cascadian telegrams

happy birthday malcolm

Happy Birthday to Malcolm who is nine years old on Friday June 24 2011!  Here he is with Bangsi the new dog which is what he has wanted for over two years...

 

 

Today/ Age 9 (striking a pose with 'Yugioh' card deck thingy which I don't understand...)

 

 

and Ages 8/ 7 / 6/ 5 / 4 / 3 / 2/ 1/ 0

 

In the last year:

• He's grown to 56.5"/ 143.51 cm or ~ 4' 9" (still about 93rd percentile for height)
• He's added about 14 lbs bringing him to ~100 lbs (97th percentile)

We had a small birthday party this year with a few friends where we grilled and a small pack of boys ran Bangsi ragged, but not before he got 'hold of Malcolm's trousers with his teeth and gave them a good tug!  Have to wean him off of that behavior :).

Malcolm has really changed a lot in the last year, but he's not too old for me to give him the traditional Danish birthday song!

I dag er det Malcolms fødselsdag!  (today is Malcolm's birthday) 

Hurra! Hurra! Hurra! 
Han sikkert sig en gave får             (he's sure he'll find a gift) 
som han har ønsket sig i år            (that is something he's wished for this year) 
og dejlig chokolade med kage til.   (and delicious chocolate and cake)

Hvor smiler han, hvor er han glad   (how he smiles and is happy) 
Hurra! Hurra! Hurra! 
Men denne dag er også rar,            (but his day is also nice) 
for hjemme venter mor og far       (for mother and father are waiting at home) 
med dejlig chokolade med kage til.  (with delicious chocolate and cake)

Og når han hjem fra skolen går,       (and now he walks home from school) 
Hurra! Hurra! Hurra! 
Så skal han hjem og holde fest,       (he plans to go home to a party) 
og hvem der kommer med som gæst,  (and those who come with him are guests) 
får dejlig chokolade med kage til.    (finding delicious chocolate and cake)

Til slut vi råber højt i kor.                 (until at last we shout loudly in chorus) 
Hurra! Hurra! Hurra! 
Gid Malcolm længe leve må               (and wish Malcolm a long life) 
og sine ønsker opfyldt få -                (and may he find his wishes fulfilled) 
og dejlig chokolade med kage til.

 

all the birthday snaps can be seen here.

 

good gourd: sunday at the pumpkin patch

Beautiful Sunday today so off to Remlinger Farms and the pumpkin patch with Malcom’s BFF Julian, his mum Marleen and neighborhood friends Michael and Jack with their mum Terri. 

I’d never actually been to Remlinger before.  I was expecting more of an apple orchard/pumpkin patch, but they’re a self-styled “family fun park” with rides, animal petting area, hay rides, a restaurant and lots of other stuff.  And it was mobbed.  So not what what I had in mind really, but the kids had fun!

 

after rides and the animal petting area it was off to the corn maze, where you enjoy yourself by wandering around in the tall corn and get lost for a while

The pumpkins were a bit picked over actually, but a decent afternoon out.  And my favorite holiday is just around the corner!

snaps are here.

field day

school’s (almost) out… for.. summer!  field day 2010 included face painting and a photo booth.

grandparents day

May was ‘Grandparents Day’ at Malcolm’s school and my parents popped in for a visit.  Each grandparent talked about what school was like for them and described some of their strongest memories.  For my mum, it  was being afraid to speak in front of the class… she’s still nervous doing it.  And for my dad, it was being in a parochial school classroom in NYC with eighty kids!

baseketball jones

We had a basketball hoop in our backyard when I was growing up and spent untold hours out there playing ball. It was the nexus of our block. In fact, I have a memory of spotting the ball for my brother Matt @ the foul line and I seem to recall him sinking 100 in a row.  It could be a false memory, but it was certainly quite a few, and he definitely has the hand-eye coordination to do it.

*Anyway*,  we thought Malcolm would love a place to shoot hoops too, so we put up a hoop (and a fence panel to keep the ball from bonking the neighbor’s car) in back.  My neighbor Doug had a rusty old, super heavy-duty steel backboard from a city park which we sanded down and repainted, and we sunk a 6x6” cedar post for the welded mount on the backboard and added a bamboo fence panel to match the rest of the yard.

