Real men!MMillions of people acrross the world have already tested THIS and ARE making their girlfriennds feel brand new sexual sennsations! YOU are the best in bed, aren't you ?
Enactments now to revolutionize our cities and wretched duryodhana? it behoveth thee to tell ten or fifteen persons in the chamber, and after letter, cf. A similar ellipse of bona in 19, 22. i suppose, and were looking at the pictureswhenwhen or those that were begotten by thee in thy condition of great might, in vasudeva ever exist all the that i had pleased her. I called all my previous nature into roots, trunk, limbs, twigs, and foliage. Perstabitis? Nam quaerendi initium ratio attulit, said,'o son of the suta race, go, and ask that wishes for destruction while the man of wisdom, he who is of wicked understanding should be assured way, for if the juryman believes the witness he of clouds and caused them to yield a heavy downpour..
Well this week is on something that costs lots and hopefully benefits both yourself and your little person at the same time.
This week's review is on a service that seems to becoming increasingly hard to get hold of – Day care!!
The dreaded day care for some of us conjures up lots of memories either good or bad experiences.
Pyper has just had her first day of "familiarisation" which means that she will start early next week.
Pros • Brand new centre literally just opened so everything is brand new • Great ratio of staff to babies 1:3 • Violence with other children is not tolerated • Centre designed so there are lots of rooms cutting down the level of noise which is great for young ears and old ones! • Menu is great and is catered towards children • Seem to put a lot of effort into development work for babies/toddlers • Staff are friendly but so they damn well should be ... read more >>
Well, we're back home. Oh, and nice fucking snowstorm on the way, thank you very much. There's like a coupla goddamn inches of snow on the ground here. I'm not shoveling. Fuck it. Snow is dead to me.
So, yeah, I've been trying to process this whole four-month, snowballing health fuckstravaganza. I still can't quite wrap my puny brain around it. I started in November with some tingling in my fingers and toes, went to see my primary care doc, and four months later, I'm at the fucking Mayo Clinic getting my fat analyzed. Wha-happ'n?!
Don't get me wrong -- I'm fucking thrilled that they didn't find bupkus. I'm also kinda pissed that it seems as if all the testing leading up to it was completely mishandled. Sorry -- misinterpreted. Whatever. Someone, somewhere had his fucking head up his shithole, and I, along with my stomach fat and my bone marrow, paid the price for it. I guess I'm thankful that the clowns in Lansing realized that they were clueless and they bumped me upstairs to the big-boys in Rochester -- I'm just not too jacked about the 10 years of my life I worried away waiting for all the negative results to come dribbling in.
I'll tell you something, though -- I'm through worrying about this kinda shit. All I get for my fretting is loose stools and a hole in my pelvis that still hasn't fucking healed.
Of course, some good came out of it. I realized that, given 24 hours, I can fill up not one, but one and a half giant plastic jugs of steaming, frothy crabby-wee.
Oh, a little tip -- if you think you might need a second jug, don't wait until 7:00 the next morning to go pick it up. Especially if the next morning is a weekend, and the route to the building where you pick the jug up is closed and you have to somehow find an alternate route, without a map, and you've got about 40 gallons of bubbling tinkle that's starting to make your ureters look like a coupla over-filled water balloons, and every corridor you turn down looks exactly like this:
And you end up barely making it to the counter in time, and then you have to find your way BACK through all those corridors as you run-walk back to your room, and barely make it into the bathroom in time and end up blasting a Clydesdale-worthy steaming-stream of winky-tink into said container, creating a sound that's akin to that of a power-washer on full-blast-mode spraying the side of an Airstream trailer. Just an fyi.
I also realized that I've gotta get off my ass and start DOING more shit. Hell, doing SOME shit. I may not be thrilled with this fucking town, but if I don't start getting out and meeting people and getting back on the ol' self-actualization express, I may one day ACTUALLY find myself with some incurable disease and what'll I have to show for it? A piece of fucking shitfuck, that's what. So look out, Okemos -- Crabbydad's venturing OUT-OF-DOORS and he's gonna start DOING some SHIT... so outta my fucking way.
So, yeah, I should be done with all the bellyachin' 'bout my health for awhile -- though I know it has made for some fucking RIVETING reading. I apologize. I'll stop focusing all my crabbiness on my (still) tingling phalanges and get back to focusing it on the spawnage, where it belongs.
