Elfy's Dirty Cousin Pays A Visit

Not long after Elfy (Jacob's Elf on the Shelf) joined us, we received a surprise visit from Elfy's cousin, Wolfpack. You may have seen Wolfpack's half-brother in the infamous movie The Hangover.

Wolfpack is not quite the charmer that Elfy is. In fact, he's kind of dirty. He doesn't shave. He's always wearing his sunglasses indoors (rude). And he's always carrying around a bearded Lego baby in a front pack. Lego Baby is notorious for popping open a can of beer before noon.

Neither Wolfpack nor Lego Baby are good rolemodels for my children. But Elfy is too kind to send them packing. "It IS the holidays," he is always reminding me. Personally, I'm ready to drop kick them out the door. This is a touchy subject that we are still finessing.

Meet Wolfpack:

When I first met Wolfpack, he was taking a bath in my favorite soup bowl/cup. Much like my children, he pees in his bath water.

That night, he drank too many beers and passed out on the floor. 

But he still woke up bright and early to corrupt Jacob's toy dinosaurs with stories about doing blow off a transvestite hooker's stomach. 

We all breathed a sigh of relief when Wolfpack disappeared for a couple hours. Until we received a collect call from jail asking for $10,000 in bail money. Santa, the bill is in the mail for that one.

When Wolfpack returned to our home, he completely disregarded my lengthy lecture about Cleaning Up His Act. Instead, he decided to do some snow angels in his leftover cocaine. I'm not quite sure HOW an elf acquires an entire cup of cocaine but I'm pretty sure I'm going to have to forfeit that bail money.

Cocaine and train crossings do not mix. Wolfpack learned this the hard way....OR quite possibly, I may have paid Thomas for a hit on the guy. Whatever. I plead the fifth. 

After the pedestrian versus train collision,  it appeared that Wolfpack had  taken on a profound new perspective on life. He suddenly found beauty everywhere in the world around him. Or, more likely, he had exchanged his cocaine habit for a weed habit and was as high as the waistband on my dad's favorite pair of sweatpants.

But it's ok. Wolfpack is much more tolerable when he is high. 

*Please note that to complete this post, I had to google "how to do blow" in order to confirm that you can in fact do blow off of a hooker's stomach. I did not find an answer. But I really hope no one needs to review my search history in the near future.

LILLI AND THEO :)

Lilli and Theo are wishing all our friends a very happy new week!

Insta Weekend #5

Hello my friends!

Happy New Week!!! The past week was a mess for me, so I didn't post so often in my blog, but this week I will try to write again more often! 

So this weekend again was a great one for me and my family...

 We had great time drinking hot chocolate and coffee with beloved friends,

I went out after too many months (!) for a free alcohol beer with my girlfriends,

and we had amazing moments full of Christmas spirit and laughs with my family in a cute Santa Claus Village!

I love this period...and I love it even more when I am on vacation. I can spend hours with my family, with my friends and we can do things unusual for us. Especially from now on that my princess is old enough to follow us in our exodus.

So have fun and memories full of smiles and Christmas Spirit!

         mats mouts

Everyone Is Either Screaming Or Crying: It Must Be Christmas!

My husband is many things. He is a good man. He works hard. He's very responsible. But he's not exactly the leader of the fun parade (I'm not even sure he is IN the fun parade).

He is very frugal, which automatically takes a lot of "fun" things off the table (helicopter tours of Seattle, owning a pony, spending a week on a dude ranch learning how to be a cowboy, hanging out in a hotel for a week just because I love hotels). He is also a liberal, which takes even MORE fun things off the table (gun fights, sky-diving with George W., growing a chin-strap beard, Nascar, ATV races, and, in fact, anything that uses any environmental resources at all- we have a three sheet of toilet-paper-per-pee bathroom rule.). And, I' conservative. So at least we will always have fun political debates where we call each other names and accuse each other of trying to ruin the country.

So you can just imagine that our holidays are ton of fun.

First step is usually acquiring a Christmas tree. It's usually cold. There's a lot of walking involved. Then there is the (mostly) friendly annual tree debate (fir or noble). And then we are off to `schlep the kids around a gigantic forest full of weird strangers wielding handsaws. This time Jacob wanted nothing but to run and hide in the trees. Ryan hates anything to do with Christmas (lights, Santa, etc) so I can only imagine that his refusal to nap on the car ride over is due to some philosophically opposition to Christmas trees. He cried and begged to be held the entire trip. These things are exactly why doing things "as a family" makes my husband crabby and twitchy. And then there's me: determined that everyone is going to have fun damnit and make some good family memories.

