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1. Monday, November 18, 2024:
   Maia's Art Day   second grade art      The girl in barettes is Maia's best friend, Rahel.      A cat store full of tired mother cats and kittens.     A cat!      Stories from Maia's standardized testing.   "Peru is in South America. Peru has mountains and rainforests. I want to visit Peru because I want to see Machu Pichu. To get there, I fly on a plane."   "When I was in 1st grade I made a clay pot in art class. First, I put some clay on my finger. Next I pintcht the clay. Then I put both thums in the clay. Last I paneted the pot! THE END" 
2. Wednesday, October 16, 2024:
   Ian Fragments Day    ♠ Yesterday at 6:54 AM, Ian said that he didn't want the sun to come up because it hurts his eyes and he loves the darkness.   ♠ Ian wants to be a ghost for Halloween. We have yet to define these requirements more clearly, but I expect it will be a white sheet type of affair like the one Papa Bear wears in the Berenstain Bears.   ♠ Favourite foods: pizza, yogurt, hamburger buns. Tolerated foods: vegetables, chicken tenders. Disliked foods: popcorn shrimp, salmon.   ♠ Ian loves riding the yellow balance bike he inherited from Maia and asks us to watch him "drift", which really just means coasting in a big arc on our dead-end court.   ♠ Current song...
3. Wednesday, September 25, 2024:
   Ian Year 3 Month 5 Battle Report  Ian turns 3 and 5 months old today.     He's phonetically reading and can easily sightread some simpler books without hearing them first. He plows through a stack of books at breakfast time while slowly eating and his favourite book is a Cars anthology of questionable merit.   When not reading, he likes driving his Hot Wheels cars around. Grandpa got him a box of 50 cars so every Monday morning we take him to "car library" and he gets another one out of the box. He prefers games where he drives cars around rather than pretending to be something himself (although there was a brief phase where he always wanted to reenact the tractor-tipping sequence from the Cars movie and then he pretended to be Frank th...
4. Wednesday, August 14, 2024:
   Family Fragments    ♠ Maia is 7 years old.   ♠ Cats are in, bunnies are out.   ♠ Her favourite activity is reading chapter books. She finishes them so quickly (and retains the story) that it's never cost-effective to purchase books. It's fun hearing her pronounce words she's only read in books, like "abyss" and "grotto". One of her current favourite series is Dragon Masters, but I also got her into Peggy Parish's classic Bill, Liza, and Jed mysteries that I read as a kid.   ♠ After watching or reading anything, she will make crafts or games about the story. Her bedroom is often a spider web of scarves and pipe cleaners tied together for some obscure purpose.   ♠ ...
5. Monday, July 15, 2024:
   Battle Reports Day: Maia's First Weeks    I have created a  compilation PDF  of all the Maia-themed posts I wrote during her first year of life. Nothing earth-shattering -- just the mundane details of what we were doing at the time, what was going on around us, the songs we sang, and how Maia evolved into her next level of Pokemon.   This is kind of a practice run for a longer-term project I've been incubating in my brain for the past few years -- what happens to the URI! Zone when its patriarch has been smashed? Do I hope the domain name and web hosting just coast along online forever? Does it just devolve into a splintered collection of broken pages in the Internet Archive?   I would like to write some code that automatically ex...
6. Monday, May 27, 2024:
   Ian Day    In the automatic tongue-out phase of picture taking.      Enjoying a lollipop while playing dress-up with Maia and her friend.      Fell asleep on the 10 minute drive to Chuy's.       Ian sings "Yon Yonson" but replaces random words with "raccoon" 
7. Wednesday, May 15, 2024:
   Maia's Art Day    Maia started a car dealership in February after Rebecca bought her new Kia Niro. The jeeps are so cheap because "we have too many and no one wants them!"      A silly robot.      This is what adorns Maia's bedroom wall at the moment. Charizard is her favourite Pokemon.      Ice skating.      If I had $100, I would buy some more cat stuffed animals.      An all-inclusive sketch of Maia's elementary school, from the bus circle and flagpole in front to the basketball court and playground in the back. 
