Calvin

(if you want the short version of this blog - skip to the bottom.  Whatever you do don't miss that video.  It will change your life.)  

For years I loved reading the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes.  Who doesn't really?  The comic was funny because it mimicked the real live of the average 6 year old boy.  Well my friends, I now live with a six year old boy and I can easily see where the inspiration for the comic came from.  What you are about to see is not a pre-scripted simulation.  This is all real, spontaneous creation of our six year old also known as the Wombat. 

Fist there was the night I came home to find the babysitter feeling satisfied at a job well done.  She, in fact, had done a great job and we would love her to babysit anytime.  She told me they had a great night with the kids and they had done face painting.  YES!  You gotta love a babysitter that plays with the kids.  No problem, I thought.  She did warn me that Romney didn't want to take off his face paint.  Again - no problem.  When I went down for the night to check on him before I went to bed I expected to see a spider on his cheek or maybe a snake or lightning bolt.  Instead, I found this kid looking like the old WWF Ultimate Warrior....or maybe a little like Stupendous Man!

The other day I found this in our family room.  "DO NOT TOUCH PLEASE!" The writing immediately reminded me of Calvin.  I couldn't find a picture but I'm sure there is a comic somewhere with Calvin trying to keep Suzie out of the G.R.O.S.S club with a sign that looks something like this...

This was Romney's latest costume.  He LOVES creating stuff with tin foil.  We go through a lot.  

He also loves this hat.  He wanted to wear "his cowboy hat" to the natural history museum with his white button up shirt and slacks because he wanted to "look nice."  He cried when we wouldn't let him wear his OTHER had that is even bigger than this one to a rodeo recently.  We were concerned no one would be able to sit next to him.  

 It is great when he gets the camera all to himself....

  And nobody has moves like my six year old.

 

The little things

In our family we feel like we should celebrate small milestones.  For example....Joanie is over a year old now and her life has been hardly recorded at all.  The first year primarily consisted of sleeping, eating, laughing, and crying.  She was/is the sweetest of babies.  At some point around the 9/10/11 month mark she developed a loud screech that basically stated...I WANT.  Guess what?  SHE GOT.  I don't know what it is about the girls in our family but they come with STRONG opinions. 

Here are a few milestones we celebrated recently in Joanie's life...
 FIRST BIRTHDAY!

FIRST BED HEAD!  Lets be honest...some us in the family struggle to grow hair on our heads.

FIRST SUSHI NIGHT WITH PICKLED GINGER!  Hmmm...many significant milestones in our family involve food.  (I couldn't figure out how to get the video to download.  Too bad for you.  She loved the ginger and kept asking for more...but she always made this face between each bite.)

FIRST MEXI-NIGHT WITH SPICY SALSA!  I told you we liked food. 

FIRST SLOT CANYON!  Dangerous?  Depends on who you ask.

 

FIRST PRACTICING....

 

FIRST MISCHIEF (this is clearly her favorite drawer.  Her 459th mischief was when she turned off the computer while I was writing this post...TWICE....A little passive aggressive if you ask me.)

And while there is no picture to mark the occasion, yesterday our little J Bird, Bright Eyes, JJ, Baby J, Joanie Baby....took her first consecutive steps.  We couldn't be more proud.  

It's been a long time since I rock and rolled

Okay peoples.  (by peoples I mean - Hi Mom!)  I'm just going to pretend like I haven't been neglecting my blog for the last two years and pretend like I've kept a careful record all this time.  In fact I have.  I mentioned Joanie was born and since my blog has really been about the funny things that happen in my life it is safe to assume that NOTHING funny has happened in the last two years.  Nothing whatsoever.  My MBA program is SOOOOO close to being done and some things are about to change around here and now....abracadabra.....I blog again.  So there you go.

I have a funny to story to tell you about my brilliant daughter...aka The Hurricane...but first I have a confession.  I am...right now...at this moment...downloading an album illegally.  I really didn't want to but I was left with NO options!  I've wasted so much time tonight trying to buy the album legitimately that I finally gave up.  The album is one of my new favorites.  The artist is Passenger and he has a new album and I want it.  I went to his Facebook page and tried to buy it from his store but they will only ship to the U.K.  So I found it on iTunes, only it is not available in the US iTunes store. I found it in the Australian iTunes store but since I don't live in Australia, iTunes won't sell it to me.  Later, I also found it on the German/European iTunes page but I don't live there either.  Frustrating!  What is a guy to do?  I could listen to it on Spotify, but it isn't there either and they continually confuse the indie folk Passenger from the UK with the hard rocking metal band Passenger from Sweden.  They are not the same.  Going without the new album was not an option so I just started googling it and unfortunately I could only find illicit ways to acquire the album so here I am with credit card in hand and nothing but a free illegal download that is probably going to give my computer an STD or something.  Thanks for letting me get that off my chest.

So anyway - the reason we are here......I was in charge of dinner the other night and that meant what is usually means, which is a 5 buck Hot and Ready pizza and, if we are lucky, maybe some crazy bread.  We eat at Little Caesars all the time (by all the time I mean most Mondays when Marie has to work late) because you just can't beat a meal for 5 bucks that you don't have to make or clean up.  A few weeks before this wonderful meal I had attended a parent/teacher/kid (because we go to a hippie school so the kids come to the conference too as full participants) and Lainey's teacher heaped on the praise.  She went on and on about how awesome Lainey is and how she is one of her favorite students and she wasn't kidding.  (IF ONLY WE COULD GET HER TO BEHAVE THE SAME WAY AT HOME!)  Lainey was doing so great and is doing so well that she was given the blessed opportunity to do an extra research project  WHAT? Yeah, you are so good that you can do extra.  I knew right away that this sounded like more work for me (okay, for Marie) rather than for Lainey but she was excited.  Lainey is great. She is a wonderful, smart, bright girl.  I'm not one of those parents who thinks that their kid is smarter than everyone else - really.  She is awesome but I don't care if she is top of her class.  Too much pressure.  That is why we chose the hippie school over the ELP school.  Those people were crazy.  (Sorry those people.)   The point is, Laine chose Italy for her research project.  So we were driving home from Little Caesars with our meal in a box and Romney started practicing his reading and read the box with the name Little Caesars. Thinking that I'd be a good educational dad, I said to Lainey - "Do you know why it is Little Caesar?  Do you know who the name refers to?"  At this point, Laine says, "Well, is it Caesar Augustus or or Julius Caesar?"  My  response was.."uh...well, um. uh."

Smart kids can be such a pain.

Download complete.....

Spring Camping, Part I

 Hooray for Spring and the camping that comes with it!  We dragged the Kingfish down south with us as our guide to some pretty epic slot canyons.  We left snow in the homeland only to meet 11 degree lows at night, but the kids were troopers and we all lived to see another day in the canyon.