Story Time Returns!

This morning, Gabe had a meltdown. Because it's been pretty nice for the last week, we've been taking more or less daily trips down to the nearest park so Gabe and Norah could goof around for a little bit. But this morning it was just too windy and chilly, so I made an executive decision not to get them out in it. This did not sit well with Gabe. He threw a good old fashioned hissy fit complete with Norah-esque throwings of himself onto the floor and wailing and the figurative gnashing of teeth. And the whining. God the whining.

Actually, I knew it was an especially severed case almost immediately. Gabe has a progression of tantrum throwing. He starts with the "dweedling" (this is an obscure reference to a friend of mine who, once upon a time, would convince us to do things he wanted us to by getting in our faces and saying, "Dweedle, dweedle, dweedle" forever until we caved in--and, though it's obscure, I find it particularly relevant)--he unabashedly keeps repeating his request (this is the whining part, but he carries it throughout the tantrum) until I cave in. If I don't, he starts sobbing. About a minute into the sobbing, he usually progresses to the guilt-laying stage by saying, "I am crying because you are mean." To which I invariably reply, "YOU are mean for being emotionally manipulative." For some reason, he always blows that response off. The next step is making threats. His go-to threat is "I'm not going to play with you anymore." At first we tried to talk him out of this threat, but now we usually just say, "That's fine. I'll just play with Norah instead." That tends to break him out of that funk quickly. If he still hasn't gotten what he wants and it's something he REALLY wants, this is where the tantrums begin. If it's severe enough, he'll work himself up to a state where he literally can't breath.

Today, he skipped from the whining straight to the working himself into a frenzy state, so I knew he meant business. I needed a quick remedy.

I tried to counter, as I always do, with "fun" alternatives that he always does--playing with his blocks, watching a movie upstairs, reading a book, driving his cars around, whatever. None of it worked for him. There was a serious playground fixation in place.

So I quickly visited my repertoire of distraction options and settled on story time. It's something we do fairly regularly, but, to date, we haven't tried anything like an involved story with actual characters and the like. Usually it's just "X is playing with Y and they have a picnic" or something simple like that. Today, I wanted him to start working on character and setting development.

So I told him to go upstairs and grab some friends. He threw down five or six of his favorites and we started to go over some back story.

First, he grabbed Nole (a white and grey dog--I didn't take new pictures, I'm afraid, but you might be able to make them out in the videos). I couldn't remember who Nole was, except that his name was Nole, so I asked Gabe what he did. "Is he an astronaut or a trash collector or an accountant or a teacher?" I spit-balled. "Trash collector!" he replied excitedly. Great start, I thought. There are a few places we could go with that.

Next was Fat Sheep, "What does Fat Sheep do?" "He's a baby!" he answered. So I put Fat Sheep in Norah's little activity saucer. Amy Horsie, it was decided, was Fat Sheep's mom. And Molly Moose was our friend Sandy (who stayed the night here last night, the only reason she was fresh in Gabe's mind--I've got a video of them playing together, too, because the kids LOVE Sandy and were being pretty entertaining last night in her honor, but I'll probably wait to post that next time). Buzz Lightyear and Soupie, it was decided, would play themselves because they are both superheroes. We had an emergency situation brewing and people were going to need rescuing.

Obviously, this was a bit of a let down when we started with something as promising as a trash collector, but emergencies are Gabe's bread and butter right now, so it wasn't the least bit surprising.

We obviously need to work on his build-ups a little. Being the "straight to business" type, Gabe didn't mess around with his saving those in trouble. What you don't see, is that the trouble was supposed to be a burglar. Unfortunately, we used the only other stuffy close by to play the role--Norah's Lulu (which is her wubbie and the doll she carries with her all the time and sleeps with). Seeing Lulu involved, Norah came and took her back before I could even get the camera set. Still, Gabe did a good job saving the day.

After the first take, I got some more video just to see how things would progress. Norah wasn't content with sitting in the wings, watching, and she got herself more involved by disrupting everything Gabe was trying to do. After the first save, Gabe did manage to build his own little storyline. He continues in the next video.

The story here was supposed to be Gabe's friends riding in a submarine to get to Tractorland and Combineland. The pillows represented the submarine. I have no idea where Tractorland and Combineland were supposed to be as Norah never let the story progress beyond putting the pillows on the floor. As evidenced by these videos, it's pretty clear that Norah's primary source of entertainment these days is doing everything in her power to annoy Gabe.

