Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Since we were spending time on Tyla’s family on Sunday, we decided to celebrate Mother’s Day with just our family on Saturday. While Tyla was showering on Saturday morning, Elijah and I made a run to the donut shop. He picked out the biggest donut with sprinkles that he could find.

After that it was off for another ride on the Edmond-Kingston ferry. This is becoming one of our favorite family activities. We park in Edmonds (street parking is free east of 6th Ave) and then walk onto the ferry. Kingston has a number of little restaurants near the dock along with a park. Kudos to Elijah for snapping a picture of us.

We stopped at a new place for lunch, Main Street Ale House and had a great lunch. We had previously eaten at Drifters, and while that was fine, I think the Main Street Ale House will take precedence. For dessert we walked across the street to Mora Ice Creamery. That was delicious and filling.

The timing worked out well and a ferry was leaving so we got back on and rode back home. The weather was much nicer than we expected and I think we all had a great time!

I wrote about Elijah’s favorite songs back in December and that list is still pretty accurate. I thought it might also be interesting to record the shows that he likes to watch the most:

• Winnie the Pooh
• Fox and the Hound 2
• Cars – He’ll specifically tell you “Cars 1, not Cars 2”. I agree.
• Thomas the Tank Engine
• Curious George
• Bob the Builder
• Clifford the Big Red Dog

The top two are the only ones he’s asked to watch for the last month or so, but the others have had their time in the spotlight of obsession too.

It’s pretty cute how much he loves Winnie the Pooh right now. One of my favorite games is when he pretends that he’s Roo and I’m a Heffalump. He leads me around the house and explains things too me. Usually when I ask him to tell me about his day, he says, “I didn’t do anything. I just laid on the floor. All day.” But when he’s Roo, he goes into great detail. I love it!

My parents came to stay with us over Easter. They are so good with Elijah, and Tyla and I were happy to have a break. In fact, we even went out for a date night while they were here.

We didn’t have anything huge planned while they were here but our days were nicely filled. The biggest trip was probably a leisurely ferry ride for lunch. I put Dad to work and we knocked a bunch of things off my todo list both at our house and the church property.

We’ve had a record shattering wet winter and spring, but somehow the weather was pretty nice while they were here.

We all look forward to their visits and it’s hard to say goodbye, but we’re looking forward to seeing them again this summer.

I’m thankful to have a couple dozen good pictures from most years of my life. Elijah? He’s going to have thousands per year. What will that do to his memory of these early years? Will those pictures trigger memories earlier than what used to be normal?

I don’t remember what my “earliest” memory is, but here are some that I know happened fairly young (around 3-4 years old?). I’ll leave the psychoanalysis about why I remember these specific things up to you.

• I walked up the stairs of our house in Michigan, and said, “Hi Mom!” Mom turned around and said, “Why Mom and not Mommy?”
• Dad took me bowling. It was just the two of us. I don’t remember bowling but I remember driving to the bowling alley with him.
• I pooped or peed in my underwear sufficiently long after I had given up diapers and my parents made me dip it in the toilet and clean it out. It was so gross that I never wanted to do it again.
• I remember two neighbors from our house in Michigan. The one next door had a pool WITH STEPS IN IT! Wow. And a neighbor down the street bought a Corvette. I remember thinking, “Why did you buy such a cool car and pick a color that looks like poop?” It was that classic brown color from the 70s.

So there we go. Those are my earliest childhood memories. I wonder what Elijah’s will be? Hopefully not the motorcycle race.

I imagine that there will be lots of times that I disappoint my son. Saturday was a huge one.

Some years, the AMA Supercross tour comes through Seattle and I’ve always wanted to go see a race. They convert Century Link field into a big dirt track and go nuts. Three years old seemed like a bit of a stretch, but I figured that Elijah and I would give it a shot. Practice started at 1pm so the plan was to buy the cheapest seats we could get, go early, and leave before the crowd got huge and raucous.

I hyped this with Elijah for weeks leading up to it. We were both incredibly excited about our planned day together while Tyla got a day to herself. On Saturday morning, I told Elijah that our day was going to be even MORE fun because we were going to ride a bus to get to the stadium. That might have trumped the motorcycles in his book. I thought I was so clever with this plan.

