We Are Thankful For The Walkers

This picture does not include Sid and Grant, who were present but didn't make it into the photograph. I took lots of other pictures that were totally blurry. What a disappointment! Who messes up point and shoot pictures? It's embarrassing. As I get older, I seem to find more and more ways to have technological mishaps.

Yesterday evening our good friends from Montana came to visit. Ed and Kathleen Walker and their 5 children. I will now take this time to remind you that 5 + 5 = 10. Kelly, Grant, Sid, Calvin, Craig, Josie, Jon, Grace, Audrey, Tommy. Ten kids! It was really fun and surprisingly peaceful. We all enjoyed homemade pizza and ice cream cones. After we had eaten ourselves sick, we put the kids to bed and stayed up late talking about everyone we know. Ed and Kathleen used to live here until May 2006 when they moved to Billings. It was a really sad time back then and everybody cried because the Walkers are just the type of people to inspire serious tears when they packed up and left town. (I'm talking unflattering, gasping, blotchy-faced tears as opposed to decorous weepy sniffling.) But now we get to enjoy their visits! It's fun.

Then this morning we met up with some local friends the Carley's and all 20 of us ate breakfast at IHOP. 14 kids, 6 adults, 1 baffled server and numberless other unsuspecting IHOP patrons caught in the crossfire. We trust we put on a good show for everyone.

Walkers, we miss you already.

The Gymnastic Stylings of Jos

Josie loves gymnastics now. There was a time in the not-too-distant past when Josie was all like "I hate gymnastics!" and stuff, but now she really loves it. Her specialty is the cartwheel and she has got 31 flavors of those. One handed, two fisted, elbow, arms hooked together inside the long sleeves of her shirt. Really any kind a 7-year-old Marylou type can think up. She is a cartwheel monster and cannot--can not--watch TV or have a conversation without doing a cartwheel every 3.4 seconds. You think I am joking.

Anyway, in addition to cartwheels she has now mastered the art of the back walkover. I guess I shouldn't say "mastered" it because that implies that her toes would be pointed and her legs would be straight, but she now does them without landing on her head and without me "spotting" her, which is great for me because I think I was starting to develop some sort of serious arm injury from keeping her body aloft and her head off the floor. I'm not kidding! My arms were killing me.

So here is a professionally produced video of a few of her tricks. Never mind Tommy's little moment on camera. He was a total disappointment. (Also please disregard the sad little white tree--yet to be decorated--in the corner.)

Communitcating With The Small

For as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed spending time with small children. Maybe this is because kids are so funny. And admit it, even if kids drive you nuts--even if you actually hate children--they are a laugh riot. A few random conversations I have had lately with Tommy, newly turned three:

In the car on the way to church, Tommy is rehashing for me a recent storyline from Dora The Explora. It is about Boots. But that is all I am clear on, because Tommy isn't what you'd call a brilliant conversationalist. He has the vocab you'd expect from a kid who doesn't really make communication a priority--preparation no doubt for when he becomes a teen. It was all about Boots and boots and a gate and a map. I don't really know what the heck he was telling me, but I had a great time listening. And just like Tommy's story, my little story here doesn't seem to have a point to it either, other than aren't kids funny?

Today we were in the kitchen together and I was asking him if he wanted a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He said he did, and then specified "in a dinosaur" which means he wants it cut out using the dinosaur sandwich cutter. Our conversation is all just for show because he wants the exact same thing every day. But today when I repeated back to him "in a dinosaur" he kind of had a little freak out and said "not a real dinosaur! A sammich dinosaur!" And I laughed and laughed because I thought just how dumb does this kid think I am?

And last Saturday I found him sitting on the island, covered in "I Can't Believe I'm Eating This Crap Instead Of Butter", crouching over our dear old free toaster, now defiled with butter substitute. As I was looking around for the camera I scolded, "You have absolutely ruined our poorly functioning {free} old toaster with the missing control knob!" To which he replied "I didn't did! I didn't did!

Oh but Tommy......you did did.

See? Funny, huh?

It's Snowing!

And we couldn't be more pleased. In the 13 years we've lived here, this is the first time the snow has come so late in the year. Not that we are complaining.......it's just that snow before Christmas is so seasonal and fun. Baking cookies, sled riding, stomping around the snow in the backyard. Check back with us in February, when our attitudes will have become considerably less romantic. Because is there anything more depressing than a blizzard showing up to freeze all of the buds off the trees? I just say no to snow in May. Don't you?

Josie out braving the elements. That is her bike behind her, rusting away. We must have told her 47 times to put it in the garage. (Did you ever do this to your Barbie's legs?)

