The Wargo Blog

Elizabeth’s been losing some teeth lately. She fell a while back and whacked two of her front teeth and they started to wiggle. On Sunday, she was getting out of her church dress when I walked into the room. She had her dress pulled over her head with her belly exposed. Of course I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to give her a big belly tickle. She screamed, pulled her hands down and promptly knocked one of her loose teeth out of her mouth.

I’d tickled her tooth right out of her mouth.

Of course, the tooth wasn’t really ready to come out yet, so there was a lot of screaming and blood. Anna soothed her while I laughed uncontrollably. I got some very serious dirty looks from her (Elizabeth) as she cried in her mom’s lap. Anna doesn’t really give me dirty looks, but Elizabeth’s got a good one. I pity her future boyfriends and husband.

Well, we signed the kids up for Soccer at the local Y. August played last fall and Elizabeth didn’t want to, but this year she’s in. We split them up, so they’re not on the same team. We thought that would be best considering Elizabeth’s ability to be a bull in a china shop.

In preparation for the season starting, I had them out in the front yard tonight after dinner kicking a ball around. Before long a couple of neighbor kids came over and we had a full yard, 3 to 7 year old game of keep-away going. I won.

The other night, the kids were supposed to be in bed and I was sitting on the couch downstairs watching the Simpsons. The den has this huge vaulted ceiling and it’s open upstairs right by the kid’s rooms. It sucks for watching action films or something you actually want to hear any night, but what can you do?  I told Anna that I want to close the opening with Glass Block – she is of course not in agreement.

Anyway, during the show, some sophisticated orchestral music was playing and all of a sudden this little head popped up over the balcony. It was August and he said ‘Was that Mozart?’

This weekend I did some things that just has Anna shaking her head.

We went over to a friend’s house Friday afternoon and they had a trampoline in their garage. It was for a neighbor’s Christmas gift to his kids and they were storing it for them. Of course the kids started bouncing on it (which I admit was pretty dangerous). I of course quickly noticed that the kids could climb up on the stair railing into the house and jump off onto the trampoline for more bounce. At first I offered to toss Elizabeth onto the trampoline from there, but she chickened out. She climbed up on the railing, right next to Anna, and as I made sure she was safe up there (as safe as she could be standing on a railing over a concrete garage floor), she jumped onto the trampoline.

It was so funny to see Anna jump out of her skin when she saw Elizabeth leap!  She was standing right next to her and didn’t notice she was up on the railing.  Too funny!

Of course I had to let each of the kids do it once before I forced a stop.

When we got home, we delivered a gift to our neighbor’s across the street and as we came home we (me and the kids) noticed that it would be really cool to ride the kettcar down the driveway. Here’s a picture of the driveway (snow covered today of course).

August chickened out, tugged on the break all the way down. When Elizabeth did it, she went full tilt, down the driveway, across the street (with me making sure there were no cars coming of course) and into our yard. When she hit our yard, she went over the curb and went airborne (just a foot or so) before coming crashing down.

After seeing Elizabeth do it, August wanted to try it again and did it full speed. Too much fun!

Everyone’s safe and nobody got hurt – but Anna questions ever letting me alone with the kids.

August and I headed out to play golf yesterday. My back’s been bothering me for a long time now and was finally getting good enough that I thought I could handle it. It was of course 100 degrees F, but we went out anyway.

Well, we made it all of 5 holes. August was just too hot and way distracted…’look, a bug’ that we just couldn’t play. The funniest part for me was when he’d be lining up to take a shot and, instead of looking forward to the pin, he’d look behind him. I just couldn’t get him to pay attention to what he was doing.He did have some nice shots, hitting balls 20 or 30 yards. He’ll get better and better over time, I can’t wait to do it again.

I need to figure out what to do with the E girl. August has a set of hand me down clubs to use but Elizabeth doesn’t. I don’t know whether to buy her left or right handed clubs.

August has been bugging us for some time now to let him go over to a classmate’s house (let’s call her Suzie). He’s made us drive into her cul-de-sac to try to find her house and this weekend I promised we’d ride our bikes over there to see if we could see her outside. We headed over and found them – her and her sister (go ahead and crank on my grammar) rushed over to see the twins and Suzie gave August a huge hug. They rushed off to play while I met the father and later the mother. It’s so cool to see the kids make friends, but the huge hug he got was…interesting. I didn’t know 6 year olds hugged that much, but a lot of girls hug August.

As I talked to the parents, it turns out that they used to live in Akron – even worked for the Beacon Journal (the local newspaper). We stood in the yard and talked about neighborhoods,  Luigis,  Szalay’s corn and more. It was fun.  I promised to bring them some Szalay’s corn if I can on my next trip home. We even talked about having some shipped – I offered to get some myself to help reduce their shipping cost. Apparently you can’t get corn like that here. Rats.

After we left Suzie’s house, we headed over to the house of that boy who called Elizabeth the other day. He’s apparently a first grader, smitten with Elizabeth and lives just about 2 blocks down the road from our house. Same thing with her – when the boy came home (I was talking with a neighbor when they came home) Elizabeth got a huge hug from this boy.  We have a play date scheduled with him on Tuesday and even August’s invited (which is good).

It’s so nice to see the kids make friends and get such warm welcomes from their classmates. The mother of August’s friend said several times how nice and social August was. Good to hear – now if I can only get Elizabeth to pay attention to one thing for more than a minute we may be in good shape.

I had a few minutes before a customer call so I headed outside to see what Anna and the kids were doing. Anna had purchased some pine straw from a wandering salesman ($4 per bundle, cash) and she was spreading them around the beds. There was a soccer ball on the ground and I told her I was going to see if I could hit the kids (who were playing about 50 yards away). I put the ball down, wound up and kicked it. It curved slightly as it made its way to August (who was riding his bike on the sidewalk). It hit the ground in front of him, bounced up and hit hit right in the middle of his chest. Nailed it!

August isn’t happy about it, but at least I know I can still hit a Soccer ball.

Here are some pictured of the front beds Anna’s working on.

While August and I were out doing Manly things, Elizabeth was busy decorating the house for Easter. She made little ornaments out of paper and taped them up all over the house (and I do mean all over the house).

Easter Decorations

They must be everywhere – too cute.

Our new house has a lot of storage. When we first looked at it, it kept me awake the first night because I knew I loved the house, but I couldn’t think of how, since the house didn’t have a basement, we would be able to get all of our stuff put away. We went back the next day and I took an inventory of the storage space and quickly found that we had enough (probably too much).

Each of the upstairs front rooms have dormers and to either side of the dormers are storage rooms (with little half doors). Augusts’ room has two of them, but they’re unfinished (as shown in the figure below).

One of the Storage Closets

I promised August that we’d cover the walls in the storage rooms (August uses one of them as a little play room as you can see) and he’s been bugging me ever since we got here to get started on the project. Today I pulled out the back seats in the van, put a booster seat in the front seat and August and I headed to Home Depot to buy some drywall.

What was funny, and perhaps another story to tell here, was how August and I spent the whole trip there trying to come up with all of the compound words we could think of (his idea). We had ‘drywall’ of course, fireman, firetruck, dogwood and many more – it was a ton of fun!

Anyway, the van was just a few inches short of the 8′ we needed to store the sheets of drywall, so a nice guy at Home Depot (a very nice guy actually) helped cut them in half so they’d fit. August helped out too and before we knew it we had what we needed loaded up in the car.

I’m going to take a couple of days off next week and use one of them to hang the drywall.  I’ll post pictures when it’s done. Stay tuned.