Where’s Oliver?

/ Shane / 5 Comments

Some of you are probably wondering, where’s Oliver? I haven’t been talking about him too much on here. Well, that’s because, quite frankly, he doesn’t really do very much!

I am very sensitive about slighting him, time-wise, but it keeps happening despite my best efforts. I feel like I talked about Evie a lot more, though I haven’t looked back on the blog to confirm. I know for sure that we haven’t been taking as many pictures of him, compared to Evie at this age. In fact, even now, I think we tend to take more pictures of Evie!

I can’t really help it though. Oliver sleeps pretty much all the time. This is quite a bit different than Evie, who was awake all day. I never thought I would have complained about a baby sleeping all the time, but sometimes I wonder like, “Shouldn’t you be awake? Looking around? Learning something?”

I think that this is all extremely not fair to Oliver. I don’t think he’s doing anything less than any baby this age. With Evie, everything was new and amazing. Now that some of the shiny has worn off, being as it is the second child, everything isn’t so awe inspiring anymore.

Not to mention the fact that Evie has been a little more (intentionally) mischievous lately. Pretty much to be expected, however, it makes it a little bit harder to just sort of enjoy Oliver. You can’t stay in bed all day cuddling him when your toddler is out breaking things in the kitchen.

So if you’re wondering where Oliver is, he’s mostly sleeping in someone’s lap, forcing them to spend all day on facebook. It’s not like you have a choice, you can’t wake up a sleeping baby!

Go Try It On

/ Shane / Leave a comment

I am hopeless when it comes to picking out my clothes. Not just my clothes either, but also when it comes to dressing my children as well. It’s like, I can memorize a list of rules of what things go together or whatever, but when I look at an outfit, it looks fine to me. So then, if I remember, I have to compare it to this always changing list of rules in my head to see if it is okay. And that’s assuming I even remember all of the rules.

I’m proactive about my disability. In order to overcome, I went out and married someone, just so that she could tell me what to wear so that I don’t make a fool out of myself. But not everybody can be so lucky.

Enter technology.

Check out Go Try It On. Take a picture of yourself and write a little statement about what you are wearing the outfit for (first date, dinner party, presidential inauguration, what have you), and you will get instant feedback from people as to what works / what is wrong. I’m sure people tend to be mean, but from what I saw, people genuinely were trying to help. So now, thanks to the Internet, you don’t have to be a fashion disaster.

Now with less robots!

/ Shane / 4 Comments

Lately, Evie has been a little frightened at night time. Every time she mentions something like that, my heart really goes out to her. I wish she never had to be afraid of the dark. So lately her fear has been centered around robots.

See, all the doors in our house have like 6 panels in them. Evie decided a long time ago, that they kind of look like robots. The two smaller top panels kind of look like eyes. Evie has mentioned this for a long time, but only recently has she been afraid of them. And her room has not one but three of these doors, because the closet has two.

So this is where her brilliant daddy stepped in. I suggested we cover up those robots with old art projects. This killed two birds with one stone, because it used up some of these art projects. You kind of hate to throw them away, but what do you do with them? Well, you wallpaper your doors to hide the robots, obviously.

So the other day, I hung up around 30 pictures all over the doors. In addition to hiding the robots, it looks pretty good! (if I do say so myself) I hung them sort of randomly with all different mixtures of orientations, painting, markers, white paper vs. colored paper, etc. I almost wish I would have done it a long time ago, even without the robots. The room looks cheerier, and it is a good display place, over space that wouldn’t have been used by anything anyway. Plus, I don’t have a big stack of art projects sitting around anymore.

So, I guess if your kid has a problem with robots in their room, I would recommend hiding the robots with art. And if all else fails, there’s always robot insurance.

I think Evie is starting to generate quotes on purpose

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Evie: “Where do you stay a long time before you go home?”
Sara: “What do you mean, honey?”
Evie: “The hospital! Such as.”

Okay Ms. North Carolina.

Evie: “I smell something”
Me: “I think it was daddy’s stinky toot.”
Evie: ::fake crying:: “Your stinky toot is making me cry!”
(Don’t let it ever be said that I would let my own embarrassment stand in the way of a funny story)

Evie was eating pretzels dipping them in peanut butter. She likes pretzels, but mostly she just likes the peanut butter. Finally, she finished all the pretzels, but there was a little peanut butter left.
Evie: “It’s finger time!”

Evie: “I like to put [the cup] on the sun, so the sun goes down.”
Me: ::chuckling::
Evie: “I think you should put that on your e-blog, because it’s really funny!”

Done and done, sweetheart.

Things that annoy me

/ Shane / 2 Comments
  1. When someone does something wrong in traffic and yells at me for it, when I’m totally in the right. The thing that really annoys me about this is that I can’t prove it to them. For example, when someone goes straight in a turn only lane and practically runs me off the road, even though I was in the straight lane, and then curses me out. I just want to drag them back to the intersection and show them how right I was.
  2. Endless puns in news stories. Stop trying to be clever, and give me the news! I’m trying to read about the story, not read about how clever you think you are. Get a blog and get off the “real” news (“real” news being news that may contain news-like substance).
  3. Having the wrong name typed on a form rejection. I mean, you’re already giving me a form rejection, how much work is it to make sure you switch out the name? It is bad enough that you’re crushing my hopes for my daughter’s educational welfare, would you mind not making me feel like I’m one of a million and you just couldn’t be bothered?
  4. My cat.
  5. That my dryer has an “optimum dry” setting, but it also has a “more” and “less” dry option above and below it. If there is an optimum amount of drying then, by definition, why would you need anything else? Why would I intentionally choose to dry something less than the perfect amount? And isn’t drying it more than the perfect amount sort of gratuitous?