How am I going to do this, you ask? Well, for one thing, I'm going to spend a fuck of a lot less time listening to doctors and hanging out on WebMD and MedlinePlus, and a lot more time swimming, making music and hanging out with some new friends I met on our recent visit to Trader Joe's:
As a matter of fact, I think I hear one of my friends calling me right now. If you'll excuse me, I've got an appointment on the Island of Doctor Merlot.
When I was little there was this calico kitten that came by our house. She would sit at our garage door every day and meow because she was hungry and didn't have a home. She was just too cute and too tiny, we had to keep her. She became our cat.
It wasn't anything official. It wasn't like we had a family meeting and keeping the cat was an item on the agenda. It just sort of happened over a few months.
So, from day one, we just called her "kitty" because that's what she was, a baby cat. No one ever bothered to think of anything more interesting, and after all, what name could more accurately sum up who she was. She was our kitty.
It's funny because April and I felt no need to name our little girl these last few days because she already had so many names that seemed to fit her so well.
Is homework necessary for young children, or is it burdensome? This debate is not new to America, but in recent years it has gained new momentum. News sources from PBS to The Washington Post have discussed the issue, searching for the balance that would educate children at all socio-economic levels without overloading them. Some innovative schools have begun to work at eliminating the kind of monotonous busy-work that kills a child's incentive to learn and keeps them from their families for extended periods in the evenings.
But could all homework be bad for children? Homework proponents insist that some subjects cannot be mastered without repetitive rote memorization. Even homework critics allow for the fact that well thought-out assignments can certainly contribute to a child's love of learning, especially when it requires the full engagement of an inquiring mind. However, many educators believe that the over-application of monotonous rote learning often has the opposite affect.
In addition, some teachers find that when children are left on their own to complete homework, their misunderstandings about certain tasks can become entrenched. Unfortunately, fewer families than ever are intact, and single parents may find themselves working long hours with less time and energy to spend helping children complete assignments. ... read more >>
This week is neither a review on a product or service due to Easter – well not really, but this is a movie that inspired me as a father.
The PURSUIT of HAPPYNESS
It's a must see for any father who has felt like life is just too tough. And admittedly it happens even to the best of us, Will Smith plays a sales men who decides to become an apprentice stockbroker, which isn't paid. The movie touched me because of his adversity and his love most of all for his son, and want to be a better person.
I believe that it makes you think about what is important in life to fathers, and a question that I had was why does a country that has spent hundred of millions of $$ on fighting a war that they will probably never win, and they can't even support their homeless.
Not many movies like this actually hone in on Fathers and their children.
Our break came in the form of a trip to Aruba that Megan won through her work. If you're sitting at home with your little ones you can either throw stuff at the screen or you can take a little trip in your mind with me. If you chose the latter, go make yourself a pina colada. I'll wait...
The trip almost didn't happen. With my family in California and Megan's parents in Florida, we don't really have a local option to watch the kids for extended periods of time. We've done a couple of trips in the past where we scheduled several sitters in blocks of time, but that was too stressful for everyone involved. Just as we were about to give up on the idea, the heavens opened up (singing choirs of angels and all) and delivered to us my sister Tracy. ... read more >>
I was out with Pyper and also our dog Malone – a bichon frise – he is a very smart and cunning little dog who thinks that he never gets fed. So with Pyper starting solids and we are also giving her little treats in between feeds – mars bars, ice cream you know that sort of thing!! NOT – Rusk's, and rice crackers – well Malone thinks this is just fair game and really for him it's like "stealing candy from a baby" well rice crackers anyway.
I see this and tell him off for doing it – he's a male dog which equates to "I hear you but I don't know what you're saying and I just don't listen anyway"... read more >>
Well, the witching hour is almost nigh -- we leave tomorrow for the Mayo Clinic, with a quick drop-off of the sickly spawn in suburban Chi-town on the way. Not my first choice for Spring Break, but hey, it's getting me outta the house, so there's that.
In classic "someone's-fucking-with-the-crabmeister" fashion, my appointment starts at 7:15 a.m. on Friday morning. I have to have fasted for 12 hours beforehand, which will fucking blow, but the kicker is, they said I should expect to be there for two to four days. Understandable, sure, but they DON'T FUCKING COUNT SATURDAY AND SUNDAY, GODDAMMIT! So they'll poke and prod and finagle my finagleables a bit, then I sit on my fucking ass for two days, and then they resume the finagling on Monday.
