Zoe is home from school today. Sick. Again. (Zoe is one of the few kids on the planet who actually LOVES school… so much so that she will fake wellness to go. Like, if her arm was half severed, she would try to tape it up and put on a heavy sweater and attempt to get out the door before I spotted the blood.)

Anyway, I made her stay home again today. She is bored beyond words. I am about to go print her out some math sheets so she can pretend that she is at school.

In the meantime, though, check out the sweet fort she built this morning in the piano room. She built it especially for spying on the neighbors and people delivering things to our door. (Our flat screen is scheduled to be delivered this afternoon… yeah, you heard me. Flat screen. The family who hasn’t had cable — not even local channels — for a year and a half is getting a flat screen. Sometimes we actually like to flush our money directly down the toilet.)

Behold: the “Sick Fort”

Did you see her wallet? Did you catch it? If not, go back and see if you can spot the 86 seconds its on screen again.

And here she shows you the peephole for spying:

And now I’m off to print math sheets and stealthily administer medicine.

(Post script… I realized after watching the videos that the video of her wallet was so long that flickr actually cut it off. You don’t get to see the other objects contained in her “adventure bag” or the sweet Exit sign. Darn.)

My kids love crepes. My husband loves them, too. It’s one of the favorites in his family. On the weekends when we’re feeling ambitious, we’ll often make them. (And by we, I mean Jon, with the help of one or more of our kids.) But this morning, Jon asked the kids to make crepes while he mowed the yard… a request that they took very seriously. So seriously that there were no adults allowed in the kitchen. It was a Kid Only Zone. They got down the blue recipe book and got to work.

Crepes:
1 C. milk, 2 eggs, 1 tsp. salt, 1 C. flour, 1 Tbs melted butter

Mix in that order:

Next, use a measuring cup to pour batter into pan. “Swirl” batter to make crepes thin:

Flip after 1 minute. Don’t overcook.

Mix secret sauce:

My kids were totally ticked off that I disclosed the ingredients in the secret sauce, but I assured them that it’s still very much a secret, since I’m not giving you the recipe for our homemade jam. (Incidentally, you can experiment with different flavor jams. My personal favorite is blackberry.)

Finally, roll, drizzle with maple syrup, and sprinkle with powdered sugar:

Frickin yummy.

Reuters:

Video was captured of events earlier this week illustrating an apparent attack by a ferocious infant boy on his older brother. For the entire duration of the attack, the sister of both boys laughed hysterically and offered no help to the older boy. In fact, at one point the sister actually spit on the older boy (though this may have been accidental, as the girl has a huge hole in the front of her mouth from missing front teeth). Meanwhile, the careless mother of all of the children sat behind the safety of the camera, also laughing and offering no assistance. The infant kicked the ten year old repeatedly in the head and face, and did so effortlessly; the infant almost seemed unaware of his own actions, though at one point he seemed to try to cover the camera lens to hide his identity.

Details to follow as this story develops.

I found this video on the camera card today. I didn’t realize that Zoe had taken some video while I was in the hospital. (The day after Deacon was born, to be exact.) But bless her for doing it, because Deac is so small. And we hadn’t yet even finalized the name.

(Pop the Dramamine before pressing play. After all, this was filmed by a 6 year old with twitchy hands and a wandering eye.)

I know, I know… the cuteness is burning your retinas, right? I am rude for not giving you a heads up… but I wanted it to be a surprise: the utter preciousness. Please email your kiss requests, and I will be sure to smooch the little guy for you.

Jachin and Zoe had their first duet recital tonight. They’d been practicing with the neighbor kids for weeks and weeks, and the night finally came. There were some nerves… I thought Jachin was actually going to throw up at a certain point before his performance. And when they called Zoe’s name, she stood up from her seat but wouldn’t walk over to the piano without a little coaxing.  But they did just fine. They did fabulously, in fact.

Here they are after the recital with their certificates:

And for the video:

Oh! Susannah

Ode to Joy

Chop Sticks

(You can tell that he likes playing this one. And I love that he’s all worried about someone turning the page for them.)

Echo March

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.

Hope your Christmas was very Merry, indeed.

(pics up on flickr)

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.

This is what Zoe and I did this afternoon.

We need our own show. I mean, Zoe is way cuter than Rachel Ray, right?

(*ahem* Hey, Food Network, call me!)