Thanks, Beth!

Beth got us some nice presents for Christmas, but in every box she gave us, she stuffed a few of these dollar store tuna and chicken salad combos. Why would she do this, you ask? Read this blog post of hers to find out. Notice that the blog post was written in March of 2009, nine months ago. Nice. Next year she's getting Kira's nutcracker:

Stuff I've been doing while not writing on the blog

We have been on the GO for days and days and I have been so busy. My parents came for a visit the other day and I made them a meatloaf in a bundt cake pan. It was delicious but not exactly pretty. Looks like something from a bloody colon. (mmmmmmm.. bloody colon...)

I also made a couple of blankets or my nieces. This is one of them.

Other than that it's been drive drive drive, shop shop shop, make Chex mix, eat Chex mix etc. etc. etc. I have eaten so much Chex mix I think I might be dealing with an electrolyte problem caused by the salt and Worcestershire sauce; symptoms: weight gain, ankle swelling, lethargy, and constant debilitating thirst. I hear there is a cure; stop eating Chex mix.

Yeah, like I'm going to do that.

Sam is a teenager now

Yesterday was Sam's thirteenth birthday. He told me his birthday wish is for me to stop making him shave his perv-stache and let him grow it "long," (ew) along with also growing his chinchilla-thick head hair. I suppose I will have to let him be in charge of his own hair growth now don't I? I think he pictures himself looking like this:


I'm just afraid he will be this guy:

and then when he turns 16 he'll start driving a brown van and parents will hide their small children from him.

Anyhoo, Happy birthday to my sweet little boy who is growing up too fast. I hope you have a great year being 13.

AVATAR!

Sorry I've been AWOL for a while. I've been so busy! I saw Avatar yesterday and LOVED IT! I thought it would be boring, but it was so good. I didn't think I'd like it because I'm not the biggest fan of James Cameron (the director) because I saw him on TMZ and he was kind of a jerk.

Mitch and I went with the kids, in-laws and a bunch of cousins. The kids thought it was okay, but I was actually weeping through about a third of it partly because it was so good, and partly because it was so beautiful. I love how the Na'vi people look (the blue people). I love them so much that I put a picture of one of their faces as my iPod wallpaper. I think I will be on the cutting edge of learning their language too. Hey, people can speak Klingon (dorks), I think people will start speaking Na'vi and I will be one of the first.

I heard before I saw the movie that the story was weak, but I didn't think it was that weak. I liked it. The military general was way over the top though. I could have written better dialogue for him. Writers should permanently eliminate "You're not in Kansas anymore!" from any dialogue they write.

So, in the tradition of my usual very informational movie reviews, this movie is a don't miss. Why? Because it's good and made me cry. And I'm a hard nut to crack.

Kiyevame! (goodbye in Na'vi)

Presents

Well? Did you have a good Christmas? We did, even though the BLIZZARD kept us from traveling anywhere. I was smart enough to go to the grocery store on Wednesday evening and get staples like cookies, chex mix mixin's, pie, pop and beer.

The kids got fantastic presents. Kira got Heelies (shoes with wheels in the heels) and she is so excited because she grew out of her old ones and has been dying to be the most obnoxious person in places like Home Depot and the skywalk again. With her old ones I would take her on errands with me and she'd say she wanted to go look at something and then I'd see her zip by the aisle going about thirty. I just pretend I don't know her when she does that.

What? By the time I realize it's her she's 100 yards away and wouldn't hear me yelling anyway and then we'd both look like assholes. I just have to be patient and wait for her to go by me and then grab her hood and watch her feet fly up in the air, and then when she's flat on her back in the aisle and I have her full attention I quietly say, "Give me your wheels. NOW."

Sam got an iPod Touch. Before Christmas I told him the present his grandparents were giving him was so good that when he opened it he'd poop his pants. When he got his presents, he opened the biggest present first. It was a van transformer, which is good, but not pants-pooping good. He thought that had to be the pants-pooper because it was the biggest. Then he opened some socks, and then in a tiny little gift bag he opened the iPod. He didn't poop but he did almost faint. He is beyond thrilled. Kira is a little jealous, even though she got his old iPod that she has been coveting. She got hold of his new iPod today and wrote him a little note with the notes app. Here it is:

Wash your hair when you take a shower even the back of your head. Stop chewing your finger. You look better with long hair. You chew vary loudly. Your.poops rely stink. You shoud rely shave your mustash. Your hair is stiking up in the back. Where is your stoking.