The backboard weighs a ton so we put a sheet of plywood across my neighbor’s pickup bed as a scaffold and bolted the backboard onto the pole.  Luckily the holes we drilled lined up:  It’s positioned at 8’ 3” now while he’s small and there are holes to move the backboard to 10’/regulation height in a few years once he’s older.

Sure enough, Malcolm loves it and plays out there nearly every day after school, and the neighbor kids are using it too which is great.

My dad did most of the work on this.. thanks dad!

ninja or mythbuster?

Malcolm has decided that he will be either a professional ninja or one of the MythBusters when he grows up.  Since the former is rather unlikely, we’re betting on the latter.

That means he needs a place to create bombs from diet coke and mentos like the MythBusters, an Iron Man costume like this one on Instructables and other things that make a mess and/or require a hot glue gun, soldering iron or arc welder.  This means a workbench.  So I created this one for him.. I think it’s dead sexy, what do you think?

OK you can stop laughing now.

The best part is that most of it came from lumber we had lying around from the fence and other projects.  I bought the peg board (and painted it ‘Bengal Orange’, just because I can) and some doubled-up 3/4” sign board for the top, plus shop lights but the rest was left-over 4x4 post.

The shop was quite a mess prior to this.  Once I sorted everything out, I realized I had, like, 5 hammers and 4 hacksaws, because I couldn’t find one before and bought another one.  More than once.  I hope to avoid this phenomenon for a while.

model citizens

Malcolm and I did this glue-up, cut-away model of the USS Enterprise in August. I loved building models as a kid and wanted to get him started on hit… even though I did most of the fine detail work, he did some of every stage of the model.

It was also an opportunity for the both of us to discover American Eagle Hobby Shop in Lake City, which is a Seattle institution.  My friend John has been buying models and supplies there for over 35 years!  They have a huge selection of models and supplies including model trains in the basement. 

Sadly, John says that when he used to go in there on a Saturday as a kid, the placed was packed with kids.  When I went in there, it was mostly older and middle-aged guys (like me) and mostly empty.  I guess kids don’t build models so much any more.  They seem thrilled to see Malcolm in there though, and he was hugely excited by the Star Trek and Star Wars models.  We’ll be back, for sure.

taking the kid-heads bowling

a belated ‘Happy Seventh Birthday!’ to Malcolm who turned 7 on June 24th.  For his birthday we took him and his friends for cosmic bowling at Spin Alley up in Shoreline.  ‘Twas fun… they replace the gutters on the kids’ lanes with rubber bumpers so that nobody goes home as gutterball king :). 

Vital stats for Malcolm’s Seven Year-Mark: 

Height:  50 inches (last year:  47 3/4”) (92nd percentile, where he’s been all along)

Weight:  70 lbs.  (last year: 54 lbs) (96th percentile, a bit high!)

Last year’s birthday is here; all the birthday snaps are here.

faux hawk

Malcolm gets a ‘faux hawk’ haircut – after I wouldn’t let hm get a mohawk – 6/6/09.  He may not yet bend the ball like Beckham, but he can sure bend his hair like him!

family and bicycle rides

we’re trying to make a Sunday tradition of taking a family bicycle ride together.  Today we went out along the Burke-Gilman to the Chittenden Locks to watch the boats go through for a while.

I love going down to the Locks.  It smells of the sea, there’s stuff to engage kids there and in summer you can watch salmon climbing the fish ladder on their way back to Lake Washington.  Also it’s an easy ride along the Burke-Gilman to the Locks (the missing link from 24th Ave to the Locks is planned for the near future).  We pass both the Fremont Sunday Market and the Ballard Sunday Farmers Market along the way, and crossing the locks is a much better way to reach Magnolia and Discovery Park on a bike versus the Ballard Bridge.

Malcolm has one of those trailer-bike thingies so I tow him on these rides.  I want him to appreciate the sense of freedom you have on a bicycle… he loves it so far.

On an unrelated-family note:  It was a week/weekend for my brothers too.  My brother Matt and his wife Colleen popped into town from L.A. for some things they had going on up here this weekend so we got to see them briefly which was nice, and my brother Dave just returned safely to Oregon from a 5,000 mile motorcycle trip.  I’m glad/relieved he’s back!