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)

Ok, so it’s been a few days since I last posted. And whenever I go several days without posting, I start obsessing about what I will write about, and think about how it has to be stellar writing because my readers (all 5 of ya) have been waiting and now I gotta post something meaty to chew on.

Well, so sorry. But instead of blogging “steak”, you will be feasting on stale bread and water this evening. Because all I’ve got for you is a small holiday freak out. Ho freakin ho.

Today was a tough day at church… well, not so much “tough” as “there were a million things to do, which gives me a million opportunities to drop the ball at some point”. We had treats to prepare and deliver, I had a lesson to teach (and for some reason, teaching a room of small children still makes me sweaty and my voice quivers… like I’m in high school AP English class all over again, giving an oral report on a book I never got around to reading)… where was I? Oh right, treats to deliver, lesson to teach, “meet your teacher” activity to plan, announcements to… well, announce. And to top it off, I found myself standing at the front of the primary room with thirty little pairs of eyes staring at me judgementally because I couldn’t figure out how to get the DVD player from the library to work, and those little pairs of eyes weren’t getting to see the video of baby Jesus being born.  Make it work, dumb teacher, the eyes say to me. Press play… how hard is that??

Harsh.

But now Sunday is over and tomorrow is Christmas Eve. Yay! I am breathing a big sigh and pressing play on the iPod. Boney James Christmas is soothing and puts me in a terrific mood. Tomorrow is nothing but hot chocolate and Christmas tunes, last minute wrapping and — in fact — last minute gift buying. (I know, I’m being one of those people this year.) But I only need to last-minute-shop at the Bosch store, which I’m guessing isn’t all that crowded on any given day. Even Christmas Eve. (Ok, knock on wood.) Nothing more to worry about until Christmas Day, when we won’t spend enough time at one of the relatives homes and someone’s feelings will be hurt, and I’ll fret about it and mentally note that we will need to spend more time at that person’s house at Easter.

Yes, it is hard being neurotic, why do you ask?

More in the morning, when I have more space between me and this day.

So, like a dumb butt, I sent out 30 or so Christmas newsletters (with spiffy family photo included) before doing a thorough read-thru. And when I did finally do a thorough read-thru? I found 2 typo-s in it. They occur in the paragraph directly following the other paragraph that states how I started blogging, and I love writing, and I’m a going to be a great, famous writer, blah blah blah. Ok, I didn’t really say anything about me being a great writer. Which is good. Because after reading through the newsletter, people with rightfully conclude that I’m not such a great writer. In the very least, I’m a horrible typer. (As a side note: spell check doesn’t think “typer” is a real word. I should probably use “typist”, but I’ll keep it in there just to showcase my stupidity.)

This has, however, been a good lesson for me. Read through stuff… because written jokes really bomb when they aren’t even speeled korrectly.

(a fun game!: find the typo-s in the Christmas newsletter and receive a booby prize by mail!)

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.

Me: (flashing the $100 dollar bill my mom gave me to cover a couple Christmas gifts) “See, babe, you aren’t the only one with big bucks.”

Jon: “Woah, where’d you get that, Miss Moneybags?”

Me: “I flashed a guy my boobs today.”

Jon: “Sweet! You need to do that everyday.”

Me: “You aren’t jealous that I flashed a guy my boobs for money?”

Jon: “Nahhh, I know what I’ve got and I’m okay flaunting it. I’m not a jealous lover.”

Me: “Well, what I didn’t tell you is that he paid me to put my boobs back in my shirt.”

Jon: “Wow… that’s a sad story.”

I wonder if this is how Stan spent late nights when he was a kid… drawing pictures and writing stories by lamp light when he should have been sleeping.

He’s precious and makes my heart flutter, the cute little guy.

But I still made him turn the light off.

…it’s because Jon and I have been eating them all. Your chances of receiving any chocolates for Christmas diminishes at the same rate at which my butt expands. And, well… have you seen my butt lately?

Jon has.

Poor guy.

I’ve told you already that we had family pictures taken a couple of weeks ago… for the first time in the history of our marriage. We ordered a nice, large one for over the fireplace and then 50 inserts (4″x5″) to go into Christmas cards. Anyone want to venture a guess how much it cost us?

Nevermind, no depressing guesses. Suffice it to say, it was a large chunk of my Christmas present. I asked if we could purchase the rights, but they don’t do that. So after all of the primping and preening and deciding what to wear… here it is, in all of it’s scanned glory:

It’s copywritten, and I’m pretty sure it’s not supposed to be posted, so I will have to kindly ask you to not steal it from my blog. And if I get any calls threatening to send me to jail, it’ll have to come down. Those of you receiving Christmas cards will get a pic anyway.

This wasn’t the best one of me, but it was the best one of everyone else. I wasn’t even about to pay for a “head swap”… I’m not that vain (and we’re not that rich). They did however straighten my front tooth (cheaper than braces) and smoothed out the crow’s feet. That was nice of them… for $550.

I got nothin’ today, folks. So instead of trying to write something, I’ll just copy and paste some awesome pearls of wisdom that I received in a bulk email:

*Do not walk behind me, for I may not lead. Do not walk ahead of me, for
I may not follow. Do not walk beside me either. Just pretty much leave me alone.

*It’s always darkest before dawn. So if you’re going to steal your
neighbor’s newspaper, that’s the time to do it.

*Don’t be irreplaceable. If you can’t be replaced, you can’t be
promoted.

*Always remember that you’re unique. Just like everyone else.

*Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes.
That way, when you criticize them, you’re a mile away and you have
their shoes.

*If at first you don’t succeed, skydiving is not for you.

*Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach him how to
fish, and he will sit in a boat and drink beer all day.

*Never, under any circumstances, take a sleeping pill and a laxative
on the same night.

Good advice, every one. Now that you are amused and inspired, go on with your day.