Winning!

I was originally thinking about doing a blog post where I quoted some of my favorite lines that Charlie Sheen has been word-vomiting all over the place lately (and then work my stories into those quotes somehow…which would have been pretty funny), but I have a sneaky suspicion that this whole thing is not going to end well and I’d rather not have an entire post devoted to it if it turns out that his face melts off from all of his “winning!” in a few short days.

Instead, I’ll just play it straight and tell you about some of the cool stuff that’s been going on with us lately…I know, I know…it’s not nearly as fun as telling you I’ve got “Tigerblood” or that “I’m an F-18 and I will destroy you in the air!”….ok fine, I just had to throw those in there…I think I got them out of my system for now…”I’m not bi-polar, I’m bi-WINNING!”…ok, that was the last one.

Last weekend we were trying to come up with something fun to do with Landon…something new that he hadn’t done yet…We wanted to take him someplace classy, sophisticated, and a great place to learn social behavior. So naturally we took him to the local bowling alley! And not one of those newer, fancy bowling alleys, but a very old one that has been around since I was his age. This place was like a cross between the DMV and Wal-Mart, with a little of the post office sprinkled in…it was awesome! We were hoping that they’d have one of those kid ramps that we could use (for the uninitiated, the ramps help little kids get the ball moving with some velocity down the lane)….unfortunately this particular bowling alley didn’t have ramps…either they were too expensive for the alley to purchase (my first guess), or the alley manager decided that any kids unfortunate enough to be bowling there needed to be physically strong enough to survive and that sissy ramps would only weaken them (my later guess).

We did luck out in the respect that they had bumpers….I was a little concerned that they were just going to have a couple of the junkies out back run up and down the lanes keeping the balls out of the gutters, but thankfully it didn’t come to that.

As you can see, Landon even got his own little pair of bowling shoes, which Michaela couldn’t get enough of (they were pretty cute). The lightest ball that they had was 6 lbs, which was still pretty heavy for the little guy. Based on his estimated weight of 40 lbs, that’d be like me bowling with a 30 lb ball…needless to say, it was heavy for him…but he did great! He’d run up to the line then roll the ball as hard as he could…unfortunately that really didn’t translate to the ball moving all that fast. I think it took about 5-10 minutes on average for his ball to make it down the lane, and I kept waiting for the ball to bounce off the pins and head back towards us (which never actually happened).

Somehow Michaela managed to get a gutter ball with her first throw (which I didn’t think was possible with bumpers), but after that she hit her groove and ended up bowling her best game ever (while almost never using the bumpers). Landon did great as well, although his attention waned when a family parked next to us and one of the kids busted out his “Spider Man” ball…mind you this kid looked to be about 18 and way too old to actually have a “Spider Man” ball, but even still…Landon thought that kid was “WINNING!”… he he he. And speaking of that family, I won’t get into specifics, but “Big Carl” really needed a belt…We assumed he was the fun uncle, but there really wasn’t much fun in seeing a 300 lb dude’s crack every 3 minutes as he bowled…just an observation.

So that was our bowling story…

On Monday we had Landon’s first ever parent-teacher conference. We really didn’t know what to expect as every time we are dropping him off or picking him up it’s basically a “free-for-all”, but his teacher had really great things to say about him….please allow me a few paragraphs to brag about my son now…his teacher’s exact words were “he’s a total bitchin’ rock star from Mars!”…oh wait, sorry…that was Charlie Sheen again…

Actually, she told us that Landon was very advanced in almost all areas that she works with him including numbers, flash cards, logical problems, chemistry, calculus, cooking, and motor skills (I only made up a couple of those). She also told us that he is considered the “leader” in the class, and is also able to break up fights when necessary (so his fall back job is now prison guard)….She says that he’s very determined and when they play “find Kelsey” (which is essentially an Easter-egg hunt in the classroom, with toys instead of Easter eggs) he is always the first one to find the toy and will not quit until he finds it.

She also said that he loves to participate and is very engaged, but there are certain times when he sort of wants to do his own thing for a little while. This caught us by surprise so we asked her to elaborate…she told us that he’s just not into art, and whenever it is time for arts and crafts he sort of disengages and wants to go off and play on his own. When I heard this, I almost fell out of my chair laughing because that is 100% exactly as I was when I was young. I think it’s going to be up to Michaela to help nurture his artistic side (if he has one lurking in there somewhere), because when it comes to art, I could take it or leave it!

All things considered, we are very pleased with Landon’s development and are very proud of how he’s doing at school. He’ll actually be starting a phonics program soon and from what I’ve heard, the linguistic learning increases significantly so we’re excited to see how that goes.

I think this post is long enough for now and besides, I’m too busy winning to write any more today!