It’s been mentioned before that Simon’s favorite TV show is 500 Greatest Goals (or “500 Gratist Goles” according to his All About Me worksheet).  This week we have already watched Greatest Goals of the 2012-13 Champions League, and Greatest Goals of the 2012-13 Premier League Season is scheduled to record this afternoon.  Simon doesn’t just love goals, he has developed criteria for ranking them:

1. The goal is struck from distance.  Outside the penalty area is almost a must, near the half-way line is sublime.
2. The goal humiliates the goalkeeper.  Chipping over a keeper who’s come off his line or leaving him flat-footed while the ball goes in the opposite corner is acceptable.  Nutmegging the keeper or forcing an accidental own-goal is getting somewhere.  Causing the keeper to injure himself, while regrettable, is comedy gold.
3. The goal is the result of a feat of acrobatics.  These are the best, really.  Diving headers, sideways volleys, and, the crème de la crème, bicycle kicks.

Here is a goal from last Summer that checks all three boxes:

Bicycle kicks…part of a whole series of  ridiculous soccer moves that I see kids (including Simon’s cousin Ben) endlessly practicing, but never quite pulling off — kind of like skateboarders on Bardstown Road.  Simon has been practicing the bicycle kick for the last couple of months, and I always want to tell him to stop wasting his time and work on his fundamentals.  I don’t, mind you.  I let him have his fun.  And I have to admit that, for a fairly timid child, he can fling his body over backwards with a fearlessness I could never muster.  The first time I saw his overhead foot actually connect with a ball I just about plotzed.

Well, Simon made his first honest-to-God bicycle kick goal this past Monday. It wasn’t a real game — just a bunch of us horsing around at the field hockey goals in Seneca Park — but it was incredible! Simon and I were practicing crosses while his friend Menelik, tired from running around in the heat, was taking a turn in the goal.  I lobbed a high ball into the box, assuming Simon would head it, but instead Simon ran to position himself facing outward between the goal and the ball.  I could see the light go on in his eyes and I knew he was going to go for it!  The ball took a single high bounce, Simon went over backwards with his right foot extended, and WHAM! The ball went straight over Menelik’s shoulder and into the back of the net. I was stunned.

The only unfortunate thing about this? Simon didn’t really get to see the goal itself since he was in the process of landing on his back (and, I assume, trying not to break his neck). I suppose he’ll have to wait a bit until he has 10 slow motion cameras following his moves from every angle.  And while Simon loves to see the abstract goalies of TV land humiliated by a stunner, his sweeter nature takes over when the action is closer to home.  “I didn’t tell about my bicycle kick in Sharing Time today”, he told me when he got home from school on Tuesday.  “I was afraid Menelik would be embarrassed.”  Menelik doesn’t have anything to be embarrassed about, I explained to him, but Simon certainly has something to be proud of.

After a couple of sound thrashings, I decided to take it easy on Simon for a game and he quickly got up on me 5-1:

I’m going to beat you like a tied up goat!

Really?  Why do I feel like Simon’s Pappaw has something to do with this.

A couple of nights later I really let him have it and got up on him 9-3:

Oh man — we’re gonna get relegated.*

Yup.  Definitely watching too much late-season English Premier League.

And finally, in a desperate move to wave off one of my goals:

That doesn’t count.  He was offside!

If you understand what “offside” means and how a Foosball table is set up, that last one is hilarious.  Trust me.

—–

* The bottom three teams in English Premier League get relegated down to the lower league for the next season.  The top three from the lower league get brought up to Premier League, but I don’t know the fancy word for that.

“Earth,” I was telling him, “has a lot of things that make it a good place for people to live.*”

“Like milk?” asked Simon.

“Yes, but I was thinking of some more fundamental things.”

“Milk is very healthy for you and it helps you grow.”

“All true,” I said stifling my laugh, “but in order to have healthy milk we need some other things, like water, air, sunlight….”

“Oh yeah,” said Simon, “and Earth also has some really great spheres.”

“Hmmm, okay.  What spheres are you talking about?”  I thought maybe he meant the Moon, possibly even the Earth itself.

“Oh you know,” he said, getting that I can’t believe I have to explain it to Daddy tone in his voice.  “The Troposphere, the Stratosphere, the Mesosphere, the Thermosphere and the Exosphere.”

Yep.  Simon not only knows the five layers of Earth’s atmosphere (in order), he finds ways to work them into conversation.  This kid so needs to get into the Math, Science & Technology magnet program for next year.

—

* And, yes, for all you philosophy of science nerds out there, we’ll get to the Anthropic Principle in a few years.

“Daddy,” he asked in the car on the way up to Douglass Loop, “can I ask for the usual?”

“Sure,” I told him, “but if the person at the ice cream shop doesn’t know you very well, they may not know what your usual is.”  Simon certainly knows what his usual is: Cookies & Cream.  In fact, it’s mine, too, and we rarely stray from it.  “You may have to explain that you mean Cookies & Cream.”

