Turkeys and Cow Pies

Sent the monster off to his grandparents for the weekend. Before being a parent I'd have never known so strongly the paradoxical and simultaneous emotions of extreme joy and sadness. I'll miss my little guy, but the weekend is busy and he'll have a great time with his grander-parents.

Finished the Website tutorial with Code Academy today. Good walk through using HTML, CSS and later Bootstrap to emulate the Airbnb homepage and then alter the data to create a personalized page. Excellent way to learn the languages and practice building pages. They say mimicry is the best way to learn new skills...also a fine form of flattery unless you ask a prosecuting attorney. That's a joke. haha. My son mimics us often. Many years ago I heard an individual say that children are not taught, but "caught." Do as I say, but not as I do rarely works in childrearing. A lesson I took to heart and has served well in these first years of parenthood.

We saw a turkey in our backyard today. She came up to feed on corn and birdseed. Second time this week I've seen her now. The Monster made cow pies while I picked up the greenbelt today. He had a great time making those patties. I think that's the first time he's really had an opportunity to get his hands and feet in mud and play. One side of me was mortified, but the other, especially post-bath chuckles at the new memory. He's all boy.

Time to clean, the weekend will not afford an opportunity.

Almost forgot, we started the day with a first hair cut. Got the lock!

Green Keeping and Coding

I've slacked off on the blogging, put not on production in the last three months..The renewal process with SS kind of threw me off and it's taken me awhile to get back into the swing of things here.

Last month my little family said goodbye to winter with one last sledding expedition down our backyard and in the same day hello to spring by watching the toddler jump in new puddles in the front yard. We did have one last cold snap and the King and I pulled the sled out for one last adventure in the woods and on the hills. When he grew tired of walking in the snow covered trails I set him on the sled and pulled him along behind me. I'm fresh out of rope, but I was able to improvise by pushing a pine bough through two holes at the head of the sled. A twist of the stick held the bough in place and the plastic held against the friction and pulling action. I was pleased and my lad enjoyed the ride through our last glimpse of winter wonderland.

Now that spring has arrived I take him out to our piece of the greenbelt and we fill trash bags full of aluminum cans, discarded bottles and styrofoam. He observes me, and without any instruction or prodding he joins in the green care with me. His power of observation makes me proud.

I'm plodding along with front-end web design. Last night I completed code academy's jQuery course. Finally, $ is no longer a mystery and I am now a master at completing $(document).ready(function() { $('elementToEffect').event(function() { $(this).thingToAffect(parameters); )}; )};

My next big project is incorporating Google maps with third party APIs to display neighborhood details. Time to learn Knockout JS by going through its documentation and then hit this project hard.

TMBP: Supernova Toddlers

Today was a hard day. Wearing and trying. K is anxious and I can't help. All I can do is keep my cool and be as sunny and even tempered as possible. My ball of energy was going supernova today and that's hard to deal with in public settings, but he's a toddler. He's doing his job of exploring and experimenting-very messy business, all of it.

Days like today give me an extra appreciation for the evening time. After the last cup of milk has been sipped down, after the lights have been turned off and our little guy says goodnight to the both of us before choosing a lap to crawl into and rest. He pulled me up to the bedroom for a mock good night. He bailed on the bed, ultimately, but it's rewarding to know that at the very least I was a good enough parent for my son to want to pull me upstairs for goodnight cuddles. I did my job, even under stressful situations, and I know it because he trusts me to sit by my side and lay his head in my chest and close his eyes for the night.

TMBP: Frogger and sledding

Late last week/early this week I finished the JavaScript tutorial with code academy. Now I'm back to creating a frogger clone with Udacity. It's a fun project. The canvas and engine has already been created. They can be edited, but the first step is to cause the enemies and player to render, move and collide properly. The code academy classes did great work in helping me understand object oriented programming. Within two days I've got the characters rendered and moving. Now it's time to construct a collision formula. Something that will calculate the pixel box and when there is 0 space between the enemy and player cause the game to reset. If I don't have it down by tonight then tomorrow for sure.

King pulled me up the stairs today, I thought to play, but then he grabbed his boots. I guess he decided it was time to play outside. And it was snowing so who could blame him? We bundled up and slid down our local hill for 20 or 30 minutes before he started losing his mittens. Watching him interact with his environments has been one of my favorite things to do in the recent years. Everything is new and I guess will be new for the next couple years, at least. All the tromping up the snow covered hill helps his appetite. When we got in he ate two apples and a pack of crackers. Guess we can call sledding a work out!