Man I have so much going on this week. There are so many things I want to write about, I really wish I had made more of an effort to post during the holidays. I don’t want to leave anything out, but at the same time new stuff is going on and I want to get past Christmas. The first section is a list of things I’ve got bouncing around in the ole noggin and then I’ll try to wrap up Christmas (no pun intended…on second thought…yes that pun was intended)
First Things First
**I’m missing my ruler at work. I know this doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I’ve had it for 4 years and I like it. I neeeeed it!! It’s all metal and wobbly with cork on one side for those times I need it to stick, then slick on the other side for when I’m scooting down the page. If you have seen it please let me know. I’m thinking about posting signs up around my cube farm.
**I’ve got a couple of job opportunities floating around in the Ether and I am in impatience overdrive. One of them I mentioned yesterday and the communication is mostly through email. The other is something local and I’m waiting on a call. Both are killing me. I’m checking my email and calling home to scan the machine every half hour. It’s making it hard to find time to do anything else…like the job I’m getting paid to do during the day…at this moment
**I got several clothes for Christmas that fit now, but I need to lose weight. So do I lose the weight and risk not getting to wear the new outfits or return the outfits and risk not being able to lose the weight that would drop me down to the next size? I’m not worried about the shirts; it’s the pants that are sorta baggy but not too baggy. I spilt a drink in the car the night before while I was wearing a pair of the jeans. I think I mooned half the city as they drove past me while I was pulled over on the side of the road scrubbing the seats of the station wagon.
Christmas Traditions
With this being Fred’s first Christmas we really wanted to set up some of our own traditions and modify others that just wouldn’t work now that we have a 9 month old. The previous years have been all day extravaganzas that started out 7:00 a.m. and last till 10:00 p.m. This was great when it was just the two of us, unfortunately there was no way the baby would be happy that long. No matter what he got from Santa! So instead of making 4 trips back and forth across town, we started early trying to consolidate. This sorta worked, we went to my moms on Christmas Eve and Pops came to our place Christmas morning (we intended to circle back to his place Christmas night but the baby just couldn’t go without anymore sleep). That knocked out 2 places, but it made Christmas Eve almost as long Christmas day once we factored in Church and the Mimi’s that night. Plus we just ended up staying longer at the grandparents on Christmas day and only really saved an hour and a half. Who knows what we will do next year. After 13 hours with only a 30-minute nap, Chief RedFace came calling and he only wanted new toys.
One thing we definitely did right was Christmas morning. We stayed up extra late/early wrapping gifts, opening all of Fred’s toys so he could jump on them the second he saw ‘em, we laid out cookies for Santa, carrots for Rudolph, Lucy wrote a note and took pictures, then we took bites out of the food and snapped a couple more pics just to prove Santa came, I even managed to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas at about the 1:30 a.m mark. It’s weird but as much as the whole staying up till 2 and getting up at 7 part of Christmas kinda bites…it also felt like my final initiation into parenthood. I just kept thinking that I was just one of millions staying up all night so that our children would be able to wake up and believe in the magic of Christmas. When Linus stepped up to the mic and told the Christmas story I just…I had forgotten what Christmas felt like through the eyes of a child. With only 4 hours of sleep under my belt I was practically the first one in the next room to see what Santa left behind…Lucy beat me by mere minutes.
Toys R Us
I have to preface this next part by saying that we go overboard on Christmas. I am very fortunate to be apart of two large families and with that comes the fact that by the end of the day most of the time we can’t see out the back of the car. Part of me feels guilty about all that we receive but even if I did say “Lets back off on the gifts this year” nobody is going to have any part of being told how much they can or can’t buy for their only grandchild. I’m not going to pick favorite gifts I’m just gonna talk about the ones that screamed for attention. If I miss anything it was more from lack of time than lack of enjoyment or gratitude.
Dude Fred got two of the coolest things I have ever seen!! The only thing keeping me from wishing I could go back in time and be his age again so I could get my hands of these is the fact that since he’s part mine and they are part his then they are part mine as well. I’m specifically talking about Pooh and Spidey. It’s a tiny Spiderman that spins his hands around and sings “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and I am playing with it more than he is. I may put it in the bed with us tonight (that’s not weird cause Fred is still there too…look for Fred Vs The Bed Part IV coming to a blog near you this month). Meanwhile as Spidey does his dance and shakes his groove thing, Pooh is riding a freak’n turtle around the room and when he stops all you gotta do is clap ya hands to make him go again. How cool is that!!! If only it had one of those things that made him change direction when he bumps into something. I could just sit there and play with Fred by going all “Clap on. Smack Smack” He also got a train with a removable giraffe, elephant, and monkey, a mega block farm complete with tractor and chicken, a hammer with a soft end so it doesn’t hurt so bad when he clobbers ya in the face (it still kinda hurts a little, just ask Lucy…man he got her right in the lip with the handle), books, DVDs, clothes, balls, phones, bubble blowers… I’m tired just thinking about all he got.
