Good kids

I felt really proud of the boys this morning!  And they weren't even there.  When I went out to catch the bus this morning our neighbor was there with his son waiting for the elementary school bus.  We got to chatting, of course, about our boys playing together and how we were both really appreciative of the other's offspring.  I don't remember if I've mentioned this before, but our neighbors just moved to the US for school from Korea and their son knows very little English.  Anyway, their dad thanked me very warmly for the fact that my sons treat his son so well.  I was kind of surprised, since I've noticed frequent misunderstandings, miscommunication, and even a little crying (Michael) and yelling (William).  But he insisted that they were very nice and very patient with his son, especially in light of how the kids in his class treat him.  Apparently he gets teased and taken advantage of quite a bit there, and it's still the first week of class.  :(  That made me sad, but I still felt very proud of my two boys!  I love those little guys!

Whoo hoo! I'm still mostly sane! :D

For those of you who don't know, Jenny has spent the past two weeks (though it feels more like two months) in Scotland at a theater contest where one of her plays was being performed.  Well, I must say, I am ready for her to get back, like, yesterday!  Not that I haven't been having fun with the kids mind you.  Actually the opposite problem.  I've been spending so much time with the kids that I haven't gotten very much of anything else done.
But buddy, have been having a good time!  Me and the boys especially have been nerding it up!  I played Age of Empires II with William once, and now he and Michael ask to play it with me all the time.  They still are trying to master things like... well... the entire game, but they have a blast doing it!  I also finally bought another board game that I've been wanting to get for a long time.  One of the new Dungeons and Dragons stand alone 4th Edition board games: The Wrath of Ashardalon.  The recommended youngest age for players is 12, but Michael and William both love it!  This is only the fourth board game I've gotten where the kids have asked me to play it with them on a regular basis.  (The others are: Heroica, HeroQuest, and Munchkin.  All of which are table-top role playing games.)  But they especially love The Wrath of Ashardalon because of the highly detailed miniatures and the level of freedom of action within the game.  We've already played through the first five adventures and we just got it a week or so ago!  William's favorite character is the half-orc rogue, and Michael's is the dragonborn wizard.  I usually play the elf paladin so that we have at least a little healing magic.  Even if the boys make fun of me for playing a girl.  :P
All three of the kids have also really enjoyed the time they/we've been spending with others.  We had some new neighbors move in right next door about a week and a half ago.  They have just arrived to the US from South Korea and were very eager to get to know us and have William come over to play with their eight-year-old son so that he could start being exposed to English.  William had a blast!  Of course, it probably didn't hurt that they're son is also a big fan of Minecraft and Legos...  Well, since that first fateful day all three of our kids have gone over almost every day from lunch to dinner.  I'm not complaining, since it gives me a little down time, which is nice.  I'm just constantly paranoid that they might be wearing out their welcome.  I mean, when I'm taking a nap and my kids who are next door wake me up, I figure they're probably being a little rowdy.
We also went swimming with another family that we've hung out with several times, and the kids had a blast doing that as well!  Especially Carly!  She and Michael (but especially Carly) finally got up the nerve to jump into the pool if I caught them.  I had to remind them to not run along the pool after each jump when they were coming back to jump again.  William, on the other hand, tried to drown the son of the other family by playing shark with him.  :{
I also went and hung out with some of my friends at a game night.  The kids played with some of the other kids while five of us guys played Scotland Yard.  It's an older board game that has just recently been re-released.  It involves all but one of the players trying to hunt down the remaining player before the game ends.  We lost.  But we had a great time and enjoyed a healthy helping of unhealthy junk food.  :)  I also went to a birthday party for one of my professors.  I've been to their (very nice) house a few times before, and they have been to my apartment a few times when the kids were here, so I was hopeful that there wouldn't be any complications.  Well, they had a lot of friends, colleagues and neighbors there, and I was the only one with kids.  The kids did reasonably well for their first foray into the world of boring adult "parties".  Though Carly did scream bloody murder when their dog jumped on her, and it took constant reminders to keep William from exploring their house in the guise of a monster spy.  <sigh>  They had an amazing array of wonderful horderves as well!  Everything from goat cheese and salami on special bread to mushroom-filled little quesadilla-looking things.  All very delicious!  William ate salami and Michael and Carly cleaned out the fruit bowl.  <siiiiiiigh>
In other news, during the past two weeks I did find out that Angelo State University had given the instructorship that I had applied for to another applicant.  Oh well, it is actually kind of nice not to have to worry about moving again for another year or so.  I also finished collecting the summer data for my dissertation.  I had a pretty good response rate, so I'm very hopeful that I will not have to run my experiment a third time in the Fall.  Now if I could just force myself to sit down and work.  Well, maybe after Jenny gets back...

