Baby Wong (Caleb Wong & Caris Wong & Obi Wong)

Sorry, Caris.  But I’m of the same opinion.  You’re free to go ice skating if you like.

Mukund (Ames, IA)

What do you think about the Winter Olympics in regard to the fact that all of the sports are incredibly specialized and open to a select few people who happen to have access to say, a bobsled track?

Bill Simmons

My only question with the Winter Olympics is why parents would choose to push their kids to be an Olympian in the first place. For instance, my daughter loves ice skating and she’d be great at it. But why the hell would I want to wake up at 5AM for the next 10 years so she could skate, and why would I want that life for her? Hey, here’s your upside – there’s a 0.000000000002 percent chance you might win a medal. That just seems insane to me. I’d rather my daughter was doing more important things, like watching Max and Ruby.

For those of you who don’t know, we are in Belize.  You may even know that we missed our plane Saturday morning, in case my poem/rhyme didn’t make sense.  Here’s a photo journal if we have the photos.

We were suppose to catch the 7am connecting flight to Dallas Saturday morning.  However due to poor planning, we barely missed the flight.  The next flight to Belize is the red-eye flight connecting in Miami.  We were always curious to see how our kids would handle the red-eye flight.  Looks like we get to find out.

The kids had fun at night at the airport.  We had to keep them up for the 9:25pm red-eye flight.  They were barely holding up.  When we get on the plane, Caris falls asleep in my arms rather quickly.  It is hard to hold her the whole time for almost five hours. Caleb, however, does not do so well.  The T.V. is on the whole time during the flight, and Caleb cannot peel his eyes off the television.  He’s captivated by it.  He only sleeps for 2 hours.  And the one rule we have with Caleb that we forgot about…  don’t mess with his sleep.

We have a five hour layover in Miami, so we’re hoping Caleb and Caris would just sleep at the airport. Caris does alright, although it is difficult for her to go and stay asleep.  Caleb, again, has trouble. It doesn’t help that there are birds flying INSIDE the airport.  But he just can’t sleep well outside his dark room.

<— See the birds?

Both kids are awake on the Miami to Belize flight.  It’s morning time for them even though they only got a fraction of the sleep they normally get.  And they’re hungry and it’s breakfast time.  And it’s only a 2 hour flight.  No point trying 2 hours to get Caleb to sleep for 5 minutes.  Caris still tries to find time to get some sleep whenever she can though.

The flight to Belize is not the final destination though.  Oh no.  We still have to fly to Ambergris Caye.  Big planes are not needed.  In fact big planes won’t fit on that airport.

I know some might be scared of these little airplanes.  But they are fun and exhilarating.  The trip doesn’t end there though.  A boat ride to the resort, and we should finally get there.

Now it’s time to lounge around.  It’s been a long trip to get here.

And it’s hot!

Very hot!

But we’re here.  And sometimes we just need to chill and zone out.  Guess what we’re doing here.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

We rented a golf cart the other day.  On our way back to our resort from town, this guy stops us in the road.  This guy happens to be one of those timeshare recruiter guys who offers you something in order to hear their spiel to buy a timeshare.  Normally they give you free breakfast or lunch or even cash.  We got $100 cash last time we were here.  This was different though.  Instead, he handed us this scratch off card like a lottery ticket.

Yvonne scratches her ticket gets one palm tree and 2 big X’s on her ticket.  I scratch off my ticket and I got three palm trees.  This is good, right?

Well, everyone is a winner here at Village Reef.  That single palm tree gets you $25 or something.  I don’t know the exact prize.  But the real winner here is the three palm trees.  We take a look at the back and that’s the big prize!  There are three possible prizes.  A) Caribbean vacation.  B) $1000 HP Laptop.  C) $700 US cash.  I want the cash.

However the choice is not ours to make.  There’s a “void if remove” part on the ticket will reveal what we actually won.  However, we’ll have to go through the timeshare spiel in order to claim our prize.

The next morning we go back to there to claim our free breakfast and big prize.  We meet up with Laura (who by the way was 100x better than the Williamsburg spiel-er).  We were not interested, and went on to collect our prize.  Guess what we got.

I could use a laptop or sell it.  The cash works even better.  But when are we going to be able to go on another vacation in the next 12 months?  Worst off it’s not redeemable for cash and non-transferable (unless authorized, whatever that means).  Hopefully we can sell this or give it away.  The place was nice though.

No Nexus One for me yet.

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

Off to Belize we go.
Mommy and Daddy and Caleb and Caris
Wake up early to go

Over the river and through the woods
Off to the airport we go
But Mommy and Daddy are late again
American Airlines says no

Over the river and through the woods
Off to home we go
The kids are tired, the parents are weary
But we’re going to sleep at home

Over the river and through the woods
Off to Belize we go
We’ll try tonight to go again
Our plans are put on hold

I’m not really into those “I’m going poop” Twitter or Facebook status updates.  Those types of messages usually fall into the disgusting, boring, and TMI category.  But this requires a special post because of the monstrosity I witnessed today.  I love you, Yvonne.  The wonderful things you get to see while married and pregnant.

So I come upstairs to see Yvonne on the toilet going poo poo.  I’ve been downstairs for approximately five minutes, and she’s been on the toilet the whole time.  Naturally she’s a quick pooper and is done within a minute or two, unlike me and my male peers who can go for hours.  So it was unusual to see her still there.  Summarizing her own words, she said she had to go but it won’t come out.  I leave the bathroom and begin to move our cat downstairs when she calls to me, “come see the baby I just made.”  I’m thinking, “that’s disgusting”, and I have to move the cat downstairs.  But she insists I look at this baby.

