Captured some strange lights with my digital camera last week…
Amoeboid UFOs? Not exactly. Actually it was just my kids with some dollar store glowsticks. They waved them around in a dark hallway, and by simply turning the camera flash off, this is what I ended up with.
Sort of neat, though, don’t you think? Best $2 we ever spent. Damned things glowed for two days, too.
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 05-07-2008 | 12:05 AM
Posted in: Kids | photos | Comments (1)
A miscellany of conversational snippets overheard in the Gorbould household this past week. Thing One is 6, Thing Two is 4.
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Thing One: Dad, we need new markers.
Dad: We do?
Thing One: Yeah. These are out of marker juice.
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Thing One: Hands up, who wishes they were Godzilla?
Dad: Me!
Thing Two, to Thing One: What about you?
Thing One: Nope.
Thing Two: Guess we’ll have to squash you, then.
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Thing One, out of the blue: Ahhhhhhh!
Dad: What?
Thing One: I’m scared.
Dad: Of what?
Thing One: Spring.
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Thing One: Dad, I need you to come to school tomorrow.
Dad: Why’s that?
Thing One: I need you on my squirrel catching team.
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Dad: If you have children, what do you think you’ll name them?
Thing One: Cappuccino, and Streetcar.
Dad, to Thing Two: What will you call your kids?
Thing Two: Poo Poo, Pee Pee, and Bum-Bum Smell.
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 04-22-2008 | 10:04 PM
Posted in: Kids | Comments (3)
So I took my four-year-old to the Raptors game on Sunday, a 118-111 loss to the Hornets. She’s been to a couple of games, and always comes up with some great lines, as I blogged previously.
On the way home this time, she had an idea for overcoming Toronto’s losing streak:
Dad, I have a secret idea for the Raptors but don’t tell. We should tell them to practice 100 times! And then we tell the Hornets to practice only one time! And then the Raptors will win. Tee hee. And maybe because we teached them, the Raptors could even send us a thank you card!
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 04-01-2008 | 12:04 AM
Posted in: Kids | Sports | Comments (0)
A few days ago, my four- and six-year-olds went out looking to buy Valentine’s cards for their classmates (”Valentimes”, as my youngest calls it, and I’ll be damned if I’ll correct her.) We started out looking for friendly, non-branded cards like back in the day - you know, the ones with the bad puns. No dice, so we would have settled for non-violent, non-gender-stereotyping branded cards… Dora, Snoopy, anything… struck out there too. And this was what was left, rather clearly delineated by gender:
I’m pretty certain none of the Grade 1 boys know what “sentient” means, and the kindergarten girls can be called “stylish ” only if wearing pink rubber boots, pajama bottoms and your bathing suit is haute couture.
They all enjoyed the cupcakes, though.
(Speaking of Optimus Prime, I did rent the Transformers movie last week - effects good, writing schlock. But I couldn’t hear “Optimus Prime” without thinking that a more timely hero/villain would be called Optimus Sub-Prime, chiz chiz. I even started to mock up a Photoshopping image to go with it, but then I did a Google search and found someone had already done it. Good on ya.)
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 02-15-2008 | 01:02 AM
Posted in: Kids | Comments (0)
This is Gringo, the cat with no shame.
He belongs to Lily, a friend of my two little girls. He’s sitting in a box, playing the part of the baby.
In case you are wondering, yes, he’s wearing a scarf over his head. And a pink T-shirt. And when they said, “Here, Gringo, cuddle this giraffe!” and put it under his paw… well, he kept it there. For 15 minutes.
I’d like to say Gringo was heavily sedated, or drunk, but no. He just puts up with anything. He’s not even going to be embarassed that all his friends will see this on the internet.
This is a problem, because my girls are lobbying hard to get a pet cat next year. I’ve worked rather hard to give them realistic expectations about cat nature, but this fuzzy aberration has ruined my credibility along with his own.
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 02-04-2008 | 12:02 AM
Posted in: Kids | I hate nature | Comments (4)
With a kindergarten teacher for a wife, plus kids in JK and Grade One, I’m constantly tidying up photocopied sheets on letter shapes and sounds.
Occasionally, my wife tells me, she has to discard sheets from British primers (aside: I still can’t bring myself to pronounce this word properly, as “primmer”). You see, the English don’t just speak funny by accident. They painstakingly learn it!
Both my parents are English, so I feel justified in making such comments. My mom’s been in Canada for more than 30 years now, but I still enjoy posing questions to her which require the past tense of eat: “Well, Paul, I et it.” Priceless!
Anyhow, last week I discovered this sheet, which purports to teach kids how to make the “Ahh” sound. You can do it three ways:
Yep, that’s “ahh”, as in “Drive your cahhh,” “wish upon a stahh” and wave your “ahhm”.
Action: Open your mouth and say WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU TEACHING THESE KIDS?!
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 01-16-2008 | 01:01 AM
Posted in: Kids | Rants | Comments (2)
There’s some part of the primitive brain that makes you feel happy when kids laugh… exploit it.
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 11-08-2007 | 12:11 PM
Posted in: Kids | Comments (1)
I’ve always thought that a child’s choice of Halloween costume speaks volumes about the way they are put together.
The kid who wants to wear what everyone else is wearing, and the kid who wants to wear what nobody else has thought of. The kid who wears a different costume to school than for trick or treating, and makes three abortive costume changes in between. The boy who wants to be a pink ladybug, the girl who wants to be 50 Cent, the mom (or dad) who wants to be Slutty Nurse… Freud would have a field day. Maybe that’s why I agonized for months over my costume choice as each Oct. 31 drew near - I’d be wearing my inside out.
