So, it was an interesting weekend. Lisa was down in Madison catching up with her folks, leaving me with our rambunctious little toddler. This was a fact that was both fun and challenging, but on the whole the weekend went well. We spent a lot of time outside biking around the lakes, cooking, shopping at Target, and, uh, painting the kitchen (without Lisa knowing we were doing so).

Generally speaking, I’ve found Mathias is happy whenever he can be doing whatever his mom or dad is doing. In most cases it’s enough just to let him mimic what we’re doing—he had a dry paint brush for much of the painting, for example—but every now and then it’s not enough for him to mimic: he needs to have his hands in whatever Lisa or I happen to be doing. This is most problematic when cooking, but I’ve managed to stop that issue—for now—by giving him a perch or location where he can safely see what’s going on.

In the meantime, we’ve installed a child door on the entrance to the kitchen so we don’t get a repeat of what I found him doing when I got out of the shower on Sunday: He’d pulled one of his little toy chairs up to the stove, climbed up, and disassembled one of the burners to see the “clock” inside. (The metal base of the burners kind of looks like a dial, and Mathias is obsessed with anything that looks the least-bit clock-like.) Later in the day I found him on top of one of the kitchen counters, placing plastic bowls in our toaster oven. I have to give him a little credit. If he’s going for disaster, at least he’s aiming high.

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If there was an actual train wreck over the weekend, it was dinner on Saturday. I decided for us to try the Tin Fish—an occasionally decent restaurant in a fantastic location that keeps us suckers coming back—and came prepared for the long wait I expected with Cheerios, milk, and other items to keep Mathias distracted. It took about an hour and a half to get dinner, but, regrettably, the distractions stopped working on Mathias at the 1:15 mark. The last 15 minutes before we were served were among the longest the entire weekend. Mathias became chipper again once offered french fries, but he wouldn’t touch his fish chips.

The trip to the Mermaid Car Wash on Monday deserves an honorable mention, I suppose: It turned out the car wash was a bit, uh, advanced for Mathias, and while he definitely enjoyed watching the inner workings of the car wash, he was basically horrified to see our car get pulled through it without us in it. So, not quite the father/son bonding exercise I thought it would be. Maybe a year from now he’ll find it more interesting, and acceptable.