Ah, To Be Young and Costumed

There are many things that I don't miss about being a child: the lack of self determination, the teasing, the peer pressure, the "fitting in," the feathered hair. But there is one thing that I miss a quite a bit: being able to wear whatever you want, whenever you want.

Perhaps it is a longing for simpler days when the imagination was allowed to roam free. When I could pretend to be a dinosaur or a Transformer or Luke Skywalker with impunity. Or maybe it's just because I like to wear weird clothes. Whatever it is, I miss being able to, quite out of the blue, put on a piece of a costume at random and go about my business as usual.

That's what Gabe did this morning. He had us put on his fireman hat from his Halloween costume. And, as he sat in the living room, watching his new favorite show ("Dino Dan," which is pretty terrible--it is the story of a kid, maybe seven years old, who is an utter social retard. He is completely obsessed with dinosaurs. EVERYTHING relates back to dinosaurs to his way of thinking. And, somehow, he is surrounded with friends who don't mock his every word. Also, he sees these dinosaurs roaming around the real world and interacts with them. This is the most confusing--and for me irritating--part, as other animals--like their family dog--react to the dinosaurs, but nobody but Dan ever sees them. Thus, either he lives in a world where computer animated dinosaurs rampage unknown to all humans or Dan is crazy and, somehow, that craziness spreads to nearby animals and other non-sentient beings who couldn't "back his story up." Either way, it's also a terrible show and the kid who plays Dan is awful.).

What was I talking about? Oh, right, costuming. Here's a picture of Gabe with his PJs and hat on as he eats animal crackers for breakfast and watches his show.

The Nice Thing about Being a Shut-In

It's impossible to swing the dead cat that's been missing for the past two months only to be found buried under a pile of twenty year old newspapers without hitting a sad or depressing story about a shut-in. But I think that is due, in large part, to media bias. Nobody wants to hear about the shut-in who kept his/her house in order and lived a safe, moderately productive, but exceedingly boring life, so nobody does. All we hear about are the people who balloon up to 900 lbs., collect their feces in pizza delivery boxes, find dead poodles buried in enveloping folds of flesh, and have to be airlifted by helicopter out of a hole in the roof to be removed from their house when they die. It's sad, really, and quite unfair.

What is it the shut-in wants out of life? Why do they refuse to leave the comfort and safety of their own houses? The answer is simple: people. Most people suck, and when faced with the option of going out and facing sucky people or staying home, for some it is an easy choice. Why bother to interact with people who will undoubtedly come to disappoint expectations when it's SO much easier just to avoid them altogether? And then there is the house itself. The common home has everything one needs to be happy--food, comfort, entertainment, and peace and quiet.

I can certainly understand the appeal. But I don't have the mettle to become a full-fledged shut-in. At best, I could only ever hope to achieve the title of dilettante because, frankly, I need SOME human interaction to be happy. I am perfectly happy to take up the role of "homebody," or someone who will generally choose to stay at home over many social options, but that's about as far as I'll take it--and it doesn't take much coaxing to get me, albeit grudgingly, to get out of the house to do stuff.

If left to my own devices, that is. Having small children has inflicted a certain degree of shut-initude on me. I know it's POSSIBLE to fill my days and life with excursions into the world of people with my children in tow, but I'm fine with generally passing on most of these. The way see it, I'm doing it for the kids. Sure it might be "good" for them to get out and do stuff more often, but consider the circumstances and decide whether it would be ACTUALLY good or not. Is it better for my kids to grow up seeing me react negatively to the imbecilic actions of other people or to be shielded from that by staying at home? Or consider my reactions to them. While out in public, I am a bit of a battleaxe. I don't tolerate misbehaving of any sort. And, while it's good for them to have SOME experiences in these situations so they can learn proper social etiquette, would it not be better to limit those experiences so they don't come to associate "going out" with "constantly being harassed to act civilized"?

I don't know the answer, and, frankly, this all feels like me making excuses. But it sounded good in my head a little bit ago.

Anyway, let's discuss one of the positive aspects of being a semi-shut-in that I discovered this last month.

You can do pretty much anything you want to with your "look" while you're a shut-in. It's kind of great, really. Because I don't have to meet up with people who will judge me based on how kempt I am, I had the freedom to prep my face for the Halloween costume I worked up for our party last weekend. I went as Mr. T.

Me, pitying the fool; Libby, doing whatever Punky Brewster did (annoying an old man, I think, as I never watched that show much).

For the benefit of this costume, I was able to grow out my beard for the last month. Admittedly, I probably could have done this even if I worked a regular job without having to explain myself TOO much. But you'll also notice that my head is mostly shaved--because I don't believe in half-assing a costume if I can avoid it. After the party, we finished the shave job, so now I look like this:


Had I been regularly interacting with people and worrying what they would think about how I look, there's a better than average chance that I wouldn't have had the guts to see what I look like with a shaved head. As it happens, I have a head shape that nature has already been kind enough to convince us is normal to be smooth--the egg. Really, if I could just add about a pound of straight jowl, my head would look exactly like it should be cartoned up and sold with eleven others in the refrigerator section.

I'm not saying it's the best look for me--but I might be willing to say that it's the best look available to me considering the follicly challenged nature of my head.

Actually, I wish I could do the mohawk. I think the Mr. T look really worked for me. I looked tough as hell. And, since I'm NOT tough as hell, it would have been a great trick to play on the rest of the world. But the wig that we used looked like a mangled rodent, and bits of my head are still sticking to my pillow where we weren't able to get off all of the spirit gum to hold it on. So it's not a look that I'll be repeating any time soon.

Either way, without being a shut-in, there's a very real chance that I never would have tried it out. So, suck on that "Hoarders," being a shut-in isn't ALL bad!

Exercising with Kids Around

Last night, shortly before the kids' bed time, Libby decided to do a few stretching exercises. I've mentioned before how difficult it is to establish any sort of reliable exercise routine with small kids in the house, but I've never had any good video to offer as proof. Here you go.

I'm Bringing Back Feathered Hair (with Gabe's Help)

Gabe's hair is crazy right now. Libby is letting it grow out again, but I don't think her plan to let it grow until next summer is going to pan out this year. Last year, it wasn't a problem because we kept cutting it until August or so. This year we only cut it once, in May or June, and it's already getting pretty shaggy. Right now, it's a good kind of shaggy, but I bet by the end of the year we'll be moving away from the "cute kid with disheveled hair" phase and into the "little kid with weird hippy hair" phase.

Anyway, Saturday night, after washing Gabe's hair, I decided to try and comb some of the crazy out of it. I decided to do this by combing it straight back. When he got out of the bath, he looked like Draco Malfoy, but then, as it dried, something FAR awesomer happened. The hair on top started to part into a feather. For some reason, the hair on the top of his head stays pretty straight but the stuff on the sides and in the back curls. As it dried, the stuff in the back turned into what we used to call a "duck's ass" when I was in grade school.

It was fantastic.

It didn't help that he was eating pears the entire time I was trying to take these pictures. But look at that magnificent feather!

Libby's back there cutting up her pears. For the first time since we tried to make pear wine (which tasted like a mixture of fresh yard clippings and diesel fuel), we did something productive with the pears in our yard. We get a ton or two most years, but they are pretty flavorless and awful, so mostly the squirrels and neighbors who haven't tried them before get the majority of them. She decided to make some pear juice this year. It wasn't bad. We're trying to figure out a way to make it into hard cider because success with that would propel our pear trees from Nuisance status clear up the scale to Enabler.

The Duck's Ass look. VERY popular when I was a kid. Technically, both sides are supposed to meet in the middle, kind of carrying the part from the top of the head all the way around to meet in the back. This is what it did originally, but since we didn't put any hairspray (which we would have used in grade school) in it, his hair relaxed somewhat. So, maybe not so much a duck's ass as a duck's leg or belly.

Unfortunately, we already put together a fireman costume for Halloween for him, because this experiment offered me a glimpse of a truly inspired costume--the Greatest American Hero. If we could get Gabe to sit still long enough to curl his hair on the top, it would be PERFECT. I even found a web site that sells kid sized GAH shirts. It's gonna be AWESOME next year (for me, because, honestly, I'm one of about fifty people in the world who still remembers the Greatest American Hero well enough to want to dress my three year old up like him).

The Kids Do Some Cute Things

After their naps (well, Gabe's nap and Norah's "nap" today--yesterday, it was just the opposite), the kids were in rare form, so I thought I'd get a little video of them.

Sweet lord the video worked! This would have been slightly more amusing if I'd gotten the camera turned on about five seconds earlier as Norah walked head first into the door. Still, pretty cute, though.

Then I followed up with a little more of them dancing, and Gabe practicing his piece of performance art that he's been working on with his microphone.

It's Good to Be King

Yesterday, Gabe got his first taste of a fast food joint's "play area"--not counting our two nightmarish trips to Chuck E Cheese, of course, because it isn't so much a "play area" as a hellscape of noise and sensory overload.

I know, I know. At three and a half, we're probably well behind the game here. Probably he should be pretty familiar with play areas by this point. But, truth be told, I try to avoid feeding the kids fast food as much as possible. Partly I do this because it is the responsible thing to do, but mostly I do it because it's a waste of perfectly good money for food that I can buy in the freezer section and microwave for the kids (which is good, since Norah will still only eat brown, greasy foods at this point, despite our repeated efforts to get her interested in ANYTHING else).

Yesterday, though, Libby broke down and went to the Burger King here in town so Gabe could exhaust himself in the kids' area. Personally, I rank Burger King just above Spam on my list of sustenance options. I can't stand the place. I think pretty much all of its food is nauseating. Libby, however, disagrees. Probably it has something to do with our experiences growing up. The nearest Burger King to me while young was about sixty miles away. Libby was only a few blocks away from one. I don't think I had my first Burger King until I was in high school, and I found it wanting. So, had it been up to me and Burger King was the only option with a play area for kids, Gabe probably wouldn't have had the opportunity to play in one until he could drive there himself.

Anyway, he loved the crown. Norah loved it too, but not so much for wearing on her head.

Gabe, obviously ignoring the No Shirt, No Shoes, No Service sign. Also, when I first saw this picture, I thought he was also ignoring the unspoken No Pants No Service rule.

She's still not a fan of things on her head. Not surprising, really, considering Gabe is only now buying into the splendid world of personal transformation by hat.

Eventually, I think Libby said she had her arm all the way in there.

This is something she's strangely fascinated with right now--holding something up between her eyes and looking around it. Kids are weird.

Gabe Decorates Brownies and Works on His Lying Skills

Sunday, Libby bought a brownie mix and decided that it would be a good idea for Gabe to decorate it.

Now, on the surface, I'm very supportive of Gabe being involved in the kitchen. I like the idea of him learning to enjoy cooking. It's a very useful skill to have, and I look forward to the day when I don't have to cook every meal. But I do generally have one small problem with it--the clean up. Even though it is invariably Libby's idea to get the boy involved in the cooking process, it is never she nor Gabe who has to deal with the aftermath. It is me. And, as I learned Sunday, frosting is an oil-based food, which means it's not all that easy to clean off the floor and other pieces of furniture.

Anyway, I cooked the brownies because I didn't really see any point in having to clean up TWO messes--the one left by mixing the brownies and the one left by decorating them. When I was done, he was set loose with a spray can of frosting (an invention I had not seen up to that point) and a jar of sprinkles. The sprinkle container was one of those ones with four different kinds of "holiday" sprinkles in four separate compartments. Normally, such a container might decorate ten or a dozen cakes. This container decorated one. This was a seriously decorated platter of brownies.

After Libby put on the first squirt of frosting to show Gabe how to work it, she handed the can over and he immediately stuck it in his mouth to suck out the remainder of the frosting.

Oh, yeah, Norah got in on the fun, too. Shortly after this, she wandered off to leave little orange handprints all over much of the dining room.

Instead of using a spatula to spread the frosting around, Gabe preferred to use his hand. He still didn't end up actually spreading it all that much. Pretty much there was a pile of frosting in one corner, and much of it ended up being scooped into his mouth.

The sprinkles. The first piece of this brownie that we ate was like putting an open-faced peanut butter sandwich that had fallen, face down, into a kitty litter box into our mouths. Eventually, the sprinkles soaked up some of the oil from the frosting and became edible. Also, when Gabe wasn't looking, I dumped all the loose sprinkles into the trash can. Still, after it was all said and done, the layer of frosting and sprinkles nearly doubled the thickness of the brownie.

