Author: Shane

Christmas 2016

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We started out on Christmas Eve with the play at church. Evelyn and Oliver are both in the choir, Oliver was set to be a lamb, and Evelyn was set to be Mary. What we did not expect was that Alex got conscripted to be baby Jesus (which means Sara was conscripted to play the “Innkeeper’s Wife” and help on stage). Alex is a little big to play a newborn,but was absolutely slaying the audience with his toddling around, saying, “ma ma” and playing with the hay. It didn’t hurt that Evelyn is his actual big sis, so was much more comfortable around him than the typical Mary.

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Evelyn naturally nailed her big speech. That girl just has an absolute lack of stage fright, which means she is able to deliver her lines slowly and clearly in a way that most kids just can’t manage. Like, she would say it the same whether talking to me at home, or orating to 1500 people (yes, 1500 people! We always tell her she’ll probably never play to a bigger audience than the Christmas play!)

And for Oliver’s part, he was the most adorable sheep you’ve ever seen:

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Vania got all three kids matching pjs and they were THE BEST. There are little t-rexes with Santa hats on them! They are the exact pajamas I would have picked out (assuming I even knew such a thing existed!)

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Barb knit Alex some *adorable* hat and mitten sets:

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However, those pictures don’t really give the…flavor of the experience. Alex HATED having them on. You can see above that we had to constantly bribe him with raisins to get him to leave them alone long enough for the pictures. I would say this is a more accurate representation:

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In fact, Alex hated the hats so much, that after that he refused to open any more presents. He reached in, felt the tissue paper, pulled his hand back like he got burned and then just shook his head “No!” We had to open them and show him they were not hats before he would accept any gifts.

Other than that, though, Alex has a phenomenal first Christmas. He loved his car set from Santa, loved having everybody home to play with, loved all the boxes and wrapping paper, and most of all, loved the “na na” that Evelyn gave him. He hands it to you, demands, “Na na!” and then sticks his tongue out and goes “blubalubalubalub”:

Sara and I have officially been married too long, since we got each other the EXACT SAME PRESENT. Sara opened hers first, and since I wasn’t sure she would really like it I rushed to explain all the features that I thought she would like (Ceramic burr grinder! Doesn’t take up space on the counter! No batteries required!). Sara just kind of smiled and nodded through the whole thing, until Ollie said in a very confused voice, “Wait…I thought you got that for daddy?”

“It’s like Gift of the Magi!” shouted Evelyn.

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I thought it was such a unique gift! I didn’t even mean to get a hand-crank one, but when I saw it I thought she would like that one better!

Finally, there was one truly enduring gift that will be remembered long after Christmas is over…

I’m talking about Ollie’s fitbit.

Ever since last year when Evelyn got one, Ollie has been pining for a fitbit of his very own. And just like when Evelyn got one he is obsessing about it every. second. of every. day. Nary a step is taken without a full reporting. He spent the entire day yesterday pacing up and down the hallway. The number of times we had to say something like, “Oliver! If you don’t sit down and eat your supper I’m going to take your fitbit away!”

Naturally, Evelyn responded in the way any big sister would: by pacing up and down the hallway behind him, making sure he doesn’t get more steps than her. Just the two of them doing loops, all day long. Luckily it was like 60 degrees for no reason, so we did get them out of the house for a bit, and Oliver managed > 20k steps for the day (and that was with going to see a movie!).

Better that than another hand-crank coffee grinder I guess.

Quote Monday has a sweet Christmas quote for you…

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Me, giving Sara a hug: “Merry Christmas.”
Sara, whispering in my ear: “I think you need to wash your wookiee suit.”

Alex, on stage as baby Jesus, signing: “All done”

Interview with me about writing and live theater

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Hey everybody, check out this excerpt from an interview I did with The Pulp Stage as part of their (successful, yay!) crowdfunding campaign.

The question was, “What do our plays and genres mean to you as a writer?” (My answer is as long winded and as rambling as you would expect.)

Vivid Nightmares, Puppet Master Edition

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I have always had very vivid dreams until lately when I think I have been so sleep deprived that my body doesn’t have time for that crap.

But the other night I had a real doozy, and I can’t seem to shake it. If you are not into creepy murder puppets, I suggest punching out now…this gets pretty gross.

So somehow I had befriended these puppets, right? I think I was hired to dust some dead lady’s house or something. And the puppets were all like “hey man, it is so not fair that they keep us locked in this room, you know?” And eventually I was like, “Yeah, that’s really not right to treat these guys that way!”

So I let them out of their room and the first thing they wanted to do was to kill these two people who had imprisoned them. I was a little uncomfortable with that, but I kind of thought, “Yeah, well okay. I mean I guess they’re pretty mad they had been wrongfully imprisoned, and who am I to say I wouldn’t feel the same way if I were them?”

So the puppets killed these people and then we all went back to their ancestral, underground homeland. They had these magical tunnels that connected to the ventilation systems of every building in the world. And they were so happy to be home! And there were suddenly, like, hundreds of them. Way more than I remembered releasing.

Now, it turns out these were some bad puppets. I mean these things made Puppet Master look like Sesame Street (except for Leech Lady because UUUUGH *nothing* could be worse than Leech Lady). Specifically I remember this one came down the aisle pushing this old fashioned pram that was like spraying blood out the sides like a sprinkler and all the puppets were just going nuts like this was the best, awesomest thing ever.

Right about then I realized that maybe I done goofed by letting these things out.

So there was this one puppet that looked like a sailor or something and I was asking her where all these other puppets came from and she was like “Oh yeah, we can like turn into regular people so we can pass and like get closer to our victims.” It turned out that each puppet had like a really specific type of person that they liked to kill (for her it was sailors). Then I realized this puppet on the other side of me that was all black with like a quilted, plain-white face (facial features, like a nose, but no like eyes or anything) was actually my co-worker Amy. And I was like, “Oh man, I never even knew you were a murder puppet! You’re so good at pretending! So who do you like to kill?” and she was like, “Feminists” and I was like, “Yeah, I guess that makes sense.”

So then I was like, “You know what? These puppets really were my friends so, in for a penny, in for a pound: I’m just going to turn myself into a murder puppet too.” I had a vague notion that if I just ate what they were eating I could turn into a puppet, so I thought maybe I could get some of that blood that was spraying out of the pram. But then someone handed me a little paper plate with like some meat on it and they said it was a child. And I was like, “Man, I really don’t want to eat any children, but it looks like chicken and it’s in a nice vindaloo sauce, so really this is probably my best bet.” But I couldn’t quite bring myself to eat it, so I was just like carrying around the plate because I kept thinking I would get to it in a minute.

So this party was getting wilder and wilder and all the puppets were like disbursing into the ventilation systems to go out and spread murder into the world, and the puppets didn’t seem to mind that I was there, exactly, but some of them were getting a little TOO friendly, and that’s when it finally occurred to me that:

  1. All of the puppets that I knew were no longer in sight,
  2. It’s possible that they were never really my friends in the first place, but it was all a ploy to get me to let them out, and
  3. There very well could be a puppet who had a really specific type of person they wanted to kill, namely, me

Right about then the lights went out and I was sitting in the dark thinking about how this whole thing had really gotten away from me, and I hadn’t eaten any kids yet, so I wasn’t a puppet myself, and I probably doomed the world, and also there might very well be puppets crawling towards me in the dark right that very second…

And then I woke up.

And then the next day Amy knocked me out of the fantasy football playoffs in my work league SO SHE’S OBVIOUSLY A MONSTER AFTER ALL.

The end.

They grow up so fast

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So most of you probably saw this video from over a week ago now, but I’m saving it here for posterity:

With all the new stuff that Alex is getting up to, it’s easy to forget that the other kids are growing up too!

Ollie in particular just suddenly seems so old all of a sudden. I went to get him out of class early one day for a doctors appointment and I just had to laugh. He’s in real school now! They were doing math, and then when I got there he took care of his math notebook and I was just like, “Wow, he’s like a real kid!”

In fact, Evelyn had some multiplication flash cards the other day, and Ollie was pretty dang good at them.

He has gotten so good at reading all of a sudden. I remember this with Evelyn too, but it’s like he just got to that point where he realized that there’s writing everywhere, and he can read it. He’s reading billboards, the backs of cereal boxes, and addresses on Christmas cards. It’s like a whole new world! It’s so much fun to listen to him read an Elephant and Piggie book.

He’s also a very detailed artist. He can sit and draw for HOURS, and he draws these really elaborate scenes. He loves to explain to you all the little nuances and hidden things he’s added to his drawings, and he gets very clever with them.

And if that wasn’t enough, Ollie started taking piano lessons! It seems absolutely crazy to me, but there it is. He is so excited about it! I can tell he feels grown up too; he’s very proud. And even songs like “Mary Had a Little Lamb” seem so impressive when this little boy is playing them!

Not too long now before he starts writing his own blog!