9Months and Still Growing
During my little hiatus from all that is Charlie Blockhead, Fred turned 9 months old. That same week just happened to also be the week he learned to clap his hands together. We practiced for a couple of nights and the next thing we knew he was doing it on his own. Now every time he does anything, weather it’s as simple as sitting up or as complicated as raising the roof (the roof, the roof is on fire we don’t need no water let the hmmm hmmm burn), he expects a standing “O”. In other growing baby news, all he wanted was his two front teeth and baby gets what baby wants. Now that he’s got a set of chompers he is eating better than mommy and daddy. During the day while we munch on such delectables as “Turkey Sandwich with mustard” and “Peanut Butter a la strawberry jelly”, little man has been eating pizza, ravioli, mac n’ cheese, and peach cobbler all week at the day care. Now he’s all into something called Puff Corn that is supposed to be kernel-less popcorn (now in butter and cheese flavors!!). Though they look like Styrofoam peanuts that have sat in the sun for to long, they taste scrum-diddly-umcious. When Lucy isn’t looking we play the old one for you two for me game.
All of this is great, but by far the best-kept secret of the holidays was the fact that Fred apparently knows how to stand up and push his scooter around. While at the Mimi’s Christmas Eve night he received a rolling activity center that folds up and turns into this walker type thing-a-ma-jig. He’s sitting there pushing it along on his knees, when being the lover of all things toy that I am; I figured I better check this new piece of equipment out. I quickly discovered it had a handle and folded it out thinking I’d do it once then a couple of months from now when he needed it I would know how it worked. Well that learning experience has zoomed by already, cause when Fred saw it he just grabbed the thing by the handle, yanked himself up on his feet, and off he went right there in front of the whole family. So many jaws hit the floor you would have thought there was a doctor with a tongue depressor lurking around.
Christmas Crumbs
This is just a few quick notes and then that will about do it for Charlie’s Christmas Spectacular. Maybe tomorrow I will ad a bunch picks and include Halloween since I’ve forgot to post them too.
**What is up with those twisty ties all his toys are packaged with? For crying out loud, I had to get a blowtorch and wire cutters just to get “My tag along puppy” out. By the end of the day I felt like I had been installing a barbed wire fence. By the time I get the darn thing open, Fred’s done moved on to something else and screaming for me to open it instead. Like some type of the assembly line where the shirtless bald guy stands over you ready to strike you with his whip the second your pace dips below his liking.
**How much is too much meat? I ate so much ham I think I may officially be part pig now. At one place since I had already had a big meal an hour earlier, I just piled my plate up with turkey and ham. This way I got the best the buffet had to offer and could use the previous meals as the reason why I couldn’t eat anything more. It would be just plain rude not to eat anything after they spent all day slaving away in the kitchen.
**Finally, I have to mention two classic gifts that will forever be in the Christmas Hall of Fame.
1) Lucy picked my favorite picture of baby Fred and had it made into a mouse pad. That is the coolest, most creative thing anyone has ever done for me and I almost hate to use it. She figured that and told me she had it made for the specific purpose of me taking it to work and I better not hurt her feelings. Man I love the thing. It’s like a piece of floppy art.
2) Broccoli pulled a rabbit out of his hat and got a graphic artist he knows in Iowa to make a Charlie Blockhead collage. Not only did she by sheer luck use orange and blue paint (GO WAR EAGLE GO!!!) she read every blog I have ever posted (all 87 of them), hand wrote them in different angles, added pictures of Lucy, Fred and I popping out from the top and sides, she then had it framed. Every time I look at it I see something new. It also had the unfortunate side affect of causing my ego to expand. Man I have written some great stuff in the past!! I don’t go back and read my old articles so I kept asking, “Did I do that?” I immediately hung it on my wall in the family room.
Well that was a Charlie Blockhead Christmas. If yours was half as amazing as ours, then you had yourself a very merry hoho…I know we did.