Heading off to goof around at the bus stop across the street. Remember my kids waiting for the bus dressed up for Halloween? Thank you, Mother Nature, for cooperating for a change.

The sun. It won the battle about an hour after the kids got picked up by the bus. No shoveling today!

Fun at the Park

Good grief, today's outing was rather dismal. The kids had the day off and so while Sid and Calvin went on their merry way to play with friends, Josie, Jon and Tommy were left home to shift for themselves with me. Josie has been begging for the past week to go to the new park that finally opened near our house. (Josie is one of those rare people with the talent to punish you in the most exsquisite way if you do not give in to her demands. As unpleasant as this trip turned out to be, staying home would have been much more painful.) We have been watching the park come together for the past several months and you would think from the wait that it must be something special. It is not. Not to alienate my male readership (all 3), but this park was obviously designed by a man, if you catch my meaning. The "park" area where the slides and swings are located is small and awkward, to make lots of room for a completely superfluous and I predict, seldom used softball field. Oh, and two putting greens.

In addition to the park's smallness and awkwardness is its closeness to a busy street--yet at the same time its long distance from the parking lot. A mother would never allow for such poor planning and design. Because as mothers, we all know that when it is time to go home, each child between the ages of 18 months and 3 1/2 years will have to be physically carried off like a combative fugitive of the law. Dragged kicking and screaming from the slides and swings up the long hill to the parking lot. (Unless they are running straight into traffic, in which case their nimble little legs will carry them off at an enviable pace.) No, I'm quite confident that a woman's opinion was not sought in the planning stages of this park.

The park is .4 miles from our house, at the end of our long and winding street. Today we drove the car to the park, then passed the park on our way to McDonald's. Approximate distance from our house: 4.5 miles. We then arrived back at the park with our sack full of rapidly cooling fast food and began stuffing our wind-lashed faces with cheeseburgers and fries, in a futile attempt to warm ourselves. You have never seen 4 people so pathetic and huddled as we were, shoveling lunch into our mouths. Because guess what? Today was dang cold. We spent more time in the car acquiring lunch than we did at the park. As you can see from these gorgeous photos, we sure picked a beautiful day for an outing at our new park!

Beyond the kids, a peek at that softball field we will all enjoy and appreciate so much.

This is the entire kid portion of the park. See those houses at the top of the pic? And the barely visible cars? That is the parking lot. This must have been how the pioneers felt.

Baby Guy Turns 3

Sunday Tommy turned three and I thought I might mark the occasion by telling you three things about him that you may not already know:

1. Sure Tommy gets into a lot of scrapes--most of which I chronicle on my blogs--but for the most part he is a very easy kid. He has been our best sleeper (something not to be quickly glossed over when one has five children) and is just a mellow kid. He adores his older siblings and frequently asks me during the school day "Where are the children?" Tommy only uses his amazing powers for evil when he is bored. As long as there are some other kids around, he is happy to stay out of the food coloring and peanut butter (and Vaseline, cake flour, powdered sugar, vitamins, bread, Tilex, baby wipes, diaper cream, nail polish, markers, dish washing tablets, toothpaste, hair wax, and etc.)

2. Tommy loves to take a bath or a shower. In fact, if someone starts the tub they better be prepared to share.

3. Tommy patiently puts up with a lot of hugs and kisses from all of us--he totally lets me make out with him all the time. Moms, you know what I am talking about.

First A Pink Costume, Now This

Patrick

When I was really little (probably 4) my parents took us to visit some of their friends. Their friends had a bunch of little kids and one of the kids, a boy, was my age. I remember we didn't get along particularly well until we were just about to leave that evening, when the boy came in wearing his jammies. Obviously a hand-me-down from one of his older sisters, he was wearing a fuzzy pink sleeper. This immediately caused me to reevaluate him as a prospective friend. I mean, pink was my favorite color. His name was Patrick. True story.

Tommy loved trick or treating. At the end of a 1/2 hour at a slow waddle from house to house, he was still interested in acquiring more candy. I was ready to drop him off at home with Pie so I said, "Now it is time to go home and eat your candy!" That was all it took.

Tommy loves his Patrick Star costume. He is wearing it right now. It is hot and rather tight in the head/face region, difficult to get into and out of, and it really does make his bottom look big--but you won't hear him complaining. I just hope this doesn't instill in him a life-long love of pink fuzzy sleepers. Because that would be weird.

(Please click on the top photo to check out the belly button. My favorite part.)

