Trying to catch up on posts via one massive brain dump

I thought about blogging more the past couple weeks but I just couldn’t. Ever since I became a contributor of Silly Little Ones, I wanted to wow them and their audience with my wit, knowledge and terrible writing style but it just wasn’t meant to be.

I think it all stated a couple of weeks ago when 4-year-old Stewie stopped sleeping through the night. He started getting up around midnight and walking into our room, and waking me and my wife out of very sound sleeps. Then the routine begins to bring him into our bed. You see, Stewie (aptly named after the baby from Family Guy because we think he always wants to kill us) still wears a pull-up at night and he soaks it! This not-so-little guy goes to sleep with a pull-up under his pajamas, and sleeping on a towel on top of his bed sheet which is over a plastic mattress protector, and by mid-night, he’s sometimes soaked through all of them. What am I saying… Most nights he wets right down to the mattress protector. We’ve tried waking him 2-3 times at night to pee, we’ve tried no pull-up, not letting him drink after 6pm, and we have spoken to him about it but none of it works, so when he appears in our room, I take him to pee, change his pull-up, and place a towel down on our bed then find somewhere else to sleep.

To put it in perspective, neither my wife, nor I have slept a full-night’s sleep in a LONG time!

Tonight, with the chance of thunderstorms, I put him on alert – not that he needed it – to come to our room as soon as he awakes… JOY!

So normally the amount of sleep I get doesn’t matter to me. Actually the more I get, the sorer I am in the morning. For my wife, once she’s up, she’s up, so when Stewie comes into our bed he starts chatting, usually about why he came to our room and once he starts there is no stopping him.

Being on this detox has fouled up that too. Both my wife and I are exhausted most of the day and we feel like giant balls of crap. It’s not that we are hungry, or that we are craving anything, but our joints are achy, our heads hurt and when we look in the fridge for something to eat, we are sadly disappointed. With that in mind, I broke my detox tonight. I had purchased a yogurt bowl for both boys at karate this morning and neither boy ate theirs, so after 8 hours of looking at it, I finally ate the strawberries out if it, then promptly finished the bowl. It was FANTASTIC! The detox is scheduled to go on until Thursday night, but I really needed something different to eat than rice cakes with almond butter and sliced banana’s on it (which is delicious by the way!).
A big part of me wants to continue the detox because I need to keep losing some weight and this appears to be the best way, especially in light of the fact that my steps are way down on the Global Corporate Challenge (GCC) this past weekend.

Over the past couple weekends, I’ve taken the boys for long walks and we’ve spent the day as a family running errands and I’ve been in the high 20,000′s for steps, even passing 30,000 steps on of those days, but this past weekend due to my horrible mood and the intense heat that is pounding Toronto (not complaining – I LOVE the heat) I’m in the low 20,000′s which is really disappointing. Since my team is battling for top spot in North America for my company and we sit near the top 15 teams in Canada for all companies, every step matters. This weekend really was disappointing and I’m going to have to make it up… At some point in time, but very soon.

So a re-cap of the past couple weeks, please, you say;

My wife and I celebrated our 10th wedding anniversary (tin) on July 1st, and just tonight I noticed that her 95-year-old grandfather gave us a card that read, “With Deepest Sympathies”. LOL.

For our anniversary I bought my wife a Slingbox and a $25 gift card for Zynga (Cityville / Farmville) and as I tweeted that night that she was REALLY excited about the gift card. Granted neither her, nor I know anything about a Slingbox. I heard an ad on the radio by Rogers Fan590 morning show host Greg Brady who described the product and it sounded great. So I bought it. It plays our HDTV on any computer… How cool is that?

My wife bought us the Mirvish package and we went to see The Railway Children which was incredibly good. The theatre was great, the characters were full of enthusiasm and easy to fall in love with, but the seats in the theatre were BRUTAL! At one point I realized my knee was in the shoulder-blade of a 75 year old woman in front of me. I’m sure she was not amused, but that should not stop you from seeing the show. If you are tall, or a little wider than the average person, as for a front row seat or a seat in the last row in the aisle (last row is still amazing seating!).