Till Next time …Late Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!!!
First Things First
**I’m missing my ruler at work. I know this doesn’t sound like a big deal, but I’ve had it for 4 years and I like it. I neeeeed it!! It’s all metal and wobbly with cork on one side for those times I need it to stick, then slick on the other side for when I’m scooting down the page. If you have seen it please let me know. I’m thinking about posting signs up around my cube farm.
**I’ve got a couple of job opportunities floating around in the Ether and I am in impatience overdrive. One of them I mentioned yesterday and the communication is mostly through email. The other is something local and I’m waiting on a call. Both are killing me. I’m checking my email and calling home to scan the machine every half hour. It’s making it hard to find time to do anything else…like the job I’m getting paid to do during the day…at this moment
**I got several clothes for Christmas that fit now, but I need to lose weight. So do I lose the weight and risk not getting to wear the new outfits or return the outfits and risk not being able to lose the weight that would drop me down to the next size? I’m not worried about the shirts; it’s the pants that are sorta baggy but not too baggy. I spilt a drink in the car the night before while I was wearing a pair of the jeans. I think I mooned half the city as they drove past me while I was pulled over on the side of the road scrubbing the seats of the station wagon.
Christmas Traditions
With this being Fred’s first Christmas we really wanted to set up some of our own traditions and modify others that just wouldn’t work now that we have a 9 month old. The previous years have been all day extravaganzas that started out 7:00 a.m. and last till 10:00 p.m. This was great when it was just the two of us, unfortunately there was no way the baby would be happy that long. No matter what he got from Santa! So instead of making 4 trips back and forth across town, we started early trying to consolidate. This sorta worked, we went to my moms on Christmas Eve and Pops came to our place Christmas morning (we intended to circle back to his place Christmas night but the baby just couldn’t go without anymore sleep). That knocked out 2 places, but it made Christmas Eve almost as long Christmas day once we factored in Church and the Mimi’s that night. Plus we just ended up staying longer at the grandparents on Christmas day and only really saved an hour and a half. Who knows what we will do next year. After 13 hours with only a 30-minute nap, Chief RedFace came calling and he only wanted new toys.
One thing we definitely did right was Christmas morning. We stayed up extra late/early wrapping gifts, opening all of Fred’s toys so he could jump on them the second he saw ‘em, we laid out cookies for Santa, carrots for Rudolph, Lucy wrote a note and took pictures, then we took bites out of the food and snapped a couple more pics just to prove Santa came, I even managed to watch A Charlie Brown Christmas at about the 1:30 a.m mark. It’s weird but as much as the whole staying up till 2 and getting up at 7 part of Christmas kinda bites…it also felt like my final initiation into parenthood. I just kept thinking that I was just one of millions staying up all night so that our children would be able to wake up and believe in the magic of Christmas. When Linus stepped up to the mic and told the Christmas story I just…I had forgotten what Christmas felt like through the eyes of a child. With only 4 hours of sleep under my belt I was practically the first one in the next room to see what Santa left behind…Lucy beat me by mere minutes.
Toys R Us
I have to preface this next part by saying that we go overboard on Christmas. I am very fortunate to be apart of two large families and with that comes the fact that by the end of the day most of the time we can’t see out the back of the car. Part of me feels guilty about all that we receive but even if I did say “Lets back off on the gifts this year” nobody is going to have any part of being told how much they can or can’t buy for their only grandchild. I’m not going to pick favorite gifts I’m just gonna talk about the ones that screamed for attention. If I miss anything it was more from lack of time than lack of enjoyment or gratitude.
Dude Fred got two of the coolest things I have ever seen!! The only thing keeping me from wishing I could go back in time and be his age again so I could get my hands of these is the fact that since he’s part mine and they are part his then they are part mine as well. I’m specifically talking about Pooh and Spidey. It’s a tiny Spiderman that spins his hands around and sings “Itsy Bitsy Spider” and I am playing with it more than he is. I may put it in the bed with us tonight (that’s not weird cause Fred is still there too…look for Fred Vs The Bed Part IV coming to a blog near you this month). Meanwhile as Spidey does his dance and shakes his groove thing, Pooh is riding a freak’n turtle around the room and when he stops all you gotta do is clap ya hands to make him go again. How cool is that!!! If only it had one of those things that made him change direction when he bumps into something. I could just sit there and play with Fred by going all “Clap on. Smack Smack” He also got a train with a removable giraffe, elephant, and monkey, a mega block farm complete with tractor and chicken, a hammer with a soft end so it doesn’t hurt so bad when he clobbers ya in the face (it still kinda hurts a little, just ask Lucy…man he got her right in the lip with the handle), books, DVDs, clothes, balls, phones, bubble blowers… I’m tired just thinking about all he got.
