(ADAM has just helped me buy something at Best Buy.)

ME: Thanks for your help. You’re a good little friend.
ADAM: Don’t call me that.
ME: Well, you are. You’re my best little boy.
ADAM: You can call me the best big little boy.
ME: Okay.

Christie has the total kindergarten wrap-up.

The headlines: the school attached to Christie’s church has pulled into the lead, and we’re going to attempt to wrap up a real summary of how much private Catholic school is going to actually cost.

The details: there is public school, and there is private school. I imagine a lot of you are thinking “huh, free vs. a couple hundred bucks a week… doesn’t sound too hard”, and, for a lot of parents, that’s a fine way to look at it. After all, free isn’t free: you’ve paid for public education since your made your first $5.25 at Dairy Queen. Might as well get what you’ve been paying for.

But the public school where we live has five kindergarten classes. That seems like a lot to me. It has a surprisingly high percentage of non-English speakers, and my kids read. It’s not particularly close: the bus ride might be 10-12 minutes, by our calculations. And it would only be their school for three years - we’d have to reshuffle our routines in 2011 and make a whole new decision about “where are we going to 3rd grade?”

And the relationship with the local public school hasn’t been particularly warm. I trust my wife’s instinct on things like this - while we’re both the agents for our kids, it’s an uphill battle if you haven’t impressed her.

But there are more than enough reasons to do what we’re doing: as fledgling Catholics, they’re going to either be in a Catholic school or have a standing appointment every Wednesday night to get what they’re missing out on. If they can get that out of the way during the day, then we’re all set. Private school is going to offer them better access to technology, better access to music programming, more one-on-one attention, and easier access to pre- and post-school activities.

They have little groups of kids from all age ranges - K-8 - and that’s your buddy group. In my school experience, I never talked with people a grade above or below me. (And the kids that were two grades behind me are a special kind of awful.) But at private school, they’ll have the cross-grade groups that team up and go places together. And the kids, then, get to know everyone in the whole school.

I am still cogitating carefully about all this, but that might just be me dealing with the reality of it. (It’s going entirely too fast, honestly, but if we go at my speed, we’ll start kindergarten when they’re 11.) I don’t want to have a prejudice against public schools where I live, but I know the schools struggle. I think it’s selfish on some level to pull bright and talented kids out of public schools and put them into private schools - it doesn’t make the problems the schools face any easier, but I want the best for my kids. On that note, I find it incredibly strange that we’re a family that will comfortably handle private school tuition - that’s not how I grew up at all. And I’m slightly uncomfortable about the idea that the education my children will receive is going to be framed by the ideas of Jesus and Christianity and Catholicism.

I know my kids. They will both do their best learning and growing in an environment where there are real expectations and a ton of help getting there. Private school may not be the easiest thing for them, but I think in the long-term, it’ll be the best thing.

In terms of kid-safe programming that doesn’t drive me crazy, American Idol has been pretty good to us this year. I’m not sure if they’re following it exactly, but they have an idea about “you’re going to Hollywood”, and how that’s somewhere near where Lightning needs to go at the beginning of Cars, and also that it’s warm there.

But yesterday Adam wanted to tell me how Simon talks, and he did two bits in this hilarious English accent that were a pretty fair approximation. I want to say that Simon is his first exposure to any English accent, but we do watch a ton of Mary Poppins and there’s plenty of English characters in things like Lion King, The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, and probably a ton of other stuff I’m forgetting.

So maybe he’s less interested in the English accent bit than he is in the character of Simon, which would be kind of interesting. Christie says “he has an ear…” but these are accents and impersonations - role playing and characters and personalities. He’s four - he can’t be smart enough to figure that out yet. I don’t know.

Since that was probably better experienced first-hand than related on a blog, I’ll list a few more things that Adam tells us.

• No, you’re in time out.
• No, you’re having a break from candy.
• No, you go sit on the stairs.
• You’re thrown out of this house.
• You’re thrown to the sky.

