ppppa ch pa pa ch ika ika ika

Here in the Twin Cities we have a seemingly endless supply of classes and activities for little kids. From art to ballroom dancing to music to Chinese, with just a little searching you can fill "_______ for kids" with most any subject that you want your child to get an early start on. Well, almost every subject. Despite Minneapolis/St. Paul being home to several music schools, I can not find a single Beatboxing for Kids class. What the hell yo? I thought the Minniapple was supposed to be all progressive and shit.

So MacPhail Center for Music, to help you get with the times I've compiled a short list of possible instructors for your new Beatboxing course:


Biz Markie, Nobody beats the Biz!



James Burchfield



Gregg Pattillo



or The Fat Boys might be looking for work these days.

The Nook is Dead. Long Live The Blue Door Pub.

Ok, the Nook isn't dead, it's actually bursting with life and that's the problem. We're just blocks away and it is impossible to even get in the door. Well, a couple of ex-Groveland Tap guys have come to our rescue. They just opened up The Blue Door Pub and it is St. Paul Restaurant Heaven.

The Blue Door is a family friendly neighborhood pub with a real Cheers-like atmosphere. The staff is AWESOME friendly. A waitress turned one of the tv's to cartoons for Q as soon as we sat down. Even if there wasn't cartoons, Q would have still had the chalkboard wall to keep him occupied until the food came. In true "Small Paul" fashion we already know one of the waitresses from her days at Java Train. Like I said, family friendly.

The Food. Ohhh the food. Pub food perfection. They have successfully combined the Minnesota virtues of quality ingredients, inventiveness, and a little kitchiness (Spam bites and tater tots). They take the Twin Cities' favorite burger, the juicy lucy, to a new level using a veriety of cheeses and other ingredients to stuff the burgers. The deep fried green beans are a must-try that will go great with your Surly or Schlitz and if wine is more your speed, they have a nice selection as well.

Alas poor Nook, I knew the well.

Update: HOLY CHRIST ON A STICK! It looks like the word definitely got out. Friday it took over an hour to get a table for the 3.5 of us... and we showed up at 5:30. It didn't help that on a few occasions groups hanging at the bar that showed up after us saw a table clear off and jumped on it before the waitress could seat the people on the list. Maybe I should have grown a pair and did a little yelling but it really isn't in my nature.

PM4K8

Adele



Bat for Lashes





Atmosphere

Shit.

Ozzi just walked unaided for 5 feet. When Q hit milestones like this we celebrated. With Ozzi, we now see things like walking for what they are, advancements in trouble-making technology. These are just 15 more steps toward world domination.

Hero of The Week: Jay Walker

As long as I can remember daydreaming has taken up a large portion of my time. These daydreams vary from crazy inventions (that wouldn't work) to ideas on helping the less fortunate (that I always forget) to fantasies of what I would do once one of those ideas made me a multi-billionaire (which will never happen). One of those fantasies that I have held onto since I was a kid is my dream home. Certainly the layout and features of the house in my head has changed over the years, but one critical aspect of the design has remained constant, the library. I have always dreamed of a home centered around a massive library that contained a motley collection of bizarre, remarkable, and historic books and artifacts.

This brings me to this weeks hero, Jay Walker. The man behind priceline.com has transplanted the library in my brain strait into his Connecticut home. His library, featured recently by Wired, houses one of the greastest collections in the world celebrating knowledge and inovation. I would sacrafice my finest goat to get an hour in that room. Of course, I'd have to leave the boys at home. Something tells me Jay wouldn't apreciate drool on his Engima machine.

From King James to James Bond, Chaucer to Sputnik, a personal library like no other.
Photo: Andrew Moore

Living The High Life

One of the many joys of being a stay at home dad in St. Paul, going for a walk on a beautiful Fall Friday. If you're in St. Paul this weekend make sure you take a walk down Summit to enjoy the peek fall colors. There is a maple in front of the Governor's Mansion that has the most gorgeous combination of green, yellow, orange, red, and deep burgundy, all on one tree.

A Serious Question

We've got potty-training pretty well licked at this point but could someone please tell me how you are supposed to teach a 3 year old how to effectively wipe his own ass? On a few occasions now he has taken it upon himself to do the paperwork on his own with a variety of less than desirable results.

PM4K8

The Faint



Mates of State



We are Scientists

Internet Schooling

The Alphabet





Geography





Math, Economics, and Contracts



Geometry

Hero of The Week: Dean Kamen

After watching Iron Man over the weekend, Dean Kamen seams like a logical choice for this weeks hero. If there was someone flying around in a super high tech metal suit saving peoples lives, I'm pretty sure it would be Dean Kamen. I've been fascinated by Kamen ever since I saw him demoing the iBOT many years ago and then heard him say,"You have teenagers thinking they're going to make millions as NBA stars when that's not realistic for even 1 percent of them. Becoming a scientist or engineer is." Later I read an article (that I can't seem to find now) about his private island where his lab is deep underground, acessible only through an elevator in his house.