9Months and Still Growing
During my little hiatus from all that is Charlie Blockhead, Fred turned 9 months old. That same week just happened to also be the week he learned to clap his hands together. We practiced for a couple of nights and the next thing we knew he was doing it on his own. Now every time he does anything, weather it’s as simple as sitting up or as complicated as raising the roof (the roof, the roof is on fire we don’t need no water let the hmmm hmmm burn), he expects a standing “O”. In other growing baby news, all he wanted was his two front teeth and baby gets what baby wants. Now that he’s got a set of chompers he is eating better than mommy and daddy. During the day while we munch on such delectables as “Turkey Sandwich with mustard” and “Peanut Butter a la strawberry jelly”, little man has been eating pizza, ravioli, mac n’ cheese, and peach cobbler all week at the day care. Now he’s all into something called Puff Corn that is supposed to be kernel-less popcorn (now in butter and cheese flavors!!). Though they look like Styrofoam peanuts that have sat in the sun for to long, they taste scrum-diddly-umcious. When Lucy isn’t looking we play the old one for you two for me game.
All of this is great, but by far the best-kept secret of the holidays was the fact that Fred apparently knows how to stand up and push his scooter around. While at the Mimi’s Christmas Eve night he received a rolling activity center that folds up and turns into this walker type thing-a-ma-jig. He’s sitting there pushing it along on his knees, when being the lover of all things toy that I am; I figured I better check this new piece of equipment out. I quickly discovered it had a handle and folded it out thinking I’d do it once then a couple of months from now when he needed it I would know how it worked. Well that learning experience has zoomed by already, cause when Fred saw it he just grabbed the thing by the handle, yanked himself up on his feet, and off he went right there in front of the whole family. So many jaws hit the floor you would have thought there was a doctor with a tongue depressor lurking around.
Christmas Crumbs
This is just a few quick notes and then that will about do it for Charlie’s Christmas Spectacular. Maybe tomorrow I will ad a bunch picks and include Halloween since I’ve forgot to post them too.
**What is up with those twisty ties all his toys are packaged with? For crying out loud, I had to get a blowtorch and wire cutters just to get “My tag along puppy” out. By the end of the day I felt like I had been installing a barbed wire fence. By the time I get the darn thing open, Fred’s done moved on to something else and screaming for me to open it instead. Like some type of the assembly line where the shirtless bald guy stands over you ready to strike you with his whip the second your pace dips below his liking.
**How much is too much meat? I ate so much ham I think I may officially be part pig now. At one place since I had already had a big meal an hour earlier, I just piled my plate up with turkey and ham. This way I got the best the buffet had to offer and could use the previous meals as the reason why I couldn’t eat anything more. It would be just plain rude not to eat anything after they spent all day slaving away in the kitchen.
**Finally, I have to mention two classic gifts that will forever be in the Christmas Hall of Fame.
1) Lucy picked my favorite picture of baby Fred and had it made into a mouse pad. That is the coolest, most creative thing anyone has ever done for me and I almost hate to use it. She figured that and told me she had it made for the specific purpose of me taking it to work and I better not hurt her feelings. Man I love the thing. It’s like a piece of floppy art.
2) Broccoli pulled a rabbit out of his hat and got a graphic artist he knows in Iowa to make a Charlie Blockhead collage. Not only did she by sheer luck use orange and blue paint (GO WAR EAGLE GO!!!) she read every blog I have ever posted (all 87 of them), hand wrote them in different angles, added pictures of Lucy, Fred and I popping out from the top and sides, she then had it framed. Every time I look at it I see something new. It also had the unfortunate side affect of causing my ego to expand. Man I have written some great stuff in the past!! I don’t go back and read my old articles so I kept asking, “Did I do that?” I immediately hung it on my wall in the family room.
Well that was a Charlie Blockhead Christmas. If yours was half as amazing as ours, then you had yourself a very merry hoho…I know we did.
Till Next time …Late Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!!!!
1 comment:
So, is Iowa still the "nothing state"???? I'm so glad you enjoyed your gift! :-)
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