overachiever

To prove his talent and/or his stubbornness, Jared managed to get an ear infection WITH tubes in his ears. So what's next? Antibiotics and then tubes again. Happy Monday!

autumn? nope. crazy season.

I'm not sure this past weekend will fit into one blog post, but I'm going to give it a whirl!

Friday night, thanks to my mom being here to oversee what's here of the collective, Joe and I went to the Switchfoot concert. Despite the fact that they are my favorite band ever, this was only the second Switchfoot concert I'd ever been to. And it was fabulous! It was just Switchfoot, no openers. They played the new album ("Hello Hurricane") in its entirety then they played some older stuff. The concert was at Warehouse Live, which is a pretty good venue. I'm not sure I'd willingly attend a standing room only concert for just any band, but with this concert it actually worked. And here's a picture of Jon Foreman when he came out into the crowd and stood with the guy directly in front of us to sing a chorus of one song.


Saturday was Jared's birthday party. He had requested a Thomas (the Tank Engine) cake for his birthday party. And this is why it is useful to marry an engineer (among other reasons):


I also had train engine shapes for the kids to color and then I would assemble them with shoulder straps so they could be trains on the train tracks. Well, that didn't pan out. Instead, after Jared opened his presents, which were literally *all* trucks, with a few clothes thrown in for good measure, he took to driving his trucks around on the tracks. So it all worked out.


Sunday was Ashlee's 5th anniversary at our church. She got a golf cart for a gift. That didn't really have anything to do with us, nor did it add to the craziness of my weekend. I just thought I'd share.


Today, I implemented plan A of the "get Jadyn to stop chewing on her fingernails" attempt. This consisted of painting her fingernails (and her toenails, just for kicks). She chose red glitter polish - one of my personal favorites for the Christmas season. So I painted my toenails too. Her toes look cute, and so do mine! Hooray for having daughters!

I talked to Alaina today...she's doing well. I am really looking forward to seeing her pictures!

This is the conversation I had with Jared this evening. He decided that one of his little cars - a school bus - also had ice cream in it. So he offered me some.

Jared: "Here's your ice cream!"
me: "Thanks!"
pause
Jared: "Give me a money!"

A little later, he offered me some more ice cream.
me: "I don't have any money."
Jared: "Get some!"

boys are special, reason #111 and #112

So I'm driving home from the Galleria area at 6:00pm tonight. (Enough said, right? It gets better.) I was picking up my sister's and daughter's passports which had been freshly approved and stamped with visas to India. I had Jared and A.J. with me. (Told you it was better.)

Determined to suck it up and deal the best I could, we made it out of the visa office without a trip outside/to the bathroom/wherever for some, um, more stringent discipline. Anyway, we're in the car, sitting in traffic, and Jared is alternating between entertaining me and telling me which way I should be driving. At one point, he starts singing "Twinkle Twinkle," and asks me to sing along. So I do. Then he asks me to sing the Doxology (we've started singing that at bedtime also...long story), so we sang that together too. As soon as we finish, he says, "Okay, time to go to bed now! Going to sleep in the car!" He then closed his eyes and leaned against his headrest, feigning sleep.

Of course I had to play along. "Jared, are you sleeping?"

Without blinking, "Yes!"

A few seconds later, in his delightful yelling voice, "Wake up time!"

After about 30 minutes and 10 miles, I asked him about one of his classmates at Mother's Day Out. I had been tipped off about this particular classmate from my informant.

"Jared, was Aubrey in your class today?"

"No."

Knowing otherwise, I persisted. "Jared, was Aubrey in class today?"

Unintelligible mutterings, then, "Yeah."

Different tactic. "Jared, is Aubrey your friend?"

Without hesitation, "Aubrey's a girl."

Clearly, being a girl disqualifies one from friendship status in Jared's world.

the dawn of understanding

You may have heard the tales of Jared's naptime and bedtime exploits.

So I have taken to locking the door to the bathroom and putting up the gate in his doorway so that he cannot get out or relocate the bathroom accessories to his bedroom.

This afternoon, I did as usual, first locking the door to the bathroom.

"Mommy, you lock the door?"

"Yep. So you can't get in and make a mess."

I put up the gate in his doorway.

"Mommy, now I'm stuck in here!"

"Yep."

