Game Craze 2010

It all started simply with Candy Land. It's an easy game that doesn't require counting past two. You draw a card and if it has two colored squares, you move your token that many colored squares ahead. There is absolutely no strategy or skill to the game. We move next into Chutes and Ladders (and the strange variant, Snakes and Ladders). This has the added complexity of having to count based on a die roll. Both Candy Land and C&L have the ability to last forever. Very annoying games. I was glad when I introduced Dylan to Go-Fish, but still made the mistake of showing him War.

The last few weeks have broadened still with Jenga and Uno. A little more skill and strategy is involved and we have had some fun with those.

This week has been pretty tough. The Chess Club at school kicked off and Dylan had to know all about it. It was like going from addition and subtraction to doing geometry. He is picking it up, though. Carol is really much better with him and Chess than I. He needs constant reminding to think about the consequences of his moves. Never mind the strategy of several moves ahead. The little bastard did knock off my queen yesterday, though. I took one hell of a big swallow and reminded myself that this contest is about Dylan's learning!

Today, we opened up the kid's Monopoly, but that game is SUPER lame. We ended up pulling out the full version and played over a large pan of dinner Nachos. Nacho nachos! Dylan again had is beginner's luck on and managed to amass a large amount of dough by very fortunate rolls of the dice. Once Dad put hotels on Park Place and Boardwalk, Mom remembered that she had laundry to do. I told Dylan that often there are no winners in this game and we should shake on a draw game.

Martin's Legacy

Today our family participated in a Celebration of Service in Honor of Martin Luther King, Junior. The event was appropriately named, King for a Day, and we all got to help out our community in a myriad of different ways. There were 10 projects spread out all over the city and we had the honor of visiting almost all of them.

Dylan and I got to play amateur photogs for the event. Dylan was assigned to be the "candid" photographer and I was to be the "posed" photographer.

Mom was assigned as photog "crew". I was also asked to provide some wrap up words at the event luncheon. Here is what I said (probably not verbatim):

"Thank you everyone for coming today. For those of you who do not know me, my name is Derek Darling and I have been associated with RochesterCares for almost 10 years now.

This day and the work that you have done is of great importance and I want to try to convey to you why that is. My son, Dylan, is five years old and has been learning about Martin Luther King Junior this week at his school. At one point this week we are talking about it and he says, 'Martin was very important because he changed the rules.' I said to him, 'Oh, really? What do you mean he changed the rules?' Dylan says, 'Before people could be mean to one another, and he changed the rules so that they couldn't.' Ah, the innocence of childhood!

I love how he calls him, "Martin". We always hear him referenced as Martin Luther King, Junior, or Dr. King, or as MLK. To hear him referred to as Martin really makes him tangible and I get the feeling that my son really gets him as a real person. I really love that.

And we have made some great strides since Martin was around. This has been a banner year for the struggle against oppression. We elected a President with african roots and skin that is much darker than any President prior. I have often seen posters around that talk about "The Dream realized".

But I want to tell you that this dream is not a reality. This dream was never about color. This dream is about justice. It is about people treating each other with respect. It is about the eradication of ignorance. If you think that Dr. King's Dream has been realized, I urge you to look around. In our own city, graduation rates hover around 50% and violence is a daily occurrence in our neighborhoods. This is not the dream.

You are the answer. It really doesn't matter what project you did today, whether it was sorting medical supplies or keeping company with the elderly, you made a difference. You stood up and went out and met new people and got directly involved in a community need. You learned something, you connected with each other. This is how we battle ignorance.

Thank you to everyone who participated today and contributed to continuing the effort to make this Dream a reality..."

We are training Dylan early to be civic-minded and we really had a good time talking to everyone and taking some pictures.

Updated: Here's an article from the D&C covering the event.

Christmas 2009

I am not sure what it was, but I felt a little different about Christmas this year. Perhaps I was a little more sentimental, but I felt like the Christmas spirit was a little more present this year than it has been in the past few years. People just seemed more friendly and more connected.

We had a nice time at church on the afternoon of Christmas eve, then came home and took some photos of our family all dressed up. Yes, I am growing a beard! We were even able to get the dog to come and get in the picture. We let Dylan open one present before heading over to the Clements to party and have some snack. Unfortunately for him, he picked out some paint pails that Grandma had sent him- he was looking for a toy! Little did he know that those pails were just a prelude to the rest of his gifts!

Around 6:30, we headed to the Clement's house and had a great time eating and drinking a lot of great food. The queen of the night was Aunt Susie with her carmelized onions wrapped in phyllo! WOW! We tracked Santas progress on NORAD's web site and listened to Matt play Christmas carols on his saxophone. But the evening could not be complete without a special visitor. This year, Santa couldn't make it, so he sent Elmo instead. Dylan was very tentative with this visitor, but I think he had a great time. Here's some photos from the party:

We all went to bed much too late. Dylan put out some sugar cookies and milk and we all tried our best to sleep. Dylan had written a note to Mr. Claus again this year, asking for a large Optimus Prime Transformer that he has been pining over for at least two months. So it was a very pleasant morning when he found Mr. Prime wrapped on our couch on Christmas morning. I wasn't exactly thrilled that we had to find him there at six o'clock in the morning.

Santa had eaten the cookies and drank the milk. We had a great time opening presents. Even McCloud got a new chewy bone that he carried around the house all day. Dylan got a full set of arts supplies and spent a good portion of his day between his new easel and his new robot-slash-truck.