"Look at all these trees!" I exclaimed. "Isn't this fun!?" As I said that, Ryan was clinging to my body screaming his eyes out and my husband was yelling at Jacob to put down the handsaw or else he would single-handedly cancel Christmas for the next five years which set Jacob into a giant tantrum. At that exact moment, a stranger approached. Seeing the camera slung over my arm, he asked if we would like him to snap a family photo.

"No." My husband immediately snapped.
"Yes please!" I returned.
I always win.

My boys, pretending to have fun. Very good fakers.

Also: go Seahwaks!

Jumping.

Quality Control checking to make sure Dad is doing a good job.

Dad needed a little break.

Somehow, we all survived. With a tree in tow. And all children and fingers accounted for.

As the tree was getting set up in it's stand, my next task was to tackle the Christmas lights, for both the house and the tree. When it comes to Christmas lights....well, it never comes to Christmas lights. At least, not so long as my husband is concerned. In the six years we have been married, I've had to do the Christmas lights every year or go without them. This isn't bad, except for one thing: me. I kind of suck. I'm lazy. I take short cuts. I'm much more inclined to throw away a strand of lights than try to find the culprit-burned-out bulb. In fact, I'm SO lazy that this year I finally bought an outlet timer so that I don't have to go outside and walk the two feet necessary to unplug the lights at night (we can't leave them on all night because....see above about my husband being a frugal liberal).

But still....the lights got done. I only got three splinters in my finger and dropped the f-bomb two times.

When I came inside, it was time for the best part- decorating the tree! I clearly instructed Jacob not to put any ornaments on the three until I got the lights and the ribbon on first. I only had to remind him of this one instruction fifteen times, each time I caught him trying to place a rebellious frosted pinecone into the no-trespassing Area 51 of the un-ribboned and un-lighted tree. One lengthy time out later, and I set him loose to decorate to his heart's content. Ryan is still not a fan of the tree. He thinks the lights are "hot" and screamed in response to each of my attempts to get him to put an ornament on the tree.

By the time the tree was decorated, five ornaments had been broken. Good thing 70% of our ornaments are homemade salt dough forged into pathetic renditions of angel, reindeer, and stocking shapes.

As I hung up the stockings and set up the nativities and Christmas candles, the boys tackled the sacred tradition of "Sweep Up All The Rogue Pine Needles." And we embarked on a nearly month-long journey of trying to share our tiny home with a Christmas tree. Even without a giant Christmas tree in the middle of our living room/entrance/dining room, our 950 sq. ft. house with it's four residents and all of their crap greatly resembles a can of sardines. With the Christmas tree, taking up every precious inch of extra floor space, it's.....um....cozy. Cozy is simply code for "it's so crammed in our house, we have to step outside whenever we need to take in a breath." That may be a slight exaggeration. But not by much.

After 70% of the needles (I gave up on the rest) were swept up, we were finally done (except for the five empty rubbermaid buckets marked "X-mas" which will probably litter the house for the next three weeks, instead of finding their rightful place in the creepy basement). I made some hot coa-coa so that we could sit in the living room and enjoy the results of our hard work.

We leaned back, side-by-side, gripping our mugs and staring happily at the glowing tree, which was in steep competition with the glow eminating from my husband's violent computer game just four feet away. We watched the twinkling lights in short-lived peace, which was only occasionally interrupted by the sound of blood and guts splattering the screen nearby. A smile spread across my face as I finally got to enjoy the wonder of Christmas through the eyes of my young boys.

And then Jacob spilled his hot coa-coa in my lap and began to cry. Ryan screamed repeatedly, "Mess! Mess! Mess! Mess!"  My husband looked away from his virtual fist-fight just long enough to yell, "Jacob, clean that up! No more hot chocolate for the rest of your life!"

Ahhhh, the magic of the holidays.

MY LITTLE SUNSHINE :)

Zoe is wishing all our friends a very happy weekend!

And I will finally have time to visit your beautiful blogs after a very busy week, with an intensive course and Christmas celebrations at the school!

By the way, this is a necklace I've wanted to remake forever... but Zoe likes it so much that I never get myself to do it... :)

Joining The Ranks Of The Saps: Elf On The Shelf and The Wonder Of Childhood

Short version of long story: I gave in and bought a damn Elf on the Shelf.

When I first heard about Elf on the Shelf, I was adamant that I would never own one. The thing is creepy as hell. And when Elf on the Shelf ideas started to flood my Pinterest page, I only hated it even more. I didn't want to be subjected to millions of photos of creepy smiling elf dolls doing ridiculous things. I swore Elf on the Shelf was a big conspiracy established by toy corporations to drive up holiday sales. And, I must admit, I thought all the parents who were going along on this ridiculous game were just a bunch of saps. Big, old saps.

