>Jack is really into the Elmo song night now. (That’s right now in Jack speak.) My favorite part is “H, I, J, KAI, ELMO, P.” It seems like he randomly says, “Bird!” at the end of the video, but he is reading an alphabet book, and there is a bird in it. Note to self, tell Kai’s mom about Jack’s homage to him in the alphabet song.
P.S. That is Luke snorting in the background – not me.
P.P.S. Obligatory puppy photo:
>Still easing into 2010 here. I know it’s probably sort of lame that I always wait until after my birthday to write thank you notes, so I just have to do it once a year. But how bad is it that I am going to have to include thanks from Jack’s birthday too? Pretty bad I guess.
Did I ever write about the time Luke had a complete meltdown because he didn’t write the letter “A” perfectly and it “looked like it’s pants were falling down”? I don’t know because the search function on this blog is not that great. I think it was at least 2 Valentine’s Days ago. We had a similar incident today because he spelled Science incorrectly during FTYNWT. (Family thank you note writing time.) He started to spell it phonetically, and then I wrote it out for him. (Meltdown number 1.) And I spelled it wrong. (sciene, if you must know.) So when I corrected him, we had meltdown number 2. I told him just to scratch it out, because I don’t like to end up with an uneven number of note cards and envelopes, so I wasn’t giving him another card. It’s one of the 1000 weird things about me. Of course, I later screwed up someone’s last name on an envelope so theoretically, it would have worked out OK. He didn’t want to scratch it out though, so it was straight to bath and bedtime.
I am just going to go on and on for a while about thank you notes and then all the blog readers who are expecting a thank you note will sort of remember this somewhat boring post and think they actually did get one.
Or, I could add another Jack anecdote…
Dave took care of making sure Luke got in the shower while I gave Jack a bath. Jack likes to randomly talk about things from the past that you think he would never remember. After the 100th mention of the same subject, it’s less amazing though.
This week, he has been talking a lot about the airplane ride he took the weekend before Christmas.
Example:
Me: Here’s a coupon for Einstein’s bagels.
Jack: I ate a bagel on the airplane.
Amazing, right?
In the tub today he put a washcloth across his lap and said, “Dis my airplane blanket. ‘Cept cleaner.” Then he took the loofah and said, “I buckle my seat belk.”
I’ll stop there. But Jack is very funny these days.
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>From the mouths of babe… And by babes, I mean 6 year old knows-it-all.
Sunday was errand running day. We went to home depot, the verizon store, and we wanted to go to Bed Bath and Beyond, but we just didn’t have time.
Dave decided we should walk from Home Depot to the Verizon store, and he would catch up with us after he dropped the furnace filters off at the car. “Oh, what the heck, I’ll just drive over so the car will be there.” It was 17 degrees on Sunday, and snowy.
Jack was holding hands with Luke and I, and running. Then he would just drop down and hang from us and take a bunch of fast steps while dangling, parallel to the ground. Then he would jump, then sometimes fall, then run.
Once he broke free and ran towards the street. I scooped him up, and in between his screams, I tried to explain to him that when we are walking near a street you cannot let go of mommy’s hand. You! CANNOT! Let! Go! Of! MOMMY’S! HAND!
Luke had a good suggestion though, “Or you could just hold on tighter, Mommy.”
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We took the boys to a CU game recently. Got there sort of late, left early, napped through the middle, and yet somehow Jack absorbed the fight song. The game was a few weeks ago, and yet it wasn’t until this morning that Jack was running around the house saying, “Shoulder to shoulder. Fight! Fight! Fight!” I felt the need to explain it all to the daycare teachers this morning in case all they heard was “Fight!” and all they saw was a fist in the air. The teacher said, “Oh I know. He says, “Go go go Buffaloes!” all the time. Especially when he sees a buffalo. There’s one in the sand box.
In other news, we ate a late dinner on the patio and enjoyed a beautiful fall evening as the stars started to come out. Dave said, “I see one, two, three stars. No, four.” And then Jack said, “Five.” Yes, my little genius knows some numbers. He also said “Seben. And eight, eight, eight.” But when I tried to get him to count starting at 1… well, I regretted it. Because when he starts at one, he can’t stop himself from following “one” with “two, three, GO!” And then he jumps up and down a bunch of times. Yeah, I know, it’s really cute, but when he is standing on your lap it’s not that great.
Hmm, what other cuteness? Jack and Luke were kicking the soccer ball in the back yard and Jack fell. Dave was trying to get him to just shake it off and keep going. Jack said, “I tan’t. Leg hurt!” But then once he got a kiss from his daddy and big brother, he was just fine.
Speaking of the big brother, he was at the game too!
>Luke was happy to sit in the car cart at the grocery store with Jack last week, possibly because he could read while I was shopping. We went out to breakfast on Sunday and he started reading as soon as he finished his pancakes. And then Luke wanted to leave his bike in the bike rack and ride home in the trailer so he didn’t have to put his book down. Ahhh, Luke, you remind me of myself. Of course, I was much, much older when I picked up a book and didn’t look up for 7 years until I got my driver’s license.
Yes, we have entered the world of chapter books, and it is very exciting.
