Swimming

I'm in a swimming class this summer. As you know, I've been pretty reluctant when it comes to swimming (or even getting my head and hair wet in the bathtub). Previously, my view was that I'd learn to swim "when I was a teenager," but I've been trying the Starfish class since Mommy signed me up. I just finished the first of two weeks. I started off slowly. The first day, I didn't get into the pool at all except for dangling my feet in while sitting on the side. I'm a big believer in learning by watching rather than doing. The second day I stayed out until the bell to end class rang-- then I let a teacher carry me into the pool to fetch a toy. The third class, I got into the pool and held onto the wall for a couple minutes and kicked a little while the teacher carried me. The fourth day, various promises of rewards (a treat after swim, a visit to the wading pool) convinced me to get in a bit more and I finally got in and held onto the wall for much of the class. I also kicked a bit, though still wanted by head way out of the water. At home, however, Mommy and I played "blowing out the candle" in the tub (something my instructors did in the pool-- a finger is a candle and I blow it out a bunch of times, the final time with my mouth under water). Mommy hopes this transfers to blowing bubbles at Monday's swim class! I'm still a bit nervous about the whole thing, but I'm making progress.

Carey's Patch Moves

Yesterday, I played Chess with Daddy. After a slow start, we decided to (sort of) play by the acutal rules. The main exception is that no knights are allowed on the board since I don't like to see any of the horsies get hurt. Anyway, Daddy taught me what he called a "Carey's Patch Move"---the X-ray. Daddy said that my great-grandfather taught him lots of these moves and that they're all very tricky (I like it when I can do tricky things), so naturally I was eager to learn about the X-ray.

While we were playing, Daddy put my queen in the dreaded X-ray. She was stationed in front of my King to protect him when a nasty Rook came down to the same rank as my Queen and King. Daddy happily announced that the Queen was the victim of the dreaded X-ray. The rook "X-rays" the queen and sees through to threaten the King. The poor, helpless quenn can do little else than capture the rook. Unfortunately, Daddy has another rook guarding the first one, so he then took the queen.

After this, Daddy cleared the board of pieces and gave me two rooks while he had a king and queen, so I could do some x-raying as well. I did pretty well in finding the X-ray move. Sometimes I would lose my rook to the queen, but often I would figure out a way to trade my rook for Daddy's queen. After my elation at the X-ray, Daddy promised a new trick for next time---the dreaded "fork." While I know what a regular fork is, it will be interesting to see what the Chess version of a fork turns out to be.

[Daddy Addendum: In looking up X-ray in wikipedia , it turns out that what I was taught as the "X-ray" is actually known as the skewer. The actual X-ray is a bit more complex than the skewer.

Aidan the Card Shark

As you know, poker is one of my favorite games (and favorite sports to watch on TV). During our painting job, we moved a bunch of stuff around the house and I discovered a book containing 25 kids card games as well as a nice big deck of cards. I persuaded Mommy to pull this out from the other stuff and helpfully dropped it off on Daddy's desk in hopes that he would learn some of the new games. Fortunately, he did. Over the weekend weplayed two new games---both of which I managed to win more often than not. Here they are:

Go Boom

Each player starts with 7 cards. The object is to get rid of all your cards. The eldest hand leads a card and then the other player must match either the rank or the suit. If the other player can't he must draw from the stock until a match is made. High card of the led suit takes the trick and gets to lead the next card. Winner is the player to get rid of all his card with last trick winning in the event of a tie. When a player gets rid of all his cards, he call out "Boom!" as loud as he can.


What's interesting about this game is that it's the first trick-taking card game I've played. I had no trouble figuring out the rules for matching rank and suit, but I don't like it when I have to take a lot of cards from the stock. For one thing, it's pretty hard for me to hold all the cards.

Take Them All

In this game, each player gets 10 cards. The idea is to be the last player holding cards. In addition to the cards in each player's hand, a card from the stock is turned up. The suit of that card is trump---a super-powerful card suit. The eldest hand leads a card. The other player must follow suit if he can, otherwise play trump, otherwise play anything else. High card of the led suit takes the trick unless it is trumped. The winner of a trick gets to lead the next trick AND take a card from the stock. The game ends when one player has no more cards. In the event of a tie, last trick wins.

I crave variety, so I've already thought of a variation on these games. I like to add jokers to the deck. Jokers are super-duper powerful cards---they take any trick in which they are played.

Card playing is great for counting skills although I have, on occasion, referred to a number "2" that I've seen outside the card-playing context as a deuce, which I suppose is a little confusing. I also like to save my queens until the end of the game since queens are really nice---like Mommy.

