My So Called Life

Quote Monday – Water Edition

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Me: “I’m going to go stick my head in the fountain.”
Evie, getting upset: “Nooooo!”
Me: “Why not?”
Evie: “Because that’s where your ears are!”

She does not like water in her ears! Really, she doesn’t like water anywhere near her face, but particularly the ears. So I didn’t stick my head in the fountain because she was upset, but after a while she started tugging me over towards the fountain. “Guess where I’m taking you!” she said. So I went over and put my head in the fountain (it was a really hot day). As soon as I took my head out she started sobbing.

Evie: “You need a towel! Get a towel!”
Me: “Why? It will dry, honey. I like getting my head wet.”
Evie: “No! No! You have to poke your ears!”

By this I assume she meant dry the water out of my ears (it wasn’t even in my ears!) I told you she doesn’t like water in her ears!

Sara: “Why are your breadsticks wet?”

This was in response to some of the saddest, soggiest, most unappealing breadsticks I have ever seen. The place had a “limited menu” for Sunday that was so crummy, Sara and I decided not to eat.

Me: “What was your favorite part about the water park?”
Evie: “When we went to the potty!”

It’s not like she didn’t have a good time! I don’t know why we even try to plan things. However, it should be noted that she let me dunk her head in the water (asked me to do it actually!) This has never happened before (see above for water-in-her-ears-phobia). She didn’t even rush to get out and get a towel right away (but she did a different time the same day when she accidentally tripped and her head went under for a nanosecond).

I should also mention that Sara totally flipped out of her tube and got dunked the first time she went down the big slide. Of course, this was the only time this happened and I wasn’t around. Totally missed it! 😦

As for me, I am totally lobster-ized. I slapped some sun screen on my shoulders, arms, face and neck, and even reapplied it. That is why every place other than my shoulders, arms, face and neck is bright red like I’m wearing some sort of weird red sunburn sandwich board. It’s actually kind of funny because it looks even worse compared to my un-burned arms and shoulders. And usually, whenever you have a sunburn, your shoulders are the worst part. But since my shoulders were protected, it doesn’t really hurt much to wear a shirt! I guess we know for sure that the new sunscreen we were trying works! Consider my painful middle the control group.

The little men who live in your stomach

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I don’t remember how this first came about, but we have somehow stumbled upon a very effective technique to get Evie to eat things she might not otherwise eat.

The story goes that there are little men in your tummy who take the materials you send down to them and use them to build things, which help you grow big and strong. For example, if you send down broccoli, they might make trees to line the roads. If you send down some tomatoes, they might add apples into the trees. Milk might turn into clouds or little white bunnies.

Dessert doesn’t help you grow big and strong of course, so the builders can’t use that for materials. However, it’s still okay to eat dessert because when you send some down, the little men take a break, sit down and enjoy their dessert.

This works great as long as you can keep thinking of things that the little men can build. If you keep building firetrucks, red is going to stop being interesting. This is harder than you think, especially when you have to play this game day after day after day. (I had to make a rule that I would only be a little man during meal times) You know things are getting desperate when white materials are being turned into things like toilets and toilet paper.

The other problem is that, the first time I was a little man in her stomach, I instinctively used the fake I’m-shouting-from-a-long-ways-away-but-I’m-actually-quieting-my-voice voice, as if I were shouting up to her from down in the pit of her stomach. Of course that became the default little man voice, and she gets upset if I forget and talk like a regular person.

So the good news is that we can get her to eat almost anything. The bad news is that dinner time just became a high pressure situation for me!

She’s trying to make me cry

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Parents worry about things that kids just don’t think about. “Am I making the right decisions for my child?” or “Am I raising this kid right?” Being a parent involves a lot of uncertainty. I don’t know if children pick up on this, and thus know the weak points to prod at, or if they just ask so many questions that some of them are bound to hit below the belt.

For example, one thing on my mind a lot is the fact that raising our kids in Chicago, they are having a much different childhood than Sara or I had. In particular, we yearn for some sort of yard where the kids could go out and play.

Evie: “This is silly, but for the house, for my birthday, I wanna ask for a yard.”

Ouch.

However, lately it seems like Evie has been going for the jugular. It really seems like she’s going out of the way to try to make us cry.

Evie: “When I die, I want to bring mommy with me.”

Evie: “When I die, I want to die close to the house. Can you make me die close to the house?”
Sara: “Why do you want to die close to the house?”
Evie: “So I can see you again”

Evie: “When I die, will you let me take Oliver with me?”

Cue daddy with a lone tear dripping from his giant cartoon eyes while his bottom lip starts quivering.

She hasn’t really had any personal experience with death yet, but I assume that thinking about death probably normal at her age. It’s not like she thinks about it all day, but it does come up probably every other day or so.

The thing is, you just never want to think about death in conjunction with your child. This seems pretty obvious, but I can definitely say that, although you might think you understand, its something that you can’t really know until you have a child. How absolutely terrifying it is. And also strange to think, “I guess that means my parents felt that way about me too.”

Well, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about these things, since Evie keeps bringing it up!

The Bird Restaurant

/ Shane / 2 Comments

For our anniversary, I got Sara a bird feeder. Exciting, right?

Well, as I had hoped, it was exciting for at least one person. At first, Evie wasn’t too excited about it. But once we got home and started explaining about how we would hang it on the porch and watch out the window, she started to get very excited. In fact, she was concerned that we get it up as soon as possible, since the birdies “didn’t get any breakfast so they’re probably hungry!” As if birds hadn’t been able to find any food to feed themselves before our bird feeder was created.

Sometimes, however, she would get a little confused on the difference between a bird house and a bird feeder. She kept asking where we were going to put the beds. So I explained that what we had was a bird feeder, which was more like a bird restaurant than a bird house.

Evie was concerned that the birds that ate at our restaurant wouldn’t have a place to stay. She wanted the birds to come live inside our house. Obviously we said no, but she tried to guilt us into it: “Some kids have the birds come into their house and then the mom opens the door for the birds to go outside and eat.”

So I hung it up outside Evie and I took a trip to the hardware store to get some seeds. Evie wanted to sit outside and wait for the birds to start coming, but we tried to tell her that we didn’t know how soon the birds would come. We were worried it would take a couple of days before any birds located our bird feeder, and we didn’t want her to be disappointed.

I happened to mention to Evie that maybe we should make a sign, so that the birds would know our restaurant was here and open for business. She really got behind that idea and immediately began working on a sign. The sign included many things, such as “a bird with two wings”, “a man with two very long arms putting bird seed in”, “seed on the ground”, and finally, signed “love (heart) birds”.

No joke, about 2 minutes after she put the sign in the window, we had our first customer!

Since then, we’ve had lots of birds (in fact, the seed is going down at a sort of alarming rate). Evie set a stool by the window permanently, so she can check several times a day to see if there are any birds.

Even when she was at the park, she was chasing the birds around shouting “We have a bird feeder at our house! We have a bird feeder at our house!” She’s a good promoter. She even has a name for our bird restaurant: “It’s the Bird Cheetah”, named after her very favorite restaurant name ever, the Electric Cheetah.

All in all, I have to say, the bird feeder was certainly money well spent!

Dessert of the Month

/ Shane / 6 Comments

For Christmas this year, my mother-in-law agreed to make me a special desert every month. Sort of like a dessert of the month club, except the deserts don’t arrive by mail. As far as I’m concerned this is about the best possible Christmas present one could receive!

We’re 6 months in, so I thought the half-way point might be a good place to put some of the desserts on display. I think the pictures speak for themselves, so without any further ado:

January – Apple Cheese Cake

February – Cocoa Waffles with Mint Ice Cream and Home Made Chocolate Fudge

March – Carrot Cake

April – Rhubarb Pie (special request!)

May – Homemade Strawberry Ice Cream

June – Homemade Samoas (my favorite kind of Girl Scout cookies!)

Thanks Barb! I’m looking forward to the next 6! 🙂

As a side note, thanks to my horrible spelling, the original version of this post has inspired Sara and I to start a “Desert of the Month” club. Every month we send you a full sized picture of a selected desert, suitable for framing! Contact me for pricing.