This is not a training potty. Sure it has a little figure of Elmo on it, but it is one of the most foul things you will find. This is Carters very own personal cesspool. When Tyler learned to go to the bathroom it was as if the world was stopping. "I gotta go potty," he would yell, making a beeline for the crapper. Carter on the other hand is much more stealth about it, you don't know if he is going doody unless you hear the faint sounds of Elmo saying, "you're growing up, just like Elmo." Elmo unfortunately doesn't tell us all the time how big of a kid Carter is becoming. So what happens? A big pile of crap sits in this little Elmo cesspool until somebody smells it, and by then it smells like a gang of mexicans have been eating burritos in my bathroom.
The obvious thing is to remove this potty from my house, but where do you dispose of this hazardous waste site? I would need one of those porta-potty companies to come and do it. Why don't we get rid of it? Well it's the same reason why it took us forever to get rid of his binky, his bottles, and his crib. We don't want to upset the little guy. Carter has always been more emotional than most (my wife's genes) and doesn't take well to change (my doing). So you put these two together and you unleash a beast of a child, or so you would think. There was never much of a fit when we got rid of his binky, he didn't stop drinking when we introduced the straw, and he still sleeps even without his little crib, although he does run into my bed more often.
Like a lot of parents, I am sure, we don't want to upset our kids in anyway, but we do have to realize that things need to be done for there own good. I think we have a little more anxiety over what might happen as opposed to what actually does happen. Kids have an amazing ability to adapt, it's us as parents that can't cope with change. As much as we complain sometimes about how they need to act like a big kid we never really WANT them to grow up. While we love the milestones that these kids hit, it scares the hell out of us how quickly they hit them. From binky, to bottle, to driving a car, to going off to college, to getting married and having kids of their own, it all goes too fast. I think I'll keep the potty a little bit longer. Not so much for him, but for me. Just like Elmo, my little guy is growing up.
My little man has a strange way of eating, either he doesn't or he shoves everything in his mouth at once. This morning he inhaled a box of frozen waffles, he looked like Scooby Doo eating a sandwich. For lunch we decided on chicken, not pieces of chicken mind you, he likes the WHOLE chicken. I swear he was a coyote in his past life.
I know most kids love the legs, I am a leg man myself, as well as a boob man but the whole chicken?
It might be little strange, but what is the harm a letting him pick at a bird with his little Buzz Lightyear fork? I will tell you that it stops with chicken. There will be no eating a side of beef or an entire pig at a luau. Could you imagine if we gave him an entire turkey at Thanksgiving? I don't think that would go over well with grandpa.
Unless you want your little cats and dogs to end up looking like this, I suggest you bring them inside the house tonight. There is an animal on the loose and he is eating everything in sight.
Oh sure I'll be Carters soccer coach, how hard could it be?
First we had to get the little issue of the weather out if the way. We just can't seem to shake winter, it's like a bad cold that just lingers. You think you are out if the woods and then the cough comes back and by cough I mean snow. I have been trying to have a practice for over two weeks now but mother nature has been rearing her big fat ugly head. So going into today's opening day I had met my team once for a total of 15 minutes to hand out their uniforms.
I have no coaching experience but I am not sure you need much in a situation like this. From what I've read about coaching four year olds it's pretty simple, point them in the right direction and watch out. The game started out 5 on 5 but that quickly morphed into 1 on 9 and 4 on 3 as some kids went off to visit their parents, blow their nose, get something to eat, or as Carter liked to do just stand there and do nothing. It's easy to tell the kids which way go and what lines to stay in but to have them actually do well that's another story. Kids were running everywhere. It was like a scene out of Pamplona minus the bull.
It was nice to know that I was not alone in this as the other teams coach was ready to give up after 20 minutes, as she was holding the hands of half her team most of the time. At least she had some of the kids corralled. Me, well I wish I had a lasso. It would have been much easier than chasing kids away from the concession stand. The 40 minute game turned into about 25 minutes as we ran out of players. It seems they all were getting hungry or just completely lost interest. That was certainly fine by me.