Diesels

While I love Thomas and all the steam engines, I have a more uneasy relationship when it comes to the diesel trains. For one thing, in many of the Thomas stories, the diesels cause no end of trouble. Indeed, in the Thomas movie, the main plot centers on Diesel 10's attempts to destroy the steam engine Lady and thereby wreck the magic of the island of Sodor.

Because of this, I'm always a bit cautious in assembling my jigsaw puzzle with the three steam engines (Thomas, James and Lady) and the three diesels. What was nice today was that, after we built Diesel 10, Daddy gave him a voice, and he decided that he would be very nice to all the engines. He wanted to be a really useful engine too. I like this new side to Diesel 10.

My First Real Movie

This past weekend, I went to see my first movie. (Actually, this isn't quite right. I went to see the movie "The Good Girl" starring Jennifer Aniston when I was an infant. I don't remember this however.)

My first real movie was Cars. I had fallen in love with many of the characters in Cars from having seen them in Target and McDonald's. In fact, I own die cast versions of Lightning McQueen, the main character in the movie, and Fillmore, a green tie-dyed Volkswagen Microbus (who is also my favorite character). I've got plastic versions of the tow truck, Mater, and the Porsche, Sally.

Anyway, we went to the theater, got popcorn and lemonade, and proceeded to watch the movie. I was a bit scared by some of the previews but once the movier got started, I really liked it. One rule of movies that is really hard for me to follow is that you're not supposed to talk while the film is going on. This is really tough since I like to comment about everything that I'm seeing---not just what's going on on screen, but also the lighting, the seats, and so on. After about five minutes into the movie, I asked, "Is the movie almost over?" The answer, happily, was that it was not. Anyway, I enjoyed watching the movie a lot.

When it was over, I asked, "When can we go see that movie again?" Hearing that we wouldn't be seeing it again soon, I offered a compromise, "Are there any other movies that are not scary playing in the theater?" Sadly, there aren't too many movies that are not at all scary.

Game Inventor

I like to invent my own games. Here are a couple of recent inventions, both involving dominos.

Your Tail is On Fire

In this game, the "firestarter" stacks dominos in small piles, some of the dominos in the pile are face up while others are face down. Next, the "firecatcher" has to choose a pile of dominos and lift them off the pile one at a time. If the firecatcher draws a domino that is face up, the firestarter yells, "Your tail is on fire. Your tail is on fire."

Crash Dominos

Each side arranges 14 dominos in a line. The sides then take turns choosing a domino to crash into the other side. The crashed domino is then kept by the "crashee" side while the "crasher" gets to keep all the dominos that were pushed out of the line by the crash. The winner (not that we've ever managed to play to the end) is the person with no dominos left.

Weekend Sports Update

As you know, my Daddy likes all sorts of sports. Often, various sports are on TV and sometimes I'll watch. It seems like this weekend was a sports extravaganza. Here are the highlights:

World Cup: We watched the US play Italy. I mostly choose my rooting interest based on the color of the team's uniforms and Italy had nice red outfits compared to the rather boring blue and white donned by the US. Result: I rooted for Italy during the match. Thanks to my help, they managed a 1-1 tie.

US Open: We watched a lot of golf this weekend. As usual, Daddy was rooting for Phil Mickelson. I was rooting for Tiger, but he did so poorly on Thursday and Friday that he didn't make the cut, so he wasn't playing on Saturday or Sunday. Faced with this challenge, I reverted to my second-favorite rooting strategy---root for whoever is in the lead---unless it is Phil Mickelson. Naturally, the golfer who I was rooting for, Geoff Ogilvy, triumphed.

NBA Finals: This time it was the blue team, the Dallas Mavericks, facing the white team, the Miami Heat. I rooted for the blue team. In fact, I invented a cheer:

Let's go blue team.

Clap. Clap. Clap-clap-clap.

Let's go blue team.

And so on.

Unfortunately, the blue team came up short in overtime.

Poker: Finally, I asked to see my favorite "sport" poker during breaks in the other sports. When given the choice, I prefer watching poker to all other sports on TV. I asked Daddy when I would get to learn how to play the "real" game of poker. Thus far, I've only learned how to play one card and two card versions of poker. Daddy said we're making good progress toward poker mastery.