I am probably going to be posting these delightful mini-screenplays from real life over on Tumblr soon, since that’s a great place for that kind of thing, but they’re down right now. (There was an Asian-looking girl at the top of my dashboard warning me that might happen, but I’ve been hitting the cold medicine pretty hard and thought that might be a vision.)

Dan: So that’s pretty much my office. Do you guys want to say “hi” to Carol?
ADAM: Hi, Carol. [giggles]
CAROL: Hi!
BECKY: Hi, Carol!
CHRISTIE: Are you guys going to introduce yourselves?
ADAM: My name is Adam. What’s your name?
CAROL: Carol.
BECKY: My name is Becky, what’s your name?
CAROL: Carol.

In the car, yesterday. Adam’s stuffed kitty is in the space between the car seats.

ADAM: I want to hold my kitty.
BECKY: What?
ADAM: I want to hold my kitty.
BECKY: What?
ADAM [who has, by this time, collected his kitty, but is repeating his request out of politeness]: I want to hold my kitty.
BECKY [suddenly a little exasperated]: Well, and there y’are, holding it.

• Car audio installed. Best Buy didn’t have time for me on Sunday. Boo hoo.
• Got a little caught up on sleep, I guess.
• The Cheetah Pizza guy, who once offered me a free third slice of pizza in my two-slice combo box, actually snuck a third slice in there today. Leftovers, I guess.
• Read a little bit of Code Complete, which the UPS brought.
• Oh, just in time to be announced as the newest addition to the DBA team at work. That’s okay, it’s always good to learn.
• Kids took a nap, so I actually got work done.
• Googled “new business grant minnesota”. Ding!
• Made a delightful pasta primavera, despite the fact that Becky got all the cheese stuck to one of her brocollis.
• Exercised (watching Mr. Show) and cleaned up before 9pm.

But now it’s after 10, and it looks like I get to sleep for 6.5 hours again.

Adam snuck into the computer room this morning (while I slept) and purchased “Everything’s OK”, Al Green’s 2005 album, from iTunes.

Also, I am serious. I just bought a mouse for the Mac: I think this helped him (the touchpad kind of confused him). I have my password turned off for iTunes (I just turned it off a few months ago), and he managed to click “buy now”, and when asked “are you sure?”, likely had no problem with finding his favorite button, “Yes”.

As I explained to him, he owes me $10. But Al Green belongs to him now. It’s supposed to be good. I’ll let you know.

Note: I went on a tear of 1-976 joke-line calling when I was 8 or 9. On one hand, I understood what I was doing, but on the other hand, there’s no way I could, you know? So I have sympathy for Adam.

Hey everyone. I’ve been on vacation (from work, not from my house) for over a week. That’s always fun to do if you have vacation time at the end of the year: burn it between the 25th and the 31st.

I hope you had a great Christmas - I did. Adam and Becky were really into it, helped everyone open all their presents, and said a lot of “thank you” - and that’s really too much to expect here at 3 1/2. I got to see a lot of my (larger) family and really spend some quality time with my smaller one. It’s about exactly what I wanted.

I got a fancy gaming mouse (perfect for precision poker playing), a portable stereo that hooks up with my XM (because the home kit -> boom box -> headphones set up is a little silly for my desk at work), a very nice set of stainless steel pots and pans, and a ton of other stuff that’s just so nice, I feel like I’m embarrassing myself. (Okay, I’ll mention that my kids got my Nintendogs. I have the perfect kids.)

Benno got me Warcraft, so I’ve been on that every day. It’s a lot of fun.

Christie got me Vikings / Rams tickets, so if you saw that on TV, we were there, living it up in person. I’m sure some of you are thinking it was not the best game to be at, but it was a lot of fun and very interesting. I saw what will probably be Brad Johnson’s last pass for the Vikings (although maybe not - the Vikings blog said that Childress appears to think that the QB situation is one that they’re not going to be changing into next year, whatever that means), and Tarvaris’s first rushing TD, etc. etc. My kind of thing.

