Friday, March 02, 2007


Kaspar has been initiated into the pop culture of Canada! Do you guys know this character? If you want to hang out with Kaspar, you better know him! Yup! Kaspar is crazy about Caillou.

It all began one fine day, when Steve took Kaspar to a Value Village to pick out some toys and found a video tape of Caillou amongst the bags of goodies. No, not a DVD, but a Video tape. We still have a VCR and keeping it has proven to be a wise choice, because it seems that many parents are getting rid of their perfectly fine tapes of kids stuff and switching to DVD’s. And we have stumbled onto a treasure of movies for a buck or two at the Value Village. Of course the rewinding is not fun. Neither is skipping through scenes. But, at least it’s a good reason not to watch the same tape over and over again without taking a break. Right? Wrong! The first Caillou tape Kaspar got, was rewound and played over and over again so many times, that even I seem to know the entire dialogue off by hart now.

It must have been a Wednesday or Thursday, when we first got that guilty video tape. It was all about Caillou and his cat Gilbert, but the best episode (Kaspar’s absolute favourite) is the part where Gilbert has to be rescued from the tree by firefighters and then Caillou goes to the fire station for a visit. Funny enough that coming Sunday we had made plans with Kaspar’s buddies Emil and Markus to visit our friend Mike’s work. You probably guessed - Mike is a firefighter!

The visit was an absolute hit. Kaspar might have been even more into it then Emil, who is a few years older and definitely understands the concept of a firefighter a lot better. Kaspar wanted to sit in the truck, kept asking to have it turn on, liked to move the excessively large steering wheel and cried his eyes out, when an hour and a half later we were trying to get him dressed to leave the place. If he had it his way, he would have spent the entire day there! In fact he probably would have been happy to stay overnight.

Sunday, February 25, 2007

filling dad's slippers



Steve has just left for a short trip to Chicago with the band and Kaspar has been feeling more distressed then usual. At night he kept pointing at our bed and asking “tete? tete?” As soon as we came down in the morning, he found dad’s slippers and was wearing them all morning, taking his sweet time getting places, dragging his feet across the floor in the big shoes. I bet our basement neighbor was just thrilled… Kaspar is usually very good about not freaking out, when either of us leaves the house. He’s perfectly happy to just wave goodbye and get back to whatever he was doing. However, this time Steve left while Kaspar was sleeping. Perhaps that’s the reason…