Another Reason Why Being a Parent Sucks

This week Gabe is at Transformers camp--another theme week at the karate dojo where he had his Jedi Ninja training last month. This theme, I thought from the beginning, was a bit of a stretch, and based on what he's done at camp so far, it would appear that the theme was more a product of bandwagon-popularity-jumping-onto-thingy than of them having any real idea how they could cleverly incorporate fighting robots into karate training. So far the extent of Transformer involvement has been them watching two Transformers movies (the first two of the pretty awful new ones--neither of which I would have chosen to expose Gabe to yet, if ever). But, Gabe loves the camp anyway because it's out of the house and he's hanging out with new people and doing stuff all day.

Frankly, it's a relief to me that he feels this way about doing stuff. It proves that I am not having an entirely negative effect on his development. Norah I am a bit more concerned about because I can already tell that she and I have pretty much identical personality types. It's going to be a chore coaxing her into wanting to get out and do things (because, if she's like me, forcing her to do it is only going to guarantee that she will hate it and do whatever she can to sabotage things out of spite--being a passive-aggressive introvert can be such a chore sometimes).

Anyway, back to the sucking-to-be-a-parent part. Every morning we've been packing Gabe a lunch to take with him--a peanut butter/honey sandwich, some caprisuns or juice boxes, a big thing of water, and some various snacks like crackers or a banana or fruit snacks or whatever. The first two days, when I picked him up, I checked his little cooler to discover that he hadn't eaten anything but the fruit snacks. As soon as he got into the car, then, he tore into his food and ended up eating most of what was in the cooler on the drive home.

I grilled him for reasons why he didn't eat anything else while at camp both days as we drove home and each time he didn't really have anything to say. I tried to impress upon him the importance of eating his sandwich and the healthier foods in his cooler as his meal and having the snacks either as desert or for their snack breaks or he'd run the risk of feeling like crap and not having enough energy to get through the day. 

He responded by telling me that he'd figured out how to open the fruit snacks on his own--something he had done here at the house several times, so I wasn't sure how that related to anything and just filed that bit of information away in the "Things My Kids Think Are Important for Some Reason" file.

Yesterday morning, then, after I prepared his lunch, I reiterated the importance of him eating at least his sandwich at lunch time and then moving on to the other things in his cooler. After that, I asked again why he hadn't been eating the sandwich. And he said something a bit troubling.

"I didn't want to make a mess on my face with the sandwich."

I went back into the kitchen and finished packing up his cooler, and while I did, I thought about what he'd said a bit. Then I pulled the filed information about the fruit snacks out. While he HAD opened the fruit snacks at home before, he'd always done it with scissors, never by tearing open the packaging. What he meant was that he had figured out how to open the fruit snacks, on his own, without asking for any help and without using an scissors (which he didn't have access to). And then he had only eaten those fruit snacks that he could open without help. And he didn't want to eat the sandwich because it made a mess of his face.  And he's probably the youngest kid in this class full of mostly bigger kids . . . .

It all came together and started to make sense. Gabe wasn't eating the sandwich because he was embarrassed about making a mess of himself with it (he, like my brother Ben, has a weird ability to always get food on himself no matter how careful or attentive he's being--though, admittedly, he's never being that careful or attentive either). And he was only eating the fruit snacks because it was something he could manage on his own, that he KNEW he could manage on his own and felt comfortable tackling in front of the bigger kids.

In other words, Gabe was tackling his first awkward social situation and dealing with a very early instance of peer pressure. When I put all the pieces together, my heart sunk.  Every parent, I'm sure, wants their child to be "the cool kid" who can do no wrong and intuitively cruises through school suffering no ill effects from the myriad pitfalls of social development. Or, failing that, every parent would love to shield their child from suffering through all those awful situations--and I am no different. 

I, of course, had to empathize with Gabe more than sympathize. Since I was always "the cool kid," I really don't have a wealth of personal heartbreak and social awkwardness to fall back on to help me relate to what it's like, but I have a pretty well-developed sense of compassion and recognition.  And I compassioned and recognized what Gabe must have gone through those first two days of camp this week and wished more than anything that I could protect him from that sort of thing.

This, obviously, was a pretty minor situation, and there will be far greater and worse ones down the road, and I think that more than anything is what stung. It's the beginning of our baby growing up and figuring out the world, and that's something that he needs to do without us looking over his shoulder and pushing him one way or the other or he'll always need us there to make the tough decisions for him.

