Author Archives: metamegan

>Creative Dinner Solutions

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I think my day can be summed up like this: I fed Luke dinner at the grocery store while I was shopping. He had most of a chicken tender, a slice of cheese, and lollipop. We had had appetizers at the park that included carrots and apple juice, but I would have to say this may be a new low. And even though I said, “This will be a fun adventure, what do you think we’ll find to eat for dinner?” he still said, “What’s for dinner?” when we got home. So I made him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

(The photo is of Luke, probably around 6 months.)

>L’eggo My Lego

>This morning, it was my turn to do the day care drop off, and before Dave left he helped me make sure everyone was dressed, sunscreened, fed and ready for school. Then as he was leaving he noticed we only cleared half the dinner dishes. From the front porch. Classy! This is important to the story because I think some baby food dripped onto the floor when he was bringing dishes in. I hope it was baby food at least.

Dave was out the door on his bike, and I was making the first trip out to the garage to load up my bike. Pump, lunch, bottles, attach trailer to bike. On my way out the door I heard, “Ewww! Yuck! Ewww! What is that?! Eww!” It looked like a tiny drip of baby food. It was brown and gooey, so let’s just all agree that it was baby food. I said I would wipe it up in a second after I got back in from the garage because my hands were full.

Before I could finish attaching the trailer to the bike, Luke was at the door sobbing. “He ate it! Bean ate it!” The baby food? Sweet, problem solved. “NO! He ate my green lego! He ate it, and it’s gone and now I will never, ever, ever be able to make the castle again! I want you to get it out of him!” Hmm, well, yeah I can’t do that. I do suspect that the lego must have had baby food on it too, because Bean doesn’t really eat plastic unless it is wrapped around cheese, chocolate, tortillas, cookies, any other type of food, or garbage. And the baby food spot on the floor had disappeared too so at least I didn’t have to clean that up. But the really bad part was that I have been reading Parents magazine (aka 1001 ways your kids could die magazine) in the lactation room, so instead of saying, “That is what you get for not putting your toys away” or even “Hey, maybe leaving your legos on the floor is a bad idea!” I had to say, “Wow, I bet you are really sad that Bean ate your lego. I understand how you feel. I don’t like it when Bean eats my things either.” This was supposed to calm him down.

It didn’t work, of course and when we were 3 blocks away he mentioned that his teeth were covered in boogers from all the sobbing. I contemplated my options but I didn’t see any soft leaves around, and I didn’t want to use my shirt to clean him up, so I road home to get kleenex. Which he used to wipe the boogers off his teeth. Off. His. Teeth. I just threw up a little thinking about it.

Then we rode another block and I started trying to cheer him up by mentioning that today was field trip day! Yea! Field trip day! And that is when I remembered that I forgot the car seat. So I turned around and got the car seat. And then we rode the rest of the way to school and work and I got there sometime just slightly before lunch.

>Dun de dun duh, Dun de DAH!

>Jack had his first non friend/relative babysitter on Saturday. (Milestone for Mommy.) OK, we hired one of the teachers from the daycare, so it’s sort of cheating since she is a professional. Dave and I had dinner, drinks and we saw a movie. I was thinking I could do one of those mastercard, or visa or whatever “Priceless” commercials. But first of all, that has been done to death. And secondly, I can only mentally add up some of the cost without thinking maybe it would have been better spent paying for a year of Jack’s college tuition.

Then I keep reminding myself about how I didn’t see the 3rd Indiana Jones because I went to the theater at the Great Northern Mall with my friend Kristen, and when we found out that ticket prices had gone up from $5.00 to $5.50, we just couldn’t justify that extra 50 cents. That was 19 years ago. If I had seen the movie I am sure I would remember how good it was. Instead I am thinking about all the interest I have earned off those 2 quarters. (At 4% compounded annually for 19 years, it’s $1.05, or approximately enough to pay a babysitter for just slightly more than 6 minutes.)

But enough about how cheap I am.

We saw Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and it was awesome! At first I was thinking it was sort of cheesy, but then Dave reminded me that Indiana Jones is very, awesomely cheesy. I really wish I would have saved that poster I had of Harrison Ford in my room for all those years. Sadly, I was not able to find a replica in 30 seconds of internet searching. OK, I searched for another 30 seconds. I don’t think this was it exactly, but it’s close.