Sam found it more hilarious than offensive to him personally, so I'm wondering if this is part of an ongoing inside joke about naggy things I tell them. Is that paranoid?

Merry Christmas!

It's been so great this month to get all the cards and letters from people I generally don't stay in touch with well enough. But I'm sad to say I only got a few Christmas Letters, the ones where people summarize the entire year in a one page letter. I love those letters, but one time I got one from a friend I have since lost touch with, in which she confessed to an "almost" affair she had with a co-worker.

Awkward!

But the more I thought about it the more I like the idea of an annual Christmas confessional/too-much-information letter. I think I could easily tell enough about myself and my family to keep people from looking me in the eye until at least Thanksgiving, the hard part is paring it down to a single page. I'd have to pick a theme like "lies I've told this year" or "bathroom incidents." But even that might be a little long considering the millions of lies I've told, and that 2009 is the year I learned that it's very important to take bathroom breaks at work when I can, and not to try to hold it too long. (lesson learned the hard way)

That all sounds too hard when I really just want to wish you all a fantastic Christmas and New Year. I'm happy to say that my biggest problem these days is the ever-present Chex Mix crumbs in my bra (itchy). I hope Chex Mix in your bra (or something of equal seriousness) is the biggest problem you encounter in 2010. I'll work on my theme for next year's letter. You work on yours too.

Love,
Sarah

Blackhead

Today Kira told us all that she thought it was weird that Charlie Brown's friends call him a "blackhead." I had to tell her that he is really called a "blockhead" and she looked at me like, "Ohhhhhhhh...." I wonder if she's been calling kids at school blackheads.

I can talk, read, and use the toilet

Sam and I drove to Forest Lake for a hockey tournament this weekend. While on the drive down, we noticed tons of billboards that had pictures of cute babies on them that said things like, "I had finger prints before I was born," and "I could smile before I was born," and "I have Down's Syndrome."

(Why would you think I was lying about this?)

Well, so what? What's with all the bragging? Why take out a billboard advertisement to tell me that?

I can talk and read and use the toilet (suck on that, babies) but I don't have enough money to advertise it on a million billboards. Those babies must be rich. (However, I am impressed with the down syndrome-baby's ability to write "I have Down Syndrome" in huge letters on a billboard.  I bet that would be hard.)

Holiday Program #2

When Sam was getting ready for his school holiday program and tried on his new pants that he just got in September, he discovered that they were a little tight. I tried to primp him a little and he would have none of it. He wouldn't let me comb his hair, or tie his tie, or see how many fingers I could fit in the waistband of his pants to see how tight they were. He came out of his bedroom with me following close behind and Kira looked at his pants and said, "Holy... You look like Michael Knight." (of Knight Rider fame) I thought I was going to pee my pants laughing.

He wouldn't let me take a picture of his pants so I had to sneak one when we got to the school and he walked ten feet ahead of me pretending I didn't exist.

The concert was very good and the kids did a great job. The gym got boiling hot, but I loved every second of it because I haven't been warm for three months.

watermelon watermelon watermelon

Sam puts the "awk" in awkward

I said, "Okay Sam, let's get a good close-up picture of your face."

"Um, .. a little freaky, let's try again."

"Okay, it wasn't that funny... again."

"Bless you... let's try one more time."

"Finally."

Why intelligent design is such a stupid theory

In a word; teenagers. Sam is fast approaching teenagehood, his birthday is at the end of the month and he will be thirteen. He's a very nice boy and I'm not expecting any horrific behavior from him but even if he does act like an asshole from time to time in the next ten years I will probably have to write it off as teenager-induced mental illness.

Already there is evidence of the hormones racing through his veins - a creepy little mustache (that he is ridiculously proud of); growing like the incredible hulk, (if the hulk only grew tall and didn't put on any muscle mass); and fits of emotional overload. I can't really blame the guy because his brain is being marinated in new hormones and chemicals at a rate that his little synapses have never experienced. And coupled with the newly marinated brain, his frontal lobe, the part of the brain that is responsible for judgement, reasoning, and emotions, is going to be taking a developmental break for the next several years, in the middle of which he is going to be DYING to drive a car and have sex. Sounds like a mean joke, doesn't it?