Then...it happened. My first parental encounter with Keeping Up. Keeping Up is a phenomenon whereby your children, who are otherwise perfectly content and happy to play with cardboard boxes, are suddenly placed in dangerously close contact with a foreign object (usually a toy) and instantly infected by the must-haves. Your child did not even know this thing existed yesterday. And now it consumes his every thought.

I'm not a fan of Keeping Up. I couldn't give a crap that my children don't have the latest in technological toys, the most advanced educational tools, or the latest fashions. I'm proud to buy my sons' pants at Goodwill (and every time a hole magically appears in the knee, I feel righteously vindicated in doing so). Jacob's favorite toy is a $3 used transformer that he stumbled upon at Goodwill. I don't want my children to instantly have everything they ever happen to want. Just because Tommy has it, doesn't mean they need to have it.

I felt that my parental ethics in this regard were strong. That I could withstand hurricanes of 1,000 pathetic whines for days on end without budging.....But I forgot one little thing. When it comes to the task of keeping the wonder of childhood fantasies alive, I'm a big fat dum-dum sucker. I'd go miles in a snowstorm out of my way to keep Christmas magic alive for my children. Because childhood is a self-contained, fragile snow globe landscape perched on a ledge. Childhood is a wondrous land of innocence, naivete, imagination, suspended disbelief. It's a time when the whole world is a play land for discovery. Where evilness is incomprehensible. Where acceptance is unbounded. Where possibilities are free flowing. Adults look at the world and we see flaws. A snapshot of the world through a child's eyes is magnified, beautified, and brightened three-fold. But this world only stays alive so long as it is kept apart, untainted, untouched.

That is why the state of childhood is so fragile. External forces are always at play, trying to shatter this pure snowglobish world. And where these external forces do not succeed, internal ones eventually will. As the child grows and sees more of the world, new forces spring forth. Doubt. Skepticism. Disbelief. Scrutiny. The need for logic at any price. These things will eventually bring the whole globe down, shattered and broken.

The short, rare years of early childhood: I would preserve them for my children at all cost. Even if it means perpetuating a ridiculous ritual.

This week my son was introduced to Elf on the Shelf through his friend. My first reaction was to hold my ground and not give in to this newly fabricated "tradition." But as we drove away from the friend's house, my son recounted for me the tale of the Elf on the Shelf. As he did so, his voice carried the distinct and rare elements of amazement and belief. He told me all about his friend's Elf in the same tone and manner that I would use to tell the first person I saw about an incredible encounter with a purple genie riding a unicorn.

Despite his recountings, I was still unconvinced, until Jacob asked, in a sincere and sweet voice, "Mommy, why did Santa send an elf to Tommy's house and not to my house? Will he send one to me?"

And as much as the good parent in me so desperately wanted to quash any notion in my son's brain that the very fact that his friends have something is a perfectly justifiable reason for him to have one also, I just couldn't come out and say "no." "No, Santa will not send you an elf." I just couldn't do it. Instead, I reveled in the fact that he was so innocent and untainted by the reality of life that he actually had the ability to believe, and with so much passion. I wanted to encourage that. I wanted to keep that little piece of magic alive for him.

I realize that all these lies about Santa and the Easter Bunny and now the damn Elf on the Shelf are probably just contributing to the darkness of reality that a child faces when he leaves his childhood behind. I understand that we as parents may be adding to the harshness of adulthood by manipulating these gullible little minds and allowing them to think grandiose thoughts about reality that, in fact, are not true at all. But, looking back on my own childhood and the grandness of the snow globe world in which I lived, I truly believe that it is all worth it. While Santa and the Easter Bunny and magic may not be real, these happy myths leave little imprints on us that we carry well into adulthood. Even if we stop believing as adults, we hopefully carry with us an important lesson on the power of perspective and how perspective influences happiness.

Most people look fondly and happily on their childhoods. It often seems like childhood is a much simpler and happier time compared to the adult drudgery we live in today. And yet, even though WE have grown, the world is still the same. There is hope that if we can just change our adult perspective, the happiness of our childhood may return, if just in minute amounts. There is ever the possibility that if we can adopt a childlike perspective, the world could be a little brighter for us.

And THIS my friends, right or wrong, is why I gave in to a felt doll with a creepy, painted plastic face.

Elfy's grand entrance.

The Working Mommy's Lament

The moment I get off work, I experience a mini high. Stepping out of the office and breathing the crisp winter air is as good as any drug. But most of all, I am dying to see my kids.

Sometimes it's easy to be away from the boys 8 hours a day. I fill my mind with information, my time with adult-interaction, and occupy myself by thinking through some challenging legal issues. It's rewarding. It keeps my brain sharp. I feel useful.

