Quote Monday prepares for Christmas

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Evie: “After mose and geez, it’s always us.”
Me: “…?”
Evie: “Moses, Jesus…”

Me: “We have to go to [a local church], because someone very special is going to be in the Christmas play.”
Evie: “Jesus??”

We’ve been listening to a lot of Christmas music on the radio lately. I’m not sure Evie entirely understands how the radio works.

Sara: “Uh oh, we left your radio on all night!”
Evie: “Well, not all night.”
Sara: “Yeah, all night.”
Evie: “But, didn’t they go home for the night?”

Evie: “Don’t the people at the radio station get tired when they’re singing all those songs?”
Me: “No, they record it once and play it many times.”
Evie: “Yeah, but don’t their throats get sore? From all the singing?”

The 5 Best Toys of All Time

/ Shane / 1 Comment

When Sara sent me Wired’s list of the 5 best toys of all time, I was a little skeptical.

First off, how do you quantify “best”? Most anticipation? Best bang for the buck? Most total joy experienced by children? Second off, best is pretty subjective. How could everybody agree? Is it just one guy’s opinion? Do you take a poll? Do you install joy-o-meters in kids’ skulls and measure it electrically? What kind of sample do you use? Surely people of different races and genders would have different favorites. I was never into My Little Pony, but it certainly had a following. And this list is “of all time”. How do you account for different time periods? Does a hoop with a stick make the list?

This is Wired, so it’s probably a gadget. An iPad maybe? Surely Wired would say that’s a better toy than, say, a rocking horse (which doesn’t even have apps). But then again, most of the time these lists like to go retro. The original Nintendo? But is that better than the current Nintendo, with all of its technology? A Lite Brite? But then again, what could you really do with a Lite Brite?

Yes, I was getting a little riled up. I could only come up with one item I was absolutely sure had to be on the list: legos.

So, it was with much anticipation (and derision) that I opened up the list, ready to absolutely hate it. There is much justification over at the original article, but if you don’t want to read it, I will give you the list below:

5. Dirt
4. Cardboard Tube
3. String
2. Cardboard Box
1. Stick

TOTALLY NAILED IT.

That list is 100 times better than any list I could have composed. Without question, those are the 5 greatest toys of all time (of ALL time, with a few of them going back a lot further than my hoop-and-a-stick). I have had a heck of a lot more fun with those things than any toy anybody ever bought for me.

Which kind of makes you think, doesn’t it?

I’m not sure what would be in the total top 10, but I would vote for “a roll of tape”, and “pots and pans”. Any other additions you’d like to add?

Link via Sara.

A Very Red-Neck Christmas

/ Shane / 4 Comments

In which we try to answer the age old question: does Santa’s neck mach his suit?

After purchasing our land, we apparently weren’t quite ready to return to the Big City, so we decided to stop and see Santa. At the Bass Pro Shop.

Now, you might be thinking that the Bass Pro Shop is a strange place to go see Santa. However, there were a few major advantages:

  1. Conveniently located off the highway (important when we usually have to go pretty far out of our way, a.k.a. the suburbs, to see him)
  2. Much smaller lines than we have experienced at various malls
  3. They give you a free picture (because they’re trying to draw you into their shop, making money on you in other ways than directly on Santa)
  4. Commercial Santas are WAY better than crazy-Frank dressing up in his homemade Santa suit (in other words, a big upgrade from what we saw last year)
  5. They had some awesome decorations

The combination of #4 and #5 really improves the quality of the pictures. Santa was very authentic. And even though you can’t see the animatronic elves in the picture, I never had an actual reindeer in the background before (you really can’t tell it is stuffed in the picture!).

The downside was that there were no less than three different types of shooting games for the kids to play while they were waiting for Santa. If you’re a hunter, I’m sure you’re bristling at me indicating that this is a problem. Let me remind you that shooting guns means something a little different in our neighborhood, and I’m not really ready to have that conversation with my 4 year old.

I definitely felt like we stood out like a family of sore thumbs there.

Sara: “Are these people in costume?”
Me: “Huh?”
Sara: “Do you think they wear this stuff every day, or did they put it on to come here?”

Methinks it was time for the City Mice to go back where they came from.

I would definitely go back there next year. Quick, hassle free, and the whole place is sort of amazing, even when you take Santa out of it. There’s a two story waterfall! Mounted wolves attacking a mounted moose! Camouflage pick-up trucks fake ramping off of fake rocks! Several tanks of live, large fish swimming around! I’m not sure that the kids found Santa to be more interesting than the rest of the place. I certainly didn’t.

The Barony

/ Shane / 6 Comments

Back in May, I mentioned our nefarious plot to set ourselves up as Land Barons. Well, it’s official! We bought our land!

Proud Owners

It’s amazing how everything came together. This property was not even on our radar to begin with, but after some things fell through with some of the other properties, we found the perfect place. I’m so glad things did fall through, because this place was way better than any of the other places.

Number one, it’s huge! It’s over 20 acres, which is almost 8 times bigger than we started out looking at. Second off, it’s very close to Lake Michigan, and very close to a really awesome vacation town with shopping, restaurants, and tons of festivals. Third off, it’s full of really old, tall, amazing trees (mostly oaks and pines), and is very easy to navigate around on, because there is very little undergrowth (probably due to a combination of the sandy soil and the large, shady trees. Fourth off, did I mention it’s huge?

The children immediately ran off into the woods and were never heard from again

The fact that we actually own this property now is sort of hard to wrap your head around. All of this land is ours. All of these huge old trees are now owned by us. How is such a thing even possible?

Me, taking a trophy of our conquest

At the closing today, the realtor pointed out that when we started looking for land, Oliver couldn’t even walk yet. That seems like an impossibly long time ago.

We didn’t get to spend much time on the land today, since it was raining, but we did have to go and just sort of feel it for a minute. Evie did find time to christen the land (if you know what I mean…better get used to it, there’s no bathroom facilities there!). It makes me kind of sad that there’s no real reason to go back until Spring.

So phase 1 is now complete, and now we can move on to phase 2: fortifying against the zombie apocalypse!

The Dangers of Book Learnin’

/ Shane / Leave a comment

Evie has always been into reading books. The trouble with learning the English language from a book, is that you learn to phrase things in ways that people just don’t say. I have noticed Evie doing this quite a few times. For example, the other day Evie walked in and said:

“Something is queer in this room.”

Meaning strange of course. I wish I had more examples, she does this all the time. Anachronistic little turns of phrase that she picked up from a Little House book, an old fairy tale, etc. This is especially worrisome because we just finished reading Pollyanna.

Pollyanna seems to be some kind of endurance test to see how many synonyms for the word “said” can be used in a single piece of literature. Nobody ever says anything; they always exclaim or sigh, retort or rejoin.

“You are the most extraordinary girl!” ejaculated Aunt Polly.

Ejaculated? Seriously??

Yes, seriously. At least a dozen times, someone ejaculates in that book. So far I haven’t heard Evie use that one in conversation, but I’ve been holding my breath a while now.