8. Wednesday, May 01, 2024:
   Ian Year 3 Battle Report  Ian has finally made it to the age of 3!      Primary stats:     Height: 36.25" (23%)   Weight: 28.4 lb (17%)     For scale, he is as tall as 6.042 standard hot dogs end-to-end, and weighs as much as 284 standard hot dogs.   Not much has changed developmentally since the  year 2 month 11 update . He knows his shapes, months, colors, and other trivia, reads the weather report in our Sunday paper, and recites books and songs from memory. He always wants a book at dinnertime but feels like he cannot make the choice himself.   His favourite catchphrase right now is "LET'S PLAY!" -- he doesn't always want to play Duplos by himself, ...
9. Friday, April 26, 2024:
   Interview Day: Ian Edition   wisdom at age 3       What is your favourite color?    "Purple."    What is your favourite DVD?    "John Deere."    What is your favourite food?    "Waffles."    What is your favourite drink?    "Water."    Who is your favourite cat?    "Amber."    What do you like to play?    "Trucks."    What is your favourite book?    "Trucks."    What is your favourite planet in the solar system?    "The Moon."    What is your favourite holiday...
10. Wednesday, March 27, 2024:
    Maia's Story Day  We've had enough art for a while. How about the written word? Maia has started writing stories (although she rarely finishes them).     Amber the Cat for Brian Uri by Maia Uri   It all started when I was six. Amber was snoozing on the couch. I looked at her again. She was stretching her paw.     What woke her up? Suddenly dad sat next to me. I bet it was dad walking toward me. It was time for bed. (I was learning about time in school).   That night, I dreamt of 100 cats in our house and I couldn't find Amber.       The Mystery of the Missing Wand by Maia Uri   Once upon a time some fairies lost a very important wand. One of ...
11. Monday, March 25, 2024:
    Ian Year 2 Month 11 Battle Report  Ian is just 1 month shy of turning 3 and, jokes about "half his life" aside, it feels like he's been 2 for longer than 50% of the dynasties in imperial China.     Ian is full of big emotions and very aware of how he feels, but struggles to adapt when things don't go exactly as expected. We can be having a perfect afternoon and then he'll fixate on something that isn't quite right and have a tantrum. He averages 1-2 tantrums per day at the moment. We're working through it patiently and we hope it improves in year 3.   He naps well and sleeps well. As soon as he's up, he runs to the living room to recite scenes from his tractor DVDs while driving trucks around. He likes to play by himself until he reali...
12. Monday, February 05, 2024:
    Ian Year 2 Month 9 Battle Report  Ian is 3 months away from turning 3. As Einstein theorized, the closer we get to age 3, the longer it seems that age 2 has lastest.     Ian is fierce. He knows exactly what he wants and isn't afraid to raise Hades when he doesn't get what he wants. Related, his emotional IQ is off the charts and he will conclude his tantrums with phrases like "Will you snuggle with me?", "I need to feel better!", "Take care of me!", or "I want to be happy!". He is great at using and throwing away Kleenex, but hates when we have to suction his nose. Even showing him the giant boogers is a non-starter because he'll turn away ("No! I don't want to see that!")   He likes when I make up songs and rhymes (his favourite for ...
13. Wednesday, January 24, 2024:
    Maia Year 6 Month 6 Battle Report    Maia is now 6 and a half, halfway to the teen years! She's an absolutely awesome little person. Here are some factual fragments that stand out to me:   ♣ Bunnies are out and cats are in. Maia will sometimes speak more in cat language than English (2 meows is YES and 1 meow is NO).   ♣ She takes good care of Ian and is surprisingly patient with his tantrums. They sometimes play together without adult interaction and I can hear them talking in the other room.   ♣ She has her own style that involves 1 - 2 headbands (usually cat ears), multiple bracelets and her favorite cat-face boots.   ♣ She took a weekly ballet class last year and is now enrolled in ...
