I thought about letting this site go, the name is up for renewal and I thought maybe I should just let it expire. I don’t write enough so is it worth the money. I’ve come to the conclusion that it is worth the money and that I should write more, especially when it comes to Dylan. It will be nice to have someday and look back on the things we did. I mean he’s already 2 and we’ve done SO much and I can’t believe he’s 2 already.
I felt bad for Dylan Saturday night. We put him to bed around 8/8:30 knowing that the fireworks would be going off in the next hour or so. We live across the street from where the fire them off but we figured we’d get a warning shot and be able to get up to his room before they really started. I mean every other year they shoot one and wait a few minutes. Not this year. Terri and I were watching a movie downstairs and we hear boom, boom, boom, boom, boom followed by crying over the monitor. We ran upstairs as fast as we could but it wasn’t quick enough. We turned on the light in Dylan’s room and found him sitting up in the corner of his bed with a wall of stuffed animals protecting him. I’ve never seen the look of fear in his eyes like I did on Saturday night. We brought him outside so he could see that there wasn’t anything to be afraid of and eventually made our way back inside to watch them out the living room window. It wasn’t as loud inside and eventually he started saying the names of each color as the exploded in the sky. I still don’t think he’s a fan of them but I know eventually he will be and has the perfect hourse for viewing them.
The Weekly Horrifying Fact - I spent $60 to fill up my tank the other night. I’m not one to normally complain about gas prices because I see gas as a neccesary evil but a few more $60 fill ups and my pocket is going to start to complain.
The Weekly Music - I found Brady Rymers new childrens CD this week. Brady Rymer used to be in a band from here in NJ who I saw many times in the early 90’s. Dylan loves the song “Jump Up” and I will certainly have to get him singing it on video.
The Weekly TV Show - Wipeout….Out of shape people trying to do an obsticle course full of water and mud. There is one section that has 4 very large balls where the object is to bounce from one ball to the other without falling into the water below. It’s pure comedy and it just doesn’t get old to watch people bounce around like a pinball before taking a dip.
The Weekly “This Shit is Big” event - I live in small town and the other night a 21 year old kid was stopped for a routine traffic stop. We don’t know what happened next but we know that the kid took off after being stopped, either with or without the cop attached to the car and the kid ended up getting shot 5 times by the cop. Now like I said, I live in a small town, a quiet town but this incident is going to be talked about, argued over for years to come. Details are still very sketchy but I can already see the town dividing over it.
The Weekly Celebrity Death - I never thought George Carlin was lose your shit kind of funny but more of a genius that could make everyday life into a comedy routine. If it weren’t for people like George Carlin, would Jerry Seinfeld have ever found his brand of comedy? To this day, everytime i fly somewhere I think of George Carlin and his “Let Evel Knievel get on the plane, I’m getting IN the plane.”
The Weekend Plans - Few chores around the house, a haircut for Dylan, some shopping and getting ready for our trip to Boston next week!!
It’s summer so you know what that means, there are approximately 220 some days until I actually get to see a new episode of Lost or in the case of my other favorite show, October Road, I will never see another new episode again. So what has a Couch Potato watching in the summer?
So You Think You Can Dance - my wife is a dancer so she’s the one who got me into this show. Now I don’t know a arabesque from a Ronde de Jambe but I do know the moves some of the people on this show have are downright sick. Now it looks like the show lost its best Hip Hop choreographer but it’s still a very entertaining show when the judges don’t have diarrhea of the mouth.
WipeOut - Ok, so I’ve watched one episode and if it wasn’t for the 2 announcers just making fun of everyone, this show wouldn’t have lasted more than 5 minutes but there is just something funny about having announcers make donut jokes at the contestants who’s day jobs are in the criminal justice field.
Dead Like Me - Yes, the show was cancelled some years ago but HDNet shows the repeats every Monday night and its just a funny show and worth the time to watch.
Jeopardy - “What is Alex you’re a dickhead?” and the show makes me feel dumb but its a must watch because once in a while I’ll shock myself with a right answer!!
Thats really about it, not a whole lot of choices on at night. So what do you watch that I should be watching?
The only part of being an adult (that is NOT in the educational field) that sucks has to going to work in the summer. I mean lets be honest, we all knew how awesome the summer was as kids but did any of us not take it for granted?
When I was 4 my parents were sick of the warts that we were getting from the lake that we lived near and decided to put a pool in the backyard. There were countless days where my mom (who was a teacher and had her summers off) my sister and I would get up and be in the pool by 9:30 and not get out until my Dad got home from work. Thinking back about that I realize how shitty that must have been for my dad, especially since that was in a day and age where any worker with a job in Corporate America had to wear a suit and tie.
For many years early in my life, my family used to spend the second week in July vacationing at Lake George. We used to go to this little place that had a number of cottages sitting up on a hill, overlooking the lake. The cool thing about this vacation was this it was the same families every year so you got to know a bunch of people that you saw once a year and there were A LOT of kids. Also, my grandparents and my aunt and uncle, who all lived in Long Island at the time were among the vacationers at this place during the second week in July. Lake George was where I had my first smore, played kick the can for the first time, tried my hand at water skiing and where I learned how to play golf. certainly was a family tradition to go up there every summer.
For the second year in a row, Terri and I will be going up to Boston with Dylan and Uncle Mike for the 4th of July weekend. We will be visiting some friends while we are there and missing some other friends who are heading out of town that weekend 
but its starting to look like somewhat of a summer tradition as this is the second year in a row we’ve done it and 3rd year in the last 4 years that we’ve visited the great state of Massachusetts.
So what are your plans this summer or even for the 4th?? Going somewhere fun??
First, the big news of the day…Dylan peed in the potty this morning for the first time. I don’t think he quite gets how big of a deal it is but he did it… He’s getting to be such a big boy!!