I still don't know who half the kids on the team are. Thank God they had numbers on their back. That I am sure will come with time as will the kids ability to listen and understand, I would hope anyway. We do have 10 more games, so hopefully they will get it by June. We have 10 more games?
I really can't believe that my little guy is turning 4 today. I know that time races by when you have kids but my God wasn't it just yesterday that that he came into this world? With my oldest it does feel like he has been around almost 7 years, sometimes actually it feels like he has been around longer. How can Carter actually be 4, he is still wearing 12-18 month clothes and he looks like he could pass for a two year old. You always get this idea that your kid is not growing until someone makes a comment about how big he is getting, well with Carter I swear he has been the same size for the past three years. He might not be growing in size but he really is starting to mature. It wasn't too long ago that you could count on a Carter screaming fit of over 10 minutes at least once a day. But those days are getting fewer and farther between thank God, but so are the little Carterisms. You know those cute little words your kids say that you can never catch on camera but you will always remember. Carter's were things like "Bingsay" and "Mony, pony, bony, sony," words that never made sense to anyone but him. He doesn't say things like that anymore and that's how I can tell he is getting to be a big kid. Sure he still struggles with the nuances of the english language, but he is starting to get all the tenses down and slowly is learning his letters. Part of me just wants him to stop right here and leave his learning where it is. I like hearing him butcher our language but unfortunately I don't think society would accept him if he was 20 years old still saying "Bingsay" all the time. I am sure it would be a huge hit with the ladies though!
Carter is a little kid but its almost like he never had that baby time. I am sure it's this way with a lot of second children, where they get immersed into the world of their older sibling. There was no Barney or Sesame Street like Tyler had. There was no progression from baby stuff to toddler stuff to big boy things. It's as if he came out of the womb and went straight to Star Wars, it's what Tyler has liked since Carter was born. Maybe thats part of the problem, I haven't seen him grow from a toy standpoint in almost three years! Any parent of a child who likes Star Wars will tell you that this "phase" could last a long time. I guess I should start realizing that on Carter's tenth birthday he will probably look exactly the same as he does now and be playing with all the same toys.
There will always be those moments that I will look at him and picture him in his 2T, yes he still wears that size, fleece pants, and his crocs and think about what an awesome kid he is. This morning he asked me, if now that he was four did that mean he was getting bigger. I told him, yes he was getting bigger, but he will never get too big. My little guy will always be my little guy.
As someone whose main way of connecting to the outside world is through the written word, my blog means a lot to me. Its humbling that there are people out there that would take the time to read what I have to say. When I started up this blog it was initially a way to let people know that kids are crazy, not just mine. I have had feedback from people letting me know that the stories I have been sharing are much like what they are going through as parents. Its nice to know that we are not alone in what we deal with as parents, dads and moms.
I have surprisingly had thousands of visitors at my site, mostly because of some reviews that I have posted about the Disney Dream cruise ship. I know those people come to my site mainly for that reason but many of them have taken the time discover who I am and the OTHER stories that I have shared. I just wanted to say thank you to everyone that has taken the time to browse through my site. Way more people have read my blog than I ever expected.
I am entered in a contest to find the 25 best Daddy Blogs. If I were to be put on this list I would then be up there with other authors such as Chekov, Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Dr. Seuss. Please take a second to vote for me in the Circle of Moms Top 25 Daddy Blogs. There is nothing to sign up for and it literally will take a few seconds to cast a vote, which I would hope is for me. Just click on the image below and you will be taken taken to the page where you can show your love.
OK moms I have officially had it with you. You think you are so cool with your little heart shaped pancakes and your ability to match your kids socks. Well I am here to say that you are not all that you are cracked up to be. A recent Dadlogic study found that a full 93% of stay at home moms do the weekly grocery shopping. What the lazy other 7% are doing I have no idea, but I will tell you I thank them for staying home.
During a recent visit to the grocery store I found scenes like this all over the parking lot. Since I did not see one man in the store, aside from the guys stocking shelves, I have to assume that women are too lazy to put the shopping cart in their little corral. Nothing gets me more annoyed than having to slalom around these things to find a parking space.
The spaces are for cars not shopping carts. I don't want to see them on the curb and I certainly don't want to see them next to where I finally am able to park my car.
It's utter laziness by you moms. Oh but you can get away with it because you are shopping for little Jimmy and his sister Sally. If they don't get their Poptarts the world will end. Why do they even bother having a little area to park the carts if moms are not going to put the carts there?
See the one cart in this picture, that is mine. My cart is not taking up space in the parking lot and is certainly not bumping into peoples cars. The same Dadlogic study found out that 98% of all the stupid little dents on your vehicle are caused by shopping carts that run astray at the grocery store. That is a pretty high percentage and one the you moms should be ashamed of.
It was raining today and that only makes it worse. Someone has to gather all these carts up and it certainly is not a mom. I know that you are in a hurry to get home and watch The View and bake a pie, but next time you are at the store do us all a favor and instead of buying that shamrock shaped sandwich cutter, take that time to get your cart out of the way.
The accommodations on The Disney Dream are quite nice. They are larger than that of other cruise lines that we've been on. Other ships we've had to get adjoining staterooms to have enough room, but on the Disney ships we have never felt like we didn't have enough space. We were lucky enough to have a Category 9b stateroom, in other words it was a Deluxe Oceanview stateroom. One giant porthole was our connection to the outside world, letting us know in the morning that it was time to get up. I shared this room with my wife and two boys and there was plenty of room. If you are a family of four this room is just the right size, I mean all that you really do here is sleep and get dressed. The thing that Disney does right with these rooms is that there is a bathtub. So many other cruise lines give you this shower that really is the size of a phone booth, not taking into account that there are little kids onboard and parents need to give them a bath. The shower area is separate from the toilet, making it convenient for two people to get ready at the same time. Lets be honest the wife is going to need extra time for hair and makeup and the extra room gives her the freedom to get herself all dolled up.
These rooms can comfortably sleep 4 people with a bunk bed that comes out of the ceiling. Every night the stateroom attendant would lower the top bunk down with the idea being someone would sleep there. Now this wasn't the case with us as the boys like to sleep in the big bed, so who was on the bunk bed? That's right, yours truly. Carter did sleep up there the first night of our cruise and he seemed genuinely excited to do so. That didn't last, although he did like hanging out up there. If you are looking for a little privacy for you and the misses, this is not the room for you. That being said I don't know if you are going to get that private time if you bring kids on the cruise. Of course you could jump up a level or two and get yourself one of those Concierge Rooms. They do have a separate bedroom that you can lock the door. I was able to gets past security, the big gate that they have, and get some video of what a one bedroom suite looks like in that heavily fortressed area.
As for the gate I think that is the stupidest thing that I have ever seen. There certainly could have been some other design, or maybe some sort of glass sliding door but this thing just looks pretty prison like, not that the people inside are prisoners by any stretch of the imagination. I get the idea they don't want the average cruiser walking down these hallways, certainly you pay a price for the peacefulness of not having people walking the halls at all hours of the night, but seriously this is a horrible way of doing it. This combined with that stupid concierge deck outside on the 13th level, I don't think that I would have been happy if I were to stay in these rooms. I can only hope that when they are done building the Fantasy it won't have this thing on it.
The interior rooms were quite nice as well but were smaller than the Oceanview rooms. One thing they do in these rooms that I have not seen anywhere else is the give you a fake port hole with a view outside. It actually is quite cool as there is some sort of camera that is showing you exactly what it looks like outside. It's almost as if every room on the boat has a view of the ocean. Of course the view is not a full 180 degrees but at least you get something.
One final thing to note about the rooms is that each room comes with two wireless "wave phones." Each room has two numbers, since we were in Room 2046, we had 20461 and 20462, that way you can call each other. I really like this idea and I have not seen it on any other ship. You no longer need to bring those stupid walkie talkies with you anymore. Its really annoying seeing people try to yell at each other, you can hardly understand what anyone is saying half the time. Anyway with these you have the ability to talk and text, so you now have no excuse to not be in direct contact with the little lady as you sit in the sports bar watching a basketball game and she is playing minigolf with the kids. It's also a great way for the Kids Club to get in touch with you if they need to and they also work on the island. Its just a great touch.
All in all the rooms on the Disney Cruises are better than those on other ships. The standard rooms are always larger than those of their counterparts, which probably takes away from the size of the common areas on the ship. I will say that my room had some annoying pump sound coming from Deck 1. It was something that was making noise all night. If you are a heavy sleeper it probably would not bother you, but I would avoid staying on Deck 2. I liked the location otherwise as we were close to the midship elevators, the restaurants, and the gangway but the noise was something that just bothered me.
This time of year is like Christmas, Hanukah, Easter, Kwanza, and the Fourth of July all rolled into one. March Madness is what I wait for and dread at the same time every year. I always pick Syracuse to with the National Title and so far I have been right once in my 37 years. To be fair I have not been a fan since birth so I will say that I have been following them since I was 10. So in 27 years I have correctly predicted a Syracuse University Basketball National Championship 3.7% of the time. Those are unfortunately not very good numbers. This year though that number will rise to 7.15% as I predict The Orange will be crowned 2011 NCAA Basketball Champions.
THE CASE
First lets start with the obvious, in 2003 Syracuse was the #3 seed in the East. In 2011 they are again the #3 seed in the east, a pretty good place to start the comparison. The last time the Syracuse lost to Uconn in the Big East Tournament was 2003. This year, of course, they lost to UConn once again. This is a very sore subject as I hate Uconn, but if we have to lose to them to win the National Championship, so be it. In 2003 the Orange had one senior, Kueth Duany. This years version also has only one senior, Rick Jackson. The two are completely different players but both provided that much needed team leader. In 2003 they had three Freshman contribute significant playing time, Gerry Macnamara, Billy Edelin, and of course Carmelo Anthony. Now this years team has four freshman but I am only going to count Baye Moussa-Keita and Fab Melo as one guy, lets be honest they don't contribute enough to be considered two players. That leaves C.J. Fair, and Dion Waiters as the two other Freshman. So that makes three freshman. Hmmm. There was a lefty in 2003 that was quirky, Josh Pace. This year we have Fair. Both somewhat unorthodox players, but also guys that got the job done. The big difference between the two teams was obviously Carmelo, but we won't get into that because that is not the basis of my comparison.
From a stats standpoint a couple of things stand out. This year SU was second in the country in Blocked Shots per game. In 2003 they were also #2 in that category. I know, this is getting pretty eerie. The Field Goal percentage defense is something that also stands out. In 2003 SU's defense allowed opponents to shoot 39.0 percent from the field, this years squad allowed opponents to shoot 39.3 percent, pretty close numbers. As we all know in 2003 Syracuse played there first round games in Boston, MA. If you look at the distance from The Carrier Dome to the TD Garden it's 313 miles and you can drive there in around 5:15. This year the opening round is in Cleveland and the distance from the Dome to Quicken Loans Arena is 335 miles and you can drive there in 5:34. I will call this a wash because the people of Syracuse are a smart bunch who I am sure could get there faster and find a shorter way. Both number one seeds in their bracket started with the letter "O." Oklahoma in 2003 and Ohio St. this year. Both of which are more known for their football teams.
Of course there is a possible matchup with a Roy Williams team should they advance and we all know who was the coach of the losing squad in the 2003 National Championship game. Finally who is looming on the other side of the bracket? None other than Kansas and we all know who SU won their only title against. Is there any reason to actually play the tournament this year? It all seems too similar to not happen again.