So we parked the truck at the Mercer Island Park and Ride. I bought my bus ticket on my phone app and we waited for the bus. It showed up and we hopped on. “Umm sir, that’s a Metro ticket.” “Yeah?” “This is Sound Transit. Different ticket.” …. I only had twenties in my wallet and the machine didn’t give change. “Oh. I’ll get off.” No problem though, right? I’ll download the Sound Transit app and buy a ticket. We’ll just get on the next bus in 15 minutes. But oops, Sound Transit doesn’t HAVE an app. There are a few bus stops with kiosks where you can buy a ticket. I was fed up with the fact that we have TWO bus systems and that I couldn’t buy a ticket for the one I wanted to ride, so we gave up on that and drove to the stadium. Elijah was disappointed but we talked about making the best of the situation.

It was a short drive to the stadium but whoa, parking was $50! Private lots a little bit farther down the road were $40. I kept driving. The normal area where we park for Mariners games had a $20 option. Ok. Fine. Whatever. We paid our money and I hoisted Elijah up on my shoulders for the one mile walk (seriously, I measured it and Google maps said 5279ft.) to the stadium. Elijah was getting pretty antsy by this time, but hey, we’re here. Time for the big payoff.

Wait… why is the stadium so empty? Why is there still earth moving equipment on the track? Shouldn’t they be practicing by now? I asked one of the stadium workers and … too much rain. Everything has been delayed until 4pm. It was 12:30pm.

Elijah had no clue and was still grinning and excited. So we walked over to the outside edge of the stadium while we watched the trains go by and I thought about what to do. In the end, I decided to just call it quits. There’s no way we could sit around for 3.5 hours with nothing to do in the cold and misty rain. I knelt down and told Elijah that the motorcycles weren’t running today.

Elijah has a few different cries. There’s the “I don’t feel good” cry and the “I’m not getting my way cry.” But the one that gets to me is the “This is really sad” cry. His lower lip starts to quiver and tears well up. It’s such a pure, innocent emotion. That’s the one I got.

Ouch.

We wiped off his tears and took a picture by the track before heading back to the truck and leaving. Disappointing Elijah so badly (twice in the span of an hour) hurt way more than the pile of money we wasted on the tickets and parking.

On the long walk back, I decided I would try to salvage the day by doing something else that might be a little special. I gave him three choices: go to an arcade, go to the McDonald’s play place, or go to church and mow the lawn. He chose… go to church and mow the lawn. That kid loves tractors! On the way there, we stopped at Dairy Queen for some ice cream and then he happily sat on my lap for over two hours while we bounced around the church yard.

I definitely feel burned by the whole experience. When I got home, I tried to figure out how I could have known about this before leaving the house. The best I came up with was that Century Link tweeted out a new schedule for the day about 30 minutes after we left the house. Not great, but it would have saved us a lot of grief.

Maybe in another year the sting will have worn off and I’ll be willing to try this adventure again with a four year old.

Home Depot has Saturday morning projects targeted at kids. I thought I’d try to take Elijah to one since he likes to work with me in the shop.

The project was a photo box which I realized would make a perfect Valentine’s Day gift from Elijah to Tyla. I obviously helped him a lot, but he did do a lot of the hammering and decoration by himself and I tried very hard to restrain myself and let it look like a 3 year old made it.

We motored through it pretty quickly but he still lost interest toward the end. I think we’ll wait a little longer before trying another one, but he was very proud of what he had made and was excited to give it to Tyla on Valentine’s Day.

The other weekend I had to spend a couple hours at church putting up some new light fixtures. I took Elijah along with me and he quietly played with the school toys and helped me out for the whole time. He was so good that I decided to reward him with his very first trip to a McDonald’s. I don’t have anything against that place and we aren’t avoiding it intentionally, but it’s not on our regular rotation unless we’re running through an airport or something like that.

I picked out one that had an indoor play place so he got to start with his own Happy Meal and then play on the equipment for as long as he wanted. That turned out to be about 45 minutes and then we finished it off with an ice cream cone. He was a little excited about the whole thing as you can see in the pictures. He said he really liked going to “Donalds”.

Elijah loves trains so we decided to take him down to a big model train show at the Pacific Science Center. It was a good excuse to check out that place too.

The show felt a bit odd. There were a bunch of displays set up all over the museum, and the museum itself is made up of an oddly shaped (modern architecture or something goofy) buildings so it was tricky to know if you’d seen everything or not. He was interested in the trains but he was even more interested in the kid science displays.

We got there right when it opened and then left a little after lunch time when it started to get busy. I don’t know that we’ll be going back there because it’s a pretty expensive day, but Elijah had a lot of fun so I’d say it was worth the trip.