Teenagers are as stupid and helpless as toddlers when it comes to navigating the real world, but unlike toddlers, they resent their parents and don't talk a fraction as much as toddlers, so you never know what's really going on in their heads. When they do occasionally tell you what they're really thinking about, the adult instinct is to say, "That is the stupidest thing I've ever heard," because what they said is probably the stupidest thing you ever heard. But, of course, if you say that they won't tell you anything anymore, so you have to bite your tongue and listen to the ridiculous theory about how having a huge snowplow attached to the front of your compact car is a good idea.

I've been thinking about getting full-time work again, but with this teenage thing looming, maybe now is not the best time. Sam will be easy compared to Kira (I hate to even think about that), so perhaps now is not the best time to leave them to their own devices. We've been lulled into complacence while they were in elementary school, but soon the ultimate-parenting starts up again. I hope we are ready.

That, among many other reasons, is why I think intelligent design is such a stupid theory. Another is the fact that the prostate gland, which ALWAYS gets enlarged later in life, goes around the urethra. How dumb is that?

If I was going to intelligently design a human, the control center (brain) wouldn't be teetering on the top of a skinny neck, just begging to be hacked off or cracked open, it would be in the center of the body. And eyes would be on stalks and would be able to regenerate. I could write a book on how I would design a human, but I won't bore you with any more details because I don't want you to be thinking "that is the stupidest thing I ever heard."

How would you design a human?

Holiday Program #1

Kira's big Christmas concert was today. It was pretty good. It was crowded, as usual. I had to get there an hour and a half early to get a seat in the third row. I forgot my iPod too so I just had to sit there and talk to people to pass the time. Oh, the humanity. (just kidding) But the concert wasn't too long and the kids were SUPER cute. I absolutely love boys in little tiny ties. One second grader was wearing a short sleeve dress shirt and a tie and he looked totally natural and comfortable, like a tiny pharmacist.

Kira was cute too, as usual. Here she is by the tree this morning:

And here she is singing her solo, Oh Holy Night. She really belted it out and if you closed your eyes you'd think it was Barbara Streisand.

Just kidding. She wasn't singing. She had to say one line about Kwanzaa and she did it perfectly, however as her mother, I could hear the almost unnoticeable pause in the middle of her line and saw the split second look on her face that was sheer panic. But she pulled it off. Good girl! After that she went up to her spot on the risers. Here's the best picture I could get of her up there:

The kid with the Santa hat wouldn't get her gigantic head out of the way so I could get a good picture. Thanks a lot, kid.

One last thing; we had a who-can-make-the-ugliest-face contest this morning in front of the computer. Who do you think won?

Good Times

Remember going to see Santa when you were little? That was so fun.

Merry Blogmas

It's been one year since I started this blog. I remember it because my very first post was about Kira's holiday concert at school, and tomorrow is this year's holiday concert at school. She tells me that this year she is going to be standing in the back, in the corner, sort of behind the curtain. Fantastic. I can't wait. I bought her a dress a month ago and I have to go exchange it tonite because in the last 30 days she has managed to grow enough to not fit into the dress any more.

That is so obnoxious.

Sam is doing the same thing except he's just getting taller. He's a stick figure and keeps growing too tall for his pants. There were a few pair that I had hemmed and then he took it upon himself to unhem them when they started getting short and now they have big white seams. He's so cool.

I told Julie, my MIL, that he was growing like a weed and she offered to crochet a few inches of colorful yarn onto the bottoms of all of his pants like she used to do for her kids in the seventies. (She can ram a crochet hook into anything.) Either that or she could sew some bandana bells on the ends.

Anyway, the blog is a year old so I looked through a few of my posts and I'd have to say that I like the ones about the kids the most because they are my kids, obviously. This one is my fave. Or maybe this one because it was so much fun to write.

Thanks so much for reading my blog. I really like writing it, and it's nice that there are some people out there that like to read it too.

Jingle jingle

Whenever the kids and I are riding in the car together we listen to Lite FM because they are playing all Christmas music all the time until Christmas. I can't tell you how sick I am of that stupid Paul McCartney "Wonderful Christmas Time" song. It seems it is playing every single time I turn on the car.

I've been really listening to the songs this year and there are so many. There's a Christmas carol for everything. I heard "Santa Baby," a carol for gold diggers; "Baby It's Cold Outside," a carol for date rapists; and "The Christmas Shoes," a carol for con artists teaching their kids to be con artists by telling strangers to buy designer shoes for their mother because she is dying on Christmas Eve and really wants a pair of nice pumps to get her through DEATH.

