week ending june 21, 2009:

Week ending June 21, 2009: Today is Father’s Day, so I thought I’d write a little about the twins and their father. Through their years the twins have taken turns with which parent is the favorite, sometimes each will prefer a different parent, sometimes the same. Right now Alex definitely prefers Dad. Alex’s favorite thing to do is play the Star Wars game on the Wii. It has different episodes and different levels within each episode, so they’ve been playing for months and haven’t completed all the levels. Casey is impressed with how Alex can sometimes figure out the quirks of the game before Casey does, for instance Alex will say, Dad, only Jar Jar can jump high enough to get on that ledge, you have to change your character to Jar Jar. I play with Alex sometimes, but Alex makes it clear that he prefers when playing with his father.

Both kids like sharing the boat hobby with their dad. While Casey works on the boat the kids will stand in the cockpit and turn the steering wheel and adjust the throttles while making up imaginative stories about where they are traveling and what conditions they encounter. Alex doesn’t really like to draw very much, but when he does draw, it is either rockets, or boats. Both kids look forward to fishing each year. We ran the boat over to Kentmorr restaurant this year, but we haven’t done any fishing in the bay yet. We were supposed to go today, but there was a small craft advisory.

Both kids also like playing on the trampoline with their dad. With the 3 of them on there, they violate the weight restriction, so Casey just lays down and pretends to “get” them as they run in circles around him. They also like to jump over him or lay next to him and pretend to be baby animals on the trampoline.

Everyday Casey comes home for work just before the dinner is finished and then we all 4 sit down at the table together and talk about our days. The kids like to tell about a trip to the library, or a neat rock that they found, and sometimes they realize that they’d like to hear about his day too. He tries to tell them little bits about what he does using preschool analogies. Sometimes they try to give Daddy advice like “you should tell your friends at work that they have to help out more because it is not nice to make one person do more work than the others.” The twins have been to see his office and eaten lunch in the cafeteria in his office building. We’ve done a tour of the Capitol building (well, part of a tour anyway before the twins got bored).

The picture is of the kids playing with Casey one evening. They decided they wanted to give him “rock star” hair, so they tried to make it stick up but putting water on it and combing, but Casey’s hair is so short and curly that it wouldn’t cooperate. So then they got the idea to put ALL of Chloe’s barrettes in his hair and he cooperated. Daddy does a lot of stuff like that that he probably never imagined he would do such as knowing which songs are sung my Hannah Montana, which Disney princess comes from which movie (and what color dress and hair she has), and the difference between Imagination Movers and The Wiggles.