Hysterics ensue.

old fashioned sing-along

(to the tune of "Frere Jacques," emphatically and at the top of your lungs)

R-E-D red
R-E-D red
That spells red
That spells red
Fire trucks are red
Stop signs are red too
R-E-D
That spells red

(take a breath, then continue, same tune)

I am special
I am special
Look at me
You will see
Someone very special
Someone very special
It is me
It is me

Go ahead, try to get that out of your head now.

Uh-huh. That's what I thought.

You're welcome.

I will not be outstubborned.

Some miscellaneous thoughts that have not yet made it to my blog:

We went to the UH vs. UCF softball game today. It was a lot of fun! We lost that game, but we won the first game of the doubleheader, so we came out even. I think the kids had fun, but sometimes it's hard to tell. Joe almost caught a foul ball. He would've caught it had he not been holding the baby. As it was, he made sure it didn't hit any of our small children, which is what really matters. He and Alaina took it to the concession stand, where she traded it in for a blow pop. Good times.

Ravi was the color commentator for the radio broadcast of the Omaha Beef game last night. He was really good. I actually listened to 3 hours of an indoor football game on the radio and enjoyed it. The Beef won.

I discovered something depressing the week before last. When I was growing up in Omaha, I always said that when I had a house of my own, I wasn't going to live so far out that I'd have to drive by cornfields to get there. (The cornfields across from my parents' neighborhood don't count because they are owned by Boys Town.) When Joe was looking for our first apartment the summer before we got married, he kindly took a picture of the fields he drove by to get there. But that didn't really count because those fields aren't there anymore.

So a few weeks back, I decided that the equivalent of the cornfield rule around here was Buc-ee's. For the uninitiated, Buc-ee's is a gas station chain with a near-cult following. I don't know, I don't really understand it. I suspect the beaver mascot has brainwashed people or something. ("The moon and stars..." Sorry, better now.) Anyway, the new rule was that if you had to drive past a Buc-ee's to get to your house, you lived too far out. To my dismay, the week before last I discovered that there is a Buc-ee's on the other side of the freeway from my neighborhood.

Apparently my rules are a cosmic joke.

Last Tuesday, as I was changing Jared's third dirty diaper of the day, I asked, in what I thought to be a rhetorical fashion, "Jared, what did you eat?" To which he responded, without missing a beat, "Dirt. Eat dirt, Mama." (That wasn't a command, he just skipped the sentence subject of "I.")

In case you were curious, I won the stubborn contest. I knew when Jared napped until 7 the day was not going to end well...(it's 2am right now).

a good number

I'm weird about numbers. You've probably figured that out.

Today is Day #
I've always liked the number 25. It's my birthdate, of course, and it's the date of Christmas. It's the same date as my mom's birthday. It's an odd number, which is a strike against it, but it's a nice round number, and it's a square of another nice round number.

Don't worry. I'm done now.

Believe it or not, I guessed this one too!

Okay, I didn't guess it specifically, but I guessed the general category.

And this is my game and my birthday, so it counts.

Yes, I do a very good impression of a 4-year-old. I have good material from which to study.

So this present was soft, but way too big to be a shirt. I could also tell there was a rod of some sort the whole length of the present.

I guessed a wall hanging.

My friends know me even better than that!



It's a VeggieTales advent calendar! I love advent calendars!

I'm all about celebrating anything and everything possible. (You may have noticed.) But for me, part of that celebrating is the anticipation. I count down to everything. I always have. Usually it was counting down until a school vacation, or even the entire school year.

We've had an advent calendar for three years now, I think. It's a Christmas tree from Starbucks, and it has numbered boxes that hold candy, and when you turn the box around after that day has passed, a Christmas scene begins to emerge.

When I was growing up, we had an advent calendar similar to the VeggieTales one - a Christmas scene, and there was a little mouse that you moved from day to day.

When I get ambitious and have more time, I'm going to experiment with small wood crafts. I have a great idea for a three dimensional wooden Christmas tree on a pedestal. The pedestal will have numbered drawers containing an ornament to be placed on the tree each day. It's going to be very cool.

The three older kids were outside when I opened my present, so I took it outside to show them. The girls were swinging, and Jared was sitting on the porch swing with his bowl of frosted mini wheats (from breakfast, no milk) in his lap. I showed the girls, who oohed and aahed appropriately and then I heard this:

Jared: "Mama!" (in his particular form of 2-year-old insistence)

I showed him the advent calendar.

He looks at it for a second.

Jared: "Wow! Oh!"

In Jared's limited vocabulary, that is high praise, indeed.