Oh, and as a result of some last minute negotiating, my wife and I went to see U2 at the Rogers Centre.  It was incredible.  I have always been a casual admirer of their music, essentially starting after their Joshua Tree album, my wife (who arranged for the tickets) is a fan of the older stuff, and I can appreciate the older stuff, but likes some of the newer stuff they did for soundtracks, like “Hold Me, Thrill Me, Kiss Me, Kill Me” and “Elevation”. If was a little surprised when we got to the Rogers Centre that 5/6′s of the people in attendance were there for the early music and whenver they played one of those songs, the place went nuts for it.  After what was an incredible show, I am now a huge fan.

Prior to the show we had dinner at a restaurant called Fresh, on Spadina mainly because of our detox, and the food was really yummy there.

The week prior we had some incredible Indian food at Indus Tavern on Eglinton Avenue.  So so good. Highly recommended!

So that is pretty much the catch up required to bring me current.

The only other thing that happened since I started this draft on the weekend was that my kids and I went to a park on Sunday in the middle of that incredible heat wave we’re having here in Toronto and after 20 minutes of running around and almost melting we all decided to clean up this park from the garbage and tons of weeds that had grown over time. It looked to us that this part was no longer being used because some of the spikey weeds were dangerous for little children and if the weeds were gone, kids would be allowed to come play. I’m proud of my kids for wanting to help out and for 30 minutes in the sweltering heat we did this.

Urban daddy housekeeping: Global Corporate Challenge and new blogs for you to follow

I am always looking for new blogs to read and today’s post is about some that have come to my attention that I would like to mention.

The first one is Silly Little Ones – http://www.atomicreach.com/microsite/sillylittleones  A new online parenting community which gathers photos, videos and blogs on children and their stories.  Those of us who contribute content to this site benefit by increased traffic to our sites while giving readers some new posts to read and comment on from fellow mommies and daddies.

The next one is Damn Yank; http://damnyank.wordpress.com/

The third one is the Lazy Photographer http://www.lazyphotographer.ca/.  If you check out David’s page you will see he is Toronto based and you should recognize a lot of the surroundings and see through the eyes of this photographer.   David also takes family portraits at a reasonable cost – we’re scheduled for later this summer – and he specializes in one-on-one (or group) street walking sessions where he will teach you how to get the most of your camera.  If I had any time at all, I would totally join David on a tour of the streets with my camera.

Welcome to all of you!  I hope the Urban Daddy community treats you well and comes to visit every now and then.

 

Changing things up a little… did you all hear about the Nathan’s hot dog eating contest (free publicity @nathans… Please send dogs! Nitrate free and kosher please)  The winner ate a disgusting 62 dogs (and buns) in 10 minutes.

62! How gross. I mean who would go watch these?   I think only people who want to watch others throw up, or watch people die, or watch schoolyard fights on the internet.  

I think the most I ever ate at one sitting was 6 and I was probably 17 at the time and still… growing.

 

Switching gears here to the Global Corporate Challenge: www.gettheworldmoving.com

Check it out!

So I’m at day 50 of the Global Corporate Challenge.  I joined it under the impression that I would be given a pedometer, form a team with 6 other colleagues, then walk for a given period of time and keep track of the steps.  Simple, right?

Well did you know that the average white collar worker walks an average of 3,000 steps a day. The #GCC encourages 10,000 steps a day.  Last year the person at my office that walked a lot averaged 13,000 steps per day. 

Going in I had very few expectations.  Well, with kids, my first day was 13,ooo steps and nowadays, by 10am after getting my kids ready and myself ready in the morning, plus a walk I’m at that goal.   Add on 4000-5000 more steps getting them to bed and with some daily exercise, or walking I have been doing quite well… Okay, very well. Here are my totals and my teams totals to date:

Personally, I have walked 3,722kms, or just over 1,000,000 steps. That puts my team at Level 75.

As a team, we have walked 5,000,000 steps for an average of 17,734 steps per team member. My step average is 21,596

So what does all this mean for my team?!? Well, we’re 1st in my company for all the North American teams of which there are many. We are 15th out of all the registered teams in Canada (there are 618 registered Canadian teams. We currently sit at 455th in the world out of 18166 teams registered globally.

Pretty cool, eh?

And it is very inspiring to see where we rank, how close were are to moving up or down and that there is another Canadian team right behind us who have been just ahead of us for most of the past month. Competition is good. It means no nights off for my 4-1,000,000 step club walkers.

All in all I have lost some inches but not weight I have actually gained some weight, but I have a ton of energy.

So what new blogs have you come across that deserve to be recognized (and don’t be shy… mention your own too if you’re not already on my blogroll).

I am going to walk!