“Okay,” said Simon.  I could tell he was running the scenario through in his little five-year-old head.

Inside the shop, Simon sauntered up to the counter with that “I know I’m going to say something funny” gleam in his eye.  He had no idea.

“What would you like?” said the ice cream scooper, leaning over the counter to look down at Simon.

“Two of the usual,” he replied almost cracking himself up in the process.

The ice cream scooper looked confused.  “Um, what’s the usual?”

As matter-of-factly as he could, Simon explained, “The usual is when you know me so well that you know what I always order.”

After a few warm up shots, Simon ran towards the basket for his new lay-up move.  BOOM!  Simon was down on the floor.  “What happened?” I asked him.

“An L.A. Laker hit me,” he said, picking himself up.  And then after a short pause, “He just got thrown out of the game.”

Two or three plays later, Simon was down again.  “I bent my elbow backwards.  I need Kevin Garnett to help me.”  He went to the “locker room” (the couch), insisting that I play on without him.  We he returned a few minutes later, he told me that he could only play with one arm, and then proceeded to make a slam dunk on his little Fisher Price goal.  Impressive, but his one-armed passes were nowhere near as accurate as Rajon Rondo’s.

We were upstairs tonight getting him into his PJ’s, and since Simon is really interested in numbers these days and also likes to point out clocks, I decided to introduce him to the wild world of digital alarm clocks.

“See these numbers, Simon?  This is a clock and it tells time.  But it uses numbers instead of hands.  Can you tell me what these numbers are?”

Blank stare.  “No hands.”

“That’s right — no hands!  It uses numbers.  Look!  Eight.  Zero.  Two.  It’s eight-oh-two.”  It seemed appropriate, so I quoted one of Simon’s favorite nursery rhymes, Wee Willie Winkie.  “Are your children all in bed?  It’s after eight o’clock.”

“Eight o’clock is bedtime.”

“What?”  That wasn’t expected.

“Eight o’clock is bedtime.”

I wasn’t gonna waste this.  “It sure is.  Do you want to go to bed?”

“Uh-kay.”

A few giggles and five minutes later he was out cold.  Eight o’clock is bedtime.

What finally encouraged him to make a decision and go public with it?  This evening’s news reported that Michelle Obama appeared in Louisville today reading The Runaway Bunny to kids at Kosair Children’s Hospital.  “Ooooh!” said Simon.  It was a tough call, but I think he finally had to settle on the candidate with the most pro-Runaway Bunny agenda.

Could anything change Simon’s mind?  Maybe if Chelsea came over and helped point out all of the lights in Goodnight Moon.

Simon was in good spirits and didn’t seem out of sorts at all. We played hard, and he took some amazing naps.  We went for a walk in the bizarre 67F weather (Simon took off his socks in the stroller again) and played with Christopher over at Mama’s Hip. I even got a bit crazy and, after a day of Cheerios, bananas and Pedialyte, decided to give Simon some milk and macaroni & cheese for dinner.

Bad move.

A little after 11:00PM Jessica and I heard a squawk from Simon’s room — not that odd for him at that time of night, but it was followed shortly by some repeated coughs. We both sat up for that, and I went to investigate. Sure enough — el barfo grande…on the crib, on him, on the carpet, on me. Simon and I just went straight to the tub while Jessica tackled the barf in Simon’s bedroom. Simon handled it like a champ, though, and stopped crying by the time we got settled into the bath. He didn’t seem to be feeling sick or in any pain, so we just cleaned up and shared a little bit of ginger ale (he made really funny faces when he tasted it) before I put him back to bed.

The pediatrician’s office said that if he appeared to feel okay, wasn’t running a fever and kept down his next meals then he probably just needed to go dairy-free a bit longer. So we’re back to Cheerios, bananas and Pedialyte for a while — although I might share a bit more ginger ale with him again before bed tonight!

The holidays gave me the first real downtime since the crash, so last week I built a new server with RAID 1 disk-mirroring, installed Ubuntu Server on it and lugged it over to IgLou for colocation. Today I dug out an old laptop disk that had a blog database dump from April and managed to get it installed into an upgraded version of WordPress on the new server. A few minutes later, I had exported Jessica’s new blog and imported it into the rebuilt one. Apart from a six-month gap, some clean-up and a lot of missing pictures, we’re back in business.

In the next week or so, I’ll start rebuilding May-October 2007 from blog entries I pulled out of Google’s cache the night of the crash.

Thanks for sticking with us through the mess. The new URL should be here to stay no matter what, so be sure to bookmark it.

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[Editor’s Note: It must mean something terrible. He absolutely demanded the keyboard from me and then pounded away at it like Jack Kerouac on an Benzedrine bender. Now he’s hitting himself in the face and crying. I’m gonna go try to put him down and then go out and buy a new keyboard.]