Jon and his dad went to the Jazz game the day after Christmas. Instead of the usual seats (upper bowl), Jon’s dad won some sweet seats in Row B, right behind the Jazz bench. The kids and I stayed home and watched the game on TV, to see if we could spot Daddy and Grandpa. Sure enough, everytime the Jazz drove down court we saw them sitting there. And every. single. time. Zoe would jump up and down and shout ‘There they are! I see them! Daddy is on TV! My dad is famous!” It never got old for her.
(As for me? I jumped up and down and shouted when I texted Jon with “We C U guys!” and then watched him read the text on his phone. Right there on TV! It was kind of cool… and yes, I’m a dork.)
I took a little video — blurry as it is — to prove that Zoe’s daddy is famous. You’ll just have to trust me… it’s Zoe’s daddy.
Yesterday was fantastic. Christmas Eve night, the kids slept in our room (a mistake we’ll be sure not to make in future years). Zoe woke up at about 2:30 or 3:00 in the morning and barely went back to sleep.
“Mom, I’m just too excited to go to sleep. I can’t stop thinking about it!”
With every creak of the house, or bang of the duct work, or whirring of the refrigerator turning on, she thought for sure that Santa was out in the family room bestowing presents. I barely got a wink of sleep.
Then, to top it off, when I went out to do my duty of… uhh… making sure that Santa had come, she was not asleep like I thought she was. It could have been disastrous, but Jon patched it all back together… like the brilliant daddy that he is. Jachin — the one who vowed to stay up all night and snare Santa in a diabolical trap — slept like a baby.
We spent Christmas morning opening gifts. Jachin got a RipStick, which he practiced in the basement. Cement floors are perfect for skateboarding and rollerskating and all sorts of things that you can’t do outside during Utah winters. He also got a couple of Wii games and legos. My mom got him a big robotic insect that walks with creepy realism and shoots darts . It’s been clacking noisily across the wood floors all morning, menacingly shooting darts at squealing, unsuspecting girls. Girls who have been playing with Hannah Montana dolls all morning…
Which brings us to Zoe. Zoe received a singing Hannah Montana doll. The goal this morning? To get the singing Hannah Montana doll to sing at the same time as the Hannah Montana CD.
The first time through the song is cute… the fiftieth? Not so cute any more. I want to puncture my ear drums with mistletoe twigs or pine branches from the Christmas tree.
Other than a Hannah Montana doll whose batteries can’t die fast enough, Zoe also received a soccer goal set and an electronic password journal. She changed the password about a dozen times yesterday. Jachin successfully mimicked her voice several times to gain entry… much to Zoe’s whining dismay.
My big surprise for Jon was a big, fat flop. Actually, it was a big, skinny flop. The Diesel jeans I got for him (that were meant to be his BIG surprise) were too small. He looked all European and Emo. Plus, I think they had actual grease stains on them. Really expensive grease… At any rate, it was a flop. They are going back to Nordstrom, and I’ll get him 4 pairs of Lucky’s instead. Or maybe three pair for Jon and one for me…
I got a precious tiny pink laptop. It’s the smallest thing you’ve ever seen. It’s an Eee Laptop, it runs Linux which make me feel nerdy and smart and it weighs, like, a pound. It’s perfect to carry around (it fits in my purse) to do on-the-fly writing. Other than my precious laptop, I also go the complete Star Trek Motion Picture DVD set and a new exercise ball… since my old one blew away in a wind storm.
We went to Jon’s parents’ for lunch and opened gifts there. Cousins played with cousins and Kim and Mike’s kids discovered the Wii. It was precious to see Kas doing Wii bowling. We went to my mom’s for a ham dinner. We played a sweet game called Scum (where I took my turn in the scum seat. I didn’t handle that well.) I got to talk to my sister, Karen, in Maryland, and my cool uncle Beezer in Georgia. (His birth name is not Beezer, obviously… and just about every calls him Andy anymore, except me.)
The day ended with us bringing Paige home for a Christmas night sleepover. I have been neglecting them and ignoring them all day in order to blog and watch Star Trek: Insurrection. I may actually go feed them lunch now… they’ve been snacking on the Christmas treats from the neighbors that have been steadily coming in over the last week. So, you know, cookies, popcorn, Sprite, and candy. The four Christmas food groups.
This morning our whole family showed up bright and early at the dentist’s office for our semi-annual cleaning. It was tooth-scraping good times. When they start in on the scraping with the metal tools on my teeth, it almost sends me through the roof; like nails down a chalk board.
Good news, though: our whole family is cavity-free this time. Very different from Jachin’s eight-cavity visit last time. (I know, I said I’d never speak of it again, and here I am speaking about it with my big, clean mouth.)