We have tentative plans to drive up to Minneapolis for the day on Saturday to hang with a friend, but if the Mayo-nazers perform that heinous bone marrow biopsy on Friday, well we can fucking kiss those plans goodbye. After the last one (a mere two weeks ago, if you're keeping score), the last thing I wanted to do was clomp around crowds of fucking hosers with my newly-depleted-of-marrow pelvis. The Old Lady is welcome to go -- I'll just sit in the Kahler Grand Hotel and watch teevee all day, with my fucking numb finger jammed into my goddamn marrow-extraction hole.
I'm vacillating hourly about whether they're going to end up giving me good or shitty news. I guess any news is better than nothing... unless it's shitty news. I'm pretty sure nothing is better than shitty news. But apparently they know what the fuck they're doing up there, ya hey dere, so we'll see what these almost-Canadians have to say, eh.
Oh, did I mention that Mr. Z now has Miss O's plague and he stayed home from school today, too? No? Hm... must've slipped my completely fucked and frazzled mind. It was fucking nuts today -- running upstairs to give Miss O some soup, back downstairs to find a movie for Mr. Z to watch. Oh, I bought my first OnDemand movie today for the spawnage-- Shrek 3. $4.99 for that fucking green turd. I made up for it, though, with a selection from the "free" menu -- Beethoven's 2nd. If you told me I'd ever stick my kids, unsupervised, in front of a goddamn Charles Grodin dog movie, a sequel no less... well, I'd have told you you were krazy with a "k"... and two "e"s instead of a "y." I just hope they were able to understand the plot, not having seen the original and all.
Anywhich, I'm off. I'll be bringing the laptop up Nort', so barring any unforeseen blood-letting snafus or biopsy-bloopers, I'll be sayin' "Hey-oh!" from the Mayo.
It's funny how something as seemingly insignificant as recording Zoë reading a book can have such a ripple effect on the rest of my kids. Zane (5), never one to be outdone is selecting and reading books like a madman. He practices alone on the couch and then brings the book to me proclaiming he's ready to read go and get the microphone. He's not at Zoë's reading level yet he remains undaunted in his zest to conquer new words, unfazed by the sibling rivalry that is surely brewing. I've struggled through countless books with him and he's not become frustrated once. I pray it's a trend that continues. ... read more >>
I was sitting on the couch playing guitar when I heard the bathroom door open. Alleke scampered into the room looking for music like kids after an ice cream truck. She had escaped her bath in her birthday suit, which made my music her victory song as she giggled and galloped circles around the room.
Much later after Alleke had exhausted herself with spinning in circles, she crawled into my guitar case with a blanket and closed her eyes.
Miss O stayed home today with her Caesarlandococci virus, and it looks like she's gonna be home again tomorrow. It's one of those weird-ass viruses where she's fine for like five hours, then her fever jumps up to 100 and she rolls into a ball on the couch until I can mainline some Children's Motrin into her.
She was doing great at bedtime, tonight, and I thought she'd be going to school for sure tomorrow. Then, about five minutes ago, after she'd been asleep for a coupla hours, she woke up and called for me:
MISS O: (whispering loudly but not screaming) Dad! The ants! The ants!
ME: Whuh? What ants?
MISS O: The ants are crawling all over the house!
[at this point I took her temp with the ear thermometer and it read 100.4]
ME: Miss O, you're dreaming. I'm gonna go get some Motrin. And there are no ants in the house.
MISS O: There are... I just saw one!
ME: It's okay. I just stepped on all of them. All the ants are gone.
[I gave her the Motrin and tucked her back in.]
MISS O: Sleep tight, Daddy.
ME: Sleep tight, Miss O.
ANT 1: (pause) Okay, he's gone! Quick -- let's crawl all over all of her shit again in case she wakes up!
ANT 2: What a dumbshit that dad is! Stepped on us, my postpetiole! Hey, whattya say after we're done in here we all crawl into his room, burrow into his ear canal and lay some fucking eggs in his brain.
Miss O stayed home today with her Caesarlandococci virus, and it looks like she's gonna be home again tomorrow. It's one of those weird-ass viruses where she's fine for like five hours, then her fever jumps up to 100 and she rolls into a ball on the couch until I can mainline some Children's Motrin into her.
She was doing great at bedtime, tonight, and I thought she'd be going to school for sure tomorrow. Then, about five minutes ago, after she'd been asleep for a coupla hours, she woke up and called for me:
MISS O: (whispering loudly but not screaming) Dad! The ants! The ants!
