Santa and a Very Giraffey Christmas

Santa left Eryn a giraffe hat.  A giraffe pillow.  And a half-eaten cookie.



At Grandpa Larry and Grandma Geri's, he showed up in person to deliver additional gifts.

You are my clone...

I know you are, because we all love...

Easter

I post these not because LissyJo asked for them - that just encourages me not to - but because they were on my list of things to do, already open in individual tabs, I just hadn't gotten that far. But now she's ruined it. Very un-situational-leadership like of her.

Ame' and Eryn looking for eggs. Princesses get extra eggs.


Ame' has found one. She will hug it and cuddle it and love it and kiss it and call it her squishy.


F ya! This is my egg. You want to take it? You'll have to take me. Try it biatch! Colin isn't sure what he's got, but you can't have it because it matches his hoodie.


Ooooo....ooooo...nobody take them. Ahhh! Ahh!!!! Stay away! Conner looks very protective.


Dellie finds the egg her Dad couldn't find.


Eryn wearing her Christmas dress to find eggs. I don't think the discontinuity has affected her mood one bit.

Easter!

I swear Easter is basically about cleaning up the house before company arrives. It does help me gain a perspective on how much junk is floating around the house. So for a few hours, until the five children dispersed all the toys and marshmallow guns and candy, it looked pretty good. We had the Cookie Queen family and my sister's family over for some egg hunting and grilling. That's right - we grilled for Easter. Ingenious. If I ever do a ham, I think I'm just going to throw it on the grill for expediency.

For a while I was in charge of tossing a spongy softball in a game of Heads Up! The best part about that was that I managed to unload an extraneous softball glove. My day is happiest when something leaves the house. I was particularly pleased that after the marshmallow guns came out, Eryn drew an engineering-esque comparison between the guns and the rocket launcher she got for selling magazines. She carefully put a marshmallow in the end of the rocket launcher and shot it at Dan'l.

I should have some pictures to post by tomorrow when Pooteewheet's camera finishes a lengthy download.

Storyline!

I can't recommend this site enough. Storyline is famous (and semi-famous) actors reading well known books aloud. Not audiocasts, but videocasts. Eryn loves them. Among those available (and there are others):

To Be a Drum read by James Earl Jones
My Rotten Redheaded Older Brother read by Melissa Gilbert
Brave Irene read by Al Gore
The Polar Express read by Lou Diamond Phillips
Me and My Cat by Elijah Wood
Enemy Pie by Camryn Manheim

Just don't let your web saavy kid who knows how to navigate the site get anywhere near Jason Alexander's Dad, Are You the Tooth Fairy? It has a warning on it. I came skittering over to the top of the stairs, my fingers covered in Bisquick and parmesean cheese, yelling for Pooteewheet to stop her because she was going to watch something that "was too scary for little kids!" Eryn was disappointed. I'm pretty sure she has some suspicions that it's not scary at all, but hides a secret.

Fancy

The other day I was sitting around. Really bored. So for fun I just started staring at Eryn.

Eryn, "What?"
Me, "Nothing."
Eryn, "What?"
Me, "Nothing."
Eryn, "Why are you staring at me?"
Me, "I'm not."
Eryn, "Why are you staring at me?"
Me, "I'm not."
Eryn. Long pause, "What? You think I'm fancy or something?"

Hard not to laugh at that and persist with weird staring behavior. It's led to many days of me saying she looks fancy and her exclaiming, "I'm not fancy!" Finally, the day before yesterday she was in the tub and I commented that it looked like all the fancy had washed off. She thought that was pretty funny.

Family Photo Blogging

I need to catch up on a few pictures of the kids for friends and family that read the blog. So today's post will be pictures from before the holidays and tomorrow's post will be pictures from the holidays. I'd have posted these some time ago, but the whole surgery debacle interrupted my normal picture commentary.

I could blog about the Vikings game instead, as I was there last night with Ming, Mike and Adam, but the less said about that whole mess the better. I should append that my favorite exchange of the evening was in the men's bathroom where an Eagles fan bellowed during a very crowded halftime, "The Eagles' fans are in the bathroom!" Followed closely by "That's where assholes belong." Followed shortly thereafter by the first voice exclaiming, "Hey, don't push me, I'm peeing!"

Ming and Eryn fighting after the pizza event. This is why there are video games. So no one loses an eye. Unless it's from a flying Wii remote.


Eryn, me and Colin at the Minnesota Children's Museum sorting food tiles. I was biking 30 miles a day the day before this picture, so I look pretty healthy. I need to get back in a groove, because I don't feel that healthy now.


Eryn got to take home the class mascot, Sparky. Sparky has a journal and Eryn filled several pages with pictures of Sparky's adventures. There was a previous picture of Sparky in a coffin at a geocache, but that was only part of his weekend. He also attended a birthday party and ate a donut.


And wrestled under the Christmas tree.


And listened to a book about sharks. Eryn has since had those bangs reduced.


