My family had this conversation about an hour ago:
Gabe: I looked online at Target for 8 X 8 frames and they didn’t have…
Me: Dick?
Gabe: Dick.
Ian: Dick!
We’ve been trying to get better about our foul mouths and we’ve really made some progress, but not enough, apparently.
Don’t let the bastards grind you down.
I don’t know how interested you guys are in Hockey, but if you want to let the NHL have it, here is the address: www3.rresults.com/nhlresearch/index.cgi?fwd=y (Thanks, Frank)
For some reason my links won’t work today.
I know I’ve posted this picture before, but The Goon Squad wanted to remind everyone that The Tampa Bay Lightning are still the reigning Stanley Cup champions.
Even more importantly, Buccaneer training camp begins today. Let the football, beer and chicken wings begin!
You all may already know about this, but PostSecret is an interesting blog. I just saw it for the first time.
I got this off of The Sports Guy’s links, so if you read him everyday, you may have seen this too, but Corey Feldman is a freak, and somehow, still working.
Apparently Hurricane Dennis was good for something.
I was watching Maisy again today, and this time the chicken (Tallulah) took off her dress and underpants and the mouse (Maisy) took off her shirt and pants and red polka-dotted underpants and they got in the bathtub together. Plus, I think all of the characters on Maisy might be, um, mentally handicapped. There is no way I could be making this up.
Here is a very short article on why a drug dealer somewhere is about to get in big trouble with his boss.
Here is something interesting for those of you who like to read. On the Gnooks website, in the “Map of Literature” box, type in your favorite author.
I was looking through all the pictures from our vacation to put up on The Goon Squad’s website, and I noticed something odd. This is going to sound incredibly selfish, but I am shockingly absent from the pictures of my family. I know I should not be surprised, or upset, because I take most of the pictures, but it just appears as if I’m not there.
Here’s the morbid part. I keep thinking that if I died tomorrow, my kids would think I wasn’t involved, or that I never held them, or they wouldn’t be able to remember me the way I was when they were little. I guess if you looked at it objectively, they would understand that I was there, I was just taking the pictures.
I remember when we started getting doubles of all the pictures that were taken in the first week or two of the squad’s life. There were no pictures of me - or Gabe. We had pictures of the twins with grandparents, Aunts, friends, nurses… at the time I remember that there was one picture of me, and I looked so bad that I was half relieved that there weren’t more. But I was also sort of sad. You always see pictures of mothers holding their newborns and looking tired. I know I had extenuating circumstances… right after my c-section I spent several hours receiving a blood transfusion and my kids were in the NICU for a week, so it’s not like the whole family was hanging out in my hospital room taking photographs.
They could always look at my old photo albums, filled with pictures of me when I was in college. My college roommate Tammy took even more pictures than I do. I also have tons of pictures from high school when I would just hand people the camera and say “Here, take a picture of me”.
When my Uncle started using digital cameras, he began taking other pictures of himself and cutting himself out and adding himself to pictures he took of the family. At first I thought it was silly, but now I realize why he does it.
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I found this one. Our friend Mark took this one. It’s a little blurry, and Ian looks a little goofy, but it shows I was present.
I’m sure that I’m being over sensitive about this whole thing, but that is what a blog is for, right?
Maybe subconsciously I stay away from the camera with my post-twin bearing body. Maybe I’m too busy holding one twin out of the way while we take a picture of the other twin.
Maybe it is all part of the anonymity of motherhood.
It is that time of year. Fantasy Football time. I love Fantasy Football so much, that I am the commissioner of my own league on my favorite fall website NFL.com.
Anyway, I sent out e-mails to a group of people who have played together for a couple of years saying how to sign up this year for our league. They just go to the website, pick a team name, and set up their rankings for an autodraft (you basically rank the players in the order you would draft them, then at a specified time, the computer will do the draft for us, because we don’t all live in the same time zones, and several of us have kids preventing us from spending lots of consecutive time in front of the computer).
Then I got the following e-mail back from Aaron:
I’m not sure which is funnier. Is it that he was trying that hard to work the word turd into his team name? Or is it that THEY WERE ALL TAKEN? Seriously, how can that many teams have the word turn in them? This is really early in the season. Training camps just started. Either way, I’m glad I’m friends with Aaron, and I can’t wait to see what the rest of these guys pick as their team names.
Alison (a.k.a. Tiffer) had something on her blog the other day about The Latest Party Game. It is basically an interview game. I’m following Alison’s lead, by trying to answer spontaneously. If you want to play, you can play here, on your own blog on on Alison’s blog. Here we go:
What are your major strengths as a mom? I really enjoy being with them, and I think they know it. I also like to teach them everything and anything, even if it is a strange thing to teach a one year old. We talk about classical composers and football and cooking and heavy metal music, but also about “Sesame Street” and animals and the alphabet. I try to expose them to a wide variety of inputs. I also think my ability to laugh at myself makes me a little bit less uptight as a mother.
If you could fly anywhere next weekend - with Gabe but without the squad - for a romantic weekend getaway, where would you go and why? Some sort of all-inclusive resort, where we could lay on the beach and Gabe could kayak, and we could eat great food and drink really good wine and sleep in.
What are the most crucial things you’ve learned from your twins? 1) I was wrong, I did want twins. 2)There are more important things than sleep.
If you could choose to someday be a success in any career, what would it be? Since I think I am past my shot at becoming a rock star, I would like to be successful in sales. I want to sell something big. Like buildings, or cruise ships or even houses. I want something with big commissions that I really have to work to sell.