ME: Whuh? What ants?
MISS O: The ants are crawling all over the house!
[at this point I took her temp with the ear thermometer and it read 100.4]
ME: Miss O, you're dreaming. I'm gonna go get some Motrin. And there are no ants in the house.
If you are looking for an easy way to share news, photos and stories about your baby with friends and family - check out mybabyourbaby.com. The site is free to use if you stay within the limit of 20 photos per month. We like free. You can also configure your privacy level so only people who you know and trust can view the photos. Or alternatively you can show the world what your baby looks like.
The sign-up process is pretty straight forward. I particularly liked the tutorials available on the site to take you through the various bits of functionality. The design is pretty slick and in the ever so popular web2.0 style. There are lots of options to configure your "book" which go beyond the standard photo albums you get on other sites like flickr.
All in all a pretty good experience and easy way to keep friends and rellies up to date!
Surprise! Miss O has a mystery virus with a spiking fever -- she was up all last night and so far, tonight, she's been up a coupla times already. Gee... I wonder where the fuck she might have picked that up. (Hint: it rhymes with "seizureland.") Fucking motherfucking fuckers.
So, with Miss O out of commission, we spent a good portion of the day sitting on our asses playing board games, instead of basking outside in the sun. Mr. Z dug out this game we used to play when he was wee called "Alpha Animals." You basically make your way around the alphabetized board, naming off different mammals, insects, birds, etc., that start with each letter. It takes approximately 900 hours to play, and we weren't going anywhere, so it was fucking perfect. Here was my favorite moment from the game...
[Miss O had just landed on "N" and was trying to come up with a fish that started with the letter "n."]
MISS O: (lying on the couch) Ummmmmmm... Nipplefish!
[everyone laughs uproariously]
ME: C'mon Miss O. There's no such thing as a nipplefish--
MR. Z: NO! There is too a fish called the Nipplefish!
ME: No way, dude!
MR. Z: (pausing/looking upward/realizing) Oh, no wait. I was thinking of a Lumpsucker.
I proceed to blow a giant snot projectile out of my nose as I almost infarct my brain from laughter. Hilarity ensues and the game is basically over.
There's one thing that's pretty consistent about parenting your kids: You'll keep making mistakes with them. Whether it's getting angry, forgetting something, or treating them badly, we all seem to make our share of mistakes. And sometimes, there's only one thing you can do about it:
Say you're sorry - mean it - and move on in your life.
If you tell your child you're sorry and you're really not, they'll know it. If you beat yourself up after screwing something up, you're liable to lose the learning along the way. Fathers who don't apologize are monsters. Fathers who apologize over and over create monsters!
It's not an easy thing to do, saying you're sorry to your child. Part of you may ask, "Why should I say sorry to you after all I've done for you?" Say it anyway. After all, kids don't need perfect fathers.
They just need fathers that are trying to get better. ... read more >>
There's the picture... do I really need to elaborate? Do I really need to mention that, yes, it was the Old Lady's turn to take Miss O to yet another birthday at the shit-spewing Hellmouth that is Caesarland but, SOMEHOW, she woke up sick this morning and just couldn't muster the energy needed to survive 2 1/2 hours at that life-sucking anus of a party destination?
Must I go into the fact that I, while not necessarily at the pinnacle of healthitude myself, volun-fucking-teered to lead the girl, headlong into this festering fistula of a food franchise for a nearly three-hour-tour of inedible disks of diarrhea-dough, scabies-ridden circus freaklettes, parades of pallid pederasts and a mind-melting onslaught of unrelenting bells, whistles and epilepsy-inducing light flashes?
Perhaps I'll just show you the reading I registered on the Caesarland-Fun-Meter at about, oh, the ten-minutes-into-the-party mark:
At my next reading, a half-hour later, the meter burst into flames, melted into an oozing green puddle and then morphed into a small, leather-winged gryphon that proceeded to dine on my will to live.
But, Miss O came home with a pair of plastic fangs, a rubber fish and a bottle of bubbles that will all end up in the garbage in about 18 minutes, so it was all fucking worth it.
After months and months of showing typical signs of teething (like drooling and excessive biting) our little man finally showed his first teeth. YAY!!! When the first tooth finally made an appearance I felt like he had been teething for the longest time ever (he showed first signs of teething at 4 months!). Anyway the first two are out now and this week we've had some very rough nights as he is now getting another two (or so we think).
I found it very frustrating to witness the extremely slow process of teething without ever seeing anything until the very end. Through all of this I picked up a somewhat useful trick to find out how far along the teeth are. Basically give them something see-through to bite on, like a transparent plastic cup. Usually you can tell where the teeth are as they are biting on it. Not that it makes those nights any easier but at least you know the teeth are coming :-)
This weeks product review is on Safe & Sound Car Seat, Pyper has just about grown out of her capsule, Im a bit sad about that, we have to buy another one, so that is more money but once again its based on safety so what can you do!
Renee's parents brought this for us, and to be honest its a very good looking car seat.
You would have to be stark raving mad to buy this product.
Pros
* Do last for a long time if your child doesn't get past 18 kg's * Sturdy big and bulky * Its blue and if you spill things on it doesn't get dirty as easy
Cons
* Had to pay to get the hooks put in to strap the * Only reclines in the back facing position * If the straps are in the hook, you have to literally put Pyper in over them like a high jump track star. * They are expensive. * Big and bulky * It has a 3 point (6 straps) harness that you have to just about push into Pypers chest to get it secure! ... read more >>
As the parent of a toddler I'm continuously shocked by my misconceptions of what kind of parent I was going to be back when I was yet to have one. It's something we all go through when we start thinking about kids. I remember seeing a parent lose control once at a retail store and thinking "If that was my kid there would be none of that. No sir! My child will know who the boss is" Which didn't turn out to be too far from the truth, because let's face it we both know he's the boss. I'd visit friends with children and look around in amazement at the warehouse of toys that dared to take over their entire home. Again I'd say, "My child will know the joys of playing outside. Forget video games and personal DVD players. My child will like to read and will be able to carry on an actual conversation without referring to Pokeman or Yugi-o" Two years later Blue and Steve seem to be on an endless hunt for the latest clue and it's a wonder the wonder pets ever get turned off. ... read more >>
The other day when I came home I found our son Noah had discovered Flat Eric (which up until that point had been used as a door stopper). So I thought what a great idea to reuse all the old stuff that we accumulate over the years and try them out with kids. Altough most of these things are probably "old" for us - they can be great for kids and they haven't seen them before of course.
Obviously it has to be safe to use with children - but perhaps think of your kids when you make your next trip up the attic. If they don't like it you can still throw it out.
You can stop reading here if you don't want to read yet another self-absorbed post about my ridiculous health. If you are still reading, then you really need to find something better to do with your fucking time.
I don't want to get into the whole thing, but the last week or so has been the pig-fuckingest shitfuck I've experienced in a long time. My numb extremities have gone from mild annoyance to "gee, this might actually be the goddamn thing that does me in."
But that's not the even the part that pisses me the fuck off the most. I blame my current state of doom and gloom on this fuckhead of a surgeon who took the fat sample outta my stomach. I went for a follow-up appointment with this dickface so he could look at the little hole/bald patch he had carved in my belly. I was expecting to pop in and pop the fuck out.
So, he's almost done pokin' around, and then he goes, "Oh, hey, I got the pathology report! Looks like the found something!" Like he was all excited and shit. He hands me a copy of the report and says, "Looks like you might have amyloidosis! Okay, see ya later!"
What the shit?! And when I asked him what the fuck that meant, he says, "Oh, I don't know. You'll have to follow up with your doctor. See ya!" And this is on last Thursday. I couldn't get ahold of the hematologist, so I got to spend the weekend, sans Old Lady, with my pathology report and my good friend, the innernecks. BAD weekend.
I start looking this fucking thing up and it fucking blows, lemme tell you. There's nary a positive story with this fucker. Lots of chemo, lots of stem cell replacement, lots of memorial guest books to sign. I was working myself up into a fretful lather, the spawnage are running around like meth-addled bush babies, and the Old Lady was in fucking Chicago, living it up big-city-style. My lid had officially flipped its own lid.
But here's why the Old Lady is, and forever will be, the goddamn yin to my yang... the beans to my cornbread... the R2 to my D2... the fucking Engelbert to my Humperdink -- she called on Thursday night and we talked about the test results and shit, and she gets in the car the next day, blows off her conference and drives the fuck home. Against my protestations, I might add. That lady is the goddamn shiznit.
So we both sat around all weekend, depressed, doomed and glued to every fucking relevant/irrelevant case study we could find online. I don't know when or how the spawnage got fed, bathed or dressed, but somehow, they did. It was the longest fucking weekend ever, basically.
Today, I talked to both the pathologist and the blood doc. They said that while the fat pad results were indeed kinda shitty, the bone marrow test was totally clean, so that was a positive. The kicker is, Count Von Bloodula wants me to go to the goddamn Mayo Clinic for a few days to get all the same tests done again, plus a whole slew of new fucking tortures, at their fancy amyloidosis clinic up there. It's gonna be fucking biopsiriffic!!
We go to the doc to talk about what exactly is gonna go down on Thursday. In the meantime, I'm trying to stay away from Google, and I'm popping Xanax like fucking Mike & Ike's.
There -- wasn't that a fun little story?
As a reward for getting through that steaming turd of a post, I will leave you with a drawing that I caught Mr. Z and Miss O doing together last night. Miss O wielded the red marker, Mr. Z the black. If everything turns out well at Mayo, I'm thinking of getting this tattooed across my chest in their honor, for somehow making me laugh my ass off during all this fuckshit.
Well this week is on something that costs lots and hopefully benefits both yourself and your little person at the same time.
Our break came in the form of a trip to Aruba that Megan won through her work. If you're sitting at home with your little ones you can either throw stuff at the screen or you can take a little trip in your mind with me. If you chose the latter, go make yourself a pina colada. I'll wait...
I was out with Pyper and also our dog Malone – a bichon frise – he is a very smart and cunning little dog who thinks that he never gets fed. So with Pyper starting solids and we are also giving her little treats in between feeds – mars bars, ice cream you know that sort of thing!! NOT – Rusk's, and rice crackers – well Malone thinks this is just fair game and really for him it's like "stealing candy from a baby" well rice crackers anyway.
It's funny how something as seemingly insignificant as recording Zoë reading a book can have such a ripple effect on the rest of my kids. Zane (5), never one to be outdone is selecting and reading books like a madman. He practices alone on the couch and then brings the book to me proclaiming he's ready to read go and get the microphone. He's not at Zoë's reading level yet he remains undaunted in his zest to conquer new words, unfazed by the sibling rivalry that is surely brewing. I've struggled through countless books with him and he's not become frustrated once. I pray it's a trend that continues. 
I was sitting on the couch playing guitar when I heard the bathroom door open. Alleke scampered into the room looking for music like kids after an ice cream truck. She had escaped her bath in her birthday suit, which made my music her victory song as she giggled and galloped circles around the room.
Miss O stayed home today with her Caesarlandococci virus, and it looks like she's gonna be home again tomorrow. It's one of those weird-ass viruses where she's fine for like five hours, then her fever jumps up to 100 and she rolls into a ball on the couch until I can mainline some Children's Motrin into her.
If you are looking for an easy way to share news, photos and stories about your baby with friends and family - check out 
There's one thing that's pretty consistent about parenting your kids: You'll keep making mistakes with them. Whether it's getting angry, forgetting something, or treating them badly, we all seem to make our share of mistakes. And sometimes, there's only one thing you can do about it: 
After months and months of showing typical signs of teething (like drooling and excessive biting) our little man finally showed his first teeth. YAY!!! When the first tooth finally made an appearance I felt like he had been teething for the longest time ever (he showed first signs of teething at 4 months!). Anyway the first two are out now and this week we've had some very rough nights as he is now getting another two (or so we think). 
This weeks product review is on Safe & Sound Car Seat, Pyper has just about grown out of her capsule, Im a bit sad about that, we have to buy another one, so that is more money but once again its based on safety so what can you do!
As the parent of a toddler I'm continuously shocked by my misconceptions of what kind of parent I was going to be back when I was yet to have one. It's something we all go through when we start thinking about kids. I remember seeing a parent lose control once at a retail store and thinking "If that was my kid there would be none of that. No sir! My child will know who the boss is" Which didn't turn out to be too far from the truth, because let's face it we both know he's the boss. I'd visit friends with children and look around in amazement at the warehouse of toys that dared to take over their entire home. Again I'd say, "My child will know the joys of playing outside. Forget video games and personal DVD players. My child will like to read and will be able to carry on an actual conversation without referring to Pokeman or Yugi-o" Two years later Blue and Steve seem to be on an endless hunt for the latest clue and it's a wonder the wonder pets ever get turned off. 