14. Wednesday, October 25, 2023:
    Ian Year 2 Month 6 Battle Report  At two and a half, Ian is 35" tall and 27 pounds. (This is where Maia was at  three and a half  so Ian will end up being more normal-sized than bite-sized).     He goes to Kids Under Construction preschool three mornings per week and has acclimated to the experience after several mornings where it felt like pulling teeth for Rebecca to get him to go. He can recite the names of his classmates when he looks at their pictures, and likes the trucks at school most of all.   At home, he loves to build specific things with Duplo blocks. Most often, a bunny office, an airport, or a tower. He likes to make tall stacks of blocks on the backs of Duplo trucks to represent delivery trucks full of packa...
15. Monday, August 28, 2023:
    Ian Year 2 Month 4 Battle Report  Ian is older!     He's the same age as Maia was when she climbed out of her crib, but he's still content to go to bed in a sleep sack and squirm around the crib like a larvae. We've tried to start his nap a little earlier to align with Maia's back-to-school schedule but he's been more likely to just lie there singing for a couple hours instead of sleeping. He still sleeps through the night, taking an hour to sing himself to sleep and then sleeping for 10 - 11 hours.   In the mornings, he heads straight to the bookshelf to recite books from memory before a breakfast of waffle and sausage. His meals tend to start about 10 minutes after the rest of the family while he gets one more book in. "No, I not re...
16. Monday, July 24, 2023:
    Ian Year 2 Month 3 Battle Report    At 27 months, Ian is about 25 pounds heavy and 35 inches tall. He has a very sharp memory. It's no longer sufficient to say we'll do something "later" then never get to it because he'll remember that we mentioned it the next day. He can recite entire books by rote and remembers events that have happened in the past. He keeps saying that he wants to go back to Massanutten and return to the water park. (He also had two local water park experiences recently, Volcano Island and Claude Moore indoor pool).     Ian likes sharing Maia's toys but is working on being okay with sharing his own toys with Maia. He enjoys doing whatever she's doing and we sometimes enjoy that sweet spot where they flee the dinner table ...
17. Thursday, July 06, 2023:
    Birth Day  Maia is 6! Happy Birthday!     In this picture, she is pretending to be a Great Fairy in a Great Fairy Fountain and she wants to enhance your armor. 
18. Monday, June 26, 2023:
    Ian Year 2 Month 2 Battle Report     Random Ian Factoids      Ian has a loud booming voice. He can often be heard in his crib singing the ABC song or Alouette on pitch.   Ian has a very dominant personality and can bridge the extremes of emotion in an instant. After a pleasant overnight trip to visit my parents, he had 4 tantrums in the car on the way home: the sticker was peeling off his water bottle, his water bottle spilled on his pants and his pants were wet, his water bottle fell on the floor, and his cracker broke in half but he wanted a BIG cracker. This was all in the space of 2 miles of driving.   He likes clocks, watering plants, chasing bubbles, shuffling mulch, being outside, reading books, and pla...
19. Monday, May 22, 2023:
    Ian Year 2 Month 1 Battle Report  Ian is a 25-month-old force of nature. His tantrums have receded and though he can be stubborn, he's happy more often than not. He wakes up around 7:30 AM after a full night's sleep and yells powerfully until someone gets him out of the crib. His lungs can propel a sailboat across a pond at 12 knots.     Ian loves books and has memorized several about Trucktown and Thomas the Tank Engine. After we read them to him, he'll reread them himself reciting all of the words. We still do joint story time for Ian and Maia before bedtime, where we read 1 - 2 stories (Rebecca is more patient and does 2). He absolutely loves Maia and always gives her a big hug before bedtime. Maia is a great big sister too and is mostly patient ...
20. Monday, April 24, 2023:
    Ian Year 2 Battle Report  Ian turns 2 on Tuesday! He currently is about 34" tall and weighs about 25 pounds, which is 3 pounds more than Maia at the same age.     Ian can be very tempestuous -- either super happy or super upset that his opinions aren't being followed. Things likely to make him happy: catchphrases from truck books, songs about poop (© 2023 by Brian Uri!), Amber the cat, pouches. Things likely to trigger a tantrum: coming inside when outside, going outside when inside, end of dessert, and lack of pouches.   Ian is an avid reader, especially Elephant and Piggie books and any book with vehicles in it. His favourite activity is to bring books to you for reading consectively until there his a huge stack of just...

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