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This morning we started out with a signature and good intentions.  It didn’t turn out quite the way we expected.

A few weeks before my daughter’s second birthday, my wife told me that her folks wanted to build my daughter a sandbox for said birthday.   Apparently her father had built her and her siblings one when they were children and that open faced wooden structure spparently held the secrets of childhood happiness within its walls.   Given four children, that’s nothing to sneeze at.

I’m not going to say that the sandbox is the reason we decided to renovate our backyard.  It was just one of many, not the least of which was that a stone garden is kind of a deathtrap for toddlers.  It was, perhaps the reason that we pulled the trigger this year.

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So AM & I went to see Pixar’s Up! this evening on our first date night in…forever and a half it seems.

I’m not one of those people who goes for the massive spoilers or anything, so let me just cut to the chase:  it was good.  Really good.   It might just be my new favorite Pixar film, displacing The Incredibles for it’s complexity and ability to evoke emotion.

But it just might be too good about evoking emotions.

Let’s put it this way, my wife’s measure of success for this movie was not being able to sit through the film despite the giant cola drink (remember, pregnant!), but for getting through the first ten minutes without audibly sobbing.

It was a very intense film.  Much more so than other Pixar films we’d seen.  Most of the Pixar films have that one or two moment where they make your breath catch in your throat and make you fear being seen crying at a children’s movie.

Up! had…a bunch.  One big one at the beginning of the film, and several that followed, each building on the emotions and scenes that had gone before.

It was very good, but I left the theater thinking that this was a child’s cartoon for grown-ups, rather than a children’s cartoon that grown-ups can enjoy or a children’s cartoon with grown-up stuff planted in to keep the adult audience occupied.

Maybe it’s just me.

I liked it.  I’d recommend it.  Just…bring tissues.

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Last night I spent the better part of an hour pacing back and forth outside our bathroom door, listening to what had to be one of the worst knock-down-drag-out verbal brawls I’ve heard in my life.

Ok, it probably wasn’t exactly the worst I’ve ever heard.

It was the most recent.

That’s got to count for something.

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There’s a nice little entry posted to Digital Photography School challenging people to take “10 great pictures within 10 meters of you“.

So I did.  Here’s the best of my 10 shots:

This is the new shot I took of the lot for my entry in the latest Digital Photography School Assignment.

I basically skipped this week’s Digital Photography School Assignment.   I had intended to get the shot for “Ghetto Lighting + a Reflector”  (or using a light source that isn’t a flash or sunlight and adding a reflecting surface to intensify the light), but it just kind of fell through the cracks and now I don’t feel like rushing into things.

Instead I looked at the theme for the assignment opening up tomorrow:  ”Abandoned”.

And it actually makes me kind of mad.  I took a shot that absolutely embodies this theme a few weeks and a thousand pictures ago:

The abandoned lot of a burned down house.

Unfortunately the rules state that if I want a picture to be considered, it needs to be taken within the bounds of the contest.

Double-unfortunately, the lot where I took the picture before has kind of healed itself a bit.  There’s a covering of weeds and grass on the tilled soil where the house once stood.  The tree and the somewhat creepy swing still remain out in front, so it might still work.

I’m trying to think of some alternatives, just in case.

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My daughter is (hopefully) in the last throws of her nightly show of defiance towards bed time.  The moments between cries of “Daddy….DADDY!” are growing longer and the strength of the cries are growing weaker.

It’s been a day full of tantrums and distractions around the house.  After a long day of party-party-party yesterday, we finally got back to the house just west of nine-thirty.  My daughter, amazingly, had opted not to sleep on the ride home and was in full protest mode last night when we put her down.  Around eleven thirty, I went into her room and laid her down next to me on the floor.  By a quarter after midnight, she was finally asleep and I put her in her crib.

Our surprise was huge when she woke up just after six in the morning.  We took her into bed with us, which bought us another hour of sleep.

During the course of the day, she took a half hour nap while I was stollering her around town.  Other than that, no nap was asked for, and none was taken.

My wife and I could have used the sleep.

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My daughter is currently in her crib, singing softly to herself.

“Happy Birthday to you.  Happy Birthday to you.”

There’s nothing else to the song.   Just those words.  It’s not even the first two lines of the song.  It’s just the first utterance of the phrase “Happy Birthday to you” in the exact same tone and melody.   Over and over again.

By all rights, my child should be completely passed out at this point.   We had a busy day.

We went grocery shopping in the morning, out to a noon-time neighborhood barbeque, then to a two o’clock Memorial Day/birthday party for our in-town friends, followed by a quick jaunt up to Madison to have a brief desert with AM’s folks and some out-of-town friends.

Other than a thirty minute catnap on the drive up to Madison (but not the drive back), my  daughter didn’t really sleep.

At all.

And that just blows my mind.  I’m personally at the point past exhaustion.  I’m still recovering from the season-opening bike ride followed by four-mile round trip trek to dinner at Luke’s Custard Shop.  (All calories burned by exercise were replenished by the chocolate malt I had there.)  So the fact that she’s still up and going is absolutely beyond my ability to understand.

From my backyard.

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My daughter is infatuated with things that are composed of 99% air.  So why am I spending so much money on them?

The items that I’m talking about, of course, are bubbles and balloons.  Loves them.  LOVES them.  She likes to blow bubbles.   She likes to (try and) hold bubbles.  She likes bubbles in her bathtub, bubbles in her milk.  And balloons?  Balloons she adores.  If she were just a few years older, we’d be seeing Pixar’s Up this summer.  As it is, she’s been dragging around a mostly deflated balloon that we got from Red Robins a few nights back as if it were her best friend in the world.

But bubbles…bubbles are where her joy lies.  And I swear it’ll break me.

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