Notes From the Asylum

New Years in Vegas

We spent a nice quiet New Years with 10 kids and 8 adults in Las Vegas. The last few years we have gathered with our friends the Bellamorosos (Paul, Niki, and their 3 children) and the Stones (Max, Cecilia, and their 4 children) at the Stone's house. Last year the Bellamorosos moved to the Seattle area, so we thought that we might need to scale back this year. Instead, it turns out that it was Paul Amoroso's 50th birthday, so we all decided instead to do a joint trip to celebrate his birthday and New Year's in Las Vegas.

We started off by rousing the kids around 3:45am in order to get to the airport on time. Despite this, the kids did reasonably well on the long flight and we made it to Vegas with no problems. We stayed at the Venetian Hotel, which is a nice, Venice-themed hotel right on the strip. Nonetheless, our first afternoon was largely spent napping. Eventually, we made it out of the room, met up with the Bellamorosos and wandered around the Venetian Hotel's Venice-themed mall, ate some Gelato, watched the living statues (actors dressed all in white and with white makeup that stand perfectly still), and went on a gondola ride on the hotel's indoor river.

The next day we met up with the Stones as well and went on a Pink Jeep (tm) tour of the Hoover Dam. It was an excellent tour, with a tour guide that was really into the Transformers movie and was able to tell us in great detail about where all of the movie robots landed and where the movie got some dam-related details wrong.

Paul is a big Beatles fan, so the next day, New Year Eve, we went to Cirque du Soleil's Love, which was a lot of fun. I'm sure the kids didn't appreciate it as much as the adults, but they certainly enjoyed the show. Afterwards, we decided it was probably best to not be on the strip itself for the New Years Eve festivities, so we went back to the hotel, played games, ordered room service, and watched the fireworks out the window (and on TV, since our view out the window wasn't actually that good).

It was at about this point in the trip when I was helping Liam get dressed and realized that he was wearing 3 pairs of underpants. Apparently, I had been reminding him throughout the trip to put on clean underwear, but didn't think to remind him to take his dirty underwear off first. My bad. Lesson learned.

On New Years Day, we returned home, taking the red eye, and even that was delayed, making for a pretty long night, but the kids were tired enough that they got some sleep in the airport and on the plane (except Ashlyn, who has never been much of a sleeper, but who also, fortunately, handles lack of sleep better than the others), so even that turned out just fine in the end.

It was a great trip, but it was also nice to be back home.

Failing to Destoy the Evidence

LeAnn was laid out with some bug yesterday, which let Liam and Gwyneth more or less have run of the house while she stayed in bed. At one point Gwyneth came upstairs to LeAnn to ask her how to delete pictures from the camera. LeAnn, as you might imagine, decided it might be worth looking at the pictures that were about to be deleted. There was a sequence of photos of Liam, first standing on the arm of the new couch, then in a series of mid-air poses. Since our camera requires about 5 seconds between shots, this was obviously accomplished over some number of attempts. They both got in trouble, leading Gwyneth to protest, leading to an important lecture on what it means to be an accessory to a crime.

Liam on Religion

Liam started taking religious education classes at Church this year. He's officially too young because he just missed the school year cutoff, but he enjoys going and the teachers don't mind. He even went to some classes at the end of last year, some of which I was a sub for, and he was much better behaved and more attentive than most of the kindergardeners that are in the class -- not that that is hard.

In any case, whether it is because he is taking these classes or something else, he has been in a bit of a theological mood recently. He recently came into our bedroom somewhere around 5:30am, climbed into bed, flailed around for a while, than finally turned over to me and asked, "Dad, when I talk to God, why doesn't he talk back?" I was not at my top of my theological game at that hour, so was reasonably proud to have mumbled something about having to learn to listen before I went back to sleep. Though now that I think about it, it may be just that he is talking to God at the wrong time of day.

I brought home advent calendars from the store last weekend, which lead to the inevitable countdown towards Christmas. Liam, wanting a little more information about this whole birthday-of-Jesus thing, asked LeAnn if she was alive when Jesus was. She assured him that she was certainly not alive when Jesus was. He picked up the discussion again this morning when he wanted to know how old Jesus was going to be on his birthday this year.