In my last post I covered the everyday restaurants onboard the Disney Dream, and for most, those restaurants were more than enough to satisfy people's fancy needs. However for those who want a little bit more there are two restaurants that offer fine dining at a price. Palo, as most know, is the Northern Italian Restaurant and Remy is the gourmet French restaurant. Palo is offered at an extra charge of $20 while Remy is an extra $75. Most people know that the food in Palo is tremendous so coughing up the extra $20 is not a big deal. I am sure there are a lot of people that are a little skeptical about what Remy offers for that extra price. I will tell you that it is worth every penny.
Remy
First thing that I will say is that the restaurant was not crowded at all. I know that they want to keep the numbers down to maintain a more intimate atmosphere, but I do think that the price is something that is scaring people away. I noticed many empty tables and we started our dinner at 7:30 and there was only one other couple in the restaurant went we left at 10:45. Since this is such a new restaurant I think maybe the price should come down a little bit. $150 for a couple plus a bottle of wine, and all of a sudden your bill is well over $200, thats way too much to ask of people that have already spent thousands on this cruise to begin with. Then again they get people to pay a premium for booking shore excursions through the boat so they probably feel people will pay the price. As for the $99 wine pairing, my wife thought that was for a couple, but alas its an extra C note PER PERSON. This must be a place only for Concierge level folks. Gentlemen will need a jacket to dine here, I used to bring a suit on these vacations but just started to think it was too much of a hassle to pack, plus with the mess kids make its really not worth it. Have no fear though, if you do not have a jacket one will be provided for you. So now that we have gotten all that out of the way lets get down to the dinner.
Before we could actually get our food of course we had to worry about our wine, the prices range from expensive, to ridiculously expensive. There is one wine on the list that you might recognize from the movie but I don't think that bottle will ever be sold.
Of course we are talking about the Chateau Cheval Blanc 1947. As you will recall Ego orders that bottle to go with his meal when he reviews Gusteau's restaurant. I would have no idea what that meant from watching the movie but it's apparently an expensive bottle of wine. It's somewhat of a benchmark wine in that wine snobs will travel thousands of miles just to get a taste of it. On the boat they have one bottle that you can consume for $25000. I am sure that its fantastic, but at that price I could NEVER enjoy it. It's a safe bet that that this bottle will be "on display" for years to come. Disney, while they would love someone to spend that kind of money on a cruise, probably hopes that no one buys this because they are apparently hard to find.
The first course that we had on the evening was, you guessed it, ratatouille.
It was a nice dish but not one that gave me flashbacks to my childhood, I honestly could have skipped this dish but as you can see this restaurant is keeping to a theme here. It was just the first of many courses that we had. You could have as many courses as you wanted with this meal but the more you eat, the longer the meal takes, and Kids Club does close at 1:00am. There are many places that you can go to find the menu, including Disney's own website, so I will not bore you with everything that they have to offer. There are a couple ways of ordering, the ridiculous wine pairing menu or the ala carte menu. My wife and I chose the a la carte menu for obvious reasons. Being able to pick and choose, even though they said they would offer a wine pairing for each course, is the way to go. I can only imagine what the price would be if we strayed away from their suggestions. Again there is no shame in ordering a bunch of different things, after the $75 cover charge there is no limit to what you can eat, so you might as well try everything. As for myself, if you read any of my previous post on the other dining rooms, you will know that I am a beef and seafood kind of guy. Everything they had was very much to my liking.