And boy oh boy, was that a big baby.

I have never seen anything like it before.  It was beautiful and disgusting all at once.  This was the poop of a lifetime.  It was hard to measure since I didn’t want to stick my face in the toilet with this monstrous poop. But from my visual estimates standing up, I would have to guess that this baby was at least 4 inches in diameter and maybe 6 to 7 inches long.  That’s like a small football (American).  Yvonne probably lost like 4 pounds after that poop session.  This was amazing.

Pregnancy can do fascinating (or scary depending on how you look at it) things to the female body.  This is just one of the side effects, at least for Yvonne.  You eat extra food, and that waste has to go somewhere.  From a combination of being pregnant and a lack of drinking water, we were able to witness this once-in-a-lifetime poop.

I apologize for lack of pictures.  A moment like this should have been captured on camera.

Update: I forgot to mention that this poop, not surprisingly, clogged the toilet.

Like father, like son.

I got the better of him though.  I did mine at a wedding reception!

Start Slide Show with PicLens Lite

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/100115/one

The "Kramer Vs. Kramer" Award for "Best Performance by a Father and Son"

The Sports Gal and my daughter went back East last weekend, which sounded like an awesome idea until I remembered there were four football games. I got a babysitter for Saturday. For Sunday, I decided to wing it: tired my son out in the early morning, set him up in front of the TV in the late morning then hoped he’d fall asleep watching "Max & Ruby" or "Scooby-Doo." Within about five minutes of kickoff, he was screaming, "Outside! Outside!" I left the back door open, then half-watched him and half-watched the Pats game while also changing jerseys three different times. (Seriously, what were the odds of them winning as I did this? 100-1?) I finally hooked him on "Dora the Explorer" — the episode in which Dora had to find something and the backpack and the map helped her, and then they did it (inside joke for the parents out there) — and he fell asleep just in time for the start of Pack-Cards, allowing me to watch my fourth loser of the weekend get crushed out of the gate … but as soon as they started coming back, he woke up. From there, I had to half-watch him and the game the rest of the time. And the Pack ended up losing, as you know.

Now, here’s where you think I’m going to give you the old "The lesson as always: Don’t have kids" line.

Nope.

See, I knew I was losing last weekend. (Kids + gambling = losses.) That’s why I wagered very little. But after the games, when I was super-depressed, we went to an outdoor mall called the Grove and my son threw a no-hitter. No meltdowns. Held my hand when I wanted. Didn’t throw any food when we were eating Mexican. Successfully pulled off a trip to a three-story bookstore with escalators without losing a finger or knocking over a shelf. Stayed on my lap when we rode the trolley. While holding an ice cream he even enticed two women to come over to him, then bend over even though they weren’t wearing bras or underwear. (OK, I’m exaggerating a little. They were wearing thongs.) It was more amazing than Kurt Warner’s performance a few hours earlier.

We drove home, then I gave him a bath and washed the Mexican food off his face and hair. He did his calling card — pointing down to his groin and screaming, "PEE-NISSSSSS!" then waiting a beat, pointing a little lower and screaming, "BALLLLLLLLLLLLLLZ!!!!!" — and I laughed my ass off like I always do. Then we put on his PJs, read a book and put him to bed. And as I was turning off the light, he said, "Thank you, Dada."

Here’s the point: In the old days, there was nothing that could have cheered me up after 0-4 and the ugly demise of a Patriots season. This time? My kid cheered me up. So if you’re ever wondering about the pros/cons of having kids, add this story to the "pros" list.

(And when he fed his dirty diaper to our dog the following morning, add that to the "cons.")

Yvonne and I like watch Supernanny sometimes while we eat dinner.  For those of you who don’t know what the show is about, the Supernanny (Jo) visits these dysfunctional families almost always with 3 or more kids and teaches them how to solve their problems.  The show actually does teach us some things, but I joking tell Yvonne the thing this show teaches me the most is to get a vasectomy.

We had a June deadline this year to decide if we wanted to have another child.  If we didn’t get pregnant by that deadline, or decided we didn’t want another child by then, I’d get a vasectomy.  Well there’s no need to wait for the deadline, cause Yvonne is pregnant with child number 3.

We’re still early on this one (only 5 weeks along), but if everything goes right he’ll have an estimated date of September 8 of popping out of Yvonne.  And yes, I did say “he.”  Not that I know what the sex is, nor would we have any idea at this point, but I finally broke Yvonne down and got the green light for the name Obadiah.  I think it’s more the point that we used up all of our names that I got the green light.  So if it’s a boy, and Yvonne doesn’t veto the name later on, we’re going to be calling our son Obi-Wong!

Of course if it’s a girl, or we decide later that we don’t want Obi-Wong, we have no ideas for another name.  I think we’ll have to go with another ‘C’ name with 5 letters.  A girl name might be easier to come up with, since a girl can pretty much be called anything and not be made fun of.  However, with a boy, I wouldn’t want my son to have some flowery name.  And I don’t want to call him Chuck.  If possible I would like the initials to be some technology acronym like CSS or XML.  But I can’t think of any tech acronym that ends in W.  Maybe WWW, but that is all.

Even with a vasectomy, I don’t know if that can stop a machine like me.  My boys are too strong to be stopped by a surgical procedure.  Each time that I’ve knocked up Yvonne, I’ve broken through on the first unsafe instance.  There’s no stopping me and my little guys.

Here’s Caris playing with Caleb’s “new red car.”