I think my favorite this year is "Let it Snow" by Harry Connick Jr. because he's dreamy, but I also like the duet between David Bowie and Bing Crosby singing "The Little Drummer Boy" but mostly because the video is so weird. "Jingle Bells" by the Crashtest Dummies is pretty good too. Beth turned me on to that one. Thanks, Beth.

What's your favorite Christmas song?

Fact: Sam finds Kira annoying

Tonite on the way to hockey practice, Sam was telling Kira and I about how he thinks Dwight from The Office is so funny when he prefaces things his says with "Question:..." or "Fact:..." Kira caught on to it and would not stop. Every utterance (and there were many) she had was prefaced. Here is just a short sample of her rambling:


Kira - "Fact: It is now 6:30. Question: Sam, what time does your practice start?"
Sam- "6:35"
Kira - "Fact: You are going to be late."
Sam - "Kira, I was kidding, it's not til 7:00. And would you stop doing that, it's getting annoying."
Kira - "Opinion: it was not very nice of you to lie to me. Threat: I am going to punch you in the face."

(merciful silence, driving along, eventually driving past the clinic)

Kira - "Fact: I've been there before. Fact: I choked on a lollipop that the doctor gave me. Fact: it hurt a lot. Fact: you had to give me a popsicle when we got home to make my throat feel better."

This went on and on for about an hour until she eventually said, "Fact: I'm getting very tired of talking like this but I don't think I can stop."

And she hasn't.

Snow art, Texas, the Holy Virgin and vaginas

Kira was outside working very busily on something yesterday and then she came in the house to get the camera and take a picture of her creation which was this:

A giant paw print. You can't really tell in the picture, but it has terrifying claws. I think her plan is to make a bunch of them in the yard and scare any planes that happen to fly over and look down.

I also had to take a picture of this water stain on my stove today before I wiped it up.


Doesn't it look like Texas? I think it looks incredibly like Texas. It looks way more like Texas than any Virgin Mary stains look like the Virgin Mary. Too bad it couldn't be a Virgin Mary stain. If it was I might get a little attention for it, but I doubt anyone will care about my Texas stain.

I looked up Virgin Mary stain on google images and found a bunch. My favorite was this one:



The Virgin on grilled cheese. Or is it Jesus. I can't really tell because IT'S GRILLED CHEESE. I love that the woman is proudly displaying her sandwich in a plastic box surrounded by cotton balls.

When I googled "Virgin Mary Stain" I found quite a few water stains like this one:


And when I look at them I honestly can't see the Virgin Mary. If it looks like anything to me, it looks like a gigantic vagina. So then I googled "gigantic vagina" to see if what people think look like gigantic vaginas also look like the Virgin Mary. First of all let me tell you: DO NOT GOOGLE "GIGANTIC VAGINA." You will be sorry. There are many many artistic representations of vaginas and most of them are gross. This is the nicest one I found:

It could be a flower, it could be a vagina. The only question I have is why is this lady crawling into it? Then I thought, would I go into it? And the answer was, of course I would.

This is the worst one I found. Brace yourself before scrolling down....



It's a vagina bike taxi. Do you think it looks like the Virgin Mary?

What I love about substitute teaching

My workweek this week:

4 days of work
4 different grades
4 different buildings

1 outfit

Jealous?

Proof

Remember in my last post when I said that I was retaining water because of all the Chex Mix with triple salt I've eaten the last few days?

I wasn't kidding. It's weird though because it's mostly on the left side. Don't believe me? Look at this picture of my feet. I don't get it. Huh. Oh well.




(that's not really my feet. Both of my actual feet look like the left one.)

So pretty.

Ramble ramble ramble

I made some Chex mix yesterday because Chex was on sale at the grocery store. OMG I love that stuff so much. I used the original recipe and didn't add any extras like bagel chips or Cheerios (gag), but I did make one inadvertent change to the recipe. I put about three times too much seasoned salt in it because it sort of spilled but I didn't care because I really like that stuff.

What I've learned today is that it really is SALT. I ate a ton of the Chex mix yesterday and now I'm retaining water like a pregnant woman in her tenth month. SO pretty.

Mitch likes to mix a little chocolate in with his Chex mix. I don't know what is wrong with him. I say keep your savory savory and your sweet sweet. There's no need to mix them up.

I think when I make it again, today, after school, I will make sure to put in no more salt than the recipe calls for and I might skip the wheat Chex. They have the regular delicious Chex pattern, but inside is an additional panel of cereal and that tends to soak up the butter and get chewy and then stick to my teeth. Maybe I'll get some Crispix to add in there too. That would be good.