And he rode a giant ant. If I was a giant ant, I'd eat Sparky. But maybe this isn't a bear eating ant. It's not a siafu as it has eyes.


Sparky gets a massage after a stressful weekend.


Sparky and Eryn listen to Pooteewheet read Harry Potter. They're now on The Halfblood Prince.


The wrestling over, it's time to pose for a Christmas picture. To everyone that was expecting a Christmas letter from me, this will have to do. I'm just not very good at Christmas letters, and there are almost 500 posts out here every year. If you haven't found opportunity to read yourself nauseous about my family, you're just not trying.


Conner blowing out the candles on his cake at the Children's Museum. I like this picture because just before it there was some concern that there were no candles for the cake. Conner's mom noted that this would result in a "pretend blow". I hate those.


Eryn playing Castle Wars on the computer. A very simple card game that works great for kids. Make your castle bigger than 100 levels. Or make the other person's castle smaller than 1 level. She goes back to it frequently, so it must maintain some of it's fun factor.

Bored

The incident my sister refers to in this comment involved an exchange between my oldest niece and myself while my sister's children were here for the evening:

Niece: "I don't like to be bored."
Me: "Oh, I don't think..."
Niece: "I don't like to be bored. But my mommy likes me to be bored."
Me: "I don't think..."
Niece: "I don't like to be bored. But my mommy likes me to be bored. I don't want to be bored. But my mommy wants me to be bored."

(Wanders off with a number of My Little Ponys, obviously not bored).

Meal Time

We've tasked Eryn with cooking one meal a week. With help. But she has to pick what we're going to eat and do a better than equal share of the preparation. This week was foil dinners, courtesy of the cookbook my Aunt and cousins bought me and my brother when we were kids, Betty Crocker's Cookbook for Boys and Girls. Which, just as an aside, has a price as low as $0.01 on Amazon used books and retailed for $3.95 around Christmas of 1980.

Eryn seemed o.k. with the idea of cooking dinner. She's been involved in chocolate chip cookie production before and has helped me by fetching things from the fridge as necessary. And things went pretty well at first. Here you can see her chopping up carrots and potatoes, which was a little difficult as we used only a semi-sharp knife and were overly cautious about how hard she could press to chop the vegetables.


The big trouble came when we used a mixture of pork and hamburger to give the meals a meatloaf flavor. That required mixing the meat, and I had her do it by hand instead of a with a spoon. As you can see, her interest in squishing ground cow and pig between her fingers is dubious at best. In the full set of pictures, you can see her going from unsure, to mild dislike, to this one, a bit grossed out. I promised her next time we'd use a spoon to mix it, but that most people who eat hamburger tend to use their hands so they can form appropriate patty-shaped lumps. I'm of the opinion that if you're going to eat the poor beastie(s), you should have a firm understanding of what happened to the critter, and Eryn has always sort of understood where chicken and hamburger comes from, but this did seem to drive it home a little more. Then again, she's had that same face reserved for pumpkin guts since we first carved a pumpkin.

New Art

Eryn and my niece, Sophie, made a painting at Grandpa Larry's studio. Grandpa framed it and brought it over for us to put on the wall. So last night, Pooteewheet climbed a ladder and tested whether the closet would support her weight so we could have the art appropriately situated in the kitchen. You can't see it, but while she was up there she dusted.

Child Labor Camp

We run a gulag for children at the rental property in Apple Valley. Here's Eryn in charge of the nailer, putting up a piece of trim. Andrew has to give up the "little bit of white caulk" jokes when she's around.


And once the trim is up, it must be painted. Eryn is wearing the clothes of one of the female renters so she doesn't ruin her good shirt. She also helped sand the window frames to get rid of the polyurethane bubbles, and taped them to pick up the dust. It seemed appropriate as the company is E&O for Eryn and Oliver, and not A&S for Andrew and Scott.

Panty Liner

I got to Eryn's school festival yesterday, where I was scheduled to run the ring toss, and after I entered the gymnasium, Pooteewheet was flashing one of these at me from her pocket and pointed out that they could be won for scoring a successful ring toss. All I could think is, "Why would they give away panty liners to children?" Followed closely by, "What sort of idiot makes and/or wears a psychedelic panty liner?"

Turns out, it's a book mark. I should have known. Although if it WAS a pantyliner, perhaps this was the intended use.

There's P in the Pool (and Poo)

I noticed that Klund decided we should post pool pictures. There's no P or Poo, except in the word, but there is a Scooter with a Mad Hatter beer and a wizard shirt, which is almost as disturbing.

Chicks

Last Thursday I was helping Dan'l lift his new air conditioner into place, and during the visit he asked Conner what they do at the park.

Conner replied, "Look for chicks!"

A bit dubious, I asked, "What do you do with chicks when you find them?"

"Throw them at your head!"

