Hello all, in the spirit of Black Friday coming up, this weeks posts will be dedicated to holiday gift guides. There will be a separate guide for toddlers, preschoolers, and a combined guide for husbands and wives. The gift guides will feature some items that the boys already own, as well as items that we plan to purchase for them this Christmas. The items are in no special order, they are all gifts that I find interesting and think the kids will enjoy playing with. Please feel free to add items to the list in the comment section, or if you already own a particular item, share your experience with it. I hope you enjoy, talk to you soon.
Posted by Keith | Posted in Activities, Family, Tre, Ty | Posted on 20-11-2009
Let me start off by stating that I HATE THE DENTIST! There I said it! If you’re a dentist reading this blog, I’m sorry, but we could never be friends (don’t stop reading the blog though, lol). Dentists perform hate crimes against humanity and I refuse to subject myself willingly to their torture. I took the stance that I would never subject my kids to the demented hands of a dentist either; luckily I have a level headed wife who vetoed my ruling. Yesterday was Tre’s first visit to the dentist and it appears that he’ll be following in his Daddy’s footsteps. He wasn’t too pleased, and surely let it be known during his visit.
Posted by Keith | Posted in Tre, Tre’s Thursday Toy Review | Posted on 19-11-2009
Tre’s Thursday Toy Review 11-19-09
Baby’s Learning Laptop
Name: Vtech – Baby’s Learning Laptop
Manufacturer: Vtech
Price: $12.50
Length of Ownership: 11 months
Rating: 5 stars
Tre really loves this toy, he plays with it in his room every night before heading to bed. Although he was too busy eating cookies to give you a robust demonstration, this toy is really packed with features. I think it’s a very good learning aid that covers multiple disciplines within its three play options: letters, numbers, and sounds. The sound category is what has impressed me the most, it offers multiple songs and a wide variety of animal sounds as well as everyday objects such as ball, pacifier, etc. Tre has learned to point out quite a few objects around the house soley from the information obtained from this toy. You can’t ask for better results than that.
When it comes to parenting, working Dads get screwed, as do working Moms. Now that I think about it, Stay At Home Parents can possibly be getting screwed too. So I guess I should have named this post “Everyone Gets Screwed”, but then it would have sounded like a porno entry and that’s not exactly the first thought you want in your head when coming to a Daddy Blog. Therefore, since I’m a working Dad, we’ll just keep it at how us working Dads get screwed out of quality time with our kids.
Posted by Keith | Posted in Activities, Family, Holidays, Tre, Ty | Posted on 02-11-2009
Elmo & A Ninja (A Deadly Combination)
Happy Halloween!!! Oh wait, I guess I’m a little late huh? Well, I’m just like “The Simpsons”, remember how they always aired their Halloween special on the Sunday after Halloween? Okay so here we go. First off, I’m writing this post from the hotel room in Clemson, S.C. so I’m away from my normal blogging locating and it feels a little weird. I’m out here on a business trip (which will probably end up being a blog post of its own) but I didn’t want to leave you guys without some delightful eye candy (get it? halloween, candy, eye candy, lol) to get you through your Monday!
Tre going in for the kill
Posted by Keith | Posted in Tre | Posted on 28-10-2009
A while back, I wrote about Ty using “bad dreams” as a way to gain entry into our bed at night; well, we solved that problem pretty easily and now if he has a bad dream, we know that it’s genuine. But as you all know, once you solve one problem another one is bound to pop up sooner or later. That new problem is Tre, I think he somehow picked up on how the bad dream thing was working out for Ty and decided to try his hand at it. I must admit, his scheme is working out a little better than Ty’s did. All Ty wanted was to get in our bed, but Tre wants his 40 acres and a mule!
Posted by Keith | Posted in Activities, Play Stories, Tre | Posted on 22-10-2009
The Bilingual Baby
Tre is 21 months old and surprises me every day with something new that he’s learned. The kid is like a sponge, just soaking up anything that comes his way and I couldn’t be happier. For the past month or so, he has been working on mastering his ABC’s and numbers (up to 10) and he has them down pact, recently he learned his colors and can pick out any color block or crayon that you ask him to and tell you what that color is. A few days ago when I came home, he read me a book. This was a shocker, because for once I didn’t have to read the same book 20 million times in a row. Instead he brought the book to me and said “readabook”, as I began reading he turned around, put his finger to his mouth and shhh’d me. I was baffled so I just shut up & to my surprise, he took over. Picking out a few words from each page and then saying the associated animal sound. I was impressed to say the least, but his most recent educational endeavor is just down right scary.
I’m really big on nicknames for the kids; part of the naming process when we have children is to ensure that a ready made nickname is available. This is partly because growing up, I never had a nickname. I was always plain ol Keith! Keith, Keith, Keith, do you know how boring that is? I desperately wanted to be called something else; I thought it would be so cool to write “keith” on my homework, but have people refer to me by some other name (no, jackass wouldn’t have worked). But alas, that was not the case; I was Keith and only Keith, so I vowed that once I had kids, I would ensure that a nickname was built in somehow. This is a vow that I’ve so far kept and one that is now coming back to haunt me.
Posted by Keith | Posted in Grandparents, Tre | Posted on 09-10-2009
Tre Pretending To Cry
My Dad has been down visiting for about 1 week now and surprisingly the kids haven’t broken him yet. I think he’s close, but he’s still hanging in there. It takes a special kind of person to be able to deal with the high energy output and shenanigans of my kids and so far he’s holding up to the task. Keeping up with these kids is tough for me, so I can only imagine the burden that’s placed on an old fart like my Dad (let’s see if he reads this post). He has given baths, been shot with Nerf bullets unexpectedly, and has cooked food only to have it thrown on the floor. He’s been to numerous parks, participated in foot races, and played basketball & football for the first time in probably 30 years. But none of these hardships compare to his greatest battle of conquering the heart of a little guy named Tre. For some reason, the boy has a love/hate relationship with my Dad. Its so funny to watch and due to my Dad’s resilience it’s quickly turning into a love/love relationship.
Posted by Keith | Posted in Tre | Posted on 08-10-2009
Some kids scream for candy, some scream for cookies, some just scream. But Tre, well he’s a little different. The boy LOVES to take medicine, and I feel partly responsible. When I was a kid, I used to have an ear infection, strep throat, or pink eye at least once or twice a month. I don’t know if the medicine that they use to treat those illnesses are still the same, but the pink stuff they gave out back then sure was good! It got to the point where my parents had to request tablets because when I got older, I’d sneak into the kitchen and throw back a shot of the pink stuff. Ah, my first drug addiction: pink liquid antibiotic medication. I was eventually able to shake the habit, but there were a lot of cold sweats, tremors, and intense pain involved. Okay maybe I’m exaggerating a bit, but that was my childhood story and now I’m afraid Tre is following directly in my footsteps.
