It’s 2026 and I haven’t done one of these blog post things in a while, so there’s a lot to catch up on – starting all the way from summer 2025.
Summer
We used to take Calvin to the skate park so he could send cars down one of the many slopes that are plentiful in a skatepark by design. One day this summer he suggested we take his bike along, which I didn’t expect, but it ended up being a good time.
The ice cream truck that runs through our neighborhood is a tempting sound for a young child with a nascent sweet tooth. One hot summer day, Calvin finally had his own money to spend, so we chased down the ice cream truck on our bikes, which didn’t seem to want to stop for us. After a long, sweaty chase, the truck stopped and Calvin got a treat in the likeness of SpongeBob. Unfortunately, he didn’t really like the ice cream and hasn’t seemed tempted by the truck since then.
One of our summer activities was throwing tennis balls around outside. I showed him the fun of throwing a ball over the house to the other side. He never quite managed to get the ball up there but I think he had fun trying.
This is the giant-ass honeydew I grew this summer. Unfortunately, I must have picked it a little too late and it was going rotten by the time I cut it open.
We’ve been making good use of Calvin’s bike, and I think he’s been enjoying being mobile. We’ve been trying to explore as many casual bike paths as we can around here.
But Calvin has also discovered “offroading”. We don’t need no roads.
We’ve been playing a lot of board games, usually with modified rules.
Calvin’s Bang! hat.
Part of Calvin’s duties these days is helping to clean the bathroom. It’s sometimes a struggle to get him to do it, but Emily usually seems to be able to work some kind of magic to get him started on it.
He doesn’t fit in our laps quite as well as he used to, but he’s still small enough so we’ll try to savor it.
We got a Nintendo Switch this year, and after a few months I convinced Calvin to try it. Mario Kart has a mode that keeps you on the track instead of letting you fall off which makes the difficulty level about perfect for him. Playing Mario Kart has been one of his new preoccupations, but it’s something that we all enjoy doing together.
His other preoccupation remains cars, but he also enjoys building things (i.e. Legos). He maintains he wants to be “a mechanic and an engineer”.
Over the summer we visited a museum, where we had fun guessing what year the various objects were created in. We had fun perusing the old newspapers. I never would have guessed a museum would be so fun for a 5 year old.
The cat cafe in Tulsa continues to be a favorite. I think the main draw is the board games, and the occasional interesting book.
This is one of Calvin’s alter egos, Tracer Bullet. It’s been fun to hear the names he creates for these imaginary characters. It’s also sad when the personalities are inevitably retired. It’s one more thing to remind us of time marching on.
And this is Calvin as a rockstar.
Not only has Calvin taken an interest in music, but he’s taken an interest in my music, which I’m not complaining about. We now entice him to go on longer car rides by telling him he can control when a song gets skipped. It’s fun to hear what songs he chooses to listen to and at what point he skips songs. It’s like getting into his mind a little bit.
Last year I attempted to ride across the entire metro area of Tulsa on my bike. I almost made it, but I ran out of water toward the end and I had to get picked up. It ended up being somewhere between 30-35 miles. This year I made another excursion, this time I rode from Owasso to Tulsa, only about 16 miles and met Emily and Calvin at East Village Bohemian Pizzeria. There was a lot of this:
In reality it was more than 16 miles. I tried to get cute with shortcuts and ended up having to backtrack a few times. Exhibit A: I ran into this.
Fall
This year for pumpkin carving season, Calvin was able to do a lot of it himself. Even though he was using a pretty dull knife (and we were keeping a close eye on him), we were still a little nervous. He was even able to do a lot of the carving, with a bit of help.
It’s been fun to see what Calvin wants to be for Halloween each year. Last year Calvin was a barrel of toxic waste and this year he was a vampire – complete with glued on teeth that didn’t last long.
This vampire has a sweet tooth.