Weekend - Birthday, Geocaching, Rabid Rabbits - Picturtopia

We had a good weekend at our house. Eryn turned five, and we celebrated with a party at The Blast, Eagan's indoor play area. I bumped into one of the managers I work with there, and his wife, also a coworker, as their son was born just a few days before our daughter. It was a good place to party. Considerably cheaper than Pump It Up, and it came with a cake. The kids seemed to love it. We finished with an afterparty at the house, playing Wii sports with grandpa and grandma, and a whole evening of beer and Rabid Rabbits with Kyle. Perhaps it's not the best idea to teach your child to slap rabbits and hit them with hammers and plungers and hammer toss cows, but Eryn seems to understand that it's all in good fun. Racing warthogs can be very difficult.

We also went geocaching on Sunday, that glorious, warm, beautiful day that makes you wonder what the hell happened after about 4:00 p.m. today. Why couldn't it be all rainy and crappy and cold between 8 and 4 and sunny afterwards? We went down to Black Dog Park in Eagan, near the river, and found about six caches over several miles of walking. Exercise for the whole family.

And as part of our geocaching adventures, we rehid Eryn's cache, and it was accepted! It literally took 15 minutes from it being posted and accepted to three different cachers showing up at the site at the same time. Crazy! They have alerts set so that their cellphones/blackberrys alert them to new posts. No first to find for The Boss, although he found it today.

Someone rode out into Black Dog Park on their Suzuki and never made it home. It's all very Mad Max with Eryn starring as the little feral child.


The first time we tried to find this cache, it was incredibly wet and muddy and Eryn and I failed. Failed in many ways, because I took a tumble down a slippery hill and hurt my arm. That was the end of caching that day. I think the mud is still on that jacket. This time I walked right up to it and popped it open and found this. Apparently my brain had been mulling over what I'd missed for weeks.


Here's the fade shot with Eryn and her Webkin wondering why the cache isn't to be found where it would seem it should be.


Ah...you think you're sneaky, don't you Mr. Paklid. But we're on to you.


This is a geobug called something like Little Man, Big Head. You have to be pretty dedicated to be finding places to hide this monstrosity. It's huge, and heavy, meaning you can't crumple it up and stuff it into something smaller. We didn't take it - I just wasn't sure when we'd next be near an appropriate cache.


Eryn, strutting her stuff on Geocaching Sunday.


Eryn's a geo gopher. Seems like a not so sneaky cannibal was trying to catch a bit of lunch. Dude - deeper, more spikes.


A bit more posing.


Followed by acting like a ninja with a walking stick. I can only assume this is the fallout of Light Saber Aerobics at the school talent show.


Near where Eryn hid her first cache. That's right...where we were, the trees have names. Vulture and Kite aren't very descriptive, but they make for good clues for cachers. The official name of her cache, which included her first Tooth Fairy geobug, was "I Have a Cachity."


Here we are looking for good places to hide a cache. I did do a squirrel check with a stick before thrusting Eryn's face into the hole.


Birthday at the Blast. My niece, sporting the dinosaur babysitter shirt we got her for Christmas from Threadless and enjoying her cake and ice cream. She really covered some ground in the kid habitrail.


Eryn and her friend sharing a birthday hug.


Eryn reading Girls Can from Grandpa and Grandma.


Logan at the Blast. His mother is effectively hidden in this photo. Logan refused to crawl around the tubes without her. By the end of two hours, she was looking rather hot. In a sweaty, too much time in tubes that are too small for adults, sort of way.


Conner. He suffered the only real injury I know of. Somehow he managed to backflop off something, and there were red scrapes on his back that made him look like he was auditioning for Body Worlds.


Post caching. Eryn and the neighbor drawing chalk outlines in the driveway and playing golf. Those sticks to the right are geocaching leftovers. Pooteewheet's bumper stick proclaims her desire to have Edwards elected. I think the chalk outlines are a metaphor for her hopes.

Leftovers

Item 1 - this may truly surprise my mother, but I seem to have fingernails. No gloss, no weird bad-tasting dip, I just decided 40 years after I started that I'd like to quit chewing on them, so I did.

Item 2 - Pooteewheet bought a Wii. Apparently she was jealous of Klund's and had a bit of camera money left over because she's getting a cheaper camera. It makes my arm hurt, so it'll probably be good exercise for any company. Reminds me a lot of the Pong game my Dad brought home when we were kids, just vastly upgraded.

Couple of uncommented upon pictures still sitting around.

A cache I found just before I left for Rochester.


Another cache - the library card cache. Not notable for the library card, but more for the next picture.


I almost missed it because it wasn't what I was expecting. Instead of a container, there was just this thin magnetic sheet stuck to the bottom of a very old grill in Burnsville near 35W and Hwy. 13 (there's an archery range down there). Very fun find.


Easter dinner at LissyJo's. Cookie Queen is surrounded by children. At least 2/3 of them are her own.


Eryn dying an Easter egg. The colors came out much better this year.