I went to a poker tournament on Thursday, having already taken three days on a “poker break” because I’ve been playing so terribly. (Losing makes it much less fun, and I’m surprised to find that about myself. The money really doesn’t make that much difference to me, but I found myself getting really angry about it, and that is almost always something to resolve personally, not “bad luck”.) But it was something of a disaster itself, and I came home resolved to take another break. I played poorly for a few more sessions (had to burn off one bonus), but I’m taking January off from the tables.

Hey, my Warcraft queue is done, but I’ll write more later. Tell me what you did with your time off (if you had any).

Or so says Cratchit (who actually said I’m not much of a blogger “these days”, which allows us both to reflect on the glory days of blogging everything we bought, every cheese sandwich we ate, and every annoying person who ever stood in front of us in a line).

The truth of it all is that I am too much of a expectations-defying curmudgeon to really be in self-publishing. Tons of hits for cute kid stories? But I’m so much MORE than that. I am complicated. Can’t write anything else about kids until everyone else realizes how COMPLICATED I am. I will prove it, and then post more kid stories.

Okay, so here’s one: Becky wore a two-piece swimsuit for the first time the other day, and was jumping up and down from excitement, because she’d never worn a “zucchini” before. Zekini? Bikini, anyway, was what she was searching for. Christie gets very emotional about fixing these little English problems, because once they’re corrected, the kids never make that mistake again, and sometimes it seems like that’s all we ever get to keep of them. Stupid growing up.

And remember when I used to write stuff like this?

I played with the Wii on Saturday night. It is excellent and I am totally waiting for them to be actually available without waiting in line, because that’s about all it will take for me to get one. That could be because it’s the only next-gen system that’s not so hard-headed about HDTV (I don’t have one, and I’m not about to get one for video games), or maybe because they have actually done something interesting with the controller (making the whole experience a little more like being in an arcade). Whatever it is, it isn’t the internet-scribbling blog-cows who have been saying that “finally someone made a console that’s FUN, because this is about grown-ups having FUN and nothing else since the Atari has been about FUN”. If you haven’t had fun playing video games since 1985, then you’re irreparably DOING IT WRONG and should seriously consider going back to whatever else it was you were doing, if people still do that in 2006.

Yeah, those were the days.

Otherwise? My MacBook Pro is holding up pretty nicely. I need to register one of these text editors, but I’m not sure which one. Las Vegas was a blast: I hurt my feet walking around so much, but I did win the one tournament I entered, so it was financially successful. Beyond that, poker is good: barring a December collapse, I plan on paying taxes on $5000 in 2006 poker income. (That is gonna hurt.) And I’m not exactly sure what we’re doing for Christmas, despite the fact that I just sent an email out saying that the one thing we are not doing is staying up late Christmas Eve. (Which is a lot of fun, but for the next 12 years, my kids need to sleep, and sleep well, when I am not going to be at work the next day. True.)

On the way to school this morning, my iPod started playing “Girlfriend” by ‘N Sync. (Stop looking at me like that. It’s classic Neptunes production.)

“What is this band about?” Adam asked.

“Being friends,” I replied, not knowing if he meant the song or the band. That’s not a bad answer for either.

“I don’t like this song,” he continued.

“Listen to the drums. Do you like the drums?”

“I like the pillows most.”

He listened to the pillows maybe two weeks ago. (To make a long story short, we were listening to the FLCL soundtrack, and I told him who it was.) They’re one of my favorites, a very catchy Japanese pop-punk band, and the soundtracks tend towards instrumentals, but even the Japanese or English stuff is perfectly suitable for driving to school.

Of course, he spent the next five minutes saying “not this song” (to “Last Dinosaur”) and “this is not the song I like” (to “Ride on Shooting Star”), so I guess we have to keep trying, but it beats Laurie Berkner. (And Ms. Berkner is, herself, miles ahead of things like The Wiggles and Barney, so we are happy with what we have.) But it’s very interesting the stuff that they choose and remember.

There will be time, I am sure, to explore in this space Adam’s fascination with Béla Fleck and the Flecktones, along with the Tuvan throat singing of Kongar ool-Ondar.