JSL’s third birthday is today. Thanks to our recent Disney World trip, he’s gone Winnie the Pooh crazy. His birthday will have a Winnie the Pooh theme. He likes all of the characters, but I think his favorite is definitely Pooh bear. He even eats hunny… I mean honey and tells me it’s just like Winnie the Pooh eats. Personally, my favorite character is Tigger. He seems constantly full of energy and good spirits. Plus, who wouldn’t want to be bouncy, trouncy, flouncy, pouncy, fun, fun, fun, fun, fun?

My Aloha Friday question for this week is: Who is your favorite character from Winnie the Pooh?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #38

Last week, I ended with our trip to Epcot and leaving Pop Century for DisneySMMoms. After making our way to the Polynesian, we checked in and were told to go to the hospitality area to check in for Disnet Social Media Moms. B went in there while I waited in the hallway with the kids. After awhile, she came out with a ton of swag and we made our way to our room.

It was quite nice. I’m a fan of Pop Century, but the rooms do tend to run small. (Can’t expect much different from a Value Resort.) The Polynesian’s rooms were huge by comparison. The one criticism I’d have is that all of the buildings looked the same. We had trouble finding our way to our building. At least the Pop Century had different looking buildings.

We marvelled at the room for awhile but had to get ready to go to ESPN Wide World of Sports. We caught up with Christina (CutestKidEver), her husband Tom and son TJ by the bus stop and took the bus with them. This wasn’t your usual Disney bus. The strollers weren’t folded up and carried on board. They were stowed underneath (enough room to stow them unfolded) and we sat an nice, soft seats.

At ESPN Wide World of Sports, we were directed where to go. B and Christina went to the Disney SM Moms area to listen to some presentations while Tom, TJ, NHL, JSL and I went to the "dads and kids" area. They had taken a few of the fields and set up some games to keep the kids busy. They had basketball, football, soccer, volleyball and other sports for the kids to play.

The kids had a blast running around chasing balls. The only glitch was when I went to kick a soccer ball. The grass was slightly wet and my feet went right out from under me and I landed on my read end/back. Getting up, oddly enough, my first thought was "B’s going to kill me if I got grass stains on these jeans!" My second thought was "Am I injured." Luckily, there were no grass stains or injuries.

Soon, it was getting dark and time for us to head in to eat. We made our way to the dining area, parked the stroller and found the table the girls had saved for us. Going with the sports theme, they had peanuts and Cracker Jacks for us to snack on.

Alcoholic beverages, too… trying to get the moms drunk?

The food was mostly meat-based (hamburgers/hot dogs) so there wasn’t much for me, but I made do. Burger bun + cheese meant for cheeseburgers + tomatoes = cheese sandwich. Some fries with cheese sauce & fruit and you’ve got a meal. Later on, they had ice cream including Mickey Bars. YUM!

Of course, it wouldn’t be Disney if characters didn’t make an appearance. Pluto, Mickey, Minnie and others were on hand. Unfortunately, not all of them stopped by our table. TJ seemed upset about that, but I knew that we would be going with him to Epcot the next day so I told him that I knew where he could go to see Mickey, hoping that would make him feel better. (Nobody should be sad at Disney!)

It was late so we gathered our things and started out… until I couldn’t find my camera. I ran back to the table and there it was underneath my chair! WHEW! Two lost things recovered in the same day.

With that crisis averted, we left ESPN and headed for the bus back to our hotel. On the way out, though, we were handed some ESPN hats. Very nice touch. Though it was late, NHL and TJ didn’t conk out but enjoyed some time together on the bus ride back.

Then we went back to our hotel rooms and got some sleep. We all had a big day tomorrow. B at Disney Social Media Moms and me with the kids in the parks!

 

It’s been nearly a month since the last installment in my Keeping History Alive series. There was a good reason for this, though. I’ve been busy trying out Ancestry.com. The folks over at Ancestry.com were nice enough to give me a month free to review the site and I kind of got lost in it. Not in the “it’s a maze where you can’t find anything” sense. Their website is very well put together. It is both easy to use and feature-rich, a balance that can be hard to strike. Instead, I got lost in the “there’s so much information here I don’t know where to begin” sense.

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Recently, a young girl comitted suicide due to being bullied. I’ve struggled long and hard about the best way to approach this topic. It isn’t easy for me to talk about as I was bullied myself for years and still have some emotional scars. I had hopes that NHL would escape what I went through, but the other week, as I dropped him off at school, he told me that some kids were calling him names. B asked and it turned out that they were all calling each other names. It doesn’t excuse it, but at least he’s not being singled out for “special treatment” yet.

If he is singled out and bullied, however, I’m going to need to figure out a course of action. And that’s going to mean drawing upon my experiences as a young bullied kid. This, in turn, is going to mean confronting this history head-on. So think of this week’s blog posts as therapy.

