Your birthday (November 16th) and Christmas are just a little more than a month apart. So all year, Mommy and I have been preparing by secretly scouting out the clearance section at Target, as well as and Amazon.com for ridiculously good deals.
Over all, we only paid a fraction of the cost of what your birthday and Christmas gifts should have amounted to.
For the past several months, these mysterious brown boxes have been waiting for us on our doorstep when we get home…
This week, Mommy and I finally laid all your upcoming gifts out on the floor to evaluate the situation, officially verifying that we are now finished with buying both your birthday and Christmas gifts.
I am so excited about you opening these! I can’t wait to be able to sit down with you and play.
Let’s talk about that anteater…
As I recently mentioned, you have a peculiar fascination with anteaters; as seen in your picture of the anteater who ate a monster. (I love how the monster who was eaten by the anteater is just as happy as the anteater who ate the monster!)
You have been asking for an anteater stuffed animal for quite a while now. So Mommy special ordered one of the Internet. It looks so bizarre!
But I’m confident to believe you will love it. Mommy and I wondered if your anteater will end up in the same privileged category as Ellie the Elephant and Pandy the Panda Bear, who get to ride in the car with you and wear your underwear to school.
We also wonder what you will name him/her. My guess is “Anty.” I guess we’ll see in about two months for your 4th birthday.
Anty very well could be wearing your underwear to school.
As promised for part of your monster truck road trip for your 3rd birthday, we drove the Toyota Tundra to the Build-A-Bear at the Hamilton Place Mall in Chattanooga, TN.
I can’t take credit for the idea to go to Build-A-Bear Workshop, just the truck ride idea.
Mommy cleverly thought of going to Build-A-Bear as a way to celebrate with not only my parents, your cousin Calla, Aunt Dana and Uncle Andrew, but also your great-grandma, who you’ve only met a few times.
Like any man shopping, you immediately identified the animal you want to stuff, a red panda, and got to work.
Sure, you were impressed by the fact you got to pump the stuffing into your red panda by pressing a foot pedal. And by getting to place the heart in your red panda yourself.
But mainly, you just wanted to build your red panda, whatever steps that entailed, to ensure the red panda was officially yours.
Meanwhile, your cousin Calla enjoyed the journey, evidently impressed by the many potential accessories that were available to her pink penguin.
(She ended up getting her a tutu.)
You didn’t care about clothes, scents, or sounds. You just wanted your red panda.
When it came time to name your new friend, you decided to keep things simple:
You named him “Panda.”
Sometimes when your parents plan a seemingly good idea, it doesn’t quite work out as well as it did in our minds.
However, this actually went the way it was supposed to. It was appropriate and a lot of fun.
Not to mention, it wasn’t really expensive and it was an extremely unique experience for a 3 year-old boy and his girl cousin who is 7 months younger.
From Build-A-Bear, we loaded up in the truck and made our way towards the canyon, as you snacked on some delicious sour dough bread from the Earth Fare near the mall.
And of course, “Panda” was there the whole ride across the state lines of Georgia and Alabama.
To be continued…
Love,
Daddy
Disclaimer: The vehicle mentioned in this story was provided at the expense of Toyota, for the purpose of reviewing.
Two weeks from today, you’ll turn 3 years old. Today Mommy picked up a few Hot Wheels pick-up trucks as party favors for your very small birthday party coming up; the theme is “Trucks.”
The intention was for you to receive one of these party favors yourself, at the time of your actual birthday party.
Yeah.
You convinced Mommy to let you “just hold” your favorite truck out of the bunch, a brown 1987 Toyota.
That’s right, you carried it, in the package, all day, out in public. We went to your school’s Halloween party today, with each member of our family having to hold your in-the-package pick-up truck at some point.
As you were receiving candy and prizes from your teachers along the way, there we were carrying around a packaged toy.
On the drive home tonight, you announced, “Somebody said I can open it.”
You’re unsure of exactly who it was, of course. Being that the only other two people in the car were Mommy and me, it really made the “somebody” a real mystery.
By the time we walked in the front door, Mommy left it up to me. The ridiculous compromise we settled on was that we would let you open your truck, but we had to keep the package in tact and “pretend” to open it in front of your birthday guests so it would seem like a surprise to you too.
Patience is a virtue… that you’re still working on. But hey, so am I. Honestly, who’s not still working on that one?
It’s so hard to hold back sometimes, even though the timing just isn’t right yet.
I know I’ve lived that lesson more times than I wish to count.
The good news for you is, I don’t see a lot of repercussions with you privately opening your own birthday party favor two weeks early.
No one ever has to know, especially since we managed to open the package without tearing it too badly.
