I'll love them forever

For those of you wondering, I have neither died nor given up on the whole blog thing. My wife has been away (and is actually away for another little bit) at a conference so I've been playing single Dad for a while. It wasn't the exhaustion keeping away from the computer, although wrangling two kids and a dog while keeping a house livable is quite a trick, but rather the kids. I've been reveling in the two of them. They are at two such exciting ages that I just let myself get lost in the two of them for the last little while. Jakob is rapidly approaching the age of two and if he does as he does with everything else he will ram into it headfirst and laugh as he tumbles down. His grasp on the language is developing at an alarming rate and he has the coy "aw shucks" look down far too good. He randomly runs up to complete strangers and unleashes it on the, typically drawing a smile as a reward.

Megan is 4 and has all the things you expect with the age. She is stubborn and determined to push the limits and explore her boundaries which makes for some tension, but beyond that she is frighteningly smart. Though I am a parent and a little biased. We got the information kit from her school as she will be attending kindergarten in September (holy crap...already!?!?) and part of the kit was a list of the things they will be learning. I hope she won't get bored in school as she has done most of what is on the list already! I'm banking on her learning her place in school regarding her not being the boss will keep her in check. We'll see.

One of our bedtime rituals is reading. I am a chronic bookworm and often have anywhere from 2 to as many as 4 books on the go at once so the fact that my kids love reading comes as no surprise to me. Jakob has taken to recognizing the stories and requests them by title now. We're having fun getting Jakob to name all manner of things that are on the page. Once we get through the likes of Eric Carle's Very Hungry Caterpillar he gets tucked in and it on to more advanced fare. We've got Megan working through the sounds of the words and starting to spell things. While this is all impressive to me something else caught me the other night. While reading a story by Robert Munsch, and if you have kids and don't know who he is you are indeed missing out, called I'll Love You Forever. Now Robert's stuff is a little off beat and this one is a delightful tale of a Mother's fixation on her child and unwillingness to cut the proverbial apron strings to the point of stalking him as a grown up and breaking into is home to sing to him. It really is sweet if someone other than me describes the plot. You can read it hereThe basic gist of he story is that she sings a song to her baby every night that goes

I'll love you forever,
I'll like you for always,
As long as I'm living
my baby you'll be.

We have listened to Robert Munsch narrate it himself in the van so man times that she knows how the song goes. Well as the end of the story comes the mother is too weak to continue singing the song as she is very sick so the son scoops her up and sings it to her. At this point Megan decides to take me in her arms and sing it to me. Talk about sappy, I wiped a tear from my eye as she sang and tucked her in for the night.

You've got to love a bit of random love when it finds you.

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You can check out Robert Munsch's site here.
He even has a bunch of his older stories (including "Love You Forever") available as downloadable MP3 files under the storytime button. If you've got little ones it's no substitute for reading the stories yourself but much better than leaving them to rot in front of the television. Never underestimate the power of a good book!

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Regular service may briefly resume before I'm of camping for a week so unless the trees have wifi I'll be gone until the 23rd or so but should return with frightening amounts of photography and maybe some good fishing tales.