What would Fall be without going to the fair and driving monster trucks? I think we’ve done this every year and Calvin has gone on the same rides. I’ll have to put together some comparison pictures from each year.
We took advantage of delayed winters in Oklahoma and went on a camping trip, on somebody’s property. We had a tent with a bed in it, so I suppose you could call it glamping. Calvin loved it. He mostly subsisted on s’mores despite our efforts to get him to eat something else. Seems like we’ll have to go camping again when it warms up!
We visited a “pumpkin patch”, and among other things Calvin spent a long time riding around and around in a circle.
Calvin found a worm he wanted to keep and we tried our best to keep it alive. But it died.
We’ve been watching a lot of Great British Bake Off together, and Emily decided to try her hand at some fancy pants baking and made a Grand Canyon cake! Calvin has been asking to go to the Grand Canyon, so I think we’ll try and make a trip in the next year.
Emily and Calvin went to Utah for a Thanksgiving trip and then we went to Arizona for a few days. The cousins spent a lot of time in the backyard, which had something every kid romanticizes: an apple tree that you can climb.
Megan and Todd brought stuff to make homemade root beer, which transformed the kitchen into a laboratory.
The kids “helped” my dad make his family-famous pancakes.
Everyone had fun watching K-Pop Demon Hunters. It sounds terrible, but it’s not terrible, somehow.
Birthday
Calvin was excited for his birthday, probably because he figured he’d get legs and vehicles. And well, I guess he was right.
But not just any car – a remote control excavator.
Winter
Every year, Calvin has had a rough start to the school year. He’s had a hard time with the new environment, and this year was no different although maybe a little bit more difficult than his previous two preschool/pre-K years. But, he seems very acclimated at this point, and even declined on the occasions when we offered to get him out of school a couple hours early. In the beginning it seemed like a very long time for a 5 year old to spend at school (6.5 hours) – for us included – but I think we’ve all gotten more used to it.
Recently we were able to visit Calvin’s classroom during the school day, and he seemed to really enjoy that!
His after school routine lately has involved a few episodes of Tom and Jerry, the cartoon from the 1940s. It seems to have stood the test of time!
Calvin helped Emily make homemade gifts for some of our family members. He seems to enjoy sewing and it’s a good skill to learn to boot!
Christmas
A couple days before Christmas we went to Barnes & Noble to shop for coloring books to test drive a new tradition: coloring while listening to Christmas music. Calvin had a lot of fun looking at the other Barnes & Noble offerings. We spent at least 30-40 minutes just playing with stuff. We did make a purchase, so we have an alibi for any accusations of loitering, right?
And of course, what would Christmas be without checking out the lights. Except for the fun we had coloring, Calvin wasn’t impressed, until we found the “snowball pit”, which was a space enclosed by hay bales with fake snowballs provided for snowball fights. It doesn’t snow much here.
He finally got his first movie theater experience, and seems to be a fan! He hasn’t been very interested in movies overall, and has only seen a handful of full-length films, but it seems like he’s starting to warm up to them.
Calvin seems to not be deterred by the cold, and even requests to go outside more now that it’s winter. Every now and then we do something that’s a blast from the past like digging with excavators in the dirt. Truthfully, these days those moments make me a little sad, as I’m more painfully aware than ever about how relentless time is and how fleeting every moment is.
There are some undeniable upsides to kids growing older, such as being able to manage his own stuff at the airport (and not needing to bring a stroller).
Emily and Calvin visited Utah so they could celebrate “step-Christmas”.
Even though he’s always been into cars, he was never interested in arcade games involving cars until now. I think playing Mario Kart has given him the confidence to try them, and he’s a fan now. In Utah when they went to Boondocks all Calvin wanted to play was car games, and then they went back a second day so he could play some more.
In November, Calvin lost his first tooth. In December he lost a second one, so now he’s missing his bottom two teeth.
That feels like a good place to stop. I’ll end it how I always end it: with some goofy pictures:
