So, I recently picked up Mary Poppins for Maren. It’s now her new obsession. She knows all the songs, and is constantly singing them around the house, which is fantastic. I’m actually surprised at how well she can pronounce Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. She actually picks up on words and melodies really fast, and her relative pitch is really good. She even does pretty good with complex intervals. I suspect in the next year, she’ll be really good.

I’m just loving this summer with Maren. There are so many fun experiences that we’ve had with her, from fairs and festivals, to taking her to the beach and the fountain, our regular trips to the carousel, etc. Yesterday when I was cleaning the garage, I came across some of Carey’s old toys, one was just a little pegboard with little colored pegs. I pulled it out for Maren, and she sat at the table for over an hour just plugging away making pretty colors. So, today we stopped by Target and picked her up a Lite Brite. I have fond memories of my Lite Brite when I was growing up in Albany. I remember mom got me some extra templates for it that were Smurfs, I think. and I remember using it as a night light. Of course, they’ve made changes to them,; these days they’re smaller, and portable. They’ve done away with the wall plug, and gone with a battery powered one that auto shuts off to conserve energy. Never mind though, Maren LOVES it.

Speaking of toys, I was this close to buying the Optimus Prime voice changer helmet, just for it’s virtue of having the transform sounds built into it. I was checking out some of the Transformer toys, and I was a bit disappointed. I seem to remember them being make out of die cast metal, and everything now is plastics. Sad. My birthday is coming up, so anyone is welcome to find me a G1 (Generation 1) Jetfire on eBay. That was like the iPhone back in my day, a rare item that always sold out and everyone wanted. My only access to this stuff was little Billy Perkins and Kris Peterson, who’s parents bought them everything.

Oh! haha. I have a funny story about that, actually. So, I had a regular bike, in fact, I think mine was a refurb, I vaguely remember going with dad to some guys house, and he sold and repaired bikes out of his garage. It was one where when you backpedaled, you would brake. Anyway, Chad Angel had like the COOL BMX bikes that all the cool kids had back then, and his bike had hand brakes and freewheel. Well, one day we decided to trade bikes for a little while. I think you might see where this is going. So, we had a friendly game of chicken, or jousting or something going on, and at some point we found each other headed at each other. So, being used to how we would normally brake, he squeezed his handlebars, and I backpedaled. I still remember to this day, that last helpless horrifying second before impact, that look in Chad’s eyes as he realized the inevitability of the unfortunate event that was about to take place. This happened right in front of my house, and I don’t remember if I ever asked mom about it, but I can only imagine what it looked like from the front window. Chad picked himself up off the ground and said, “Uh, I gotta go home.”. It was one of those, ‘yeah, we’re both really stupid’ moments. Haha. I have a couple other bicycle stories I should share, not to mention some fun childhood memories.