David Beckham? Not Yet.

Back in September, we had the bright idea of taking Nathan to an open house for a toddlers' soccer program in Rockville.  The informational session for the Lil' Kickers program was held at the Rockville SportsPlex, a surprisingly nice complex on the edge of Rockville's industrial area.  It was held on one of about eight or ten indoor playing surfaces, complete with miniature goals, cones, and plenty of soccer balls.  We went to the program hoping for lots of fun and many opportunities for some great action shots with Nathan.  Alas, it was not quite to be.  Instead of laughter and joy, there was plenty of screaming.  Instead of running and kicking, there was picking up and throwing.  With his predilection for scooping up incoming soccer balls and throwing them back, Nathan seems to be showing more aptitude for the position of goaltender than any other.  He spent much of the time moving from soccer ball to soccer ball to see which one was best to throw.

The program is designed for kids 18 to 24 months old, so since the open house occurred a few weeks before Nathan turned 18 months, we might have been pushing it a bit.  We ended up being the parents with the kid who ran around at the other end of the field while the other kids lined up to run or sat in a circle to stack cones.  Nathan is not yet much for structured activities, apparently.  At one point, the activity proved to be too much and I had to take him out to the car for a timeout, smiling in exasperation at the horrified mother in the lobby as Nathan screamed like a banshee.  On the upside, he had some time to play with some other kids, one of the instructors taught him how to kick the ball, and it wore him out.  We picked him up a small soccer ball at Dick's Sporting Goods after the open house and, since then, he's shown some flashes of aptitude for kicking the soccer ball around.  Maybe the next open house will be better.

The Long Project

The next major construction project has begun: the phased remodeling of the entire upstairs. Now that we have a new laptop and less clutter on our desk, the home office has been moved downstairs and the front bedroom has been mostly cleared out. The first phase in the remodeling will be to change the layout of the front bedroom, allowing us to move in. The first step in that phase is to rip up the old parquet flooring that covers the front bedroom and the entire upstairs. Though the flooring is made of fairly good quality oak and has aged rather nicely, the glue underneath has worn out, so many spots on the floor creak and pop as the parquet tiles compress and rebound under our feet. In addition to these noises, there is also an intolerable amount of creaking coming from the subfloor, where nails connecting the plywood to the floor joists underneath have come loose.  So to get things started, I spent a good part of a Monday earlier this month introducing the flooring to the business end of a floor chisel, popping the parquet tiles out like pieces of a puzzle.  Most of the bedroom floor is now an exposed spread of dried--but still slightly sticky--black floor glue.  Removing the floor tiles alone took care of many of the creaks and groans, but several of the particularly noisy spots were silenced by a few well-placed screws.  My morning routine is now considerably quieter than it was with an intact floor.

The idea with the front bedroom is to knock out the wall between the bedroom and the laundry room, an extra room constructed by the previous owner.  After that, we'll build a new wall to enclose the smaller laundry closet, a room big enough for the washer and dryer but small enough to leave the master bedroom respectably large.  A pocket door between the bedroom and the master bathroom will add a bit of privacy that is now somewhat lacking and we'll finally be able to put up the third ceiling fan upstairs.  A bit of carpet should make the floor even quieter and will make the room ready for us to move in, freeing up the back bedroom for the next phase of construction.  At least, that's the plan; it could change considerably in the future.