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Jack had his first trip through the pop jet fountain on Pearl Street this summer when Grandmom and Grandad were here. If only I had my camera with me then! Jack would run straight for the shooting water, only to have it disappear before he got there. Then he would stare down the hole and wait and wait, and just when you thought he was going to get a face full of water he would give up and run away as the water shot up into the air behind him. Then he’d run straight for another water spout only to have the same thing happen again and again. The suspense was killing us all. A cheer would explode with each narrow miss. On and on, as a crowd gathered, he remained dry and warm as the russian fountain roulette continued. I say dry and warm because it was about 7:30 pm and 60 degrees. More than once I considered putting a hat out to fund his college education, because he had a bigger crowd than the zip code guy. But he did finally end up cold and wet as his luck ran out. And I had nothing in the diaper bag but a spare diaper and an old bib. Grandmom took the opportunity to get Sweet Jack a new shirt.
He has as much fun as Luke did the first time he hit the pop jets, and I had a camera for that trip, as you can see above. But Dave brought the camera with him on the next trip to Pearl Street:
>I try to take a picture like this every summer at the airport. My pictures are not really well organized on this computer, so I am going to guess that this was summer 2004, when Luke was about 17 months.
And this is Luke and Jack before we went to Mexico, when Luke was 6 and Jack was about 17 months.
>I was sharing my wonderful Fourth of July memories with my family during the fire works on Saturday. My dad used to outdo everyone with a different adjective for each firework display, and my mom went with the old standby of “oooh” “ahhhh” “ohhhhh”. And I LOVED the fireworks. My favorite of my dad’s adjectives was “multi-faceted” which I heard as “multi-fascinating”. Of course nothing could top Bay Days, and all through college whenever I would meet someone new from Bay Village (which was often since lots of people from Bay went to my college and since I didn’t go to Bay High, I didn’t know any of them) I always said, “Wasn’t Bay Days the best?” The answer was always yes. I partly did this to annoy Dave because he thought Bay Days was lame.
What was Bay Days? Well, I think it was mostly a place where goldfish went to live their last week. I know we always left with one or two and the fate of one of those goldfish could be the subject of a chapter in my memoir. More on that some other day. Other than the goldfish you could win, I think there were rides. And maybe a parade? Definitely fireworks. Bay Days and Mardi Gras were the highlight of my social calendar from about age 6 until 14.
I still love to go to the fireworks, so this year, when I was told to dial into a conference call at 9:00 pm on the 4th of July, I had to politely decline. And then when Jack fell off a chair and split his lip I told him to shake it off. And when Luke started whining, and whining, and whining, and Dave said, “Maybe going to the fireworks isn’t such a good idea after all”, I responded with, “I want to go to the fireworks, so we are going to the fireworks. Now everyone needs to quit whining and bleeding, and start pedalling or we are going to miss it, and I am going to be angry!”
It was really the stuff of memories. Family togetherness and all. So once we got there and sat down 2 seconds before the show started, I tried to fill everyone in on how much fun I had at the fireworks as a kid, with my family. It really worked to change everyone’s mood. Dave came up with some great adjectives. Jack did a lot of oohing and ahhing. I ran out of adjectives pretty quickly, and I think that might be because the fireworks display was a lot longer, and possibly better than the Bay Days display. Luke got into the spirit finally. Well, sort of. His favorite fireworks response was, “Oooh. Ahhh. Lame.”
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Dave took Luke and Jack camping on Thursday, and the plan was for me to meet them after work on Friday. Well, first the campsite was closed, then they could only get one night at another campsite, then they got 2 more nights in another spot, so they had to pack up and move, and then it rained and then the wind blew the rain shelter/tarp into bits. Then I got there and convinced them to go home. Good thing, since Jack threw up all day yesterday.
While Dave stayed home with the sickie, I took The One Who Can Not Keep A Secret birthday present shopping. I asked The One Who Can Not Keep A Secret what he wanted to get his dad for his birthday and he said, “A wii game, or a remote control car, or light saber, maybe…” I asked him exactly whose birthday we were shopping for and he said, “I KEEP ASKING DADDDY WHAT HE WANTS AND HE KEEPS TELLING ME I DON’T HAVE TO BUY HIM ANYTHING!” Sheesh, Ok. SO TOWCKAS and I went to Best Buy because I have been meaning to go there for the last 14 months since the light on the refridgerator starting telling me to replace the filter. I figured we could get a filter and shop for games for the wii. Long story short, we got Wii Little League, and thus began the longest 17 hours of secret keeping that TOWCKAS has had to endure since last year. Oh wait, last year he only had to keep the secret as he helped me carry the present down the hallway. So over the course of those 17 hours there were lots of,
“I can’t wait until tomorrow.”
“You want to open your present in the morning, right?”
“I can’t wait to play with your present tomorrow Daddy.” Etc.
Then, last night during dinner, Dave said, “After dinner, do you want to play Mario Cart Wii or play baseball in the front yard?”
TOWCKAS’s response? “Wii Baseball!!!!”
Fortunately Dave was walking out of the room, so when we was out of earshot I said, “Sssshhhhh! Or you don’t get to pick out any more presents!”
TOWCKAS’s response? “What!? I said, we should play baseball!”
Dave likes a pink cake with chocolate icing, so this year, instead of the pink (strawberry? cherry?) cake from the box, I made a triple layer strawberry cake with chocolate ganache icing. It was really good. The batter seemed really pink from the strawberries, but I guess I should have added food coloring too. Mmm. So good. It calls for 8 egg whites, and I used a trick I learned from the cupcake class, where you separate the yolk from the white one at a time in a little bowl and then dump the recently seperated egg into the bowl with the rest, so you don’t waste a lot of eggs by getting yolk in the main egg bowl on the 7th or 8th egg. However, I forgot to add in the last egg white , so I imagine that this cake would have turned out 1/8 again as tall if I hadn’t made that mistake.
MetaMegan 