animatronic dinosaur ride. Cool. So in we walk, Bern with Liam and Connor with me. We pass the animatronic ride first and Connor is already holding me tighter. It's a freakin Velociraptor with a saddle on it. Remember what those things sounded like in Jurassic Park? Remember when they stopped being cute and started eating people? The line up for that one was for big kids 'cause the little guys were having none of it. There was one little girl in a pink dress that was yelling at her parents. I'm not sure what exactly she was saying as it was mostly incoherent and in Cantonese, but I'm sure it was something like, "you put my ass on that mo'fo' I will make you pay for the rest of your sorry lives!"

Needless to say, we didn't hang around that one. Anyway, the main event is a life size Tyrannosaurus Rex in the centre of the mall. Connor's still keeping a wary eye on the Velociraptor but I can see the midsection of it up ahead. Then he sees it. WTF!? This is somewhat different than the usual friendly dinosaurs in our bedtime books and on Treehouse. If you've never seen one of these things, let's just say it's a good thing they've been dead for 65 million years. It's over two stories high, it's head is the size of a volkswagon and most of that head is made up of teeth. I take Connor out of the crowd a ways so I can take some pictures of him with the dinosaur in the background, just like a hundred other fathers around me. I got the picture above and one other, and then it roared. Then all hell broke loose as a thousand little kids including both my sons figuratively and literally shit their pants. Not only did it roar, it was animatronic too. And there was steam from a pretend volcano. Very impressive. Unless you're four.

I couldn't put him down again until we'd reached the safety of the Diaso store at the other end of the mall. Then it was a non-stop talk on how scary the dinosaur was and how we weren't going out there again.

Like I said, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Zzzzz

What was that I said last night about Connor being ok and Liam recovering?

Amygdala: Pros and Cons

Your amygdala is part of your brain. Part of your lizard brain. The part that tells you to run away from fire and to be afraid of the dark. It's the cave man of your brain, from back in the day when we weren't on top of the food chain. The part of your brain that instantaneously recognizes the horrible gurgling noise emanating from your child's throat and all it's terrible ramifications. Even if it's your first child and you have no previous experience with children, your amaygdala knows what that sound is. It receives the sound of it from your auditory system, checks your personal data base for matches, recognizes and prioritizes it against its list of potential dangers to you, then sends out a shit load of orders to every part of your body faster than the fastest supercomputer could ever dream of. You should be proud of your amygdala.

Unfortunately, as fast as your brain is, as fast as you think you are, the likelihood of you succeeding in whatever split second plan you've come up with to keep your child's puke off of you and everything around you is going to fail. Nine times out of ten. I've gotten lucky a few times. Today was not one of those times. Or two of those times. Or three. It's been a long afternoon. Bern came close. Hat's off. I saw it coming from the comfort of the living room. Xbox controller in one hand, cold drink in the other I figured I'd gotten lucky. Cherries and some type of mixed fruit drink. Wasn't pretty but at least it was in the kitchen. That would have been nasty on the carpet.

Liam and Connor both caught whatever it was I brought home from work this weekend. Connor's doing pretty good but Liam... Liam was trying to set a record. I stopped putting on new shirts at some point. Probably when I ran out of shirts to put on. It was quite the show. Water and plegm vomit. Apple juice and plegm vomit. Banana yoghurt and plegm vomit. I got lucky with the water one since we'd taken him outside to cool down a little. Really lucky, because that was an astounding amount of vomit.

Whatever it was, it seems to be out of his system now. Somewhere in the middle of an episode of Toopy and Binoo he perked up and started talking again. Not sure what he said since he was pretty sleepy by then, but I'm sure it was something like, "Jesus, Dad, you stink!"

Canada Day Long Weekend

Where to start? It felt like the Canada Week holiday. I think we must have taken over a hundred pics this weekend and since I can't put all of them in one blog, check out out Flickr page. Where to start? Well, it wasn't an auspicious start for Dad. The week leading to the holiday was his first full week back after his neck/back/shoulder 'incident.' It was SUPER busy, I was backed up from (like how I changed from second person to first there? Whatever, write your own blog) all the day's I'd missed the previous week, still sore and by Thursday my long quiet allergies made a reappearance. Friday night the allergies had to make way for an actual cold. The cold was not greedy though, it cheerfully left some room for the allergies to play in.

Saturday morning Dad feels like a bucket of warm death, but, being there for the family he dragged his lazy ass out of bed, loaded up on ineffectual anti-histamines and Advil ('cause we might as well add a headache to the mix) and headed out for the water park.

Connor was very excited about the whole thing, especially the big water canon's you could use to shoot other kids with. Unfortunately a life lesson shortly followed.

When you shoot water at other kids, inevitably they will shoot back. Liam, usually the daredevil, took a little longer to get into it. It all looked exciting, but there was the potential for getting his hair wet, and we DO NOT like getting our hair wet.

Anyway, it was a few hours of roasting in the sun, a few hours waiting in line at McDonald's and a nice nap afterwards. Not a bad day. Ok, I think we'll have to break the holiday weekend blog up a little. Hopefully I can continue the tale later today somewhere between laundry, dishes, vacuuming, yardwork, shopping and children.