And that's great and it's part of life and all, but it still sucks.

So I provided him with a few more tools to help him adapt. I told him that if he just ate the crust on his sandwiches they wouldn't be rubbing up against his cheeks, getting peanut butter all over, and I provided him with some napkins so he could wipe his face when he inevitably didn't eat the crusts and still got peanut butter on his face.

Then, when I picked him up yesterday, I looked inside his cooler. He saw me looking, knew what I was check on, and, beaming, said, "I ate my sandwich today and didn't make a mess!"

Sweet victory. If only napkins could always be the answer.

Norah Goes Meta

Last night, Gabe decided that we needed to have another movie night. He's had two of them already this week and, I guess, found a rhythm. But, last night, there weren't any movies that Gabe wanted to watch. So he fished out a Baby Gabe movie.

About a year ago, I figured out how to burn DVDs on the laptop I had. I'd tried a couple times prior to get something to work on our desktop, but either it lacked the software or this computer just sucks (both, I think), and I could never get anything to work. But I did on the laptop, so I started to compile the videos I had of the kids--I got Gabe's first two years (on THREE DVDs--and keep in mind that I didn't start the blog until he was 18 months, so I'm guessing we'll have thirty or so disks if we put all of his stuff on DVD) and Norah's first year done.  We started with one of Gabe's disks but then moved to Norah's.

She was mostly unimpressed with the movies. "That's Norah," she'd keep saying. It seemed she was thinking of herself as well as referring to herself in the third person. She watched but really didn't seem to be appreciating the fact that it was HER on the screen, just smaller.

Until Baby Norah started making noises that sound exactly like noises that Big Norah still makes (specifically the whining and the crying), and then we convinced her to start making the noises herself and I think she began to put the pieces together a little bit better.

Ruhtreat!

So, a little while ago, Gabe decided that he wanted to play with his armies. He's going through a bit of a needy phase right now. He is loath to do ANYTHING by himself for some reason. Every activity, every game, every sessions of star wars or legos or drawing or painting or swimming or everything he wants someone to do it with him. Well, not "someone." Pretty much me until Libby gets home. Norah is not an option.

And I understand why, too. Norah isn't much fun for him to play with. The other condition of playing with Gabe is that I have to do everything that he wants me to do it. He makes the rules and I have to do everything the way he wants. So, when we play, let's say Star Wars, we'll stand guys up and then he will tell me which guys get shot, by whom, and what happens to them. And then I am supposed to enact it. He's more or less becoming the director of play activities in our house, calling all the shots so that his vision of how things should work out comes to fruition.

But Norah isn't much for doing what she's told. She does pretty much whatever she wants. And usually she wants to play with whatever Gabe is playing with and do what he's doing with it--unless, an this is the important distinction, Gabe WANTS her to do what he's doing with it. Then she does something else, usually something mean like throw the toy away or hit Gabe with it.

This morning, Gabe wanted to play armies. I knew what this meant. He wanted me to sit next to him and stand up thirty or so little army guys. Then we would grab one at random and knock that one against all of the other ones, knocking them all down in about two seconds. And then the game would be over. But as soon as he told me to sit down next to him and play armies, Norah rushed in and demanded that she sit in the chair he'd chosen for me and play with the armies.

"Super," I said. "You can play with Norah!" But he wasn't excited by the prospects at all. Eventually, I negotiated a truce wherein Norah was allowed to play with Gabe's stuff, but Gabe got to make the rules and Norah had to follow them. I had little hope that this was going to work out since Norah alone makes the rules for Norah right now. But it got the kids playing together, so whatever.

And they got along pretty well. They had to compromise and each of them got to make the rules in turns, and Norah never actually followed a single one of Gabe's rules, but he was mostly able to ignore that fact and they played for almost an hour at the table.

At one point, they both started doing this:

I'm not entirely sure how the word was introduced into their vocabularies, and I'm even more uncertain how they were confusing it with it's exact opposite: "attack!" But there you go.

Summer Camp, Part 2: The EnGabening

Norah had her camp for a week, and during that time Gabe and I had "man time" in the mornings. We never managed to do much of importance during our man time, but he greatly appreciated just having me to himself for a few hours.

The next week it was Gabe's turn for camp. It was actually a pretty good experiment for what school would be like coming up this fall. Each day of camp started at 9:00 and ran until 3:00--the longest period that Gabe had ever been away from the house AND the first continuous string of busy days without the benefit of any nap times.  He's not really been using his nap times anyway for awhile now--though I've continued to insist the two kids go to their beds and do quiet things for an hour or two every day simply because I am a tyrant who likes me some kids out of my hair for a little while each day--but he's also never gone a long stretch without at least having the option for a nap there.

And he did great on both counts. He also had swimming lessons each night that week (something else we're working on this summer--both kids are progressing . . . swimmingly), so it was an especially busy, active week.  But he made it through and loved pretty much every minute of it.

Gabe's camp was called Jedi Ninja Camp. Yeah. They couldn't have possibly created a concept more unlikely to live up to the potential of its name, right? I mean,  Jedi training is one thing. Jedis are cool. Using the force is cool. Cutting things with lightsabers is cool. That alone would have been pretty awesome. But then they multiplied the awesomeness exponentially by adding the ninja component. Ninjas hide in the shadows, which is cool. Ninjas kill with stealth and guile, which is cool. Ninjas use throwing stars, which is cool. Combining ninja skills with Jedi skills would effectively create the perfect weapon (though, technically, the Jedi wouldn't be using ninja skills because assassination is the point of ninjaing, and Jedi don't work that way--just to split hairs a bit).

So there was little chance this was going to live up to the hype. Gabe didn't find out about the camp until a few days before, because we didn't want him pestering us fifty times a day for multiple weeks asking us when his camp started or what he was going to be doing there. But those two days provided ample opportunity for him to build up the classes in his head to mythical proportions. I think he pretty much assumed that he was going to be doing ACTUAL Jedi training--like Luke on Dagobah or . . . something with someone from the shitty prequels, I don't remember what happened in those movies well enough to remember any training sequences.

There's a pretty specific way this training sequence should have played out, too. With a traditional 80s training montage. And there's only one song that would fit to play in the background--"You're the Best" by Joe Esposito.  When I let this little storyline play out in my head--Gabe training to be a ninja Jedi, with music playing in the background as he progressed from training one skill to another, gradually gaining confidence and skill, my brain immediately started playing that song. It didn't go with "Eye of the Tiger" or "You've Got the Touch" from the Transformers movie or even the theme song to the Greatest American Hero (which I have to admit is only about two leaps away for my brain to go to pretty much all the time), and after I did a search to find that song on Youtube I figured out why. Because it's from the Karate Kid.

And I'm pretty sure that something similar was playing out in Gabe's head, too, in expectation of this camp. I'm reasonably sure that he was convinced that he would be able to actually use the force after his training. So I was a little concerned that he would be HUGELY disappointed in the camp when he figured out that he wasn't going to train to be a Jedi OR a ninja during that time.

But he wasn't. He had a great time. And he'll be going back towards the end of this month for a Transformers camp. How Transformers and a karate dojo go together, I have no idea. But it should prove pretty fun for him all the same.

Sadly, we didn't get a lot of pictures or video of his camp. Norah and I went to the camp a little early the first day so I could watch a bit, and I got some video of that. And then Libby joined them one day when they went to an acrobatics academy and did some training there (they filled the afternoons with stuff like that and going to movies and such because, let's face it, trying to get that many kids that age to do actual karate training for an entire day would be about impossible) and got a couple pictures and a bit of video.

But here's what we got.

 Gabe practicing sword moves. They spent a fair bit of time learning how to thrust, apparently. That and defending while holding a sword straight up and down were the only two things he talked about specifically afterwards.

Gabe in the foam pit during the acrobatics training. Not a whole lot of story to go with on this one as I wasn't there and there weren't many other pictures of him from that day to work with. My guess is they were learning how to levitate these light foam blocks with the force to start their training.

 

 

 

And again Blogger isn't letting me separate these videos or even move them away from that last picture. I swear, how tough is it to create a blog website that doesn't suck?

The first two videos are of the obstacle course Gabe went through the first day. The last video is from the acrobatics academy. Since I can't watch the videos again or anything while they are loading, and I'm too lazy to wait to see what they are, I guess you'll just have to watch them and figure out what's going on.

Summer Camp, Part 1

This year marks the beginning of what I'm sure will become a summer tradition in our household: summer camp season. Summer camp is a pretty foreign notion to me. I mean, we had our own version of camp growing up. It was called Going Deaf on a Cabless Tractor in 105 Degree Heat for Twelve Hours a Day Throughout Most of the Summer Camp. Beyond that, my only experience with summer camps derives from what I learned from movies like Meatballs and Friday the 13th. Needless to say, when I learned that camps don't always include Bill Murray or the murdering of the promiscuous, I was immediately confused.

But, apparently, when you live in town, you have to pay good money to get rid of your kids so you don't go insane over a summertime. That's a concept I'm just now starting to grasp, also. Summer sucks for a whole new reason now. Even though our kids were only going to preschool two mornings a week, somehow that got them out into the world enough for them to not be insane the entirety of the week. In fact, they were mostly tolerable. But, since they finished up with school, it's like their stir crazy kicked into high gear and now they are both always at each others' throats about everything and fighting and bickering. So I can only imagine what it's going to be like after both kids are used to having school to keep them busy for the better part of each day. I'm mentally preparing myself for the suck already.

Anyway, in the big city, people pay other people to entertain their kids for a few hours a day so those kids aren't in the house anymore. And, frankly, it's awesome! I wish we had unlimited funds so we could stick the kids in camps all summer. They loved it and I loved it. Everyone loved it.  But, sadly, we only had the funds to stick them each into a camp or two this summer, and over the last few weeks, they've both had a camp.

I was originally just going to do another huge post that got both of their camps together, but we have a lot of pictures and videos of their camps, so I will break them up. I'll start with Norah's camp.

Norah did a dance camp--she called it Fairy Princess Dance Camp. It was every morning for a week, and she butt dug it.  They did all sorts of things. I guess. Every day I asked her what she did and she'd say something like "We drew a picture" or "I danced." And that was about all I got out of her. Not much in the way of specifics.

Have I mentioned how well Norah grasps the concept of music? She can pretty nearly carry a tune now. She sings all the time. I guess I have to chalk it up to a natural inclination for music. She has been exposed to exactly the same amount of music as Gabe has been (quite a lot, actually, as I like music and we've always had something playing in their bedroom through the days and nights--and then most pre-k shows these days have some sort of musical element to them). I think Gabe likes music well enough, and he sometimes tries to sing a song here and there, but it certainly seems like he doesn't have a knack for it. But it seems to come pretty naturally for Norah.

Anyway, she loved Fairy Princess Dance Camp because she likes music, she likes dancing, and she loves fairy princessing. At the end of the week they had a recital, which we all were invited to watch. And this was when I was able to get some decent pictures of her doing stuff.

The "costume" she wore for her "recital."

The fairy princess wand Norah helped make during the week.

The recital started with a storytime where everyone involved got to hear one of the interactive stories they had worked on during the week. Something about animals singing or something. Norah sat on the instructor's lap and seemed less than impressed throughout.

 

The dance part of the recital was a story about princesses sleeping and waking up to dance out in the forest. Or something. Princesses dancing is what it boiled down to, and that's all that mattered.

Norah dancing.

Still dancing. The big girl she's dancing with was the "oldest sister" of the dancers. Hmm. First Norah was sitting on the instructor's lap, then she dances with the oldest sister. She seems to be hogging all the important people. I can't say that I'm surprised, though. She is a diva, so paying extra attention to her was probably easier than the alternative.

Still dancing. It was really a quite long dance with lots or moving around in circles around the room.

Finally the sister princesses returned to bed and some authority figure or other came to check their feet to see if they had been out during the night. This family has some trust issues--but I guess considering their feet ended up dirty from dancing in the forest, those trust issues were justified.

 

And then the dance was over and they bowed.

 

Still bowing I guess. Not sure why I included two pictures of basically the same thing. But I did, so here it is.

 

This picture is unrelated to the dance camp, but I thought it was a pretty awesome picture, so I shared it anyway.

And here are the videos from the fairy recital. Again, blogger won't let me split them up and comment on them individually, so I'll just leave them here to finish watching.

But . . .

Norah has entered what I think might be the most personally annoying and infuriating stage she has been able to find to date. The "But . . ." stage. And it's a good thing that I don't have any hair left, because I would have torn it all out over the course of this week if I did. It isn't a big deal, I'm sure, but for some reason I would rather go back to changing 30 of the most disgusting diapers imaginable a day than have to endure this stage much longer.

Sadly, there is no way that I could capture this on video to share, so I will have to describe it instead, and I'm sure that, in the end, I will just come out looking like an impatient ass because, really, it just boils down to her making excuses.

This is how it works. Norah does something. She does "something" a lot these days, by which I mean actions that will get her into trouble. She is in what I hope is the peak of her pestering stage right now too. She can't just leave anyone alone. And Gabe especially. Everything he does, she has to be up in his business. Not helping. Not playing along with. But actively disrupting. And often she does things that are just mean. If a bigger kid or a grown up did the things she does, they would likely be labeled a sociopath. It's a little troubling, really.

