We Interrupt Your Holiday to Bring You This Important Message

So are you stuffed yet?

I am.

Sam, on the other hand, just whispered in my ear: "I just pooped out all the food that my body didn't need."

He was very proud, but in more of an excited-to-have-a-great-secret kind of way. Some secrets just have to be shared though, so consider this a virtual whisper in your ear.


Happy Thanksgiving.

Tough Choices

In order to get my shopping list done today I had to sit my kids in front of a video. Don't judge, this is after I tried to occupy them with sitting quietly on the couch, counting grains of rice, sorting the recycling, memorizing the Declaration of Independence, choreographing interpretive dances to the Dances With Wolves soundtrack, etc. Nothing was working, and our 1 year supply of whole wheat organic pasta was getting dangerously low (more like a 10 1/2 month supply). And desperate times call for the Electronic Babysitter.

Hey Kids, do you want to watch a video or something?

Yeah! We want to watch Baby Einstein! 

Baby Einstein? Really? You know it's for babies, right? And it's just a bunch of video taped toys and stuffed animals set to classical music? 

Baby Einstein! Baby Einstein! 

Ummm, OK. 

Now that we know the truth about Baby Einsten, it left me thinking: in essence, my kids were getting stupider just so I could fill their bellies. (Wait, is it stupider or more stupid? I should know, I was raised on Sesame Street*, they didn't even have Baby Einstein when I was a kid.)

So for some reason I just thought the blogging world would want to know that in the battle between intellectual and physical nourishment today, my kids' IQ's took a big hit. And since their chances of getting into Harvard are now pretty much shot, I went ahead and bought them the junky high-fructose-corn-syrup-laden, flourescent-tinted yogurt they wanted so bad today. Oh crap-- there goes the whole physical nourishment part.

Well, what can I say, it's a slippery slope. I think tomorrow we'll watch Soap Operas and eat pop tarts all day.

Made any tough choices lately?


*Happy 40th Sesame Street! Check out this great post on my friend Aimee's blog.

Aarrrgghhh, is the candy gone already?

Note: In a radical departure from my strict blogging policy, this Halloween post is brought to you just a few days after Halloween, rather than my usual 3 month lag time. Don't be too alarmed, however, it's likely to never happen again. Look for our Christmas post sometime in April 2010. 

 The theme this year was 2 pirates, their pirate monkey, and the monkey's pink-haired lady trainer. I somehow convinced Mia and Sam to wear the same pirate costume this year, and lucky for me they both fit into a size 4 boy's costume, since all the skanky pirate costumes for 6 year old girls were sold out. We take any opportunity for free candy pretty seriously, and so the kids have spent the past few weeks "getting into character" to prepare for the big day. This involved referring to everyone and everything as "matey," wearing their pirate costumes almost non-stop, unruly demands for snacks, a sharp decline in proper hygiene practices, general pillaging, plundering, and of course, lots and lots of swashbuckling. All in all, not too different than normal, though I was constantly reminded of a particularly regrettable episode of Wifeswap that featured a pirate-obsessed family and the outright abuse of the word pirattitude (which is to say, any usage at all). So basically, I've spent way too much time lately thinking about one of the worst hours on television ever.

But I digress...

In the picture above, we are about to go trick or treating at a local assisted living center. Don't we look so happy? Well, somewhere in that old folks home, we not only collected a year's supply of butterscotch, peppermint, and cinnamon candies, but also something that looked and smelled suspiciously like diarrhea on Sam's pumpkin. We were too busy gagging and saying bad words to take pictures of how happy we were about that. Needless to say, that effectively began and ended our tradition of trick or treating with the old folks.

More trick or treating festivities (with a thoroughly cleaned pumpkin). What I love about this picture is that Sam and Nate have almost identical expressions, though one is smiling and the other is screaming.

 And what would Halloween be without a little post-Halloween hairpiece swap?

 We spent the evening with some friends whose attempt to buy a house had turned into a true Halloween nightmare, which we metaphorically recreated in our attempt to build a haunted gingerbread house. It looks way better in the picture-- you can't even tell that the walls aren't plumb and the roof is caved in in two places.

(Good luck Jen and family. We will miss you!)

And this is completely unrelated to Halloween, but Sam got a hold of my camera recently and these are some of the pictures he took. Turns out he's a way better photographer than me.

  

I'm not used to such artsy pictures on my blog, and it makes it difficult to know how to end this post. I feel like I should be all deep and introspective or something.

Ummmm, yeah, I got nothing.

Hope you had a fun and poop-free Halloween.