My daughters’ choices this year were embarrassingly obvious windows into their souls too. My four-year-old, ever easy going, looked at our existing costume rack and said, “Um, I’ll be… a puppy dog.” Grabbed her puppy dog costume, zipped it up and said, “Yep. Woof woof!”
My almost-six-year-old, on the other hand, decided back in March that she needed to be a wolf. Not just any wolf, but a white wolf with a grey tail like Max’s wolf suit in Where the Wild Things Are.
Well, good luck finding a child size wolf suit. I tried. Since March I scoured the costume stores, rental places, catalogs, websites, eBay - you name it. No wolf suits. The closest the internet could provide were college mascot wolf suits for $1,000 each, or adult “sexy big bad wolf” costumes (perhaps so dad - or mom - could leer at Slutty Nurse.)
Fortunately, this year Aunty Alison came to the rescue, and made a Max’s Wolf Suit for the record books. We started with a second-hand unicorn costume, and dismembered it in a manner befitting Lord Voldemort. Then she rebuilt the head, added buttons and feet, and crafted a long grey tail from a costume shop “old man beard”. The claws were the crowning touch, built from a reconstituted “necklace of teeth” from the same shop. Et voila: wolf suit.
We’re certainly not the first to try this idea, but I think it came off rather spectacularly.
It looks at least as good as this version, which won some sort of award at an English flower show.
And there’s really no comparison to this big dude on the right, who looks like he’s wearing it because he lost a bet.
And if I do say so myself, I think it looks better than the Hollywood version displayed in this shot from the upcoming Spike Jonze adaptation of the book, due out a year from now:
Though I have to say that looks like fun - it stars Catherine O’Hara, James Gandolfini and Forest Whitaker as the voice of one of the wild things.
And my wild thing roundup wouldn’t be complete (and no, I’m not going to talk about Neve Campbell and Denise Richards making out in Wild Things - file that along with the nurse) without a link to the great animated version of the classic story.
Let the wild rumpus start!
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 11-02-2007 | 12:11 AM
Posted in: Kids | Comments (0)
Kid one-liner of the day:
“Daddy! I made an invention out of Cheerios and water, but it started to smell.”
[my five-year-old, as I walked in the door the other day]
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 10-16-2007 | 09:10 PM
Posted in: Kids | Comments (3)
So, last weekend was absolutely lovely outside - or so I’m told. It was a bit of a tough one for me, because I was stuck inside with the girls. Actually it was even tougher for my eldest - she had a stomach bug, and on top of that her first pet fish died. Still, it was nothing I couldn’t alleviate by spending all weekend in the basement making… princess crafts.
First up was this pair of “Pretty Princess Headresses” - design courtesy of a book of princess crafts we were given a couple of years ago. Now, I don’t know if real princesses ever wore dunce caps covered in tissue paper and stickers, with streamers taped to the top, but the important thing is that my girls don’t know either. Next time I’m at the Tower inspecting the Crown Jewels, I’ll let you know.
After that came a 3D “Zigzag Castle Card”, which made a nice backdrop for small plastic toys to cavort in front of. Not exactly how it looked in the illustration, but worse things can happen when you give a five-year-old a pair of scissors.
You’ll be pleased to know that since the weekend a moat with alligators has been added. OK, that was me last night after the girls went to bed.
Did my masculinity suffer from so much girlishness? Not really - it has faced worse challenges over the past five years. (Also, Sunday night I hit Home Depot and fixed our toilet - booyah! Man again!)
In fact, I’ve been compiling a list for a friend of mine who just had a baby girl. Unfortunately I only have two items - three would be a bona fide list, but I’m stuck here. Perhaps you can help. It’s called…
Signs you are the father of little girls:
1) You automatically sort your laundry into lights, darks and pinks.
2) You sit down to go pee, because you are just too tired to stand.
What else? Dan, Joe, surely you guys can help here… Tessa and Jayne must have observed a few masculine indignities… help me out?
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UPDATE: And just like that, the thoroughly emasculated Sinsiter Dan heeds the call! Here’s his list, which is bigger and better than mine by far:
I started writing a list in your comments on the ‘father of girls syndrome’, and it got a little longer than I had intended. Being a Letterman fan, I must have a predisposition to lists of ten;
1. Sometimes there is no alternative to accepting the role as the Evil Stepmother.
2. Every third sentence having to do with the bathroom ends with; “But not daddy, he’s different” (I got this a lot in university too)
3. You know who Loonette the Clown is, and your creeping sexual attraction for her has become a matter of some concern.
4. You know who Loonette the Clown is, and apparently that’s normal.
5. Even though they never show up, all the Disney princesses are still invited to Thanksgiving dinner.
6. “That’s what Cinderella would do” becomes an acceptable argument.
7. Dora is okay, but suddenly seems Diego seems shifty.
8. Every day is a new lesson in things you didn’t explain that made someone cry.
9. Your facial hair is added to the list along with quantum theory of stuff that makes no damn sense.
10. The difference between pigtails, ponytails and a topknot is now a subject on which you could write a doctoral dissertation.
Thanks, Dan!
Posted by: Paul Gorbould | 10-04-2007 | 12:10 AM
Posted in: Kids | Comments (7)
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