While the wife's away . . .

When Lisa dresses my son Alex each morning, she picks out colour co-ordinated Gap or OshKosh B'Gosh outfits.

That's not happening this week--my wife and a dozen of her colleagues have taken off to Kelowna on "business."

The fact that taxpayers are paying for it is almost as appalling as the fact that Lisa left me and Alex to fend for ourselves.

Since she's gone, I have posted an ad for a housekeeper (Carla has been over twice since Lisa left and probably needs to come back a third time to remove the paint from the kitchen walls), had the babysitter over every day (this limits the amount of time I am responsible for the safety of a minor) and eaten at McDonald's twice.

It would have been three times, but I figured we had to eat healthy,so I had the sitter make spaghetti and a salad while Alex and I watched TSN.

Not to say my son and I haven't been having fun.

We painted a model dinosaur, made about 289 Lego airplanes (and played fireman rescuer after throwing them against the wall) and adopted a stray cat (actually Alex's cat Stripey adopted the cat, but Alex is feeding them both).

In the period of one short week, Alex has changed from a boy into a, well,an older boy.

He no longer calls soccer "hockey ball," loves watching extreme mountain biking on TSN (mainly the crash scenes) and likes Led Zeppelin (only Immigration Song, but I'm working on the others).

Alex is coming into his own, which is cool and strangely weird.

For instance, this morning we rode to school on the Trail-A-Bike (an attachment that makes a regular bike into a three-wheeled two seater) with him wearing red rubber boots, a yellow rain jacket, a red firehat and a blue scuba mask.

Not one item was made by The Gap or Oshkosh and that suited both of us just fine.