Catching up on some little Kaeta stories:

1. I’m so sleepy. Sometimes when Kaeta doesn’t take a nap and gets cranky, we tell her, “you’re very sleepy,” or something to that affect. So now, whenever we ask her to do something that she doesn’t want to, she lies down, puts her head on the ground, and says, “I’m so sleepy!” This is cute, but we ain’t buyin’ it — nice try, kid

2. But where are the poopies? One day I went to get Kaeta up from her “nap” (I have to put that in quotes, since she has been boycotting actually taking a nap for a while), and when I walked in she was completely naked. She looked up at me, smiled, and said,

“Daddy, I have poopies!”

Oh, how my heart raced. She’s not wearing a diaper. She has poopies. What could this mean?

“Kaeta,” I said, ever so calmly, “where are the poopies?”

She just smiled. “I have poopies!” she said again. “But where are the poopies?” I asked again.

Then she pointed to some wooden shelves holding some baskets. “In the basket!” she said. I looked in the top basket, and sure enough, there was a very poopy diaper. She had taken it off, carefully (for a 2 year old) folded it up, and stuck it in the basket. She had even gotten some wipes and wiped herself. She had then piled the poopy wipes on top of the shelves.

So not a total disaster… In fact, I was actually proud of her for trying to take care of it herself! So independent… *sniff*.

3. Don’t be ridiculous. Before bedtime one evening, Kaeta wanted to read the book Curious George and the Puppies. We have read this book, conservatively, a gajillion times, so I started reading it in a silly, radio announcer voice. As I started reading that way, she made a funny face, as if she were thinking, “What are you doing?” Then she looked up at me and said, “Don’t… don’t be ridiculous!”

Karianne and I just lost it. It’s hard to convey just how cute and funny that was. I’d never heard her use the word ridiculous, and we don’t say the phrase “don’t be ridiculous” much (as far as we are aware), so it was pretty neat that she put that sentence together and used it in context.

4. Dream sequence. On Sunday, I went in to wake Kaeta up in the morning, and she was sleeping soundly. I put my hand on her back and said, “Hello, little girl,” and her eyes popped open. She looked at me and said,

“That’s not a pixie!”

“What?”

“That’s not a pixie!”

“Um, you’re right, that’s not a pixie.”

She seemed to accept this. Then I put her on the changing table to change her diaper, and she kind of shook her head and said,

“I’m not ready for barbecue!”

I wonder what kind of dream she’d been having!

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Now, a couple of things about me (if you only read this blog for Kaeta and Jonah stories, you can skip the rest of this post).

5. Bike Genius Part 1. I mentioned in a previous post that we recently got bikes. Well, the day after we got the bikes, everyone was napping, so I decided to take mine out for a spin. It was my first chance to ride it outside the store, so I was excited.

But immediately, something was wrong: my knees kept hitting the handlebars! Every time I pumped the peddles, my knees clipped the bars, unless I sat up in a very uncomfortable posture. I thought, this is nuts! I’ve got to do something to fix this.

I also noticed the the hand brakes were in a funny place; I really had to curl my hands under the handlebars to get to them. So, with my face set in a look of grim determination, I rode the bike back into my garage to see if I could fix it.

I started studying how it was put together, thinking about what tools I might need, but part of my brain was still thinking about those brakes. They were just so wrong… then it hit me. The handlebars were just turned around backwards. I twisted them 180 degrees, and suddenly everything worked.

So, yes, I am a bike genius.

6. Bike Genius Part 2. These bikes are not the greatest contraptions to ever grace pavement. I found that out the hard way when my chain broke the 4th time I rode the thing.

Undaunted by this, I went to a bike shop and got a “missing link,” which snaps in and replaces the link that broke. It requires no tools and costs about $2.50, so I bought 2 (which, it turns out, was very smart; sadly, that’s the only part of this story where I did something smart).

Later, I sat down by the bike and placed the chain on the gears. I tried to study how this worked a little, since I hadn’t googled to find out exactly what to do. It all seemed to make sense, so I placed the chain where it needed to go, snapped in the missing link, and started riding.

But each revolution of the wheel made a terrible grinding sound. I stopped, and it looked like I had threaded the chain wrong through this thingy at the back (which I now know is called the derailer). And it was now impossible to take the chain back off, so effective was the missing link. I fiddled with it for several minutes, but there was really nothing I could do.

Anyway, to make a long story boring, I bought a chain tool similar to this one and broke the chain once more. This is just further confirmation that I was right not to go into mechanical engineering.

Well, sorry for the long post, but I think we’re finally getting caught up!

We got bikes!  Well, I put an exclamation point there, like I’m all excited about it, when actually we got bikes several weeks ago.  But I’m posting about it finally!  There, that’s worth getting excited about.

The coolest part is being able to pull the kids in the bike trailer.  In these photos I was just pulling Kaeta, but since then I’ve pulled Kaeta and Jonah together.  They have so much fun!

The least-cool part about it is that the chain on my bike broke the 4th time I rode it.  I mean, I was just riding around on the sidewalk and it snapped.  Oh, well.  I know what to do to fix it, but haven’t gotten it done yet.

If the kids didn’t like the bike trailer, our back-up plan was at least it came in a box they could sit on.  That’s a big part of parenting: contingency planning.