Christmas Preparations

This has been a little bit crazier than normal for us in our ramp up toward Christmas. I actually just finished shopping for everyone this week. I finally got out our Christmas cookies to the neighbors last night. I don't think that everything is wrapped yet. I have to put some finishing touches on my Secret Santa gift to exchange with a person of the Marchetti clan. We did get the holiday cards out - the last ones just last week. I still haven't shipped my gifts to family in Arizona or Colorado. They are just not going to get them in time. I am extending Christmas for them (Ha!) Our home office is like a Christmas war zone with wrapping crap everywhere and boxes and candies and decorations.

I am having a really great time. I am missing my motorcycle this winter season, so I was delighted when a co-worker gave me this yesterday:

Merry Christmas!

Dylan 5.0

This week we got the new OS Dylan 5.0 and it promises to have none of the problems we encountered with the previous operating system. So far start up and shut down have been seamless, none of the locking up and shutting down mess that we often got at the start or end of each day. Melt downs and stalling have seemed to have evaporated and replaced with a new user interface that is full of sirs and ma'ams and pleases and thank yous that remind you of a simpler time. It has been a real joy working with Dylan 5.0 so far and think that this could be the start of something new and creative and beautiful. To be sure, Dylan 4.0 was the best we have ever had, but the cool new UI is really kick-ass. I do worry that the patch we got with Dylan 5.0, STClause.dll, may be a big reason why it is going so well right now. This makes me a little nervous as I know that this patch does expire on December 25th. I have been on the phone with Microsoft all morning asking for what I can use to keep that patch in place after the holidays and they just keep forwarding me to someone else in tech support. I am not sure any of them have any idea what I am talking about.

5th Birthday Party II

Sunday, we had the Marchetti clan to the house to celebrate Dylan's birthday. Dylan had a great time and I was suprised at how well he held up after his party on Saturday and very little sleep last night. We had a great time and it was very nice to see everyone.

5th Birthday Party I

As per The Rule, Dylan was able to invite as many people to his birthday party as he is years old. Dylan invited old Margaret's House chums, Jack and Alec, his adopted brothers, Ben and Christopher, and his new Cobblestone mate, Rafael. It was a really great group of kids, ones that you will expect to be a part of a think-tank on solving major societal problems in some distant future. Today, however, they were focused mainly on sugar and the destructive potential of particular Bakugan or Transformers as they saw fit.

Our major new risky venture for this birthday was the added excitement of a piñata. I cleared a large space in the basement and hung the paper bull from the pipes using a bungee cord. I gave each boy two turns with a bat and a blindfold, then one shot without the blindfold. There was not a lot of progress, so I took a swing at it. It exploded all over the basement. Here's pics of the party:

Mad Scientist

This morning, Dylan was spending an inordinate time in the basement. I heard a lot of noises and rustling and called down, "What's going on down there?" "Nothing, Dad!" Right. Like I was never a kid before and never did any mischief. "Do you need any help?"

After a while, I went down when I could hear the tell-tale sounds off frustration. They are easy to catch because I use the same grunts and moans when I am frustrated.

"What's going on down here?" I yelled down as I started down the stairs. More grunting.

"Dad. I can't get the robots arms on so that they will move. I need tendons." Tendons? Dylan had constructed a robot made of various boxes that he has collected over the last few months. His so-called, "box collection", was something that I thought was a little goofy, until I saw the robot:

So he and I designed some tendons for the arms by using scrap cloth and stapling it to both the body and the arms. He drew a scary face on the little box on top and wrote "GIANT ROBOT" on the torso - just so you'd know. Don't mess with him, cause his arms move and you might get squashed.

Superhero Sighting at Juan and Maria's

Dylan has been fascinated by Super Heroes lately. I got him a Seek-and-Find book with all Marvel Comics heroes and he studies it like it is the key to future survival. It has been fun for me too, because I love that stuff. I remember having a whole bunch of old comics and a fondness for odd heroes (my favorite was Hawkeye - aka Bullseye).

Dylan obtained his superhuman status when he received his green cape from a wizened wizardess that lives in an enchanted castle on the top of Dylan's favorite sledding hill. He was most recently seen at the Public Market today eating a breakfast empanada at Juan and Maria's Empanada Stop. It was an amazing public display of strength watching him haul a 10 lb. bag of red potatoes back to the car. Thank goodness for that cape.

Artist's Date

I have been going to a weekly class that is really helping me break out my inner creative self. It has been a lot of fun. But what I am finding interesting is that Dylan seems to be breaking out his creative self right along with me. He is an amazing little artist.

We met with his teacher, Barb, for a parent-teacher conference this week to discuss how he is doing in class. She told us that she was very impressed not only by the art work that he is done but the apparent passion he has for it. He will sit and intently work on a piece for a long period of time and even over multiple days.

Over the last week or so a good friend, Seraphina, invited me to work through the book, "The Artist's Way", with her and one of the requirements for each week is an "artist's date" where you set aside a couple of hours and just do something interesting that gets your creative juices flowing. So, after all that has been going on around this, I thought, "I need to just set up and paint with Dylan." So today I got my two easels out and set up a couple of 8 x 10 canvases. We had some cool acrylics that I bought and I cruised around the house and managed to find a whole bunch of brushes still hanging around.

I set up a really cool vase with fake flowers on a stool. It is one of my favorite vases that Rebecca made for me. I am creating art from art! So, I got Dylan started and he could care less about the vase and instead went to work on a piece inspired by our 4th of July fireworks. I, of course, did my best Van Gogh impression (sorry for the bad pun). Here's the results, not that results matter: