Did you hear that?

Modern kids toys are amazing.   Even the analog, now-powered tools have all been engineered for the maximum fun and learning factor.  But, it's the battery-powered ones that I'm amazed with.  It seems like everything makes noise and/or lights up.  This is great because it engages our kids and (supposedly) stimulates the learning centers of the brains.  This is bad, because many of the light and sound toys are possessed.

Possessed, you ask?  You better believe it.  Ever since we've had kids, and therefore bought light-up, sound-making toys, they've repeatedly shown that they light up and/or make noise at times that they shouldn't.  This always--and I mean always--happens after all the girls are in bed.  I'll be walking through the kitchen, and as I'm doing something completely unrelated, I'll hear a loud (and disturbing, without any context) sheep's bleat.  "Is there an angry sheep in my house?" I'll ask myself.  Ah, but no, it's just our fridge farm, a toy that is supposed to be touched before it makes noise.  Did anyone touch it to elicit a sound that could potentially attract nocturnal predators?  Of course not!  Nobody was near it.  Possessed!

Need more?  Okay, you asked for it.  My parents got all the girls a Fisher Price Laugh and Learn house, where the girls can sit on either side of a plastic house-shaped facade and open a door between them.  They love crawling through the door and the music it plays with its many buttons.  Oh, and when the door opens it makes a child-like, comical creaking noise.  Let me stop there though--said creaking sound is only child-like and comical when you see your children sitting there playing with it.  When it creaks by itself, when no one is around to open the door, it's less comical and more disturbing.  Increase that by a factor of ten when it happens in the middle of the night when it's dark and I'm up to check on the girls.  That Laugh and Learn house is lucky it's not yet trash and garbage.

Oh look, the door makes a face that looks like an evil clown.  Great!

And don't even get me started on the life-like, battery-powered kitten that we got for Addie when the twins were born.  First, we actually own cats (which makes a life-like toy cat kind of redundant, but Addie loved it when she saw it at the store), so hearing a cat meowing isn't all that unusual.  It's only bad when it's a loud, terrible meow that's coming from a location where there can't possibly be a cat.  Compound that with the fact that it's the sound a living cat makes when it's supremely pissed, so not being able to pin down the cat's location is a bit disconcerting.  And did I mention that before we gave the cat to Addie we left it in our closet, and it would just randomly meow at a high volume with no rhyme or reason?  I didn't want to, because it's the stuff of nightmares.

I guess that I'll continue to put up with the noise making toys so long as they entertain (and enlighten?) my children.  But if anybody brings home a Good Guy doll, I'm out of here.

If the door's open

As any parent of an infant can tell you, mobility is both a blessing and a curse.  It's nice because we don't always have to get up from what we're doing to grab something for either of the girls.  It also allows them to entertain themselves a little more.  It's hard because, once they can move, they get into stuff we don't want them to get into.

This whole yin-yang of movement is made doubly (nice pun!) difficult with twins--as they never go in the same direction.  Invariably, Anne Perry will head right, and as I'm trying to keep her from eating dog food, Audrey Kate will escape out of sight to the left.  It's a constant shell game, and I'm not the first to compare it to herding cats.

What's interesting about the whole thing, however, is the fact that both girls seem to always know whenever we open a door--any door in the house.  The second a door opens, they're heading for it.  It doesn't matter what's behind the door that's open--they don't care, all they care about is being through that door.  They head for every door as if their expecting to see Mr. Tumnus every time they go through it.  And for them, every door is probably like what Narnia would be like for me.  They're little minds get blow by the fact that there's a room that has an Air Conditioning grate that they can pull up and a toilet that they can try to open.  And that's just the bathroom.

The lemming-like prediliction to head straight for any open door gets pretty hairy when you're talking about two crawlers.  Especially when it's the front door.  Now that we have Finn, our new dog, we have two children and one canine attempting to escape whenever the front door opens.  As soon as we stoop down to grab one of them, the other will make her way outside.  You can almost hear them screaming "Freedom!  Sweet freedom!"

Hopefully doors will lose their luster soon.  Because sooner or later there's going to be a jailbreak, and I'm going to have to herd cats...and a dog.

I think my phone is self-aware...