The George of the Jungle Game

Liam has slowly hoarded various coins for some time now and recently managed to build his collection up to $1 in change. As it turns out, $1 is how much it costs to rent a movie from the library for a week, so he decided to do so. He checked out the DVD for Disney's "George of the Jungle." Liam especially likes the physical humor of George swinging into trees (and there is no lack of that in the movie).

For some reason, the children decided that they were going to have a contest to see who would be George of the Jungle. Ashlyn decided that one of the contests would be to hit each other on the head with a bat and whoever could be hit the hardest would "win." Liam thought this was a fine idea until she actually proceeded to hit him in the head with his (padded, but still solid) bat. Before LeAnn got outside to break up the "contest," he managed to get his turn in.

After all this, I believe Gwyneth won the contest by climbing up the door frame until she hit her head on the ceiling.

Buying a Car

Ashlyn informed me recently that she is saving her allowance and stashing it away under her bed because she will be allowed to drive in 5 years and wants to buy herself a car when the time comes. At $2 every other week, I'm not sure what kind of car she will be able to buy in five years, but the intention is a good one. This was about a week ago. Today I came home and she had bought herself an electronic "Deal or No Deal" game with her allowance money. I'm not sure if she did the math or whether she just couldn't resist the temptation of the play-at-home, electronic version of a Howie Mandell game show (and, really, who could blame her?)

Delaware Beach Vacation

We spent a week on Bethany Beach in Delaware with Susan, Alan, Corwin, Charles, and Alice, who we also went to the Ozarks with last year. This year, however, we swapped out Alan's brother and his family for LeAnn's sister and her family. We drove down on a Saturday, which wasn't so bad, though traffic was a bit heavier than I would have hoped for a Saturday.

We spent the week in a big house not far from the beach in a complex with a pool, tennis, basketball, and a shuttle to the beach. I played tennis for the first time in many years and lost repeatedly to Sue. We tried to teach some of the kids to play: Corwin did pretty well, Ashlyn was playing for the first time but seemed to have fun. We spent most of the week on the beach, either the town beach (which was incredibly busy) or the state park beach, which was much more sane and even had parking. We took one day to take a nature cruise of the harbor and to try to catch some stuff in a big net (we caught crabs, small fish, seaweed, and a surprising amount of what appeared to be pavement). We also spent one night on a nocturnal ghost crab hunt. We also went out for one night to a seafood place where a number of people (including LeAnn) got a large pile of crabs, which took quite some effort to get out of their shells (I got soft shelled crabs, which seemed the best of both worlds).

The kids all got along great. Charles and Corwin showed Ashlyn a number of computer games and Alice and Liam were pretty well inseparable. LeAnn found the two of them sitting alone at one point on a couch in one of the bedrooms. She asked what they were doing and they said that they were talking.

We drove back on Saturday and had even worse traffic, so we called my parents from the road, found them home, and stopped in at their house for a break. We eventually decided to stay for dinner and then to spend the night, which was a nice added vacation bonus and helped to make the drive back more pleasant.

For more on the vacation, go here and continue on.

WOW

The director of the religious education program at church was asked to recruit a kid for a Catholic kids' gameshow on the Boston Catholic TV station. Gwyneth was a year younger than they were looking for, but the director asked me if she could do it as she was pretty sure that Gwyneth had a big enough mouth to pull it off (I think her words were something along the lines of "is mature and outgoing" but I know what she meant).

I took some time off work and the whole family took her to the studio for the taping. The gameshow is called WOW. Each episode has a theme (called the "Wuddabout"). There are eight kids in each episode, broken up into two groups of four that each play for half of the episode. The host, Father Reed, asks questions about the theme and the four kids answer them. More or less anytime anyone answers any questions, they get a "Wowser," which is a foam cutout of the word "WOW." At the end of the 15 minutes, the kid with the most foam words wins the game.

The "wuddabout" for Gwyneth's episode was "poverty." Father Reed started off by asking questions about what poverty is, what makes you rich, etc. He went down the row twice, with Gwyneth getting credit for telling us that poverty means poor people and that something that she cares about is her doll. Gwyneth then shot up her hand and was fortunate to be on the end of the row nearest the host and got to explain the story of the Good Samaritan (in much more detail than I would have guessed she knew, so they must be teaching her something in Religious Ed) just before the buzzer and was the winner of a WOW t-shirt and a boogie board.