>Happy Fathers Day

>Dave had a biketastic Fathers Day today. It started off with my delicious banana pancakes (if I do say so myself.) Then he was off to mountain bike White Ranch. When he came home for Fathers Day Family Time, he wanted to bike, hike and fish, so we tried to come up with a plan that combined all three. (Over achiever.) The way we did this was to immediately cross fishing off the list, even though that is my favorite thing to do. (By fishing, I mean reading a magazine on a blanket.) Then we got Jack all outfitted in the backpack, and he was fussing up a storm, but seemed prepared to nap in there when he got the chance. Once the backpack was all adjusted we got ready to leave. Dave attached the tagalong to his road bike and the trailer to the tagalong. Then the backpack got attached to the trailer. This took about an hour.

All the while I was trying to figure out the best route to our hiking destination. I googled and googled and finally found a bike map to use, and Dave and I studied it and we both memorized the first few turns and then forgot the rest. Before we knew it, we had biked 2 miles to get half a mile from our house. Things like this used to happen to us a lot when we would go hiking and we’d stop paying attention and just start following the dog. Anywho, we got back on track and on our way we ran across the coolest park ever! Dave said, “Luke do you want to stop at this park and check it out?” I think he was running before he even hopped off the bike. It was really fun and I think we could probably find it again. Dave and Luke and I all played while Jack napped.



Sadly, Dave was paged while we were there and we had to go home so he could work. Boo! But we still had a nice dinner, went out for ice cream and got everyone to bed on time.

Happy Fathers Day!

>Yellow Pine

>I have finally uploaded camping pictures! Last weekend we went to Yellow Pine Campground, which is in Wyoming between Laramie and Cheyenne.

The mountain biking was exactly what I like, which is to say, the scenery was pretty and interesting, and there were some challenging uphills, but I wasn’t afraid for my life at any point in time. But it was cold and extremely wet. I did my best to avoid widening any trails, and but I also didn’t want to fall over in puddles that were knee deep. I think maybe a little later in the year it would be dryer and warmer? We had fun anyway. But I am so mad that I forgot to take a picture of the Happy Jack sign!

Gosh, the weather has been so nice, but I am starting to see clouds!

Just hanging out by the campfire in my Little Devil costume.

The Hills Are Alive…

Flowers for you, mommy! (aka ridding the area of noxious weeds? I let this happen even though I have a strict “don’t pick the flowers” policy.)

It’s raining and I am cold!

Rain does not phase me one bit!

Warmed up and happy in the van.

Cooking breakfast in 30 mile and hour winds? How about we get the heck out of here and head to our favorite breakfast place in Laramie?

>Cheerio-ios!

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This was about the 17th take of this picture. I have a bunch of sound effects on my camera, and every time I would focus, Jack would hear the camera, look up, and smile. It’s impossible to get candid photos of him! But finally the allure of the cheerio won out, and I was able to capture the intense concentration required to match a forefinger to a thumb to pick up something small.

>Trashing the Place

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Today our good friends and neighbors returned from their first of many summer vacations and called to say, “Are you going to the park today? We’ll meet you there.” But what I heard was, “Please come over and let me cook dinner for you and your family while you break things and bleed everywhere.” I said, “I’ll bring the french fries!”

My knife is dull, which may have caused it to skid off the potato and cut my finger. Or maybe the dullness prevented the tip of my finger from being chopped off. Who knows?

We almost reached a new milestone: Meat for the baby! From a jar! (Organic of course.) But instead of opening the jar of baby food, I picked it up and then dropped it on the floor where it shattered. Sorry, it’s sweet potatoes again for you, little baby!

Then as we discussed how plastic is slowly killing us, and how we are slowly getting rid of our plastic plates in favor of plates that could kill us with lead, (or other unknown ways) Little M dropped her ceramic plate on the floor and it shattered and cut a gash in Luke’s toe. I was right there, so I probably caused that to happen as well.

That may have been a graceful time to just leave and hope to be invited back again someday, but we decided to wait until Luke had been bitten by the puppy twice. Just nips, no blood.

Yea! Welcome back from vacation! I hope we (and by this I mean you) got all the glass cleaned up!

(The picture is just another example, in case I wasn’t clear, of how messy Jack gets when I feed him. Of course the rice cereal is hard to see in the picture, but it covers 87% of his exposed skin.)