There was supposed to be a video with this, too, but Blogger is still being a useless piece of garbage. Seriously, if they don't get their problems worked out soon, I'm going to look elsewhere, and they will just have to do without the traffic the literally fives of people who visit this blog produce for them. That will really hit them where it hurts.

And I have a brief update on Gabe's developing lying skills. Today, he took his first steps in covering up the evidence.

For about two weeks now, I've been taking Norah upstairs and the three of us have been "playing" up there. I use the quotes because all I'm doing during this time is cleaning up the epic messes that Gabe keeps creating up there.

Today, I was in his room sorting through cars, trains, legos, and other assorted toys and the two of them were playing in the landing. "Cars" was playing in the DVD player, but the TV wasn't turned up very loud, so I couldn't hear anything. In addition to this, Norah is presently obsessed with the functioning of doors. She loves closing them, and had closed the door to Gabe's room a few minutes earlier. For awhile, I opened the doors back up, but I've since given up on it as she will just close it again in less than a minute.

After just a few minutes of them being sequestered in the landing by themselves, Gabe started to whine. "McQueen isn't on anymore! Norah turned it off!"

"Hold on a minute, hon. Let me finish putting away your blocks." So I did. A few minutes later I went back out to the landing to find the TV turned off the "video" mode so the DVD player would show. Easy enough to fix. I pushed the button but nothing happened. I looked down and noticed that the DVD player was off. I also noticed, with a bit of a sinking feeling in my stomach, that the front cover of the DVD bay was missing (the little cover that opens and closes as the DVD tray pops out--a wholly cosmetic piece of the player, but a piece of the player nonetheless). I pushed the eject button, the tray came out, and the DVD was gone, too.

"What happened to the DVD player?" I asked. Gabe was sitting up on the back of the couch.

"Norah did it," he "explained."

"Norah did what?"

"She was pushing buttons." This I didn't doubt for a moment. She's at that age and we really can't watch any TV upstairs while she's up there because she won't leave the TV or DVD player alone and we have no way of covering them up so she can't get to them.

"But how did the DVD player get broken?" I asked.

"Huh?" he said. This is his go-to answer for just about everything he knows the answer to but the sharing of which would get him into trouble. It's his stall tactic while he formulates his story.

I didn't feel like playing the "Huh" game, though, so I just asked him pointblank, "Where's your 'Cars' DVD?"

He pointed in between the couch and the cedar chest behind it. He'd slid the DVD between the thin crack.

I rubbed my face slowly, as I often do when faced with these kinds of issues. I opened and closed my eyes slowly in disappointment at him. "And where's the cover to the DVD player that was broken?" I pointed to the empty hole where, ten minutes earlier, a strip of silver plastic had been.

"It's in my pumpkin," he said, so I told him to get it. He'd hidden it somewhere in Norah's room and came out a minute later.

"Look! It's a hat!" he said, holding the trick-or-treat pumpkin on his head, using a clear distraction ploy. But I wasn't falling for it. I asked for the piece of plastic and he handed it to me. It was well and truly broken, and I have no idea how he managed to break it without breaking the DVD tray at the same time. When the tray is closed, the piece of plastic covering it is all but impossible to open. He would have had to open the tray, grab the plastic bit, and hold it open while he pushed the tray back in. Then, I guess, he must have just pulled on it until it snapped. It's not the kind of thing that could accidentally get snagged and broken. There had to be intent.

But he wouldn't fess up to any of it. And he really needs to work on hiding his evidence, too. I can understand hiding the piece of plastic, but I'm not sure why he dropped the DVD behind the couch. Hopefully, as he gets older, the reasons behind the things he does will become more logical and well-thought-out. Or at least maybe he'll start hiding things in places that don't require me to move a 200 lb cedar chest.

Gabe's Snowballs

Yesterday, Gabe begged me to sit down and play play-doh with him (by this point, if I don't see another can of play-doh until five seconds before I die, it will be too soon). For some reason, he became very interested in making snowballs. We have a melon baller that he uses to scoop doh out like ice cream. Oh, and there's a little "breathing" hole in the bottom of the scoop. He needed my help to pull the scoops out because they got stuck in there pretty easily. As I laid out the first four of them, I decided to take a picture because, for some reason, they didn't look QUITE like snowballs to me. I'm not sure what they look like, exactly, so I figured I would post them on here to see if anyone could give me some ideas.