DIY Parenting or Raising MacGyver

I've done the occasional dabbling in DIY projects like the playgarden and Q's robot costume but lately I've really started to re-catch the "hardware hacking" bug that I had as a kid. Spurred on by the short distance our dollars seem to be going these days and Q getting to an age where building stuff and basic science is almost as cool as Word Girl, I've found some fantastic resources and communities online.

• The best DIY site I've found out there is Instructables.com. An open forum for everyone to post and use instructions on building most anything you can imagine.
• Curbly and the Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories are two great DIY blogs that are either posting their own projects or pointing us all to the innovative ideas of others. Curbly is centered on design while EMSL registers a bit higher on the geek berometer.
  
• ReadyMade and MAKE are DIY magazines that also have great websites. A subscription to either one of them will definitely be on my xmas list this year.

And then there is Bre Pettis. Bre is the Jesus of the modern DIY movement. Formerly with MAKE, Bre is now creating videos for Etsy, blogging, and doing 700 billion other things to bring all us hipsters into the hardware hacker fold.
Coolest of all, his pilot tv show, History Hackers, just aired on The History Channel. (If you're like us and don't have cable you can find a torrent file online if you look hard enough.) The show is AWESOME! It even held Q's attention and he's 3... and its not a cartoon. History Hackers manages to perfectly blend Mr. Wizard, Nova, and Mythbusters together with a DO try this at home theme. The show is very well produced but still maintains a genuiness. I think the reason HH captures the attention of both adults and children is Bre's honest excitement for what he is presenting. Bre's ability to translate something like Nikola Tesla's ideas to something palpable like turning your bike into an AC generator with a few basic household items makes HH one program that I will make a point to sit down and watch with Q (and ozzi provided the show gets picked up for multiple seasons).

Can I get an apple Red Bull with my apple cider, apple muffin, apple pie, apple donuts, apple...

We met some friends at Pine Tree Apple Orchard today. Pine Tree is definitely kid friendly, but I think their core audience is more the 70+ crowd. At least, that was the most heavily represented demographic when we were there. The hay-free "hayride" was a fun little tour of the orchard with some nice views of the surrounding area from "the highest hill in the county" and there was plenty of room for the kids to run wild. The highlight for Q was the close proximity of the train that went by.

In the end, the visit felt a bit too much like a factory tour and not enough like a visit to a family farm. I'm not saying it was a waist of time. The kids still enjoyed themselves and that's pretty much the whole point. It just wasn't what I was expecting I guess. Maybe it was just the surrounding skyline of McMansions that put me off. Or maybe I'm just crabby from not getting any sleep the last few nights because Ozzi is fighting off a little ear infection. He was feeling much better today thankfully.


...and I still think my guy at the St. Paul Farmers Market has the best damn Honey Crisp Apples out there.

Hero of The Week: Paul Newman

I know this seams like such an obvious and superficial choice for this weeks hero, but Paul Newman is one of the very few big celebrities that I could point to as an example of a great man in Hollywood. If I could choose one person to totally emulate it would be Paul Newman (Cary Grant is a close second). He was just so damn cool without even trying.

Of course there's all his philanthropic work too.

So this week, go pick up a copy of Cool Hand Luke, The Sting, or one of the other great movies he was in and tear into a pack of Newman-O's.

PM4K8

Bitter:Sweet





Santogold



The Mountain Goats

To Do List

An important tool to dealing with ADD is making lists. Unfortunately, the nature of ADD presents a multitude of roadblocks to the mere act of creating and using the list that you need to be anything other than a walking disaster. The production of a list of things I need to do, like fold laundry, vacuum, clean the kitchen, has many enemies in my world.

One is my stubbornness. "I know I need to get this stuff done. Why should I make a list?", I ask myself. I often ignore the obvious answer, "Because the list of things you know is the reset button on the old dusty Nintendo you call a brain. The cartridge is in there but its hard to beat the game if the screen constantly goes all staticy."

Another distraction from making a list is that having to make a list of obvious stuff feels a bit like I'm admitting defeat to my own stupidity. I can admit to my own stupidity. I just can't admit that it is winning.

