Haircut for Daddie

Civilian haircuts are generally designed to achieve two main purposes: 1. Shorten hair length and 2. Improve appearance. In today's activity, Haircut for Daddie, we certainly achieved one of those two objectives.  Here's me before the festivities began.  (Note: hair has been fluffed to clearly demonstrate its full magnitude.)

My most recent haircut had been administered just before halloween and was supposed to make me look like the boy from The Cat in the Hat. So, it had been a while and the ol' weeds had grown pretty thick. Other daddies may be able to relate to how hard it can be to find time for personal maintenance, so I decided to do the thing myself, with help from the kids.

With a one-inch guard on the clipper, I turned the kids loose on my dome, snapping cell phone pictures in an attempt to document the proceedings.  My inability to aim the camera lens with my extended left hand, along with the blurred images and weird bathroom lighting end up making the whole thing look just like a bad slasher film. It really is more fun if, as you scroll, you just imagine you’re watching stills from a horror movie.

 

Whoever played the lunatic character with the bad haircut was totally overacting with that constant insane grin.  I mean, seriously!

Iris was the victim in the corner and grippng my neck, frightened as expected by the sound of the clipper and vacuum.  Jane and Sam enjoyed taking turns clipping, but they kept wanting to shave their own and each other’s heads.  They really had more fun sweeping and vacuuming up the thirteen pounds of hair on the floor.  After cleanup we had a four-person family bath, which was splendid. 

I did a bunch of touch-up work during nap time, but will still certainly get made fun of by my students tomorrow.

Fun Rating:  Haircut alone might be a 7.5 because Iris was so petrified and I had to work to keep one of the kids from cutting their or a sibling's hair.  If you throw in the floor cleanup and bath, it raises the score to about 8.5 for the whole shebang. We'll be back on Tuesdays again next week.  

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Wednesday With Daddie

Due to a funny schedule thing, I went in to work today, which means I'll be home on Weds, with a full post by Thursday at the latest. As though someone was worried about it!
Also, due to a swift veto by Mondays with Mommie, this week's activity will not be Making Meatballs, as hoped. Given the rate at which our girls ingest play-doh, markers, and loose change, it does seem best to wait a few years before resuming activities involving the direct handling of raw meat. Note to self: I must be disciplined about my forgiveness-easier-than-permission policy as it relates to discussing potential tuesday ideas casually around the house.

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spider web

My kids love tape, and really, what's not to love? It comes on a roll, you can stick things to one side of it, and that's about all there is to know.  The truth is I'm usually very stingy handing it out, but for this week's acitivity  I had to put that aside.  The idea was to give the kids all the tape they wanted and have them go crazy sticking strips together to create a huge spider web.  At the Home Depot this weekend, I grabbed roll of painter's tape for only $3.48, which is less than you would pay for your daily Triple Baconator at Wendy's.  The plan was coming together.

Side note: Blue painter's tape possesses a rare combination of properties found nowhere else on earth, making it ideal for child care and amusement purposes.  Its like a roll of duct tape married a stack of post-its and they had a blue baby.  Somehow, it manages to adhere strongly to a wide variety of surfaces (including children), yet removes easily without a residue.  You can even untangle it when it gets twisted and sticks to itself, which is great for the little clumsy ones in my family.

To get in the mood, we started out by pretending to be spiders.  Sam provided a detailed tutorial in backwards spider walking (v similar to crab).  We reviewed what spiders do (catch and eat bugs) and what they make (webs).  We made spider teeth with our fingers, and then it was on.  I helped get it all started by sticking some big pieces, but once they got the hang of it they could easily connect pieces together.  Throwing caution to the wind, I kept handing out strip after strip of tape and the web took shape.

Once we had a basic web up, we drew bugs on paper.  We ripped these out and stuck them in the web, along with whatever else it would support.  I had to help the girls ("no, this is the sticky side"), who are still mastering the subtleties of tape.