Later I got a little video of Norah. We had some trouble with our crayons yesterday. Gabe, quite out of nowhere, decided to use his crayons to color on one of our windows. He hasn't done that for a very long time--but it's something that Norah does every time she gets a hold of a crayon. I don't know what possessed him, but he's grounded from his crayons now for awhile.

Before that happened, though, Norah was working on her art desk, so I grabbed the camera. She stopped working as soon as she heard the camera beep, but she did a little dance for the camera that was pretty cute. So I'll share that. After she stops dancing, though, she stops being entertaining, so probably don't bother to watch the rest of the video.

Pumpkin Patch

So I guess Blogger might have gotten its shit worked out. At least as far as the pictures go. Not sure about the video, but I guess I'll find that out the next time I have a video worth posting.

Now I can share the stuff from the pumpkin patch. Papa's Pumpkin Patch is really a very nice place to visit. It's free, unless you want to buy stuff, obviously, and they have a few games that I think you have to pay for as well, but it's possible to enjoy an hour or two there and spend nothing, which is always a fine option. Many of the options that Gabe enjoyed so much last year were still there, and they added a few others along the way.

Probably still the activity that Gabe would have done the entire time we were there if we'd let him. This is a horse tank filled with corn that the kids can play with like sand. Here they were making corn angels.

This is a hole that is located in corn. There's probably a good, catchy name for something like that, but I'll be darned if I can think of a good one.

King of the hay bale.

There's a bit of a story to go with this next picture. The night before we went to the pumpkin patch, Libby laid up in Gabe's bed for a little while telling him stories (he's been sleeping horribly for the past two weeks or so, and now he's insisting that she lay up there and tell him stories and sing him songs before he'll go to sleep--which he still won't do for another hour or two most nights). Usually, he gets to choose the characters in the story, and this time it was Momma Wrencher, Daddy Wrencher, Gabe Wrencher, and Norah Wrencher. Sometimes we're Squeezers or Dinosaurs or Owls or whatever happens to come to his mind first, but Wrencher (what he calls all wrenches, as I'm sure nobody recalls) is the one he goes to the most often.

In this story, we were trying to find the perfect pumpkin. It needed to be big, orange, and round. Norah Wrencher found a round green one, but that wasn't any good. Daddy Wrencher found a square orange one, but that wasn't any good either (can't say as I can disagree with this one--I WOULD find the oddest pumpkin in the group). Momma Wrencher, for some reason (probably because she's "superior" or a "slave driver" or something along those lines) didn't find ANY pumpkins, instead choosing to just look on and pass judgment on what was and wasn't a pumpkin that lived up to her standards of perfection. But then Gabe Wrencher found the perfect pumpkin. It was big, round, and orange!

So, on the way there, Libby had him retell her the story, which he actually managed to remember pretty well. And that became his goal, to find the perfect pumpkin while we were there.

This is the pumpkin he found. I'm not sure I'd call it "perfect," though. It is big--compared to Gabe, anyway--and kind of round, but it had a pretty ugly brown spot on the side. I guess it's not a BAD thing if he has slightly lowered expectations for perfection. They will certainly increase his options when he starts dating.

Oh, and Norah was there, too. Sadly, since she's still not getting around all that well, she spent most of her time in the stroller. She spent most of the time she was out and about falling on everything that was on the ground. I'm a little surprised by this, actually. As messy as our living room and dining room are by mid-morning every day, she should be pretty good at walking over tricky terrain by now. She's not. So we had the choice of having a frustrated baby girl who wanted to get out of her stroller or a frustrated baby girl who was covered in mulch and mud and tripping head first into pumpkins. Tough choice, but we mostly went with the one that didn't involve a dozen wet wipes to recover from.

When we got home, Libby and Gabe made octopi out of spaghetti and hot dog chunks for dinner.

Poor impaled hot dogs. Reminds me of some etchings done of the courtyard surrounding Vlad Dracul's castle. These "poles" are even coming straight out of the hot dog's anuses--just like Vlad was a fan of doing--because, technically, ALL of a hot dog is anuses.

The finished product. More octopussy and less impaley at this point.

And Gabe enjoying the fruits of his work. I was not a fan. Of course, I don't have much use for hot dogs in general. If they're cooked on a grill, maybe, but otherwise, meh. And, frankly, the "meat"balls inside a can of Chef Boyardee have a bit more appeal to my taste buds than these hot dogs when added to spaghetti.