Here's an example.

Yesterday, Gabe was drawing on the floor. Norah saw him drawing and decided that she needed to be drawing too. There was a tub of markers and ample paper, but she wanted Gabe's marker and Gabe's paper. That is pretty typical, though. She doesn't just want to do what Gabe is doing, she wants what Gabe is using to do what Gabe is doing (until he surrenders it, and then she has no interest in doing it anymore, she just wants to make Gabe give up what he has and what he's doing--see, sociopath!). So Gabe starts to whine. "Norah! No! I'm using that!" I hear it probably three dozen times a day. It might be what is said most often in our household right now.

So, for probably the three dozenth time that day, I went to resolve the issue.  "AAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGHHHHHH!" I screamed as I pulled out all of my remaining hair and smashed my head against the wall.

Not really. While I have to admit that my level of cool is dwindling rapidly with all the fighting and whining and bickering that's going on in my house--I have a very low tolerance for conflict--it hasn't gotten to that point yet.

"Norah! Leave Gabe alone!" I chastised. I pulled her out a handful of markers and a sheet of paper and set them on the floor far enough away that she couldn't just lie on her stomach on the floor to work and position herself so she could put her feet on Gabe and kick him while she works (see? mean!). She sized up the space, I could see it, to decide if she could work and something and pester Gabe all at the same time. She couldn't. So she sat down. I turned around and left. Five steps later, Gabe again screamed, "Norah! No! I'm using that!" I quickly spun around, retraced my few steps around the corner, and there was Norah, with a foot in the middle of his sheet of paper. She looked up and me and made eye contact. She knew I was there watching. And SHE TWISTED HER FOOT. Like a melodrama villain might do to a petition to save an orphanage or something.

"Norah! That was so mean!" I lamented. And I knew what was following.

"But . . ." Every time she gets busted for anything, it's the first word out of her mouth. And there is always a pause as she constructs the excuse she's going to use to justify what she is doing.  In this case it was "But . . . I was needing to walk over there," she said, pointing vaguely in my direction. Now, this WAS a feasible excuse. Gabe was directly between where she was and the doorway where I was. However, there was also more than enough room to walk around him and his paper.

"You were twisting your foot to ruin his paper," I pointed out. "That's not walking. Timeout," I added and pointed to the nearby chair. And then she started to cry.

Also the crying. The incessant, needless, constant crying. About everything. All the time.

Ugh, girls.

Anyway, the problem I have with this, and possibly where all the frustration is coming from, is that I really shouldn't have a problem with any of this. As some will recall, I actively encouraged Gabe to make up stories to try to get out of trouble. I WANT my kids to be good story tellers, and trying to get out of trouble is when some of the best stories are born. They are moments of true inspiration. But, for some reason--and maybe it's just because I know she knows better and is doing most of these things just to antagonize Gabe and I, whereas when Gabe does something bad it is almost always due to his basically unobservant nature or because he just didn't think things through--it grates on my nerves when Norah starts with the "But . . . ."

Possibly the worst part is that I have actually had to break out the "But me no buts" to interrupt her, which I still am not sure even makes a lick of sense. Seriously. What does that even mean?

Summer, Birthdays and Slip-n-Slides

It's been a pretty busy week. That's not an excuse for me not getting around to posting an update on here sooner with birthday and such-like pictures. I don't have any good excuse for that. But there's been a lot going on.

First, let me just go ahead and say that future summers are going to be . . . interesting. My kids are only attending school for two mornings a week right now, but I swear to god they are driving me absolutely nuts now that they are home all week. I don't know if its that we all have to see each other just that much more or if they don't have enough outlets for their crazy when they can't get away from me or what, but they are insane. Maybe it's the heat and it's not them it's just bothering me. I don't know, but they aren't even old enough for this to be a thing yet and it's a thing. I can't even imagine, when they're used to having structure and stuff to do five days a week what it will be like trying to keep them occupied for three months. As I said, "interesting" (which I meant euphemistically as "going to suck," in case I was being too subtle).

The kids' birthdays have now come and gone. It's actually pretty sweet having their birthdays almost perfectly spaced at the halfway point to Christmas. Figuring we can start the behavioral blackmail about three months before the event, we can use the "you better be good or you won't get any presents" threat for fully half the year! Pretty wise approach, really. I'd fully recommend trying to plan on a June or July birthday, if at all possible.