Here is another example why it’s great to blog if you’re a parent…

Not sure what I mean from the title of this post?  Well let me explain.  There are times I have wished that I could have a camera crew following around my children..  More so my 2nd and 3rd kids due to their uniqueness but since that is never going to happen, blogging about them seems to be the perfect fit.   The only problem I have, is remembering all the crazy / zany / witty stuff they say to each other, to us and to others.   I make a mental note, or start a draft post, then something better comes along and I forget the previous thought…   Kids are hilarious.  Admit it. 

Take this evening, for example.  Child #2, Stewie was showing a childhood friend of his grampa a new toy that he has called Bey Blades.  In explaining what they are, the question was asked of him, “are they like dreidels?” to which Stewie replied, “they are like dreidels but they are not.  These are made with very sharp steel and if you spin them on your tummy they will slice you in half.”  Oh yes… Very serious boy.

Then there was the day after fathers’ day when Stewie made his 5th consecutive appearance into our bedroom in the middle of the night.  Sometimes he arrives because he’s scared of lightning, other times because he had a bad dream.  This night it was because he was “bored”. 

So I walked him back to his room – without talking to him – and tucked him back in the bed.

He started wailing and came back to our room, I swear, the second I closed my eyes.  So I got up and walked him back.  He was starting to complain so I asked him to tip toe.  He was clearly pissed because tip toe to him meant stomp as loud as you can. 

So I got mad and told him if he was going to make any more noise, that I would shut his bedroom door. 

He started to wail.

I took a deep breath (probably a very deep breath as it was past 2 in the morning and I made sure I was clear  in the way Alyson Schaffer taught us and I said to him, “This is your choice.  Do you choose to be quiet and go to sleep, or do you choose to make noise, wake up your brother, sister and mother, and sleep with the door shut”.

He chose to be quiet.

So I left.

Laid my head down on the pillow… closed my eyes… then heard wailing.

So I walked into his room and calmly said to him, “I believe you have chosen to sleep with the door shut” and with that I quietly shut his door and walked away.

He wailed louder than before.

I went into our bedroom and my wife was now clearly awake.  We huddled in for a strategy session.  She suggested I bring him into our bed to sleep before he wakes up the rest of the house.  Not wanting to be a sardine in my own bed, I went to sleep in his bed.

He must have still been upset in the morning because while I was brushing my teeth, he confronted me in my bathroom (he’s 4-year-old).  “Are you going to be nice to me today, Daddy?” he asked.

“Are you going to sleep in your bed tonight?” I countered with.

“If you are not going to be nice to me, I am not going to give you back your fathers’ day presents”.

“You took back my fathers’ day presents???”

At which point I heard giggling from our bed.  My wife had heard this exchange and apparently knew he took back my presents.

I got down to his level, gave him a huge hug and kiss, told him I love him and with that, he disappeared into his room, only to return with a bad full of presents he had given me a week prior.  He unloaded the presents as I stood there wondering how we gave birth to the repo man…

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Another interesting parenting moment came one morning last week as we were all struggling though this stomach virus.  Linus was sitting on the toilet in his bathroom, Stewie was on the toilet on the main floor of the house and our bathroom was occupied.  Only 30 minutes later did we find that Linus’ toilet was never flushed.  We called him in but he denied it was him.  He said it was Stewie.

“Stewie was on the main floor,” I responded.  “It was totally you!”

“Not it wasn’t” defended Linus.

Believe it or not, this conversation went on for 5 minutes, with myself and my wife defending our position and there was Linus with his one line of defense, “It wasn’t me, it was Stewie”.

He kept this up until we dropped it.

Some battles are just not worth fighting, eh?

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Tonight, Stewie has made his way into our bedroom at only 10pm.  He was watching my wife work on her laptop, happy to see her looking at ordering angry birds stuffed animals.  I decided in front of Stewie to suggest she not order them until Stewie was able to sleep in his bed for 5 nights in a row.   She agreed and together we explained to him why we thought this was a good idea.  Well let me tell you, for those of you who have not met Stewie before, that this bright idea of mine did not go over well at all!  He broke into a fit and through part exhaustion, part stress, he said to my wife that she was the “meanest mummy in the universe”.  All we heard about for the next 45 minutes through tears, anger and an unwillingness to forget, was that he wanted / needed / was going to get an angry bird or he was going to “break down our house”.  He was so over-tired we tried to listen without giggling.   Maybe it was us that were so over-tired…