The first dish that I had was the Langoustines Royale. I am sure that you have it in your head that this some giant Lobster tail, but this was a lobster plucked from some Norwegian midget lobster farm. It was small but good. And since I couldn't get enough Lobster I ordered that next, I probably should have ordered two. In fact I should have ordered two of everything, the food was that good. The Australian Wagyu was probably the best beef I had eaten in my life. I don't know why I had never heard of it before this cruise but I remember thinking that it didn't even seem like beef, it was so tender there was no way that this could be something that I eat all the time. When they say something is like butter I think that they had this dish in mind. It was crazy good. Chef Patrick came to our table and we asked him what his favorite dish was and he said it was the Declinaison Tomate, so of course if the chef recommends something we have to try it, and thank God we did. There were three different variations of tomato dishes that were pretty good, but it was the fourth that was unbelievable. It was the essence of tomato that came in a champagne flute that was the best of the bunch. It no way tasted like it looked. Apparently this takes two days to make mixing a bunch of tomatoes, oils, and spices and letting gravity takes its course through a cheese cloth. The result was the smoothest tomato juice you will ever taste in your life. Of course being a french restaurant they have to have some cheese course and I couldn't tell you what all the cheeses were but I don't like having cheese after my meal. It doesn't change the fact that it was an awesome meal just a preference of mine. We kind of flew through dessert as it was fireworks night and we were running late and we did not want to disappoint our kids. Again this meal was long and it could have been much longer, should have been much longer thinking back because I want to try more food. I guess I will save it for next time.
Fortunately from what I could tell there were no rats running around preparing this meal. But honestly I wouldn't care if they did, it was that good. You will find a lot of people that think differently about this restaurant, again its just personal preference. For most people the regular restaurants are more than enough to satisfy their hunger. I overheard one lady saying that there was just too much food and none of it was something that she liked. Its going to be that way with a lot of people, you might love it or you might hate it. No one knows your tastes more than you do. I will tell you that I like to try different things and am usually never disappointed when I do, and this was a restaurant that I was certainly not disappointed in. Anton Ego says it best when he reviews Gusteau's.
While Palo was fantastic, for a southern Italian chef cooking Northern Italian fare, I remember walking out of Remy feeling much more satisfied with what I had eaten. There will be people that swear by Palo and not give the new guy a chance and that is fine, not all food is for everyone. Some might not like it because its not Palo, it is the new guy. In this case though, new definitely is better.
So yesterday we started our list of Top 20 Disney babes. There were too many to include in one post so I had to split it up. While yesterdays women were hot, I think we will all agree that the TOP 10 are some of the finest women on the silver screen, animated or otherwise.
10. Rapunzel
I fear she might be a little young but hey she has that hair. I know that men are suckers for hair, and that is a 'do that you could really get lost in.
9. Tinkerbell
I think that we all have this fantasy about a pixie and there is no better one than Tinkerbell. She looks like a gymnast and she can fly which is an absolute bonus. I would never kick her out of bed for spilling her pixie.
8. Ariele
Again she is quite young I know, but aren't all these characters young? Look at the audience of these movies. I guess it's probably the clam shells, or the flowing red hair, or the fact she wants to be with us... up where we walk, up where we run. You get the idea.
7. Pocahontas
I am a sucker for a lady that knows how to paddle a canoe, and the name alone!
6. Meg
I guess the only thing that would make us jealous of Hades, to have a life servant like this. If I was Hercules, which I am obviously not, she would be my weakness as well.
5. Jasmine
Oh Princess Jasmine there is something about your enhanced eyes that makes me weak in the knees. I know if I was Aladdin I would be rubbing the "lamp" all night to make the Genie appear.
4. Jane
I hadn't been introduced to Jane until very recently. At first I didn't like her, she seemed way to snobby all dressed up. But as the movie wore on she got a little more wild. If only they would have showed her more in her loin cloth. Its enough to make any man go ape!
3. Esmeralda
I think it's the dark green eyes and the flowing black hair that make her stand out. Now only if she would perform some sort of witchcraft she might be higher on the list. She has got to stop hanging out with that Hunchback though.
2. Belle
She is all class. There is something to be said about a girl that would choose someone like the Beast to be with. It gives hope to all men out there. Besides the name says it all, "BEAUTY and the Beast"
1. Sally
Let's face it, she's a Porsche with tattoos, who happens to be a lawyer. She's from Los Angeles. She also owns a motel that I am sure you can get by the hour. You just have to get under her hood first.
So there you have it! My TOP 20 animated Disney Babes. I know some will cause controversy, you might think I have Belle too high, its just personal preference. Everyone has an opinion that they are entitled to. So who is in your TOP 10.