Sometimes, it's a little bit harder. I sit in my lumpy desk-chair, which over the years has obviously transformed into a chair for the spinally challenged. I click through e-mails. And I let my mind wander. What are my boys doing right now? I bet they are running around the park playing tag. Or perhaps Ryan did something hilarious, causing Jacob (and thus Ryan) to erupt into a fit of giggles. Maybe they are having quiet time, leaning their heads against their grandma and listening intently to a story. Sometimes, I'd give anything to be there. I'd give anything to be the one to take them to the park, laugh at their antics, or read them that story.

Childhood is to be cherished. But it zips by so quickly. Too short. And I cannot be there for a big portion of it. Life is cruel like that.

So, the moment my time in the office is over, I leap out the door, eager to see the boys. I always imagine that I will arrive at my mom's house and my boys will run excitedly towards me, bowling me over with big hugs. I imagine that we will share  some good quality time before dinner and bed. Maybe we will have time to enjoy the last few moments of daylight at the park. Maybe we will lay on the living room rug, in the very heart of our home, and play a game of Uno or dinosaurs. Or maybe we will sit at the table together and finish a holiday craft. These possibilities all rush through my mind on the drive to pick up the kids. I get so excited that I rush through several stale-yellow lights.

But by the time I walk through my mom's door, I'm met with a much different scene. Ryan leaps for me (as anticipated) but he clings to my legs, whining and crying. He is over-tired. He is over-stimulated. Jacob, who is usually a good boy all day, starts to act-out the second he sees me. He crosses his arms, pouts his lips, and gives me the stare-down. He puts his shoes on, only after I beg him to do so ten times. He refuses to use the bathroom. He throws his brother's toys. He stomps his feet. He whines for a snack to take "for the road."

I lug the kids, their car seats, and all their crap to my station wagon (no minor task). Ten minutes into the drive home, things aren't going any better. Ryan is repeatedly asking for his "baba" and crying when I cannot conjure one out of thin air in the middle of Highway 3. Jacob declares that he is STARVING and wants MCDONALDS NOW OR ELSE HE WILL DIE. Why is he not consoled by my reassurances that there is a three-day-old piece of pizza waiting for him in the fridge? Spoiled kid.

My dream reunification has been shattered. Things are going downhill fast. I need to turn this frown-mobile around....quickly, before self-pity (mine) sets in. I turn off my favorite news radio station (I'm addicted) and start to sing Christmas songs. To my amazement, Ryan stops crying. Jacob stops whining. By the second round of Jingle Bells, Jacob is even singing a long. When the song ends, Ryan yells, "More! More!" So, it's on to Frosty the Snowman. Then Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Then Santa Baby. I'm clearly running out of songs.

When we get home, everyone is in a better mood. Except me. I'm exhausted. I haul the kids, their bags, my briefcase, and some groceries into the house. I want to curl up in a ball on the rug and pass out. But....damn it. Kids. Quality time. Etc. Etc.

Jacob = world's biggest ham

So I pull out an old craft project that I had put away for a rainy day. We paint. Drill holes (macho points for me!). And plug in. Jacob is amused. Ryan not so much. He does not like the lights. He says they are "hot" and keeps a three feet distance at all times.

Ryan is too close to the lights. He does not like it.

For some reason, I am the only one who thinks this craft is off-the-charts-amazing. Jacob tolerates it and fakes a smile for the camera.

Christmas trees or Mardi-Gras gnome hats?

I warm up the three-day-old pizza and we have dinner (my husband goes to the gym 2-3 times each week and doesn't get home until 8 pm on those nights, which is why he is glaringly absent from this post). Ryan decides to use a toy wrench as a fork. It makes total sense to him. I love this kid.

When dinner is over, I clean the table, do the dishes that have been piling up in the sink for the past couple days (no dishwasher!), and get the kids in their PJs. By this time, I'm running on fumes. My desire to be horizontal is as strong as my will to get the kids in bed. Or not. I fall onto the living room rug and allow myself a five minute power nap...with both eyes open because Ryan found a pair of scissors and I'm too tired to get up right that minute and take them away. Ryan puts the scissors down, comes over to me, straddles my torso, and sits on my back. He bounces a couple times yelling, "giddyup!" Nap time comes to a screeching halt.

Ryan with his most-prized possession.

Somehow. Someway. I manage to get the kids' teeth brushed. We read a story, I sing the world's shortest lullaby, and I tuck them into bed.

snuggles

As I exit their room and close the door, I have mixed feelings. Half of me is jumping up and down (hypothetically only--remember, I'm exhausted) and thrilled to finally collapse on the couch. The other half of me is reluctant and sad. My nightly 2.5 hours with the kids went by way too quickly. When I wake up, my husband and I will have an hour to hustle them back out the door. Then it's back to work to do it all over again.

The time is just too short. My energy levels are just too low. My plate is just too full. Am I giving them enough? This question will never have a satisfactory answer.