A highlight came when sam got his sister's ultra-cute garden fairy doll to stick in the web, at which point he descended on it and pretended to eat it like a spider.  I cannot be certain about the existence of fairies, but I do know one thing:  if they are real, and if one got caught by a spider, and if someone happened to get a video of it,  THAT video would go viral, for sure.

In all, we had a ton of fun trapping and devouring bugs in our web.  I had to monitor the web and ensure that it stayed at a height above the twins' heads, allowing them to move around easily without breaking the strands that Sam had placed.  They still managed to take a good chunk of it apart, which kind of made Sam lose his mind.  I kept busy repairing torn pieces in their wake.  Frugal daddies will be happy to hear that I was able to salvage about a half-baconator's worth of tape, rewinding it around the roll for use on another Tuesday.

Fun Rating: 8.5 out of 10.  We had a ton of fun and Sam really got into the whole spider scenario.  I had to help and monitor the girls, but it was worth it.

Shop Vac

Anyone who has had the pleasure of cleaning up a job site with a shop vac has felt that thrill, the rush of power that comes with vac-ing up seemingly anything in sight, no matter how improbable.  Wow, those nails! No way, that pile of sawdust and rubble!  Caught up in the swirling moment, reality can begin to blur.  I ... just ... vacuumed.... a pony!

In hopes of passing on that excitement to my young children, I conceived today's activity.  First, the kids and I would make a huge mess by ripping up old magazines and some Scientology pamphlets, throwing them everyhwere.  Then, armed with the shop vac, the kids would  gobble everything up.  Vacs plural, as it turned out, because I got all greedy and borrowed my neighbor's, too. 

The activity started swimmingly, the kids ripping paper pieces, which made a satisfying "thwack" as they shot into the hose.

Sam took to the vacuuming immediately while Jane tore up magazines, but Iris started crying from all the noise.    Then, strangely enough, the paper pieces occasionally started to jam in the corrugated tube of the vacuum (what the?).  This was kind of disappointing until it led to a major discovery, on the order of finding penicillin in orange mould.  Turns out when you switch the vac hose from suck to blow (and no, Dad, that's not what She Said) it turns the jammed hose into an awesome confetti cannon!  Readers, I will be certain to design a future Tuesday activity around precisely this feature!

So, Sam loved it and Jane was soon manning the second vac.   Iris eventually got over her fear and settled into the role of paper ripper/thrower.  Jane figured out that if she stuck the hose on Sam, it would suck hard enough to stick.  This move was disallowed.  We tore and threw and vac-ed until we tripped a breaker, then reset the breaker and kept playing until we tripped it again.

Fun Rating: 8  Shop Vac was a super awesome activity, but paper size had to be smaller than I anticipated to avoid hose jams and we kept blowing the breaker.  Vac-as-cannon discovery was a silver lining.
Waffles

Making Waffles

The inspiration for today's activity came from a McDonald's happy meal toy that we got somewhere (and not McDonald's, smart alecks). It's a little plastic donkey, the one from Shrek, and for some reason he has a waffle in his mouth.  If you swivel its head, it shouts "my waffle!",  "hot waffle!", or "rat waffle!", I'm not sure which, but definitely in the voice of Eddie Murphy.  I have not seen that movie, but the toy certainly made me want waffles for lunch.
The kids and I opted for the basic waffle recipe from Joy of Cooking. They had fun mixing the dry ingredients, but wanted to bite each other about who got use the whisk.  I gave each twin a beater from the hand mixer and lied to them, claiming that these were whisks too, just like their brother's.  Before long, everyone got fairly bored with the mixing, and soon Sam was shining a flashlight into the batter, which is not an official part of the Joy's recipe.
The kids were pretty psyched for that moment when the first waffle came out golden, and this is one of those times when looking at normal things through kid eyes gives a nice perspective.  The batter-to-waffle metamorphosis is pretty magical, like a little batter caterpillar going in her  non-stick coccoon, only to emerge four minutes later as a delicious crunchy-outside-fluffy-inside butterfly.  It really is cooler than you probably remember.  The kids ate a bunch, with some left to share with the neighbor across the hall.
Fun Rating: 7 out of 10. Better than TV and we ended up with lunch.