Super Bowl 2015
Greetings to everyone.
Tonight was Super Bowl 49, and the family gathered around the television to watch the game and eat snacks instead of a well-rounded meal. It took some finagling, but the cut-the-cable-cord family got a stream transferred to a television.
With Grandma, Mom and Dad seated and eating, Xavier sat on the couch with us. He spent some time watching the first quarter. But the game was too tame for his liking. He dropped to the floor and teased the dog, whom we had locked outside the room to keep her out of the food. Xavier teased her through the glass.
Feeling his job done, he turned and watched the adults eating their hot wings and pizza rolls and chips with dip. He decided to join everyone.
Of late, Xavier has been really good about putting stuff away which he gets out. We've been encouraging him and working with him on this. Today, he applied these skills to the chip bowl. Taking two or three chips out, he would taste them. Deciding he had too many to manage, he put several tasted chips back. We constantly were pulling out the soggy, half-gummed chips from the bowl.
Overall, Xavier stayed in the room with us and played—more or less quietly. Often, he climbed onto the couch and sat for a few minutes before racing off to do something else. Always, however, he stayed close to the family, rather than in the kitchen or elsewhere where he might get into unsupervised mischief (Oops. I meant to type "toddler exploration").
Staying close and playing, occasionally going away to find a toy and return with it was relaxing and most enjoyable. We were able to enjoy the game more or less uninterrupted by not having to answer the question "Where's Xavier?" or "What is he into now?"
During the closing minutes of the game, Xavier grew tired and tried finding comfortable positions on the couch to lay down and go to sleep. He even had his fuzzy blanket to cover up with. Alas, he could not get comfortable, whether on the couch or on a parent. He gladly went to bed, happy with learning the final score of the game the next day.
A Visit to the Aquarium
Hello to everyone.
Xavier's Grandma Penny paid us a visit this week. It's been nice hosting her and letting her and Xavier reacquaint themselves. She arrived at an opportune time as Rebecca was in Cheyenne Thursday and Friday. She babysat for Xavier while Daddy got work done.
Aunt Chellie came down from the North today to visit with her mom and to bring Xavier the swag she got him on her recent trip to Anaheim California, which included a whirlwind visit to Disneyland. At her suggestion, we all spent the late morning and early afternoon at the Denver Aquarium.
This is the first time Xavier has visited the aquarium. He and Mom took Dad to lunch at the restaurant last Father's Day, but we did not walk the exhibits. Everyone was sick that day, and we did not think Xavier would make it through the exhibits.
This morning, we packed his big stroller, mounted a car seat base into Grandma's XC90, then headed out. As it turned out, Xavier did not need the stroller; he walked through much of the exhibits and was carried through the rest. The stroller instead carried our coats and his diaper bag.
Right out of the gates, Xavier's excitement took him from tank to tank, at a run most times. He had no awareness of crowds coming and going, and he made all of us work to keep him close.
One exhibit had large catfish and other large fish swimming near the glass wall. For a while, these held Xavier's attention. Then, he saw the video game machine next to the wall. The fish no longer mattered. He wanted at the machine. The machine, a standard arcade-sized unit, controlled a submersible camera in the tank that, until he saw the machine, held Xavier's attention. The machine allowed you to maneuver the camera around the tank in all three dimensions, right up to the fish if your control was good enough. Alas, Xavier could not use the machine, though he really wanted to.
He enjoyed many of the exhibits. Aunt Chellie helped him crawl into some "kids observation domes," which were domes protruding up into the bottoms of the tanks. To get to them, you crawled (if you are an adult) or walked if Xavier-sized, under the tank, then stood up under the dome. The fish swam around your head. After Chellie took him the first time, Xavier decided he needed no more moral support and found it fun to run around underneath the tanks.
On the way out we passed by the ray tank, where you can feed the rays. Our timing for feeding the rays, however, did not work out; they were the opposite of out to lunch. A posted sign read "The rays are on a feeding break."
Instead of feeding the rays, Xavier got to visit with a Mystic Mermaid. He was afraid to sit with her by himself, but had no problem when Daddy held him. Strange, two months ago, he had no problems sitting by himself with Santa.
Shortly after, some men came in and carried the mermaid off along with two other mermaids they carried from somewhere else. The mermaids had a show to do in another tank. This left the restaurant half empty, so we enjoyed lunch right up to the time Xavier needed a nap!
Xavier's First Hair Cut
Greetings to everyone.
Today was an unseasonably warm January day. Cloudless skies and low seventies temperatures. Rebecca had windows open around the house to help draw in some outdoor freshness and clear away some closed-up winter stale.
Xavier's hair (at last) has grown too long. Just this past Saturday, the waiter at White Fence Farms called him a girl. His hair length wasn't helping his cause.
His hair hung in his face, half way down the bridge of his nose. He often pushed it aside or attempted to blow it out of his eyes with a juicy PFFT. The back of his head had dozens of tentacles of hair so knotted, the only hope of untangling them was to just give up and snip them off. We had planned January for his first hair cut, and today we took him to a barber.
We chose a true barber rather than some chain stylist or children's stylist (yes, there are shops which specialize in styling children's hair, from the very young and up; of course, the price for such specialization is high—very high!) I wanted a barber mostly because I think it a more manly thing for one's first hair cut.
I had found just the shop a few months back, a place called "Barney's". Owned by a man named Barney, who has cut hair out of the same place for forty years. It was an authentic barber shop. A red-striped white pole; old, worn leather chairs with ash trays built into the arms; older men cutting hair; the clipped hair of the day's customers before us littering the floor; and cash not in a central till, but in a drawer at each station.
Our appointment was at 4:00 PM, an hour before closing time. Our barber was not Barney, but (ironically) the one lady barber—Lindsey, who has worked there nearly 20 years.
So, how did our little man do? He did not fuss nor cry. He was, in general, not grabby, and he sat quite still in Daddy's lap after getting used to the comb and the spray of water on his head. Lindsey took it slow so as not to put Xavier off, or in any way give him a reason to fear and cry. He spent much of his time watching another barber cut the man's hair in the next seat over.
He sat on Dad's lap instead of in the seat by himself. He is still too small to sit in the chair on his own. Also, having Dad in the chair with him made him feel secure. He did not like the spritzing of the water to wet his hair, but Lindsey squirted his hand to let him get used to the spray. Xavier decided he could live with it and only made faces as his hair was wet down.
Lindsey thought to dress only Dad in a cape to keep clean his clothes. But Dad said, "No. Part of the whole first hair cut experience is wearing the cape." So a small cape was found for Xavier to dress in.
Lindsey asked Rebecca (the official photographer of the event) if she wanted to keep any of his hair for his baby book. Rebecca said no. However, after the hair cut was finished and Dad stood from the chair, there lay a large, long lock of Xavier's hair in the seat. Rebecca decided she wanted to keep a lock after all, so we collected that hair into an envelope.
Throughout the sitting, Xavier got rotated on Daddy's leg. Sometimes he faced forward. Sometimes he faced Daddy. It made things much easier for the barber to work and Xavier fidgeted less. The whole experience was non-traumatic. I told Rebecca and the others in the shop "I'm not sure how I feel about his calmness. I'm almost disappointed we didn't capture the iconic shot of tears streaming down his sad little face."
So, this was Xavier's first hair cut. Rather than head home to turkey sandwiches, we walked across the parking lot to one of our favored pizza places and celebrated. Xavier ecstatically joined the celebration by drinking his first bottle of chocolate milk (real whole milk, not formula). His jury is out on the chocolate milk experience. After dinner, we headed for the park to let Xavier run and play.