Standing

Elise is now 15 months-old. No, she is not walking. However she is finally standing. She will now pull herself up on the ottoman and stand there for an hour just playing with the clickers, pour out her cheerios, whatever. Hopefully she will be walking soon because we now will have no pants to pass down to the next child. She doesn't crawl in the traditional sense of crawling, she scoots herself along on her butt, and I have to say she's pretty darn quick--but it's pretty hard on pants!

The Valentine's Day that Keeps on Giving

If you have a dog, you know "the sound". It's the sound that happens directly before the dog barfs on your carpet. The other morning I was happily snoozing away when, abrupty I was awaken by..."the sound". Right then and there I had to make a choice: 1-Do I get up immediately and clean up the mess before it saturates the carpet? OR 2-Do I go back to sleep and try to pretend I didn't just hear that and deal with it later? I decided to go with option 2. I mean, barf will always be there when you wake up.

So later on in the morning when I actually had succeeded in forgetting about the barf incident I noticed a purple blob on the floor in my room. Upon further inspection I realized what it was. Tom (our dog) had apparently gotten into Robbie's candy stash and swallowed whole a foil-wrapped chocolate heart. I guess it didn't go down so smoothly because up it came almost fully intact, purple foil and all. Oh the joys. Guess we'll have to have Mike the carpet guy come out again soon.

Monster Craze

Up until two weeks ago, I never knew what "Monster Jam" was. Maybe a Monsters dress-up group? Some kind of party sponsored by Monster drink? No, Monster Jam is a monster truck show/competition. And now "we" are obsessed with it as a family.

Our friend Craig found a deal on tickets and a few guys took their boys. So far it has been the most memorable thing Robbie has done in his life. He was so infatuated with it, they stayed there until 10:30 at night, and on the 45 minute drive home all three boys in the car stayed awake talking about Grave Digger, their favorite monster truck. Apparently Robbie even made up a song about Grave Digger on the way home. Their tickets included "pitt passes" so they got to go down and look at all of the monster trucks up close. Monster Jam will now be an annual tradition in our family and I think next year we may all go and take Elise. (I think it's a toss-up as to who had more fun: the little boys, or the dads.)


The next day Robbie could not stop talking about the show so Rob pulled up a video on the internet and all three of them sat around the messy armoire watching the video for quite a while.

It's so much fun to see your kids just enjoy something so much. No one can explain that to you until you have your own.