Misssion Accomplished

Our painting mission is finally complete. The painters left yesterday though Mommy, in her careful way, is busy doing little touch-ups to the areas she thought the painters insufficiently covered. The end of the mission marked the return to action of the couch and love seat in the movie room and, in particular, the pillows on these pieces of furniture. One of my favorite games is to gather up the various pillows and mold them into various shapes and then announce that I've created a machine that does whatever I happen to fancy at the moment. All of my machines require money in order to operate. Sometimes, I design pillow architecture--making caves, houses, and various other structures.

Anyway, one of the main things that I learned is that I like sleeping in the same bed as Mommy and Daddy. Because of the displacement of the furniture and the fumes, my bed and various other places I might sleep became impossible, so we all camped out in the master bedroom. At first, I wasn't sure whether I'd like this, but I've now decided that it's great. Now, the question is, do I have to go back to my own bed?

Do You Prefer Abba or Moby?

I've been back in Cali for awhile now, but I've not had any "glittery shows" until tonight. If you'll recall, glittery shows are when we turn the lights in the gueast bedroom down, crank the music up loud, and go dancing with our glittery lights. Tonight's songs featured the usual close, Yellow Submarine, along with an extended selection of Abba songs and a Moby tune repeated twice. From the Abba realm, I love "Take a Chance on Me", but "Waterloo" and "Dancing Queen" are also quality tunes. We heard Moby's electronica take on the James Bond Theme a couple of times. It's the most frenetic song ever. I like to do upside down stretches and other gymnastics as well as dancing to the various songs.

I love glittery shows!

Vehicles

This weekend and early this week we went vehicle shopping. We ended up buying a new Toyota Camry XLE in a nice bright red color. One thing I worry about is that my friends won't recognize me since I won't be in the green car. In fact, I was a little sad and teary when we were leaving the green car to drive away in our new red car.

Now you might think that going to car dealerships wouldn't be that fun, but it actually is. The Toyota dealership has a big popcorn machine, which is great (all the popcorn you can eat--yippee!) They also have a TV with Winnie the Pooh videos and a number of toys. In addition, I like to get into lots of different kinds of vehicles to see what they're like. Sometimes while Mommy was shopping, Daddy and I would get into vehicles and I'd sit at the wheel and take us both for a drive. I like to pretend that the GPS system is giving us directions. I'll say in a high-pitched voice:

In three miles, turn right.

Then I'd pull hard to the right on the steering wheel. The next direction was to go left in one mile, so I'd pull to the left, and so on. I also liked to comment on how hard or soft the seats of the vehicles are. In the first vehicle we went in, a Nissan Altima, I climbed into the back while Mommy and the salesman sat in front and commented loudly,

These seats aren't comfortable at all. And look, I see a hole in the seat!

It was true, there really was a hole in the seat. The salesman did not seem pleased at my commentary. Needless to say, we didn't buy that car. Other cars were much better.





By the way, here's my favorite vehicle---a bright yellow Toyota FJ Cruiser. It's big and yellow and has lots of yellow panels inside as well. Daddy thought it was awful, but I told him I was going to get one when I was old enough to drive.

When it finally came to say goodbye to the car guys, I gave a high five to the salesman and quipped,

Bye. See you next time we need a new car.

Music to the salesman's ears.

Presents from Daddy

I was delighted to see Daddy once again. He was away for the last couple of weeks in England, and we picked him up at the train station on Friday. Naturally, I was interested in whether he got me any presents from there. I also asked him if he has seen Kipper (a cartoon dog from England). Sadly, Daddy hadn't seen Kipper but did have some stuff for me. First, he pulled out a stuffed Paddington Bear. I liked that he wore boots, which are also my favorite form of footwear. He also had a nice hat as well, but somehow I didn't get really excited about him.

What else did you get?

I asked.

When we finally got home from the train station, Daddy wheeled out his second present---a miniature London Underground train in red white and blue. I sort of liked the train but was dismayed that the doors did not open. Apparently, they're not supposed to open on this model although, as I pointed out to Daddy, in a real Metro train the doors do, in fact, open.

What else did you get?

I asked.

For the last gift, Daddy brought out a big handful of English money. I really like money. There was a fat gold one pound coin, some hexagon shaped 20p coins, a large 10p coin, some teeny-tiny 5ps, some pennies, and my favorite coin---a big copper 2p (tuppence) coin. Now this I really enjoyed. I liked the pictures of the queen on the front of each coin as well as the many shapes and sizes. We've been playing lots of coin games these last several days. I invented a game where you have to toss the coins into some paperboard containers that held wine. If you do this successfully you win...what else...but money! I would have hot wheels car races where the winner would get money. We played Deal or No Deal with a prize of money. We played poker for, what else, money. Money is a great present.