if you look closely you can see the "i'm only looking at the camera because you asked me a hundred times" look on his face.

sigh. maybe i should get him interested in taking pictures because the novelty of getting his picture taken has long since worn off.

although she still lacks a proper name beyond "kitty", that doesn't seem to be preventing odin and her from becoming fast friends. yesterday, when we asked him what he wanted to name the cat instead of replying with his typical response of "kitty", he thought for a few moments and said, "truck!" and that's been his consistent response over the weekend.

ragdoll cats can live up to 20 years and i try to imagine him years from now trying to explain to someone special in life why his longtime companion is named "truck". maybe we'll let this one sit with him for a few days and see if he changes his mind again :-)

the day started innocently enough, with an invitation from some friends to go visit a nearby festival in gays mills the self-described "apple capital of wisconsin". it's time to harvest apples and when you're the apple capital i guess it makes sense to turn the whole affair into an applefest. it's the kind of thing that we've taken him too in the past with craft booths and the sort of amusements that odin has typically avoided with a stern response of, "noooooo!" whenever we've asked him if he wanted to participate.

that is, until today. when he discovered that his new buddy katrina wanted to go in the "moonwalk bounce house" well then he decide that he wanted to try it out too.

the next stage in The Evolution of Jumping was fun. very, very fun.

when we explained how much fun it would be to help us clean up the fallen autumn leaves, we failed to mention the part about trying to keep from being swept off his feet when blustery wind unfurled the yard waste bag!

this is the first fall that he's been ready, willing and able to help out around the yard and i must admit it could get pretty easy to take it for granted.

hopefully he'll enjoy shoveling snow when winter arrives.

even though i can't say that odin truly offered his time and energy of his own free will, i was still proud to come home from work to see him wearing a sticker from a local nursing home with the simple words, "odin volunteer." and while he may not fully understand it yet, someday maybe he'll appreciate just how much his visits brightened the days of community elders who may not see as many visitors as they should.

and perhaps someday we'll all look back at day 807 as the first day in odin's lifelong commitment to try to continually and instinctively and without hesitation ask what benjamin franklin considered to be the noblest question in the world - "What good can I do in it?"

even if it doesn't always result in a big bowl of chocolate ice cream :-)

of course, odin is constantly attempting to categorize new and unfamiliar objects and sometimes he asks us for help but more often then not he enjoys sitting and exploring the object while occasionally confidently announcing his best guesses regarding features and function based on his past experiences.

while we were attempting to find a place for books that never seem to get read, he happened upon a cribbage board and after a few minutes of investigating it we learned that, in his worldview, the most obvious feature was a "track" that was obviously meant for a "race" ( "look! a track! raaaacing!" ). but there was some hesitation as he wondered why there was no train. because obviously trains run on tracks. and if there's a track that should have a train then really it should have a thomas the train. but those were minor annoyances as he deftly raced the "cars" around the "track" while letting the pegs cluster closely together before deciding that one should break away from the pack before heading into the hairpin turn.

the old rumor about goldfish only having a 3 second memory was disproved recently and it just so happens that their memory can last up to 3 months which is fairly amazing since your typical goldfish brain weighs about 0.097 grams

some researchers claim that fishes don't deserver their reputation as dim-wits ( a reputation perpetuated by the 3-second memory myth ) and, in fact, they are "steeped in social intelligence, pursuing Machiavellian strategies of manipulation, punishment and reconciliation, exhibiting stable cultural traditions, and co-operating to inspect predators and catch food."

now, i don't know if our fish are as smart as albert the world's smartest goldfish, who has earned a place in the the guinness book of world records as the "fish with the largest repertoire of tricks", but i guess i should probably give them the benefit of the doubt that they probably aren't staring at their reflections forgetting every 3 seconds that they are fishes.

but are blind cave fish are smarter than dogs? "harrumph", says mauja who thinks that's just a bunch of hooey.

because we see him everyday, it's sometimes difficult to tell just how quickly odin is growing. sure, everybody knows that most everybody grows and it's all trite and everything, but to me it was just yesterday that his feet were barely bigger than a nickel, so i still reserve the right to be surprised at how, in what seems to be just a few days, he has grown enough so that his feet rest very firmly on the rung of the a chair that's halfway to the floor!

i sat in shock and awe, trying to imagine what the day would be like when we sat for breakfast and his feet touched the ground for the very first time. suddenly that day seems not so far away.

please welcome the newest addition to the cast of the the snowdeal show ®!

odin has really, really, really wanted a kitty for quite some time and now he has his very own ragdoll cat thanks to the fact that one of his cousin's cats gave birth recently to a rather large litter. we keep asking him what he'd like to name the cat and he alternates between "evie's kitty" ( the name of one of his cousins with the cat that gave birth to his cat ), "odin's kitty" and just plain ol' "kitty". so who knows, maybe we'll have to take over naming responsibility. or maybe she'll forever be known as kitty.

i must admit that when we were thinking of getting the cat, i was thoroughly convinced that mauja would never get over his instinct to want to kill! kill! kill! the cat, because - well - he has a history of killing small land animals in general and tormenting cats in particular. but much to my surprise, they've become fast friends and the cat seems to look up to mauja as a big, furry protective type and mauja is all too happy to fill the role. it almost miraculous because he still attempts to chase down other cats, so maybe they're meant to be together teaching each other how cats and dogs can live in harmony.

i'm actually allergic to cats and the ragdoll cat is supposedly hypoallergenic so who knows. as long as i don't have an asthmatic attack, i guess it's all good if odin's happy :-)

kris and odin have been visiting family in grand rapids for the last eight days! eight! days! rumor has it that they're coming back tomorrow, but if i were a betting man, i think odds are good that they may stay through this weekend. jeez, louise that's a long time. and they even took mauja!

so, it's a proverbial ghost town around here which might sound relaxing, but in reality there's a whole lot of missing going on. it's quiet. too quiet :-)

being here all by my lonesome also reminds me once again it's amazing, all things considered, that we only have one photograph of odin and us around the house! and that one was only recently given to us by a grandparent. the picture of he and kris instantly became his favorite and it's not uncommon to discover that he's grabbed in off his nightstand and slept with it clutched close to his chest.

well, The Great Bat Invasion may have come to an end since we decided we had finally had enough and had them all exterminated.

ha! just kidding. no, we didn't have them killed, but we did call in the wisconsin bat specialists who specialize in getting the bats out without resorting to death and dismemberment by putting one way "doors", called excluders, on all the points of entry that they can find and keep them out by sealing up all possible points they might use to try to get back into the house. after the work was done we were advised that's it not unusual to find a rogue bat or two who couldn't find their way out of the house, but if we didn't have any visitors after a week, they had more than likely all moved on to a more hospitable house. i'm almost a little sad to report that it appears that they've all left without even saying goodbye.

interestingly, they told us that even though they we were exiting through the chimney at dusk, they were more than likely not living in it and that it's far more typical that they enter through other access points and crawl throughout the structure of the house until they find someplace cozy to sleep and then enter the chimney through a hole in the mortar ( er. i guess that means no fires this year. ) of the chimney for a speedy exit at night. indeed, they did find loads of guano near the gaps where the dormers meet up with the roof which they theorized were the most likely points of entry.

sadly, we learned that one of our neighbors has taken to putting out poison to kill the bats that are getting in her house, so hopefully they don't all decide to go next door!

chalk it up to naivety, but while we generally try to keep things out of odin's hands that might be potential choking hazards, neither of us had any idea how many of his toy cars have removable rubber tires. of course, as soon as he discovered that he could easily remove the tires with his teeth, it became something of an obsession. somewhat amusingly, after taking off the tire, he'd bring the car and tire over and proclaim with great concern, "oh no! broken!" at first, we tried to explain that, in fact, the car wasn't permanently broken and we could put the tire back on without too much trouble, while adding that if he didn't want to break the car then it would be best if he stopped taking off the tires. predictably this tactic led to a few rounds of us putting the tires on only to have them come right back off.

obviously, the concern about the car being broken is secondary to that of him accidentally swallowing a tire, which i guess we were doing a poor job of communicating, so we quickly switched strategies and told him that we didn't want him taking the tires off because it might hurt if he swallowed them ( can you actually choke on a rubber tire that's smaller than a dime? ), and if he took the tire off then we'd have to take the car away for awhile.

he looked at me and the car and walked while while slowly repeating, "car. tire. poppi. take. car. tire. poppi. take."

for quite some time i heard him in his playroom, continuining to repeat the salient points that i had tried to teach him, and i was feeling very happy to have so quickly impressed upon him the importance of heeding my advice.

moments later, he confidently walked up to with the car and a freshly removed set of tires in his hands and said without hesitation and a mild sense of satisfaction at having figured out the the new rule, "poppi, take!"

what began as stomping on pillows quickly evolved into hesitant proto-jumps where one foot would remain on the ground which quickly evolved into full-fledged jumps with both feet leaving terra firma which quickly evolved into competitions with poppi to see who could jump the most number of consecutive jumps in a row ( he always wins and his current record is about 15 jumps before he collapses in laughter on the ground ) which quickly evolved into jumping off piles of found objects.

one can only wonder where this will all lead.

today odin went in for another eye exam at a new doctor's office in la crosse and they were so thoughtful and nice; they let him pick out his very own pair of sunglasses that he could keep after they dilated his eyes and they even had a whole wall that you could draw on while waiting for the dilation drops to do their thing. it was all very relaxed and made for the best exam yet.