Jachin took some awesome footage of Zoe getting her fluoride treatment. You’d think after several decades of doing it the horrible way (nasty tasting “grape” in huge plastic trays meant for crocodile mouths) that they’d come up with something better. But alas… behold another generation suffering through grape flavored fluoride in huge dental trays:
Jachin also secretly got some video of me getting my teeth scraped. My hair looked really nice today… but the video is just of me screaming “stop running in and out of the waiting room!”… and I didn’t think anyone really wanted to hear 38 seconds of that. But just know that my hair is really hanging nicely today. And I’m yelling at my kids a lot.
In completely NOT keeping with the tradition of the “leather year” (but thank you for all of your fabulous leather gift ideas), I got my husband something plastic, kitschy, and radical. Perhaps you’ve seen the commercial for the Perfect Pushup, or perhaps you haven’t. Maybe the Perfect Pushup is one of those commercials you channel-flip through. But when I saw it a few months back, I knew that my husband had to have this revolutionary product. You see, Jon does a ton of sit-ups and push-ups every single night before bed, and frankly regular push-ups seem too easy for him and his buff guns as of late. So when I couldn’t really think of anything classy and leathery, I went directly to Amazon and ordered the Perfect Pushup. It arrived Tuesday, and Zoe and I tried them out. I did one push-up and fell over. And I’m not kidding. Zoe did about five or six. But in my defense, her push-up form was pretty crappy, and I was all trying to keep my butt down and back straight like a board, grasshopper. Anyhoo… I presented the Perfect Pushup to Jon yesterday when he got home work. At first he kind of gave me that look like great, you ordered something else from an infomercial… I told you to stop doing that. But I told him how it had great customer reviews on Amazon, and how when I tried it I could only do one, at which point he gave me another look that said well, that’s because you’re a pansy. But then he tried it, and he caught the vision. It’s freakin hard, dude.
Here’s a short video tutorial that we made last night with the kids demonstrating the Perfect Pushup. Ignore the fact that they are wearing bright, festively colored witch hats. (The hats I bought yesterday for Diana and I to wear to “Witchapalooza” on Saturday. Hey Diana: make your colored hat choice now!)
(Jon is the one who pointed out to Jachin that the push-up things resemble the paddles of a cardio resuscitator.)
Jon, very much in keeping with the spirit of the “leather year”, bought me a sweet new bag. It’s brown, and perfect, and has just the right number of compartments for all of my crap… err, I mean, “daily necessities”. He then told me the cute story of going out shopping with Zoe to pick out my bag. They went to Macy’s. Zoe noticed that items with a red tag meant that they were on sale. So Jon told her to look around for purses with a red tag at which point Zoe found a certain purse with a red tag, read it, and announced loudly “What? This purse is $119 on sale! These are the sale prices?!?” (You can tell that we are used to the cheap-o prices of Target.) She then proceeded to go around to each and every purse, shouting out the indignity of it’s price. The sales chick wasn’t amused. But Jon was. They finally decided on an outrageously priced Fossil bag; the one I spoke of earlier.
Last night Jon and I — both smartly dressed and sporting buff guns, because, y’know, I did one push-up and all – headed to Salt Lake to eat dinner at Fleming’s. It was the first time we’d been there, but it came highly recommended by some friends. It was fandamntastic. We had some crab cakes (which I love, love, love) that almost made me cry, and I normally don’t get that way over food. I mean, I’m the person who thinks movie theater nachos are fine cuisine… especially if you happen upon a theater that puts jalapenos in the cheese. Jon had some tender, juicy slaughtered baby lamb… err, I mean “fillet mignon”. He gave me a bite and I felt the slightest twinge of guilt about eating a baby lamb before thinking Holy crap, that’s tender!! I had some crab and shrimp scampi. For dessert we had creme brule and chocolate lava cake. The molten core burnt my tongue… oh, the sweet, sweet pain.
Here we are in a self-taken pic because I chickened out when attempting to ask the waitress to take our picture. (Hello, it’s a fancy restaurant! They don’t DO picture-taking.)
w00t! My first video blog up and live. Check ‘er out:
The words, in case it sounded a bit garbled:
Big Mac, Fillet of Fish,
Quarter-pounder, French Fries,
Icy Coke, Thick Shake
Sundaes, and Apple Pies.
You deserve a break today,
so get up, get out,
and get away
to McDonald’s.
And the dish ran away with the spoon.
–ps: Note the polar bear fleece zip-up pajamas that Zoe decided to wear to bed last night. fyi- It never got below about 78 degrees last night. She woke up not wearing them…