...and apparently, it hates me.  Perhaps, when I'm not paying attention, my phone (a unnamed brand that that has an operating system that rhymes with an-schmroid) has been communicating with my TiVo, and it doesn't appreciate my viewing habits.  Maybe it has a grudge against Disney, since all we watch now is Monsters, Inc. and Little Einsteins?  Maybe it's reading my emails and has decided that I'm getting too much spam?  Maybe it's the fact that when one of the girls get hold of my phone, it goes straight into her mouth?

I don't know the reasons, but without a doubt, my phone has decided to become my Moriarty-like nemesis.  Apparently, I've been too cavalier in my expectations for my wave-of-the-future smartphone--expecting it to do things like function normally.  I also have the unrealistic hope that I can hit the home button and then the phone will actually go back to the home screen and allow me to make a phone call without having to wait for 45 seconds.  I know, I'm a demanding phone owner.

I don't use any applications anymore.  It's not that I'm not jealous of Anna and her i*Phone, because I definitely am.  I totally want a phone that I can use for applications.  I tried applications for a while on my phone--use of said applications somehow caused it to operate even worse than it does now.  I've since removed all non-necessary applications, reset the phone to factory, and I pull the battery every other day.  This allows the phone to barely function.  It's like I have the cellular equivalent of a AMC Gremlin in my pocket.

Maybe it's that all my expectations are smothering my phone.  I need to understand that my phone can't live the buttoned-up lifestyle I expect of it--it's a free spirit that has decided to embrace the American dream of doing its job badly, but not so much that I'll throw it out the window.  So now, I wait for my upgrade.  I've tried three times, unsuccessfully, to upgrade early (my normal upgrade cycle comes up in July).  Each time I've gone to the cell store, I show them my phone, tell them that it mocks me daily, and then they nod and say, "Yep."  They clearly know that my phone is against me, but it seems there's nothing they can do.  So, now I wait--my phone plotting against me.  At least I have the comfort of knowing that it will never do anything, because that would require a little effort.

Face Painting!

As we've grown as parents, Anna and I have learned some important lessons.  One of the most important has been to figure out which restaurants give you deals on kids meals.  Once you have more than one kid, you have to learn where to get free food.  We don't always take advantage of the deals, but it's good to know where to go to get free/discounted/cheap food on any given night.  This developed skill is what brought us to Moe's last night.

On Tuesday nights, Moe's (at least in Montgomery) has free kids meals with the purchase of an adult entree.  They also bring in some sort of child-friendly activity.  Sometimes it's a balloon animal guy (who my friend Chad and I call "The Lonely Balloon Man" because of his insistence on making really depressing, banal small talk), but last night it was a pair of super-nice face painters.  Addie really likes the face painters whenever they're at Moe's; she's just always refused to actually get her face painted.  She'll allow them to paint her hands, but she has been staunchly anti-face.

Well, last night we were sitting at dinner, and Addie saw another little girl who had gotten an octopus painted on her face.  Addie turned toward Anna and said, "I want an octopus on my face!"  Anna and I looked at each other incredulously.  After a couple of minutes feeling Addie out to make sure she wouldn't freak out the second a brush touched her face, Addie was sitting in the chair getting a blue octopus on her face.  She was so excited and so good!  She sat still and was very sweet to the face painters.

 But it only has five arms!

When we got home, we decided to let Addie keep the paint on her face because she had already had a bath before we left for dinner.  So we put our little painted girl to bed, and things proceeded much as normal.  Now, in order to fully appreciate this story, you need to know that Addie rarely gets out of bed if she wakes up.  Mostly, she'll call out to me or Anna, and she'll sit in the bed until we come to her. 

Well, last night around 11, I'm getting ready for bed, and then down the hall comes walking Addie.  First, she startled me just by her presence.  Second, she freaked me out with her face paint.  Essentially, because of the way that her face was painted, it looked like a miniature version of '80s wrestler The Ultimate Warrior was coming at me.

Although eerily similar, this is not a picture of
Addie throwing a temper tantrum.

I half expected her to run into the room and try to put some sort of scissor slam on me (Full Disclosure: All I know about wrestling is that Koko B. Ware had a parrot, Andre the Giant was in The Princess Bride, and Hulk Hogan fought Rocky in Rocky III).  Fortunately, all Addie did was stagger into our bedroom and tell me she had taken a good nap (much what I would expect a retired, punch-drunk wrestler would do).  I told her it was still night-night time, and I put her back to bed.  The face paint has since been washed off, but the little wrestler in her lives on.  Just watch her body slam one of her sisters.