My own bullied history (as far as I can remember) begins in the second grade. The bully hear wasn’t a peer of mine, but the teacher. Yes, you read that right: the teacher. Don’t ask me why she became a teacher because Mrs. D hated kids. She particularly hated little boys and, for some reason, she despised me. She would make fun of me in front of the rest of the class. She would tell me that I’d never succeed in life because I couldn’t color or cut within the lines. She would send home busy work just for me such as writing out my ABC’s. This busy work would get turned in to her only for her to hand it back to me (unmarked) with the exact same assignment for that night. My mother eventually had me hand in the same paper over and over and she never was able to tell.

There was a bathroom in the room and I would go there as frequently as I could just to get away from her. When I got the chicken pox, I was happy to be out of her classroom for awhile. I actually dropped out of school, refusing to go back, because she was so mean to me. My parents let me stay out for a short while but then sent me back. Of course, my parents tried getting me out of her class. The principal wouldn’t allow it, though. He insisted that she was their best teacher and refused to consider any possibility of her being a Teacher-Bully.

I suffered through second grade and could have easily become the kind of kid who hated school and barely got D’s. Instead, in third grade, I ran into Mrs. S. Mrs. S gave me a standardized reading test along with the rest of her class. She remarked how well I did and how she wanted me to try the advanced reading test. When I aced that one too, she put me in the advanced reading group. This led to other advanced classes which led to AP and college level courses down the road. I credit Mrs. S. for pulling me out of the train wreck of the second grade and putting me on the fast track to a great education.

Years later, I returned to my elementary school. I wanted to visit with my old teachers, but mostly I wanted to confront Mrs D with the fact that I was succeeding despite her prediction. Unfortunately, she had retired the previous year and moved away. She had robbed me of the chance to show her she was wrong, but I decided that proving that she was wrong about me by succeeding in school was good enough for me.

Coming up next week, things go from bad to worse…

Weight: 188.5 lbs (up 1.5 pounds)

Average Hours of Sleep: 5.4 hours

Total Workout Time: 0

Total Calories Burned: 0

As expected, I inched a bit above my goal weight this week. I’m not too worried about this. It’s not that high above. One and a half pounds in 2 weeks is completely doable – even if birthday parties for JSL might mess me up a bit. My big problem recently has been sleep. I tend to get very tired around 7pm. Unfortunately, I can’t just go to sleep. I need to help get the kids ready for and into bed. Once this is done, I get a second wind which lasts until about 11pm – 1am (depending on the day). Then my energy levels crash and I drag myself into bed, completely exhausted. Of course, by the time I do this, I don’t get enough sleep during the night and I’m tired the next day. Until it is time to go to sleep, though, at which time my second wind kicks in again. Wash, rinse, repeat. I’ve got to start learning to ignore that second wind (at least most nights) and go to sleep at a reasonable time.

As my Project New Me winds to a close, I’m also thinking of going over the data I collected during the 20 weeks it ran. Obviously, I rarely exercised, so that’s pretty useless. (I only keep those “Workout Time/Calories Burned” lines in there because I copy/paste from the previous week’s post to get the new one started. Total inertia.) However, it might be interesting to see whether my weight fluctuations were tied in any way to my sleep patterns.

Six years ago, we celebrated Mother’s Day for the first time in the TechyDad-TheAngelForever household. We might have celebrated the year before when B was pregnant with NHL, but 2004 was our first real Mother’s Day. Since then, she’s proven time and time again what a great mother she is. There’s nobody I’d rather have by my side when raising our children. She’s an amazing woman and I treasure every moment we’re together. So, B, I hope you have a wonderful Mother’s Day. NHL, JSL and I all love you very much. (Don’t worry, we’re going to tell her in person. Not going to rely on a blog post for that!)

And to all the other mother’s out there, I hope you have a great Mother’s Day too!

JSL’s third birthday is coming up. Family will be gathered and celebrating will be done. So why am I nervous? Well, we’ve never told my family that we blog. This isn’t to say that we’ve been actively keeping our blogging activities from family. It’s just that our blog lives and real lives were separate for the longest time. However, recently, B decided to “come out of her bloggy shell.” As such, our real lives are seeping into our blog lives and vice versa.

Meanwhile, NHL is 6 years old. As we all know, six year olds don’t exactly have the greatest track record for secrets. Add in an up and coming secret-revealer (aka JSL) and it’s only a matter of time before one of them blabs.

My Aloha Friday question for this week is: Is it time to reveal our blogging activities to our family? Should we control this reveal rather than it come as a surprise uttered by a child? If you’ve revealed your blog to family before, how did you do it?

Thanks to Kailani at An Island Life for starting this fun for Friday. Please be sure to head over to her blog to say hello and sign the MckLinky there if you are participating.

Aloha #37

It’s been awhile since my last DisneySMMoms post. This update has been long overdue. I last left off on our rainy day 3. Day 4, February 10th, was a big day. We would be leaving the Pop Century and moving to the Polynesian Resort for the Disney Social Media Moms conference. That would need to wait until later, though, because breakfast, in the form of a Cape May advance dining reservation, awaited!

We took the bus from the Pop Century resort to Hollywood Studios. From there, we could have taken a boat ride to the Boardwalk, but the boat didn’t look like it was running right then. Instead of waiting, we decided to walk. This was a bit of a mistake. It was pretty chilly to begin with and walking alongside the water just seemed to encourage strong gusts of wind. Read more of this article »