we're happy to report that his eyesight might have improved again slightly since his previous exam and each eye is somewhere between -3.5 and -4.0. you might recall that 10 months ago the best guess was that his diopter was around -5.25, so that's enough of an improvement that the recommendation is to continue to hold off getting him glasses to see how much more his eyes will improve on their own.

odin was quite the charming and chatty toddler and we were both proud that his eye doctor was very impressed with his conversational skills and commented several times that she hadn't seen a "normal" two year old with such a command of language in quite some time, little less a 25 weeker.

every so often, i run across information such as "the misdiagnosis of special education costs" that re-remind me of just how fortunate we've been up to this point. the article claims that the primary cause of the increase in special education costs in recent years is due to the ever growing number of premature kids who are surviving because of advances in neonatalogy. and a full fifty percent of infants born weighing less than 3.3 pounds will have "significant cognitive difficulties" and half of those will be "metally retarded" while the remaining half will have "significant to severe learning disabilities". it's the kind of stuff that can keep (micro)preemie parents awake at night, wondering if they are missing something or glossing over some "deficiency" that needs attention.

he really has come a long way and while every day is amazing, today was just a little more amazing than usual given the micropreemie odds.

we had been in the market for a used bike trailer, so we were mighty happy to find one soon after moving to town.

exited at the prospect of biking around some of the 1,600 miles of state trails or any of the kickapoo tours or just out and about town, i promptly took the trailer down the street to a gas station to fill up the deflated tires and discovered a few hours later when one of the tires exploded that you need to fill up them up slooooooowly. it exploded ( quite loudly, i might add )a mere 20 minutes after trying to convince odin that sitting in the trailer would be fun. luckily for both of us, he refused and never associated the loud BANG! with the trailer or he would never, ever sat in the trailer again.

after a month of procrastinating, i finally found some time to fix the tire and whoooooeeeeee going biking with poppi is an instant hit. and in keeping with his love of adrenaline, the faster i can pedal, the better!

i think when the leaves start changing colors, it will be fun to get out to the famous elroy-sparta state trail which is part of the abandoned chicago & north western railroad bed and passes through three rock tunnels that range from 1/4 to 3/4 miles in length. rumor has it that stopping off for a bite to eat at the "pies are square" in wilton is not to be missed.

burley is the trendy brand in bike trailers, but the "rhode gear" was almost free which is about $500 dollars better than a burley. i couldn't find much on the reliablility of the model i bought, since it seems that bell sports bought the brand a few years ago and promptly shut it down. i'm sure if there were any safety recalls or major problems with them, someone will pipe up and let me know.

i have developed a little theory over the years with regards to the use of concrete "footings" to secure fence posts or clothes line poles. it's completely unecessary in almost all cases. that's right, if you sink the posts down deep enough ( 2-3 feet ), you don't have to worry about frost heaves shifting the posts, which is what most people claim they are trying to prevent with concrete. no, i think that it's a convenient "myth" that has developed because it's far easier to put in a post and throw in some quick drying concrete than it is to slowly add dirt and tamp away until your shoulders feel like they are going to fall off.

i guess there are probably those kind of people in the world who don't really care that they're making their lives easier at the expense of somebody down the road who has to dig out the stuff. would they change their mind if they knew that concrete decreases the life of the post by half. probably not, because they probably know they'll have moved by then and can leave the prematurely rotted posts and heavy as all-get-out concrete mess for the next homeowner!

bastages.

one of the reasons that it's a little quieter than usual around here is that any available "free" time is spent trying to cram in a bunch of summer projects before fall and winter. projects like putting in 150 feet of fencing. if you're thinking about a fencing project yourself and maybe - like myself - it has been a few years since you've done it, don't kid yourself. it's a lot more work than you remember, even when you have the conveniences of a powered auger and a couple of young, strapping strapping farm boys.

i don't really know if good fences make good neighbors, but it sure does make for a happy malamute who no longer has to be on a lead when he's outside ( malamutes are notoriously untrainable when it comes to staying in yards and not chasing down cats and squirrels and whatnot ). and it works nicely as a toddler containment system :-)

i suppose we could sink a ton of money into one of those super 'spensive playground, but i swear odin has more fun on the The Little Giant Ladder System knockoff that a co-worker loaned to us weeks and weeks ago to help us get to the tights spots while doing the indoor house painting that we we never seem to find the time to get around to doing. i'm not sure she ever going to get it back, since no day is complete without an extended session of climbing up and down and up and down and up and down. this position that is like a long ramp is is favorite since it also allows him to hand and swing from the rungs underneath the ladder.

amazingly, at least to us, he hasn't missed a footing or fallen a single time. and apparently it's against the rules for us to stand too close to him or help him in any way. no sir, he'll have none of that.