Socks

Addie was standing in the living room while I was sitting in our recliner holding Audrey Kate.  Addie picked up one of my thick, wool socks and pulled it over her arm like a sock puppet.  The difference for Addie, is that the sock goes all the way up to her armpit, so it definitely covers her whole arm.  Addie, excitedly, began to run around the room, holding her be-socked arm in the air.

"Addie, is your arm a sock?"  I ask her.  She immediately stops running and looks at me.  "I'm not a sock!  I'm Addie!" and then she pulls the sock off her arm.  I didn't offend her--her tone was not confrontational at all--that's what was so funny about it.  Her response was about as matter-of-fact as you could get.  How do I respond?

"I know you're Addie, I was just talking about the sock you had on your arm."  She stares at me blankly and then squeals, "Silly Daddy!" and runs to her room.  I only wish I could have these kind of conversations in my normal, adult life.  It would make things much more interesting.

Supervisor: "Is that the proposal you've been working on?"
Me: "I'm not a proposal. I'm Paul!"
Supervisor: "Uh....I know, but I was just going to see if you would..."
Me (running away giggling): "Silly supervisor!"

If only...

I begin, yet again.

I don't think anyone checks my blog anymore.  I don't mean this as any sort of pitiable statement--I just haven't updated it in a loooong time, and I take responsibility diminishing returns...there's literally nothing to read.  So, I'm wiping the slate clean (yet again) and I'm going to try to start writing some new stuff.  When I started this, Addie hadn't been born yet, and then she was just a baby, so I was relying on myself for material.  What I've since learned, is that children are a goldmine of comedic weirdness. 

That being said, I'm going to try my best to update this space with the weird, funny stuff that Addie tells me, and the weird, funny stuff that Anne Perry and Audrey Kate do.  I think I need to start blogging again for me as much as anyone.  I already feel like I have a tenuous grip on all the things I want to remember about my kids anyway, and the last thing I want to do is forget all of this stuff, as I will desperately need it at future formal occasions that call for hilarious, yet embarrassing reminiscences (proms, rehersal dinners, etc.).  So, please, check back every now and again, and I'm promise I'll try to do my part.

It's not late, it's early!

Addie gets up very early in the morning--very early, like pre-5:30 AM early. We kind of become accustomed to it, but it's till jarring to be woken up at 5:15 by a two-year-old standing by your bed, waiting for you to look at her. One morning, she stood in silence until I felt her presence and looked at her--then she quietly asked, "How're you doing, Daddy?" I'm good, and you're lucky you're cute.

I wake up much faster than Anna, so Addie in the AM duty falls to me. Usually, we come out to the living room, and then Addie will sit in my lap while I rock her in the rocking chair, desperately hoping that she'll go back to sleep (Spoiler Alert--she never does). Recently, however, we've had a new development in the early morning travails. Now, immediately after waking up, Addie asks for a breakfast bar (a Kashi graham and fruit bar) or to watch TV. At 5:30, we don't want to let Addie eat or watch TV, because we don't want her thinking that if she gets up early, she'll get rewarded for it. So, the first time she asked, I told her "It's too early for a breakfast bar," or "It's too early for TV." She didn't like it--but she took it in stride. The next morning, again at 5:30, Addie looks at me--very seriously--and says, "Daddy, it's too early for Elm0," meaning we wont be watching TIVOed Sesame Street. Awesome, I think to myself--I'm slowly helping my daughter to wake up later.

Within a couple of days, however, Addie is now randomly saying "It's not early, Daddy!" We've figured that, as long as the sun is out, Addie is convinced that it's not early, either at 7:00 AM or 5:00 PM. Okay--so she's making the realization that daylight tends to mean that it's not too early. But then the kicker. While getting her ready for bed one night, I told her that it was getting late. Addie was befuddled. How can it be late (clearly the opposite of early), when it's dark outside?

I've been trying to tell her about different contexts for late and early. She doesn't seem to get it yet, but she doesn't really care all that much. She still gets up around 5:30, so we're okay. I just don't look forward to Daylight Savings Time completely freaking her out when the sun comes out before 6:00. I guess we'll be eating breakfast bars much earlier.