Describe the best concert you’ve ever attended. The best show I ever saw was Jerry Cantrell. We saw him play at a little club in Ybor City on a weeknight. The band played a whole bunch of Alice In Chains songs and it sounded perfect. I think Jerry was singing Layne’s parts and he had another bandmember singing his harmonies. The whole crowd was really into it, and a friend of ours who worked for the local rock radio station had VIP passes, so we got to go upstairs and we had an excellent view of the stage.
We made it back from vacation. Shockingly, the kids were great in the car. We had a really good time.
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These pictures are from the Squad’s first time in the Atlantic Ocean. We were up in Delaware. Yes, I know it is odd to live in Florida, and go on vacation to the beach in Delaware, but Rehoboth Beach is really nice. At first, the kids (being used to the Gulf) were scared of the loud waves, but by the second day they were loving the beach.
As a bonus for his grandparents, Ian learned how to hug while we were up there. He will throw his arms around your neck and put his head on your shoulder and say “awwww”. It is very sweet.
Here is something strange. We stopped at a rest area in South Carolina on the way home and we let the twins run around, because they had already been cooped up for seven hours in the car that day. It was at this rest area that we realized at 14 months old it was the first time our kids had touched grass. I guess it is because the grass down here is so gross (and fire ants and snakes), I just never put my kids in the yard and let them go. I wonder what other everyday things they haven’t experienced yet?
We leave today. Thirteen hours in the car with the squad. This will be their first trip out of state. Anything could happen. Luckily, we are prepared.
For the kids we have in the car already:
Plus their normal car toys. That does not include the sippy cups, goldfish, teddy grahams, cheerios, applesauce and all that crap that is in the cooler!
By the way, Gabe and I only bought the leap pads and the monster truck. The Baby Einstein videos were from Nonny and Papa. Grandma went with us to Target yesterday and I think she was already starting to miss the kids. She went nuts.
Anyway if all that plus their bears, plus Melissa’s copy of “Finding Nemo” can’t keep the squad buys for thirteen hours (plus we’re stopping in the middle and counting on them sleeping a lot) then we could be in trouble.
I am hoping the ride will look like these pictures:
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That was the first time we used the headphones. We were joking, but it worked well.
I think I’ll be able to post when I’m gone, but I’m not sure yet.
Wish us luck.
Ian found a new way to wake me up this morning. He jabbed me in the nose with his thumb three times. This is only one of the down falls of bringing a teething toddler into your bed in the middle of the night. I’m surprised he didn’t give me a bloody nose. He has given Gabe and my Mom bloody noses in this fashion. When he got Gabe, we were in Babies R Us. Gabe ended up walking around the store with a bloody burp cloth. It looked like he stabbed a baby. Ian thought it was hilarious.
Then, I went to the back of the house to get some pants on and use the bathroom. I was temporarily distracted by my e-mail, but this all took less than five minutes. When I got back to the living room, the kids were playing nicely with their mega blocks, but there were wipes everywhere. The two of them had emptied an entire large box of wipes. I know it was both of them, because I smelled their little paws and both of their hands smelled like fresh springtime lavender, or whatever the hell it is.
Next, my Dad called. As he is telling me that my assignment is to teach Claudia to roar when we say “What does Grandpa say?” (this is all true, I swear it), I look over and Claudia is waving around a diaper. As I am wondering where she got the diaper, I notice she is naked from the waist down. Mystery solved. New mystery - how did she get it off in the first place? I am never buying Huggies again. The nice big tabs make these diapers way too easy for a 14 month old to get them off. The last thing in the world I need is two bare assed goons running around in here. Especially when you take in to consideration that Ian had six poopy diapers yesterday, and that is only slightly above average.
One more thing. Last night I began to read Misconceptions, by Naomi Wolf. My first misconception was this was a work of fiction. I’m just finished the forward, and it looks like it is a book about first time motherhood. It is scary already. I’ll let you know when I’m done, but so far, I would say not to read it if you are pregnant with your first child. There are three or four places in the introduction alone that would have made me cry when I was pregnant - not that it took much to bring me to tears then… or now, really.
All of this happened (or occurred to me in the case of the book) to me this morning. I am about to hit the publish button and it is only 8:34 am. I can’t wait to see what these guys do with the rest of their day.
Becky and I braved the mall today. That makes two adults and five children, four of which are 14 months old. Andy is three and he was an angel the whole time. I can’t imagine the squad ever behaving like that, but I hope someday they will.
I feel bad for whoever had to clean up under our table at the food court. My kids threw some green beans and rice. I was trying to impress Becky and show her that Ian will eat anything, but it would have been more accurate if I would have told her “Ian will put anything in his mouth and then spit it back out and Claudia will throw any type of food on the floor”.
Overall, it went pretty well, considering the four one year olds. I also bought the squad some new shirts so that they can dazzle the grandparents with cuteness, which is sort of ironic because the grandparents are so crazy about the squad that they could show up wearing ritualistic robes covered in goats blood and all four grandparents would still think they were the cutest thing they had ever seen.
Speaking of which - my Dad has been trying to get the kids to roar like a lion ever since they were born. He does this with every kids he knows. Apparently, my cousin could roar really well when she was a little kid and my Dad is still looking for someone to top Renee. Over Memorial Day, my Dad actually had Ian roaring, it was hilarious, he would make his mouth into a little “O” shape and make dry gargling sounds. He did it for about a week, and then he got tired of everybody asking him what a lion said every five minutes. So, we’re in Gymboree and Ian sees this big orange stuffed cat, it could be a lion, or a cheetah, or a big housecat, but he’s pointing at it like crazy and “ROAR”, after three months of nothing, he roars at the stuffed lion and I handed it to him and he hugged it. If I had one child, he would currently own the lion or whatever it is. But what kind of person would I have been if I only bought one? There were five kids looking at me. Maybe I’ll go back in secret later. The other stuffed animal was a rhino, Gabe’s favorite.