Oh, you don't care about my Chex mix, you say? Well, too bad. I didn't have internet for three days because our service was down. I didn't get to blog or anything and so today while I'm at school I'm taking full advantage of the high speed internet to write about my Chex mix adventures, provide emergency medical care to the fish in my digital aquarium (don't worry, they're fine), and fix up my Facebook farm. Aren't you glad?

I hate not having internet because I have become extremely dependent on it. I had to go to my in-laws the other night to get online to check my work schedule because I never write it down, why would I? It's on the internet! The kid's schedules are on the internet too. How did anyone ever manage without going online to find stuff out? I didn't know where this school where I'm working is and I would usually look it up on Mapquest. I actually had to look in the PHONE BOOK and find a MAP and figure it out myself. And then I got lost on my way here! The internet makes me feel smarter, but I think it's actually making me dumber.

Tis the season

Do you know why the Salvation Army is called the Salvation Army? I bet you think it's because they collect people's old stuff (or salvage it) and then sell it in their stores and give the money to poor people.

That's what I thought, and if you think that too, you're wrong.

I recently learned the real story. What they are really salvaging is souls. It was started by a guy named William Booth in the 1860s. He preached to the poor and tried to feed and clothe them because it's easier to win over souls for the lord if you take care of them first. Then he and his top men, or command, as they are now called, decided to call themselves an army.

So it is a pseudo-military institution with ranks and they are harvesting souls one bell ring at a time. And much like the real military, they discriminate against homosexuals, (because as everyone knows, there are no gay people in heaven anyway so why bother, am I right?) In 2001 they sought a legal exemption from the anti-discrimination laws when it comes to hiring gay people. Because they are a church. Jesus would be so proud of his army, don't you think?

Creepy.

Christmas decorating

I put up the Christmas decorations today and, OMG, guess what I found:

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It's Kira's nutcracker that she made in second grade.

I HATE IT.

It scares me. I accidentally ripped out the big pink boa feather that was stuck in its hat when I found it today. I think it's the menacing smile/grimace that really creeps me out. Or maybe it's the dirty cotton ball it has for hair. How long do I have to keep it? I put it on the window sill behind the tree so hopefully it won't startle me too many times over the next month.

That's my least favorite decoration, which brings me now to my favorite:

This is a rock that my MIL painted for me several years ago. The Johnson's all love rocks and I make fun of them for it so Julie thought it would be funny to paint a rock for me. I make fun of them because they are all crazy for rocks. Whenever I do laundry I find pockets full of rocks from both the kids AND from Mitch. When Julie and Rich moved here I think they actually moved about 200 pounds of cool rocks they've found over the years that they couldn't bear to part with. When we first moved here Mitch told me that this area was geologically rich with agates, which is a precious and rare stone. That's what he told me. Agates aren't all that rare. Kira finds about 50 every day. I had to convert my cookie jar to an agate jar just to accommodate the rocks that Kira and Mitch find.

So anyway, Julie made me that rock and I love it. I usually take it out a little early so I can look at it. It's very detailed.

I had a good idea about 6 or 7 years ago and I'm still really pleased with myself about it. I usually send out Christmas cards with a picture of my kids on it and I also make myself an ornament with that year's picture. I make one for my parents and in-laws too. I think that was pretty clever of me.

Now that I look at this picture I wonder who the hell put that stupid stuffed bear on the tree. That's a back-of-the-tree filler. I'll have to move it.

Kira is happy because I took out the Playmobil Santa and sleigh and reindeer. I usually also put out a Playmobil hazmat scene with it because it inspires more imaginative play, I think.

We also have a Playmobil advent calendar but I looked at it today and last year I meticulously packed all the little pieces back in their boxes perfectly, and it would really be a shame to ruin that good work, so unless Kira asks, I'm not taking it out. Is that Scroogy?

Ouchie

I couldn't sleep at all last night because I've got the worst sore throat in the history of sore throats. I tried my old sore throat trick of having a banana by the bed and taking a bite when I start to feel drowsy. Usually the banana goo coats my throat long enough for me to go to sleep but last night the banana didn't even touch it. I got up to play on my new computer and check on my facebook farm. My throat was still really bothering me so I had an idea. I tried to look at it with my new webcam and discovered the problem:

The DEVIL is having a party in my THROAT! No wonder.