A Cerney Periodical

Brock has always been interested in our Perplexus puzzle balls. It's basically a large 3D track contained in a ball. You roll/balance a tiny ball-bearing along the track by tilting the ball. For most of his life, they have just been large colored balls with a rattle inside. Over the past couple months he's become an eager spectator of daddy. He'll call out which ball he wants me to use ("blue" or "colored") then he'll get right in my lap and enjoy the frustration on my face as his wiggling derails my run. It's basically, "hey daddy, you play games while I watch." OK by me! Well last night after watching a few of his favorite sections ("spiral!" and "ball fall into cup!") Brock picked up the second ball and loudly asked, "how do I do this?" So I put the ball on the start of the track and handed it over, expecting lots of failure and frustration, which is, of course, the point and totally ok. I was so w

(Brock eats strudel. Unrelated, but cute.) Brock has been working on the concept of favorites. For quite sometime, we were pretty sure his favorite color was orange. He generally preferred orange things when we looked at books, whether it was flowers or trains. This led us to suggest to him that orange was his favorite. Well he has definitely corrected us. His favorite color is officially blue. He tells us this a LOT. Last night he let out a non-stop torrent of verbal diarrhea that basically went, "I want apples daddy cut them into large chunks and put them in blue bowl 'cause blue is my favorite color 'cause i like blue more than orange 'cause blue is my favorite. Bluey blue blue!"

Brock recently let me use clippers to cut his hair. It was pretty quick and painless for all. Here's some before and after shots of the new doo. Farewell Hairman!

(unrelated pic of Brock in his fort) As you can tell from earlier posts, Brock is a huge help on brew days. One of the ways he helps the most is by letting me store all my supplies in his closet. Sometimes, like this past saturday night, I forget to take them out before putting Brock to bed. This is a problem, as I like to get up and brewing before he wakes. Brock's a pretty good sleeper, so I just wait until he's asleep and go get my supplies. This past saturday I crept in as quietly as possible. As I unlatched the closet door I heard a ruffling of noise from the crib. Did he wake up? I froze, back to the crib, thinking perhaps he had T-Rex vision and if I remained motionless I'd be invisible and Brock would fall right back to sleep. That's when I heard him. "Someone's by the closet." Oh no! I realized simultaneously that he was both awake, and somewhat concerned by the strange man in his room.  "It's just daddy Brock. I n

Matt's brew and bottle days bring out the luscious side of Brock.   I can't decide if this is adorable or a terrible action to verbally encourage. So, I'll refer to parenting tactic #5 - "ignore and record". 

We recently got a rotisserie for our grill. The first experiment: a duck! It turned out delicious despite a few first-timer hiccups. The next one should be even better. Some delays led to Brock going to bed before the duck was complete, but that gave us plenty of time to fry up some giblets! We started with duck heart. Brock's verdict: "more!" Sorry Brock, ducks have but one heart. Next came the liver. This was clearly Brock's favorite, and lucky for him, this duck had an enormous liver. There was even enough that he reluctantly shared with daddy. Thanks buddy. Last, we ate the kidneys. If you've never had duck kidneys, boy are they weird. The flavor is organ meat. The texture is super-ball. We chewed and chewed and chewed and chewed. One and a half kidneys later, Brock decided he'd had enough kidney and asked for liver again, but it was gone. Here's some of the show... The next day he ate a thigh. It was good, but I'm pretty sure he

Oh how I enjoy Halloween. Perhaps because of my theatrical inclination. More likely the appeal originated with my mom's amazing sewing feats in my childhood that allowed Jake and I to put ourselves centerpiece in our imaginations. I hope Brock will have the same experience. I think he likes it so far. No, Brock wasn't caught lying about poopy pants, that is a beak going for a pre-event test run. I think that was the longest he ever wore it. We acquired some educational material to help facilitate the understanding of Halloween's cultural practices. "Poultrygeist" was the perfect find, as it got him quite excited about being a rooster. "Boo" was/is such a hit I am actually regretting checking it out. We're men! We're men in tights! He, in fact, loved his tights so much he slept in them later.   Ah the time has come! We first went to Boo-Palooza, an annual event in our Wicker Park Neighborhood. Here we are suiting up

We scoff at the YouTube video of the child trying to "swipe" a print book like an Ipad to read. We don't even have a tablet and Brock doesn't do anything on our phones. All this, but obviously we need to introduce Brock to the written letter because as you can see he is a bit confused.