Oliver bought cookies at a bake sale today, and they look gooooooood.
So good, in fact, that he is now turning a profit by selling them to Sara and me for more than he paid for them. In fact, after dinner he was too full to finish his cookie and he offered to sell me his leftovers for $0.25.
The irony is that that boy is loaded and refuses to spend any money anyway. On the other hand, if anybody was going to raise cheap kids, you knew it was going to be Sara and me.
In the spirit of posts like this one, Sara and I have been putting together a list of words that Alex knows. We started with a few words, and then we kept coming up with more and more, texting each other additional words for the list, until we realized that Alex knows a lot of words! It seems like he learns a new one every hour or so, so I better publish this quick, otherwise we will never stop adding to it.
I think it is a pretty impressive list of words for a not-even-one-and-a-half year old!
To quote from the post about Oliver:
So I tried to be very conservative in my list, and only include words that he uses often and obviously understands completely. He has a lot of words that he has said just a few times, or that he repeats after you, but has not used independently. So those I didn’t include. He also understands about 100 times more words than this, but I think that’s pretty normal.
Anyway, here is the (partial!) list, in no particular order:
Maybe tractor too. Maybe puzzle. He also inexplicably still signs a few words, but refuses to actually make the noises: bye-bye, night-night, all done, milk, train.
Fiddling with the look of the website today. It has been a long time since I’ve freshened it up! I don’t believe in the thirteen or so years that I’ve been running this thing that I’ve ever gone with a light theme. What do you know, I kind of like it!
I think I basically have it how I want it (mostly just cleaner, dare I say, more professional?), but don’t be surprised if you notice some additional changes in the days to come.
— The Management
So Nala has been dead for a while now, and I have always found something else to do, other than write this post. But it seems like an event that needs to be recorded here, since Nala is woven so much into the fabric of this blog. Sara and I got Nala before we were married, and Nala lived with me a while, just the two of us. Nala lived in 4 apartments / houses with us. She was there when we brought each of our kids home from the hospital.
In fact, my 2nd post ever, way back in February of 2004, was about how annoying my cat was. If I would have had any idea at all that cats could live to be 17 years old, there is absolutely no way I would have agreed to this in the first place.
Nala was old, and sick. I was rubbing thyroid medicine into her ears, twice a day. She wasn’t super mobile, basically sticking to one spot unless she had to go to the bathroom, was rail thin, and to top it off we moved, which was a lot of stress for a 17 year old cat. So for some time we had been saying to the kids, “You know, guys, Nala isn’t going to live forever…”
Even still, it was a bit of a shock. We were coming home from our trip to Arizona, arriving home late from the airport. Often Sara and I will run in to do a quick check to make sure Nala’s okay before letting the kids in, but this time we didn’t because someone had checked in on her while we were gone and she had been fine. So Evelyn is the one who found her, and it was a rather unfortunate end to our trip.
The next day the big kids and I drove her up and buried her at the Haven. It was raining a little bit, and the three of us sang, “Goodnight, goodnight, sweet baby” to her. Ollie seemed pretty unphased, but Evelyn was a bit broken up about it, and I was sad to see Evelyn be sad (and certainly ONLY crying for that reason!)
We tried to explain a little bit to Alex, telling him, “All done, Nala” and “Bye bye, Nala”. He just shook his head and said, “No! More Nala!” However, he still calls all cats “Nala” and still looks around for her from time to time. I know he won’t remember her (though he will probably wonder why he called cats “Nala” for years).
As for me, I will mostly remember the years of spraying her with water and yelling for her to shut up, her peeing pretty much wherever she wanted, and getting matted up hair on everything. It’s easy to want to remember a glorified version of her, but any search through this blog will quickly show the TRUE nature of that nuisance cat. If you want to hit the highlights (or lowlights), here are a few “greatest hits” to get you started:
Although I’m glad that ankle-biting, loud-mouthed, worthless hunk of fur is gone, I cannot deny that this is the end of an era. Say what you want about her, she sure was good at Acquire, though…
Lady 1: ::sigh:: “I need to take down my Christmas tree.”
Lady 2: “You haven’t taken your Christmas tree down yet? It’s St. Patrick’s day!”
Lady 1: “Well, it’s green, isn’t it?”
Me: ::laughing::
Lady 1, to me: “Well, it’s green isn’t it?”
Me: “I cannot deny that it is green.”
Oliver: “I’m going to the moon, and I’m bringing the bad word that starts with ‘F’…”
::Alex trying unsuccessfully to scoop sweet potato chunks onto a fork::
Me: “No, poke it. Alex, you’ve got to poke it. Poke it.”
::Alex looking at me, then slowly extending a finger towards his nose like, “if you say so…”::
Shane Halbach 