In the second half of the show, with the other four kids, they were asked what they, as kids, could do to help poor people. They all started raising their hands and answering a combination of things that missed the point ("I would give them a job") and repeated answers (I think there were about three of the kids that said they would provide food). The host completely lost control of the show and they never got past that question. In the end there was a three-way tie during that segment and so Gwyneth was the only one who ended up with the boogie board (everyone got t-shirts).

Gwyneth on Long Division

Ashlyn has been taking a pre-algebra class at a local math school that does a variety of math classes outside regular school hours. She likes it and has done pretty well in it. LeAnn thought it might be good to enroll Gwyneth in a similar class since we had a good experience with Ashlyn. So, she took Gwyneth to the school last week to take a placement test. Gwyneth took the test for about an hour, which wasn't enough time to finish it, but instead of going from beginning to end, she skipped around as she felt like answering questions. One set of problems that she skipped over entirely were the long division problems, which she has been doing perfectly for some time, though she finds them a little tedious, which is why she skipped them on the test. When the instructor looked at the test, he commented on how Gwyneth obviously didn't know how to do long division as she had skipped that section entirely. LeAnn tried to explain that she is fully capable of doing long division problems and that she did long division practice regularly at home. Gwyneth admitted that she did and added, "Believe me, it's a nightmare."

Amusement Park Adventures

I took today off from work to take the family to Canobie Lake Park, which is a nice amusement park just over the New Hampshire border. It's big enough to have plenty for everyone to do (even Liam), it has a pretty good water park, and it's easy to get to. Gwyneth insisted that I take her on the Yankee Cannonball, which is an old-time, wooden roller coaster. Nothing particularly scary about it, except for the standard first drop, which is actually pretty reasonable as first drops go. Nonetheless, she closed her eyes the entire way up and claimed to be recovering for most of the remainder of the 52 second long ride, enjoying only about "15 seconds" of it, which is about the time we spent coasting into the station. In fact, it seems she was still recovering hours later as she had what can best be described as flashbacks when she went on the water flume and freaked out on LeAnn when approaching the big splash drop at the end.

Liam in the meantime requested to go on the kids' bumper cars over and over, even though he wasn't so good at maneuvering and the operator had to keep walking over to his car to help him steer away from the wall. No sooner would she help him to freedom then he would try to run her over. Cute kid.

The last time I took the kids to an amusement park was last fall when we went to some sort of county fair with our friends from across the street. Liam went on the cars that go around in a circle on a platform. He took it pretty seriously. A cute little four-year-old girl sat down in the seat next to him and kept poking him in the arm to get his attention, but he was way too focused on steering to pay her any notice. The girl's mother was near my outside the fence and kept yelling to her daughter to "leave the little boy alone."

The girls, on the other hand, insisted on finding the wildest ride they thought they could stomach. Ashlyn, who managed to actually vomit on the way to the park today due to motion sickness in the car, has never been much for fast rides. Gwyneth pretends that she is, but doesn't quite live up to her bravado. In the end, they chose the Bobslead, which spins dangling cars around at high speed while playing extra loud rock music, though it stays on the ground and doesn't do anything particularly nasty. The girls started off well enough, smiling and waving to me the first couple of times past. By about the third time around they had stopped smiling and waving and by about the fifth time around they were waving to ask for mercy with looks of horror on their faces (though Gwyneth still claims that she was waving to stop the ride on Ashlyn's behalf only). The ride operator, in a move that I have never seen before, actually did show mercy and stopped the ride to let them off in the middle. Unfortunately for Gwyneth, there's no way to do that on a roller coaster or a flume.

Ashlyn's Letter about Literature

Ashlyn recently submitted an entry to the "Letters about Literature" contest where 4th through 12th graders write letters to an author of a book that changed the way they think about themselves or the world. This is a national contest with winners in each state. Massachusetts had the second most entries after California. Ashlyn wrote a letter to Robin McKinley about her book, "Beauty," which is a retelling of the Beauty and the Beast story. LeAnn had to proofread for spelling and punctuation, which are not Ashlyn's strong points, but other than that, she did it on her own. While she didn't win, she was in the top-five for the 4-6 grade age group. We all got to visit the Massachusetts State House for an awards ceremony. Our state representative and state senator also had formal congratulations proclamations drawn up and signed and delivered at the ceremony. It was a nice ceremony (well, Liam didn't think so) and we took a tour of the State House afterwards.

Here is the letter that she wrote.