Then there is the matter of remembering. If I remember to make a list I will probably forget everything that I need to put on it. Then I have to remember that I made a list and where that list is. Grocery lists are a nightmare for me. If I actually remember to make one, I get through about half of what we need before I get distracted and forget to finish it. Most of the time then the half-assed list sits on the counter while I have gotten both boys into the car and we are on the way. If I did managed to get the list into my pocket there is a very good chance it will stay there forgotten until I get home to realize that I forgot most everything on the list.

Ironically one of the big distractions to maintaining a list of what I need to do is the ongoing, constantly in flux, list in my head of what I want to do. This isn't me choosing to do what I want over what I need to do. This is random, most often unrealistic, ideas popping into my head punching the "you have an appointment at 10 am" part of my brain in the voice box. What are some of these synaptic bullies running around in my head right now?

• wanting to take Q to San Francisco to go to the new California Academy of Science.
• grandiose romantic date nights and/or gestures that I do not have the means nor the gumption to bring to fruition.
• getting St. Paul to build a park like this one.
  
• figuring out how to convince Google, the wonderful, thoughtful, and generous company that they are, to give this blogger one of the new Google phones for free.
• wanting to go to the Mixed Blood Theatre's Distracted.
• coming up with a post for the blog where I can mention a few totally unrelated things that I think are super cool.
  

For a good time call...

612-486-5800 and make dinner reservations at Nick and Eddie for your next date night. Nick and Eddie has very good food, a romantic ambiance, friendly waitstaff, and most importantly Absinthe.

After dinner, let the "little green fairy" guide you and your loved one over the bridge into the sculpture garden. Find an unoccupied spot of darkness (harder to find than you may think), duck into the shadows, and make-out like you were 16 again.

Movements

This weekend we moved Ozzi's crib out of our bedroom and into Q's room. Our "thinking" was that his insane, unrelenting screams at night were partly fueled by the fact that he could see us there in our bed. Maybe he wouldn't have the same expectations of Q to cave to his angry, sleep depriving persistance. Or maybe he just knew that he could make Q a screaming offer he couldn't refuse; to join him in braking Mama and Papa's wills, forcing us to move Ozzi to the comforts of our bed and K8's boob.

Our second attempt at getting Q to move out onto the field with his soccer coach and other kids was a success. Our first day of soccer did not go well. Q clung to my leg crying. We had to leave early. What a difference a week filled with kicking the ball around at home and at Mattocks Park, going to a big kid game, phone calls with Grandpa and Grandma, and promises of Izzy's Ice Cream at Java Train can make. He's certainly no Freddy Adu, but he went out there and gave it his easily distracted best. He may have even found himself a new girlfriend via a shared love for picking dandelions. Preschool Soccer could be one of the funniest things I've ever watched.

We've been moved to find food for Ozzi that is not only healthy but more adventurous in the flavor department than what we can find at Super Target or Mississippi Market. We found it at the Farmers Market. Sweet Cheeks Baby Food is all local and organic and Ozzi seems to love it...

especially the beets, though the movement in his diaper the next day is, well, Vikings Purple. If you're looking for baby food definitely check out Sweet Cheeks.

Hero of The Week: William Yuan

Another Hero of The Week found via GeekDad, 12-year-old William Yuan has developed a solar cell that uses both visible and UV light opening the door to more efficient and cheaper solar energy. 12 YEARS OLD!


If you know of someone that would be a good candidate for Hero of The Week please email me your suggestions at tapirspoop(at)gmail(dot)com.

PM4K8

Finally, a DATENIGHT!!

The Prodigal Son Returns

For the last few weeks I took a brake from blogging while I pondered whether I wanted to continue with it. My life and time on the internet seemed to be taking over more and more time that I should have been spending with the boys, K8, and my real life obligations. Then it turned out, during my little hiatus, I didn't actually get any more done. I just brooded and sulked instead of actively seeking out new adventures and discoveries for me to post about. So, I have returned... or the blog has returned... or, well, I'm not sure if the blog is my prodigal son or if I'm actually the one returning. Either way, here is a quick recap of what I didn't post over the last few weeks:

A good time was had at the lake. Q fell off the dock. K8, Grandpa Doug, and I went for an awesome helicopter ride.

From etc

Ozzi got a much needed haircut.

From etc

Q helped K8 and I celebrate 7 blissful years of marriage.

From etc

Q started preschool.

From etc

Ozzi continues the cycle of abuse at the hands of family furniture. Q still has a nice scar on his lip from his bout with the train table.

From etc

We discovered a farmer at the St. Paul Farmers Market with the best damn Honeycrisp Apples on the planet.

Siji Kids just launched their online store.

Pumpkin Girl's tiesie is featured on inhabitat.

Tiny Decor, a Minneapolis, child centered version of inhabitat, finally launched their online store.

Inhabitat launches Inhabitot, a New York version of Tiny Decor without the fantastic online store.