Daddy Fun Week recapped

The summer is nearing its end. We probably still have some months of heat left, the slower (or just different?) pace is coming to a conclusion. Emily's had her week of conference and it was a really good week for me and the kids too.

I sold it as "Daddy Fun Week," sort of like Christmas or New Year's, a time of fun activities and new plans. They mostly bought it and had a good time.

My basic plan was just to keep things fun for the kids and to have something interesting to do every day. So it went like this:
Saturday: Astronomy museum
Sunday: Church
Monday-Tuesday: committee travel with visit to aquarium
Wednesday: typhoon day (unplanned but okay)
Thursday: Day of school (and maybe park gtrip?)
Friday: Day of school + Sam swimming lesson

There were several good things about the week, foremost that I had to do the full schedule and prep. It's embarassing to admit this, but I now know where all the kids clothes are, more or less, where the trash bags are, what the kids need in their school bags and so on. Doing the whole schedule solo really is exhausting. The challenge is each kid needs attention, but food has to be prepared and dishes and laundray done. I got basically 0 other work done, which is what I'd planned, but it still felt like a lot. I have so much respect for solo parents.

The week was also mostly smooth. There were some hiccups with schedule while traveling, but no serious travel breakdowns, no sick kids, and just the one day of school cancelled.

The kids themselves are doing well. I hadn't really understood how Sam's swim lessons work, but I talked with one of the moms. It seems to be a quarter system and parents can sign their kids up quarter after quarter for years on end. We've been meaning to add music back in for Sam, but haven't gotten to it yet. He is a little bit of a crooner now, although the words don't always make sense. He has some sense of pitch (better than before) but certainly not perfect. Eva and Eli are both cute little dancers. Eli has this funny thing he does where he jumps and swings his arms wildly--fun. The twins are both very smiley and giggly. I'm trying to focus on being engaged with them and encouraing their giggly sides.

There were also some unexpected surprised during the week. On Saturday, Sam had basically played with legos the entire day. We watched a little tv before the museum, but the rest of the day was really all legos. He was able to build some nice little cars and really liked working with the smaller legos. It's been nice to have all of these toys with us because we can alternate what they play with.

Emily continues to build our kid library and came back with a number of books from her trip, including a mix of local books, superhero books, and some others. They like all sorts of things. Sam spent some time reading a children's encyclopedia with me the other day. Fun, fun, fun.

That's the news from here. Life otherwise is "good." I'm pushing a little on work-life balance and I want to do whatever we can to help Emily get through soon. There are some intriguing possibilities for interesting projects here, but I have to sort of pry myself loose from the school, which always has plans for me. Anyway, these are my thoughts.

Recent Days

We're now into the middle of August, and it's scorching hot. Emily's temporarily ceased evening walks. We're doing some more creative child activities. I took everyone to the palace museum, which is close by and is really nice. The museums here are different than back home--fewer portraits, no suits of armor, etc. Instead, it is pretty much exclusively artistic works: paintings, religious sculptures, calligraphy, jade/bronzewear, etc. Painting is usually landscapes, birds, flowers, or calligraphy. Not exactly what most kids would be into, but for a couple of hours very enjoyable. Eli kept asking after the robot. Since there's one at the astronomy museum, he seems to expect every museum to have one. Undoubtably, a great idea, but rarely realized. I liked that the museum doesn't allow pictures, so it at least reduces the spectacle.

The kids are more into legos now too. We've done some great buildings and Sam is starting to use the smaller ones. Sam also got a transfomer recently, which he loves but is still a little too small to puzzle out himself.

For books, we're doing some more classics. We've had two nights of Winnie the Pooh. Emily just read Blueberries for Sal to the whole gang today. The kids are exhausting, but in an endearing way. I still wish children came with volume buttons, but we love them dearly.

The Kids are OK...

This is a little hard to make out but I believe it's one of Sam's recent pen drawings of Ben 10 in his various alien forms. They're fairly intricate. Emily recounts a conversation she had where she counted up about 20 different aliens and then Sam remembered he "forgot one." He's been watching a fair amount of Ben 10 lately.

The kids all seem quite happy today. This was our local Father's day dinner tonight and we went to our favorite pizza place. The kids had a blast. We ordered chicken legs, salad, pizza, and Emily got a calzone. Yum! The boys are pretty eager meat eaters.

Tonight, Eli's favorite toys were a snake, a Ben 10 watch, and a spider man. Eva had a little bag she carried around with her that she got at school. Sam got two dinosaurs and two black spidermans (spidermen?) from his teacher and has a favorite spiderman these last couple of days. Friday night we did some legos. They're into a lot of different things. We have a drawer of dinosaur animals that Eli loves also. He has to get a foot stool in order to pull out the drawer, but he does it daily.

Sam's had some growing pains with his legs. Last Friday and the Friday before he resisted his swim lesson. We let him skip once but Emily made him go the other time. We can't tell why he's resisting the swim class or how to push him to attend. Emily remembers refusing to swim or ride a horse at camp (for several years in a row), but she says her resistance was straightforward (and apparently more honorable). In contrast, she doesn't like how Sam is blaming it on his legs or being tired. We'll try to get him checked out Monday just to make sure he's okay.

I also took Sam to a movie earlier this week, Incredibles 2. Earlier movies were Cars 2, Brave, Rise of the Guardians, and something else. He liked this one a lot. It reminded me of happy movie viewing with the family over the years.

That's the family news from here. I've been complaining more than I mean to lately. Partly it's that the summer is the time when things are cemented from the fall. I know this will be a busy fall so I'm especially protective about extra things that take my time. Often what's fifteen minutes of work for a native speaker is hours for me, or at least a lot more anxiety than I want. I feel like we've made pretty continuous language progress and my workload has increased every semester, but there are limits to what I can do. That said, there's a lot in our life to be happy about, and we're glad the kids are doing so well. I am going to try to leave a little more of work at work. I know this stage of life is one that means a lot of balancing. I'm hoping that in coming years we'll continue to find our way.