I’ve actually started to work on posting pictures. I’ve actually downloaded them from my camera onto my PC at home which is the first step. Now I just need to upload them to flickr. I did find an old picture of what our house used to look like and a new picture of what house house now looks like. The steps were finished before the winter, the house now has new siding, new shutters and the grass has come in nicely. So I present to you….
The Before…
and The After..
We’ve gotten a number of compliments on how the house looks and that its nice to finally see someone give that house some love.
Dylan’s summer session of swimming began last night and I swear to you he’s a little fish. He’s completely not interested in doing what the rest of the class is doing, he’s only interested in swimming to the deep end. He really is a nut!! He was watching the older kids jump into the deep end last night which was followed by “Dylan jump”.. Guess it looked like fun.
Finally, I leave you with this picture. For those of you who grew up watching Sesame Street or had your kids grow up on Sesame Street, when we went to Sesame Place last month, Bob McGrath (original cast member) was there doing story time. We saw him out and about in the park and HAD to get our picture with him.
** Afternoon Update **
I’ve gotten the Sesame Place pictures up so I have moved Bob into the viewer below.
Flash!! In one word that describes the weekend. Saturday was picture day for us. For my MIL’s birthday (which was in January) we promised to get some family portraits done for her since they haven’t been done in a long time, so once my SIL was home from college, we picked a day, headed to the mall and took a bunch of pictures with a photographer studio that had done Dylan’s pictures for school back in October. I usually hate the way I look in pictures but this place did a wonderful job. There is a picture of Terri, Dylan and I basically lying on the floor that I absolutely love. There is also a close up picture of Dylan that came out very well too. If I could post them online for you I would but I don’t think I can. Speaking of pictures I really need to unload my camera of a lot of recent pictures, especially since we are headed up to Boston next week.
Because Saturday was all errands in the morning and pictures/dinner in the afternoon, Dylan didn’t get too much time to be a kid so Terri took him to a local-ish amusement park on Sunday while I constructed a closet in our new den/playroom. The one small issue we have with taking him to this place is that he doesn’t get his nap in at his normal time so when she got home around 3pm yesterday, he was severely over tired and cranky. Even though I wasn’t there, I know he rode the roller coaster A LOT yesterday and the train, which he absolutely loves, wasn’t running for some reason. Thankfully we have a season pass for Terri and Dylan so I am sure he will get to go back real soon.
The experience that was Sesame Place was not bad at all…in fact, it was kind of fun. Everyone at work was telling me Sesame Place was nothing but hell on earth and that the fact that I was going on a weekend, made it much worse. They were wrong….all of them.
Saturday morning we got up, had breakfast and got in the car. It took a little longer to get there than I had hoped but we got to the park around 10:30 in the morning. We immediately headed to Elmo’s section of the park and started to talk him into getting on the rides. Once Dylan rode the first ride with Mommy, he realized he might be in for a day of fun. We rode the Elmo fish ride many times, slid down the giant slide a few times until he decided he didn’t like it. While in line to jump on the big air mattress, he spotted the area where you can meet and take your picture with Elmo, so we had to do that instead. He hugged Elmo, he kissed Elmo and he had his picture taken with Elmo and then when Elmo was waiting for others to come, he ran back and hugged Elmo a few more times. At this point it was time for lunch and time for the rain to come. The rain only lasted for a little over an hour but it kept a lot of people away for the day so the park was pretty empty which was great because there were no lines and we could just ride the rides all day long. We decided to wait out the rain by watching Elmo’s World Live which Dylan absolutely loved. He got his picture taken while banging on Elmo’s piano. After that we rode a few more rides and then headed off to the hotel to take a nap before dinner.
After our nap we returned to the park because we were scheduled to eat dinner with Big Bird and his friends. This is where Dylan was in his glory. The characters at dinner were Elmo, Bert , Ernie, Cookie Monster, Zoe and Big Bird. He hugged Elmo A LOT but he also hugged everyone else a lot. He loved every minute of dinner, even though he didn’t eat much because he was too busy running around hugging characters. After dinner we jumped on a few more rides, Dylan won a penguin by throwing a ball into a colored tube all by himself (seriously, we didn’t help him at all) and then we watched the 7pm parade. After the parade, Terri and I spotted Bob, you know BOB…the Bob we all grew up watching on Sesame Street so we got our picture taken with him and talked to him for a few minutes. He’s a super nice guy but we already knew that. On the way out of the park Dylan rode his first Roller Coaster….TWICE!! Of course we called it a train in the sky but it was a roller coaster that went pretty high and pretty fast. After the first time, he immediately said “AGAIN” and since there were no lines, we stayed on and rode it again.
Sunday we got up, headed back to the park to do breakfast with the same characters we did dinner with minus Cookie Monster but this time it was dubbed Breakfast with Elmo which made it a lot more crowded. Dylan did his share of hugging the characters but seemed to understand Elmo was very busy and not as accessible as he was the night before. Once the park opened (breakfast was before the park opens to everyone) we headed to do some water activities instead of rides. He was happy until we went on a river type ride where he had to put on a life vest. After that, we changed to dry clothes, rode the carousel four times, bought him a shirt and an Elmo tambourine and then rode the roller coaster two more times and then headed back to the hotel to get in the car and come home.
All in all it was a great time. Saturday was awesome because it was an empty park. Sunday was a lot busier but Dylan still had fun minus the life jacket part. I’ll tell you this though, he was one super tired kid last night. He had a short nap on Saturday, a short nap on Sunday and I don’t think he slept well on Saturday night. Combine that with all the running around the park for two days(as he refused to use a stroller) it makes for one tired little toddler. Would I do it again…absolutely!! I have tons of pictures which I will post soon!!
