Help! Help! I'm Being Repressed!

Claire is eating broccoli.

CLAIRE: I'm like a giant eating trees! What else can giants fit in their mouths?
G: Trees.
M: Bread.
G: Very small rocks.
M: Gravy.
G: Churches.

Someday Claire will realize what we're quoting and she will probably hate us...

Put That Thing Back Where it Came from or So Help Me, SO HELP ME!

My parents came out for a visit awhile ago. We did so much while they were here they completely wore me out! For example, they helped me completely detail the minivan one day and another day my mom whipped up a new Boppy cover for me one afternoon between entertaining my kids and making dinner. And yet we still managed to have tons of fun too. I'll take it.

The best part about my parents visiting is always the food. I think I gained most of my weight for this pregnancy just in the 5 days they were here! I blame the fact that I now weigh as much as I did when I delivered Scott on them. Well, and I guess the holidays didn't help. And the constant eating to combat nausea in the first trimester. Hmmm... so maybe I shouldn't blame them entirely... but anyway. The point is, when they come they bring about half a Trader Joe's store with them. However, cheese doesn't pack as well, so we made a trip to Whole Foods to pick up a nice selection of cheeses (curse you Texas for not having Trader Joe's!!!).

There were some samples of cheeses out for tasting, and the kids love samples. (Who doesn't?) We let them taste the first cheese we came across and they liked it despite it being something more exotic than cheddar, so when we came to the next one we didn't hesitate to give them a taste of that too. Apparently Scott wasn't a big fan of that particular one. But rather than tell us like he usually does, he decided to take care of things all by himself. The adults were all chatting about what cheeses to get when suddenly we were aware of a spitting sound. We looked around to see Scott spitting every last trace of the cheese sample from his mouth back into the sample tray. EEEK! This was something like $10/lb cheese and we had scoop about half the tray of samples into the trash because they had been contaminated by Scott spit and masticated cheese. It was probably $5 in cheese, minimum. I'm just glad the customer next to us at the deli counter was laughing and not chasing us out of the store, pelting us with reusable shopping bags and organic rotten tomatoes.

Ultrasounds R Us

No witty comments. The honest truth is just that I'm shamelessly doting on my unborn child:

Help! My Photos Have Been RAIDed

A friend of mine is sad about recently losing a lot of photos off her digital camera. I feel really bad for her. It got me thinking about our own photo storage.

There are a lot of household tasks that I'm not very good at. Especially the menial ones. But there is one I am almost religious about. I frequently download our photos off the digital camera. I get nervous if I leave photos on there for very long.

But then I go beyond that. It's a little sad. I run my own manual RAID 1 array.

Leave it to me to have a filthy house but redundant copies of our photos on separate drives.

I've got big dreams. Someday, M says he'll set us up a RAID 5 array in his half of our closet next to the DSL router and (someday) house-wide Gigabit ethernet switch. A girl can dream can't she? (All that and I don't even have to sacrifice space in my half 2/3 of the closet for my combat boots, poodle cow skirt, and my disco ball? I knew M was a good catch!)

Even that's not ideal. I need to be better about uploading photos to an external site to protect against any real catastrophes. I used to be good about doing that, but it dropped off when kid #2 came along.

Dang it!!! Now that I've reminded myself about this, we won't have clean clothes for a month while I remedy the situation. This is all your fault...

Knocking the Knock, Knock

The kids are going through a phase where they're enamored with cheesy jokes. Knock knock jokes, "why did the [blank] cross the road" jokes, etc. (Thanks a lot "Good Laughternoon" on Sid the Science Kid.)

Except sometimes they try to make up their own and they're not very good at it. Claire does okay occasionally, but Scott... [shaking head]

Here is what the jokes are like:

Why did the picture frame cross the road?

Why?

Because it was chasing the milk!


Huh?

M's response to one of these "gems" the other day was:

Why did the porcupine cross the road?

Why?

EH! STEVE!

I couldn't have said it better myself.

Trashy

We had Claire's birthday party recently. She wanted a WALL-E party.

She asked for us to decorate the house all "garbage-y". There's nothing quite like cleaning up your house so you can fill it with pretend trash. (Maybe I should have just left my house the way it normally looks? Nah, we wouldn't want the guests to actually catch a disease...)

Here is the decor:

We went with "stacks of WALL-E's garbage cubes" per Claire's request. I'm sure our guests' parents just thought we were taking a REALLY long time to get unpacked from moving into our house over a year and a half ago... Oh well. It made Claire and Scott's day.

In fact, Scott's breakfast prayer that morning extolled the virtues of our "garbage-y" house. He has a habit of praying in statements of fact rather than making requests or expressing any kind of thanks. He opened his prayer, said, "We're going to eat breakfast and I love garbage," and then closed his prayer.

I tried to do the brown streamers on the walls for the decoration, but they kept coming out looking too orderly and nice. I had to give up and have M do it. He's got skills. He should put that on his resume. "Haphazard streamer decorating." Some things require a woman's touch, but this was apparently one of those things that required a man's touch.

Our first activity was to have the kids pot a plant to take home as their favor. Note "The Plant" centerpiece:

Good thing I still had my brown snow boots despite the fact that we've lived in Texas for almost four years now.

The kids (mostly Scott) made an exciting mess with the potting soil:

The next activity was to take turns digging through "garbage" to hunt for a Twinkie (AKA more garbage?):

And then, of course, there was (chocolate) cake:

(The caramel cubes are more of WALL-E's garbage cubes, per Claire's request. The cake itself is supposed to be one of his garbage towers in mid-build, if you're familiar with the movie. Around here, we're beyond familiar...we're intimate. It's a good movie, but anything can be viewed to excess. [Insert eye roll here])

By Popular Demand...

Introducing Kate:

24 weeks

(I thought about posting yesterday, but I was worried you might not believe me since it was April Fools' Day.)

These are from the 3D ultrasound awhile ago:

19 weeks

19 weeks

Middle name you ask? Still to be fought over determined...