John Denver fan

/ Shane / 7 Comments

This one goes out to any Habitat for Humanity people from high school who read this blog and also Carl Loesch, should he ever find it:

She really kicks it in during the “I belongs”. Allow me to explain that one.

After Evie spent an entire day singing, “I will make you hurt!” I realized I needed to revise my list of songs I played on the guitar. Since I don’t have anything in my repertoire that is kid related except for maybe Tree Hugger from the Juno soundtrack, I’ve been playing some of the simpler songs I first learned on guitar, hence the John Denver. Evie’s favorites are “mountain mama”, a phrase that she finds endlessly hilarious, and “dawn is breaking, it’s early morn” a.k.a Leaving on a Jet Plane:

(I changed the word “die” to “cry” to make it a little more kid friendly)

She also enjoys “baby song” or “baby riding in the car” a.k.a. Last Kiss, as covered by Pearl Jam.

And just for bonus cuteness, here’s quick one of Evie saying a mouthful of a book title:

Shi Shi

/ Shane / 3 Comments

Evie has an imaginary friend that she talks about sometimes, named Shi Shi. Shi Shi doesn’t come up all that often, but I imagine as time goes on she will probably come up more and more.

So, the other day I was laying on the floor in Evie’s room and Evie said to me, “Shi Shi is in the closet. Open the door, she wants to come out.” I was like, “No honey, nobody’s in the closet.” She absolutely insisted that Shi Shi was in there to the point that I actually started to get a little creeped out. Eventually, I slowly cracked the door open, half expecting some alien to jump on my face and suck my brains through my nose, but of course nothing happened. I closed the closet quickly and asked Evie if Shi Shi had come out and she said, “No, she’s still in there.” So I opened the door a second time thinking maybe Shi Shi was the ghost of some murdered child who died in the closet and now lives in our house. “She came out,” said Evie and nonchalantly went back to playing with her barn.

Apparently I had a similar story when I was a kid, in which I insisted with such fervor that my imaginary friend was coming to dinner (Casper the Friendly Ghost in case you were wondering) that my mom started to think maybe someone (something?) really would show up for dinner.

Evie has been cracking us up lately by calling Sara and me “guys”. Like, she’ll say, “Guys? You’re done eating?” Definitely one of the best part of having kids is when they say these very adult things and just crack you up.

Speaking of good things about parenting, I have been very proud lately of Evie’s manners. She is very polite and I even overheard a comment from a stranger at the museum about how well mannered she was. She consistently says “thank you” and “please” (although this one takes some reminding. She mostly only uses it if it looks like you are going to say no) and she’ll say “excuse me” when she wants to get by somebody (I get a kick out of hearing her say, “Excuse me Nala” when Nala is in her way) and she says “no thank you” if you offer he something she doesn’t want. She’s also pretty good about “bless you” for sneezes.

The other day she was rocking in her chair and, thanks to her Richard Scary book, she said, “That’s piggy manners!” (as opposed to kitty manners. It doesn’t hurt that her favorite animal happens to be the one to have good manners)

In other news, we made some lemon oregano drumsticks the other day and they looked so beautiful coming off the grill I actually had to take a picture. And the smell! Oh man, it smelled like some sort of festival or something was going on on our back porch. I actually had two different neighbors comment on the smell! Let me tell you, that is putting your grill to full use, boy howdy.

Taco Town

/ Shane / 1 Comment

I could have sworn I posted this video before, but I couldn’t find it anywhere on my blog. It seems to come up all the time, maybe due to the types of links I post about food. Anyway, it’s a great SNL fake commercial about an awesome food item. (I apologize for the idiot laughing over the top of the video the whole time, I was too lazy to try to find a better one)

So what do you think? Who’s up for making one with me?

More Evie-isms

/ Shane / 3 Comments

I think I passed a major milestone as a parent and I just wanted to blog it so that I didn’t forget this magical moment. Evie gave me my first “I don’t love you!” when I was trying to force her to go potty against her will. I imagine this will be the first of many, in fact, I’ve already gotten an “I don’t like you” since then.

There have been a few humorous ones as well:

“When Jen and Derek were here and Daddy catch me [by the face because I fell down the stairs because I was trying to look at Jen and Derek instead of watching where I was going]. I want to do it again!” She has made this statement many times and we’ve had many long talks about why we don’t want to fall down the stairs.

Thanks to Grandma Kathy, Evie insists that she needs to put her “deoder on” because she doesn’t want to “stink”. Sara spend quite a while convincing her she didn’t, in fact, stink.

Finally, this happened awhile ago, but Evie has a book in which a girl goes to the doctor with an injured arm. Knowing that Evie has vivid memories of her own trip to the doctor with an injured arm, Sara asked her, “Why is the girl crying?” Evie responded, “Because she has pony tails!”

In completely unrelated, horrific death news, a man died Wednesday after he fell into an 8 foot vat of molten chocolate. I had a lot of really bad jokes about death by chocolate, rogue oompa-loompas, etc. but I decided it was too soon.

Run Pee

/ Shane / 1 Comment

Have you ever sat in a theater, needing to go to the bathroom so bad but trying to hold out for fear of missing a vital piece of the movie? Well, no more! I give you Run Pee.

This is so brilliant. Basically, you look up a movie you want to see and it gives you a little timeline with certain points marked out that are okay to run out of the theater during. Usually these are little scenes that are maybe character builders, but don’t really advance the plot in any way.

It will tell you something like, “An hour 23 into the movie, such and such a character walks into a room and says this” and then tells you, “You have 4 minutes.” So you can look through and find a suitable place to go. And here’s where it gets really brilliant, it will give you a little synopsis of the scene you are missing so you really don’t miss out on anything. But that synopsis is scrambled until you hit a button, so you can check it out without seeing any spoilers!