The outcome: Mommy and I agree that my vegan cupcakes (the Vegan Chocolate Cupcakes With Almond Buttercream ones from the vegan recipe blog, Oh She Glows) were so good, they were actually better than those trendy “$4 cupcakes” that we used to buy.
We were able to enjoy all the physical and psychological thrills of eating chocolate cupcakes, but without the guilt hangover afterwards. (The fat in the cupcakes comes from almond milk and olive oil, not animal products or bi-products.)
They were so perfecto, we’re going to make them again this weekend. Lucky us!
(Yes, I meant to say perfecto.)
As a vegan, it is nearly impossible to find vegan chocolate.
It’s one thing to find chocolate that just so happens to not contain milk or eggs, or even honey, but that’s not good enough for most vegans like me.
I also will not accept high fructose corn syrup (Monsanto much?) nor food dyes derived from bugs (Carmine or Crimson Lake) or petroleum (Red 40, Yellow 5 and 6).
In other words, the public’s demand for vegan chocolate, as well as chocolate treats and snacks, has more than doubled in the past 3 years; in theory, at least.
So even if I sound extreme in my search for vegan chocolate, I’m clearly not alone.
Annie’s Homegrown, an admirable brand that keeps finding its name randomly mentioned by me on a regularly basis, is clever enough they actually have a “Vegan Snacks” tab on their website, featuring my personal favorite: Chocolate Bunny Grahams.
I should point out that Annie’s Homegrown is the only affordable and easily obtainable vegan snack source I have been exposed to so far.
For example, for my birthday Mommy bought me these awesome coconut cocoa ball truffles from some fancy vegan company, but they probably cost as much as a couple of bald eagle heads.
In other words, affordable vegan chocolate is a rare find.
Even if the major food companies ever pick up on this growing demand, I doubt they will be able to make a product in which vegans approve.
It’s probably not worth it to them to market to the 3% of the population who (I assume, if they’re like me) generally distrusts food companies who use petroleum and bugs in their food designed for children to eat.
We’ll stick with the plant-based stuff; even if we have to make it ourselves.
Having a kid will make your life stressful; that’s for sure. But a child also brings a certain joy and humor you wouldn’t be able to find anywhere else.
Oh, hi. My name is Nick Shell and today is my birthday. I am now 31.
“Happy Birthday; may it be your best ever!” you might proclaim. And I would thank you.
But you see, April 20th is more than just a special day for pot heads to celebrate.
It’s more than just the day that Kony 2012 would have made its big reveal in the streets had society not outed the now infamous video as illegitimate.
My birthday is sort of like the cursed numbers are for Hurley in Lost. Bad things happen in the world on April 20th. Like on my 18th birthday:
Oh yeah, and guess who I share a birthday with: Adolf Hitler, born in 1889. Seriously.
(Also, Joey Lawrence; but I guess that’s not a bad thing.)
This is the day of the year that you should hold your breath as you check the news. If we can make it through this day without some kind of massacre, I’ll be amazed. In fact, by writing all this, I’m actively trying to jinx the “420 curse.”
So why did God choose such a dark day of the year for a an arguably normal and mild-mannered guy like me to be born? All I can say is that it’s comic relief to the world. It somehow provides balance in the universe.
And as I think about this concept of comic relief I can’t help but think of my son during the past 365 days in which I was a 30 year-old man.
Never has my life been more challenging, stressful, humiliating, exhausting, maturity-enforcing and unpredictable since he was born. It hasn’t all been easy.
During my year of being 30, in addition to the culture shock of learning by immersion what to do with an infant, I was unemployed for the first part of it, then I got a job, and I also got this gig writing for Parents.com writing The Dadabase, then had to move my family back to Nashville because of financial reasons, my wife’s car broke down half-way during the move and we had to buy a new car, and our roof caved in the week we tried to move back in our house in Nashville.
We eventually got back on our feet here in Nashville. Then we became vegetarians. And not that long ago, Jack had a febrile seizure.
Um… what else? I’m sure I’m forgetting something.
It hasn’t been a forgettable year; clearly not.
I’m ready for 31. I’ll just say that.
But back to my son serving as comic relief in my life. It’s the little stuff that gets me; in a good way.
Like when I watch him chew viciously on his toy plastic vegetables though he knows they’re just for pretending to eat.
And how he likes to sit in the fridge after he mows the carpet each day.
How sometimes on the drive home in the car, he’ll start randomly making donkey sounds after 20 minutes of silence.
My kid makes me laugh; even during some days or weeks or months I wish I could just fast forward through.
Here’s to hoping the world doesn’t end today. [Insert laugh tracks here.]
My current favorite song, as it relates to all this:
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