Exercise and the Pumpkin Patch

Last week, Libby and I took a desperate step--we bought an exercise bike. For the past two months, we've been making some effort to be less fat and lazy. Now that Norah is getting older we feel as though we have fewer excuses to NOT be taking better care of ourselves. But it's a tough habit to break. For a little better than a year, we've been growing increasingly accustomed to making Norah-based excuses for not getting out for a walk or jog or whatever.

The biggest excuse has been that we're too tired--and, really, that hasn't changed all that much. Norah still wakes up once or twice a night, and now Gabe is making a habit of not going to sleep until after 10:00 but still getting up between 5:30 and 6:00. But, at this point, it doesn't seem realistic to keep claiming a lack of sleep as an excuse. We've been doing it long enough now that we really shouldn't NEED sleep.

But now, as the days are growing shorter and the time when we could get out for a walk or jog has decreased, we found ourselves with a dilemma: do we try to get some gym memberships, keep getting out for exercise even though it's dark and cold, or get some exercise equipment. We assumed, correctly, I think, that being dark and cold would end up a reliable excuse to not exercise--and gym memberships are expensive, plus they still require us to be motivated enough to travel to a gym, probably in the evening when the kids are settled down (and that seemed like it would end up being a good excuse not to do it as well). So we went with an exercise bike.

Now, sadly, I don't have any good excuses. I'll probably have to start plumbing the depths of bad ones for awhile instead.

Not surprisingly, the addition of a new, fancy-looking piece of exercise equipment to my office caught Gabe's attention and curiosity. Add to that the fact that its readout panel is filled with shiny silver buttons, and you've got the recipe for the greatest distraction Gabe has ever known. Every chance he gets, he climbs up on it and tries to "exercise." Obviously, because he's so small, he can't use the thing properly, but that hasn't stopped him from finding new ways to use it improperly.

Video

I fully expect to find him lying on the floor in a twisted heap because he's gotten his foot stuck in one of the stirrups and can't get it out--and I've been sure to clearly spell out this prediction to him several times so I can say "I told you so" when it actually happens.

OK, shit. I apologize to anyone who has a subscription to this page who keeps getting emails saying I've published a post. Bloggers video upload has been a mess for the last week. It keeps starting to load videos then has some sort of problem that crashes. Last week, if I published the post then came back to try and add the video again, it would do it. Today, it's not uploading anything. So I'll post them on youtube instead, I guess. If I didn't have two years of posts on here, I'd seriously consider finding another service because I've just about had it.

Anyway.

Video

When it became clear that traditional sitting methods weren't going to work out for him, he decided to take an alternate approach. This actually ended up with him standing on the floor with with both of his feet through the stirrups. We had to pick him up and pull him out to free him.

Oh for the love of monkeys. Blogger won't even let me upload pictures now, and without those, discussing yesterday's trip to the pumpkin patch is pointless. Screw it. I'll try again later to get that updated. Stupid technology.

Video Roundup

The last couple of days, I've been trying to make up for being remiss with the camera for the past month or so by trying to capture the kids doing cute things on video. Since both of my kids have Pavlovian responses to seeing the camera in action, though, I haven't had much success. All the same, here's what I've managed to get.

This was supposed to be a video of Norah doing her fake laugh. It's the cutest little forced laugh ever. Some day she'll make a good studio audience member for a CBS comedy. She's getting pretty good at the laugh, and she WAS doing it up to the point where I turned on the camera. The she started eating crackers. Still, even doing almost nothing, she's awfully cute.

A few minutes later, she was carrying on a conversation with herself--which she's getting pretty good at, though it seems to be some kind of Nel language that only she understands. But, once again, she stopped doing it as soon as I grabbed the camera. Then she grabbed the camera string and started dinking around with that. Probably not the BEST or most interesting video, but I don't have much more to offer, I'm afraid.

This would have been better if Norah hadn't immediately noticed me with the camera. She started cheesing it up for the camera instead of playing with Gabe like she had been. But this is a pretty good example of why it's often easier to entertain her while Gabe is around than when she's be herself.

And, finally, after the video of the two of them together, Gabe wanted to put on a show for the camera. He needs to work on his showmanship somewhat, as this video ended up being little more than him spazzing out for a minute.