Age isn't everything

This past week I finally bought a game that I've been wanting to get for well over two years now: Munchkin.  :D  For those of you who aren't familiar with this particular game, it's kind of like an incredibly simplified version of Dungeons and Dragons.  The reason I had been waiting to get it was because it requires at least three people to play and the suggested minimum age is 10.  Well, I knew that William would be able to play it since he can already pretty much read at the level required, but I knew that Michael wouldn't be able to read the cards himself.  But I finally figured, what the heck!  Well, the three of us played a practice round where we could all see each other's cards and we were all helping each other.  Then we played our first real game.  Michael and I were neck and neck for the lead and I had barely helped him at all!  Then it got to the point where both Michael and I only needed to kill one more monster in order to win.  My turn came first, and I pulled... random junk!  That's right, I kicked down the door and there was no monster!  :(  Needless to say Michael got very excited!  Then his turn and he kicked down the door and found... a chicken!  That's right, a chicken.  A lousy, level 2 meal on legs was all that stood between Michael and victory.  Well, we couldn't have that!  So I used all of my formidable arsenal of spells and potions to beef up the chicken to a whopping level 19 monstrosity, which basically means that the chicken was now almost as strong as a dragon!  Michael kind of looked at me, then shrugged, and crushed the chicken into the dirt and won the game.  Meanwhile, I think William was still reading his cards.  Michael had played the game based purely on his memory of what the cards could do based on discussions from the first game, and from his ability to read the key information on each card, even if he couldn't read the blocks of text that described the nuances.  I was impressed!
Michael had another chance to be impressive this past week as well.  One of his front two upper teeth got loose.  Finally, he asked if I could pull it out for him so he could get money from the tooth fairy.  (He was very serious on this point and informed me that he knew that the tooth fairy was real.)  Then he stood there and just waited for me to yank the tooth out.  I did, and he handled the pain very well indeed!  Needless to say he definitely got his buck from the tooth fairy that night.  :)
One last note about Michael.  A few days ago I thought that I'd introduce William to Age of Empires (a real-time strategy game on the computer that I loved playing with my dad.)  Well, William really enjoyed it, even if he was having some difficulty grasping the strategy part (William, I keep telling you, you need more than 2 lousy villagers!)  Michael watched us play a couple games together very quietly.  Then, at the end of one game, where I was just waiting around for William to clean up the last computer player, and I was waiting, and waiting, and waiting...  I finally looked over at Michael and asked him if he'd like to take my place for the rest of the game.  He nodded, still not saying much.  A few minutes later I heard from the living room that Michael had wiped out the last computer player!  Then I thought, heck, let's see how good he can do, so I let him and William play a game on their own.  After an hour or so Michael had roughly three times the score of William and roughly 100 times the resources and military might!  The rest of that game set the precedent for each of the other games that they have played together so far.  Michael sits there quietly while William is continually yelling things like: "Hey Michael, can you wait for me?"  "Michael, can you leave the yellow for me?"  "Michael, slow down, my siege weapon can't move that fast!"
Both William and Michael both are really into Munchkin and Age of Empires now, and have even been asking me to play when I was doing other things (normally I have to coax them off the Wii or away from the Legos to get them to play one of my games with me.)  I've been very pleasantly surprised when Michael comes up to me now and asks: "Dad, can I play Age of Vampires?"  :)
This is not to say that William hasn't been doing remarkably well for an eight-year old playing games designed for teenagers and above, he has been doing really quite well!  Michael has just been doing freaking amazingly well!!
On another note, we went out to the neighborhood park one morning after a decent wind storm the night before.  And immediately William homed in on the branches that had fallen down during the night.  Now, those of you who know me know that I'm always a little more skittish than most people about kids swinging sticks around, so I tried to think of a way to convince William to not break his siblings' teeth.  After thinking quickly, I asked William: "How many six-inch sticks do you think you could get out of those big branches."  William looked them over carefully and estimated that he could get around 20.  I then challenged him to find out for sure.  So, he started breaking the branches into six inch pieces.  Soon Michael and Carly got into it too, though their size limit was about a quarter inch diameter while William was successfully tackling up to a half-inch diameter.  Pretty soon we had a nice pile of relatively harmless 6 - 12 inch sticks.  It was then, looking down at their handiwork, that the kids finally realized that they had just destroyed the funnest toy at the playground.  I felt a little sorry for them, so I offered to show William how to build a fire, and then, if he did a good job building it in the neighborhood grill, he could use a book of matches to try and get it to burn.  So, in about ten minutes I explained to William the basics of fire building.  About half an hour later William had constructed a fire that would have passed him on any boy scout fire building challenge!  I was impressed!  Even more impressive was the fact that just a few matches later, William had his first fire going at a nice blaze!  I'm pretty sure that I was a lot older than eight when I successfully built my own camp fire basically on my own!
Carly, meanwhile, has not been doing any of these crazy things.  But she has really been enjoying her own new distractors.  She got a lot of books for her birthday and has been spending a good amount of time each day flipping through them and coaxing me into reading some of them to her.  No small challenge given that I can now play to new games with the boys!  She also took the allowance money she had saved up and bought a Barbie car, which she has been immensely enjoying!  And finally, she has just been her usual, incredibly cute and loving Carly self!  As an example, today, when we got home from Church, she asked me: "Daddy, I saw that you have some cards left over."  "Yes."  "Can you help me write some letters for my Grandmas that sent me birthday cards please?"  "Do what?  I mean, uh, sure."  Usually when I get an idea to do something like that, I put it off until I forget about it.  But Carly was very persistent and there are now several thank you's in the mail.  Carly is very thoughtful like that.  Another example from this past week happened when I took her to pick out the ice cream for her birthday.  She stood in front of the ice cream selection at the grocery store for a good five minutes, thinking.  Then, she said: "Daddy, I want the  green one.  It is Mommy's favorite and you and William really like it a lot too."  I love that little girl!  I love all three of those kids!  I can't believe how fast they are growing up!