Anyway, it was another unnecessarily awesome birthday celebration for our kids. They have to be the most spoiled children anywhere, really. Libby simply does too much for them. She duded up the backyard with an obstacle course that ended with a big pool of water for them to play in. And she baked these two incredible cakes.

Norah's castle cake.

Gabe's Green Ninja from Ninjago cake.

I mean, come on! Each year she seems to outdo herself. Which is all well and good, except how can she possibly continue to do that? And mostly I fear that all of this effort and awesomeness is being wasted anyway since they likely won't remember much of anything from these early birthday parties.

Personally, I believe that children should get maybe two birthday parties in their lives. They should happen when they are old enough to have, say, three friends over to spend the night. They should involve a store-bought cake and ice cream, and that's pretty much it. That's what I got (except for the one trip to Showbiz Pizza) and I turned out fine. Anything more than that is showy and unnecessary.

 The obstacle course.

Naw, I'm just complaining. It was great. The kids had fun. It didn't last long enough for the parents to want to scratch out our eyes. It was great.

The day before his birthday, Gabe decided to mildly disfigure his face. Fortunately, it's not bad enough that you can really notice it unless you're looking. He put a long piece of yarn in his mouth and then pulled it out really fast, like he was trying to start a lawnmower. So he has two stripes of rope burn on his cheeks. Boys sure are dumb. Entertaining as hell, but dumb.

I've decided that the official name for a group of children is an insanity. This is a picture of an insanity of children. And the presents. Dear god, the presents. Again, our children are ridiculously spoiled. They will never value anything because they just keep getting more and more stuff. We are, I'm sure, creating materialistic monsters. But we just can't help ourselves! We want them to have the things they want if we can afford to give it to them (and, with Gabe at least, I want to play with his toys, too).

Eating the cake.

And, most important of all, it's over for another year! Having two kids with their birthdays three days apart is also kind of awesome. Sure it means that Norah pretty much has to open all of her presents on Gabe's actual birthday or she loses her mind with jealousy and then has nothing on her real birthday to do. But, otherwise, it is working out pretty well so far. I imagine things will get more complicated as they get older and have more closely knit groups of their own friends. We might end up doing two separate parties just a few days apart--and if that becomes the case, then having two children with birthdays three days apart is a TERRIBLE idea and nobody else should ever do it.

Finally, the slip-n-slide. One of our friends gave the kids a slip-n-slide for their birthday and we broke it out a couple days ago to give it a try.

To me, the slip-n-slide was always the Phantom Menace of summertime, water-based, fun-time activities. It looks AWESOME. From the pictures on the box and the commercials, it looks like doing a log jam where YOU are the log. You run and you slide on this perfectly lubricated surface, stirring up a wake of awesomeness, until you splash like an extinction-event asteroid hitting the ocean into the pool of water at the end of the slide.

But in reality, the slip-n-slide never even comes close to living up to the hype (thus my Phantom Menace reference). There are almost no spots on the run that are perfectly lubricated. Instead, most of the surface is made up of nipple-erasing bare rubber. The track is also perilously narrow, meaning you have to PERFECTLY aim your approach or end up with the worst kind of grass burns all over your body as you careen helplessly off the edges. And, if you are lucky enough to reach the reservoir of water at the end unscathed, then one of two things happens. Either you get mildly wetter or you shoot right off the end like helpless human torpedo. If you're lucky, all the water you've been running through it has created a mud hole that will at least partially cushion your deceleration. If you're unlucky, say goodbye to the skin on your belly.

The kids, however, love the thing. And unlike the two or three slip-n-slides we've bought them over the past couple years, this one is an ACTUAL slip-n-slide and not some knock-off brand. Which means it's actually somewhat durable. Besides being pretty awful at putting water onto the slide, the cheap ones tend to fall apart whenever they are used by anyone even a little bit. But this one has held up to several uses already, and the kids have not been the least bit gentle.

Anyway, here are some videos. The kids are actually pretty amusing while they use it--and Gabe got this weird catwalk, "sashay" thing going that we have absolutely no explanation for.

 

Gabe, sort of figuring it out.

 

And, apparently, I can't caption a video except the first time when I upload multiples at the same time. Dear Blogger, stop sucking! Anyway, the second video is Norah army crawling her way over the slide, and then we get into the kids just being weird, especially with Gabe's silly walks. The last video I included so everyone could see exactly how "sweet" Norah is most of the time.