Edward Somethinghands

Sid has a recent fixation with black hair. As in, he wishes he had black hair. So a few weeks ago when he told me he wanted to spray his hair black for Halloween (using the messy but utterly temporary hair spray/hair color) I was like, You could totally be Edward Scissorhands for Halloween! I pulled a couple of pictures off google image for him and he agreed. Only, I had no idea he was only saying yes because of the hair color. In actuality, Sid did not want his hair all disheveled and spiked, nor did he want little cuts all over his death-pallor face, nor did he want actual scissor hands. What he wanted was for me to spray his hair black and then fashion some sort of gloved hand weaponry (see photo above) that in no way resembled scissors. All you girls my age or thereabouts will know the pain it caused me to continue to call this his Edward Scissorhands costume. Poor, beautiful Johnny Depp, he does not deserve to be treated thusly! Anyway, the costume was thankfully easy and took about an hour of my time. Some craft foam, card stock, silver paint and automotive duct tape and the whole thing was done. He seemed pleased, as in he didn't refuse to wear it. (He is nearly 13, I will remind you, and so we should not expect much in the way of enthusiasm for anything.)

SpongeBob Short Shorts

The big news of this particular Halloween is that Calvin got a great costume. For those of you who don't know, Calvin is a very non-squeaky wheel in a house full of other wheels that are rather screechy and demanding. Yay for me, but not so much for him. I find it all too easy to say to myself "Oh Calvin won't mind" and he usually doesn't. Sadly this happens throughout the year in a variety of situations. But what kind of message does that send? Some years in October when I am overwhelmed (okay, that would be most years) I don't really get around to whipping up something great for Calvin and so I end up buying him a cheap-o costume at Party City. Bless his heart, he never really seems to mind, but I do. In the non-PC words of my non-PC dad, he gets treated like a red-headed step child. So this year I committed myself to really putting Calvin first and he was going to be Patrick to Tommy's SpongeBob. He was really excited and a few weeks ago before school, I had him lie down on the wood floor and I traced him in sidewalk chalk. Only when I started cutting out the pink Patrick fleece I somehow made the costume too short and suddenly I began to suspect that Calvin wasn't going to be Patrick anymore. Being Calvin, when he came home later that afternoon he took the news pretty well and was soon just as excited to be SpongeBob. And he was an adorable SpongeBob.

What made this costume was the short shorts. When Pie saw Calvin fully dressed he looked at me and said, "Did you have to make the shorts so short?" Well, yes. Yes I did. Because the magic of this costume isn't the fact that I took 2 1/2 yards of green 1/2 craft foam and cut it and glued it and then hand stitch it through the glued foam to reinforce the seams, somehow creating a sponge shape and then covering it with fabric and used blue and red Sharpie's to color the bands on the socks and red felt to make the little tie. No. The magic came from the legs. I wish you could have seen him walking around in his costume, because the pictures just don't do it justice. It was the long skinny legs working those short shorts that got the laughs. And SpongeBob is meant to be funny. I know, I watch him every day.

Santa

Sometimes having two blogs can be burdensome. Like when you think you are posting on one blog and after you hit "publish post" you find out you were posting on the wrong one. Other people, people more experienced with computers and such, would know just how to fix that. It probably involves some cutting and pasting. Anyway, I posted about Super Granny over at my black blog, when really I had intended to put all the descriptions of the costumes over here. I know, you are thinking to yourselves, She has a method to all this? Well, I do. The black blog is much more snarky and full of poking fun at others. The monkey blog is meant to be the stuff my kids will read when they are grown up and want to know why there are no scrapbooks or photo albums.

So on to the next costume re-cap: Santa

Maybe it is the particular shape of the fat suit underneath this costume, but something about Jon that I cannot quite put my finger on makes me think of the Grinch dressed up as Santa.

For the last couple of years Jon has been quite sure he wanted to be Santa for Halloween. But always at the last minute he changes his mind. Sometimes I change his mind for him, like last year when I decided we would all be penguins. So this year when he again mentioned Santa, I knew I had to do it. Because he is right at the edge of childhood regarding Santa, if you know what I mean, and next year I seriously doubt he will still be interested. You may recognize Santa's glasses from Super Granny's costume. They both have the same kind. $3.99 at Party City. Jon's beard gives him fits and so he usually wears it pulled down to under his bottom lip. Kind of giving Santa more of a Brigham Young/John Taylor vibe. Anyway, he loved being Santa. He had all the kids telling him at school what they wanted for Christmas. At one point during last night's trick or treating, he told me he wanted to go home to pass out candy at our house, so he could have the kids (the girls) sit on his lap and tell him their Christmas wishes. I predict he will try and resurrect the idea of being Santa for Halloween again sometime in his teen years. I further predict that we are in serious trouble with our little Casanova Frankenstein, come puberty.