It’s 9:15pm and it’s light outside.  It’s very strange.  I don’t know if it’s the streetlight reflecting off all the snow, but the sky seems too bright to just be that.  It should be pitch black outside but you can see absolutely everything, with a yellowish tint.  Bizarre.

Snow is fun to eat.

Ready!

Aim!

Fire!

A bit more suspicious about all this than his sister. Thinks we may all be bordering on insanity.

“Kaelin, why is Koren crying?”
“Because I’m making him eat snow.”

One of the things I’m learning about parenthood is that it’s a continual lesson in humility.  As a parent, you think you’re smarter, wiser, more sophisticated than your kids.  And they constantly prove you wrong about that.

Remember how clever we were about Vitamin Kitty?  We did the whole “Bath Time” fast-swap thing for Kaelin’s benefit, because of course she would be devastated if anything ever happened to VK, or – worse – she ever found out that her current VK wasn’t the ORIGINAL Vitamin Kitty.

A few weeks ago, VK got left in the Target shopping cart.  Kaelin was heartbroken at the thought, but after a bit of stealthy searching, TA-DA!  Mama and Daddo managed to find him!  We were unconcerned about pulling another VK out of “the box” because we were pretty certain we would not be seeing the return of the lost stuffed animal.

Or so we thought.

A few days later, Kaelin came down to breakfast with an announcement:  “Look, Mama, there are TWO VITAMIN KITTIES!  How did I get TWO VITAMIN KITTIES?”

Sure enough, there she was, holding two of them.  I stood there, my brain racing, trying to come up with some way to explain this obvious faux pas without crushing her delicate sense of VK Reality.

“Maybe one of them is Vitamin Kitty’s brother that came to visit,” I managed to say before too much time had elapsed.

“No, they’re both Vitamin Kitty.  I found this other one in my stool.  I forgot I put him there the other day.  But why do I have TWO Vitamin Kitties?”

I had nothing.  Nada.  No more clever explanations to shield her from the truth.  How on earth was I going to explain this to her?

“I don’t know, Kaelin.  That’s a mystery.”

“Maybe you thought I lost him, so you got me another one.”

Dude.  Did I just get schooled by my 4-year-old? 

YES.  YES I DID.

“You know, I think you’re right.”

I watched her for a few seconds, trying to gauge her reaction to this unpleasant truth.  To see if it was going to affect her bond with her Special Friend.  I gave up when she stood in the middle of the kitchen, held out both stuffed kitties, and exclaimed, “I have TWO Vitamin Kitties.  THIS IS SO EXCELLENT!”

This is what I get for being in a hurry to push out a new blog design.  I forgot to do the cross-browser check.  If you visited this site using Internet explorer earlier today:

1) I apologize that it looked like crap.  It’s mostly fixed now.

2) You should seriously consider using a better browser.  Failing that, at least write letters demanding that if the geniuses at Microsoft are going to insist on bundling their browser into every computer that’s sold, the least they could do is come up with a browser that can read code without being hacked to death.

/end soapbox

You might notice that it looks a little different around here. You might also notice that it’s almost Valentine’s Day and it took me this long to get rid of the Christmas layout.  Judging by that timetable, I decided against the Valentine’s or even Spring layout, since it would probably be the 4th of July before I took it down.

So you get the generic.

It’s supposed to snow here Thursday.  I don’t mind the snow itself, but I do mind the way the whole city shuts down because of it.  We probably won’t have Mother’s Day Out because people are too afraid to drive in those “hazardous weather conditions.”

This morning it was 29° when I dropped the kids off and I kid you not, people were slowing down to 5 mph to go over a 3-foot patch of ice in the road.  The straight, flat, road, I might add.

Speaking of ice and snow, we’re seriously considering moving to Alaska.  Yeah, I know.  We’re probably insane.

If all goes according to plan, we would arrive in Homer, Alaska by the beginning of April and stay for at least a year.  There are a lot of factors that the move is dependent on, though.  For instance, we need to rent our current house out for a 1-year term at close to the same price that we’ll be paying for the rental house in Alaska.  Does anybody need a 4 bedroom house with a game room, media room, study, and sun room?  If so, let us know!

There’s also the matter of actually GETTING to Alaska.  We’ll have to drive, because we will need to take some of our belongings, but there’s no way the kids, pets or our current vehicles could survive a 7-day road trip through the desolate mountains of Canada.  So we have to figure out some way to fly the kids and pets there, in addition to trading in our current vehicles for something that has low mileage and 4WD.  I never thought I would drive a Hummer, but it might come to that.

So IF we get the house rented and IF we scrape together the funds to make the drive and flights, THEN there’s the pre-move yard sales, boxing up everything that’s left, and putting it into storage.

Chances are, we’re going to be very busy over the next couple of months.  If you don’t hear from us, that’s probably why.

I’m not entirely certain, but I think I may have just broken my toe.

I was chasing Kaelin around with a night shirt (Um… does anyone else’s daughter throw a total fit about what she wears to bed?  Kaelin told me point-blank that she no longer thinks t-shirts are “cool” enough to be part of her wardrobe.  Not COOL ENOUGH?  It’s a NIGHT SHIRT.  Who is she trying to impress in her SLEEP???  Anyway…) and I smacked my little toe on a chair.

It really hurts now.

Ow.

A week or two after Koren’s little “incident,” we had a more successful trip to a park.  This park includes some small hills, and for those of you who may be in the dark about such things, the single purpose of HILLS is to ROLL DOWN THEM.

Well, for Kaelin, anyway.  Koren was content to WATCH from the top of the hill, and eventually scraped up enough courage to trot down one at a pace faster than walking.

But both kids had a blast on the hills and the playground, and I was just happy to come away with pictures and no trips to the emergency room.

Toward the end of January, we celebrated my dad’s 65th Birthday.  As a tribute, I (with the help of my mom) put together a slideshow of his 65 years to run in the background at the party.  Here is that slideshow. 

Warning: It’s about a 20 minute slideshow, so grab a cup of coffee.

Happy birthday, Dad!  I hope I look that good at 65!  May this be your best year yet!

Boys.  They are infinitely more accident-prone than girls.  I’m discovering this.

We had a delightful time at the park a couple of weeks ago.  Until Koren accidentally walked backward down a step and plummeted to his doom.  Somehow, he busted his lip on the inside and the outside.  The blood was amazing.  It was everywhere, just flowing out of his mouth.

I called Jens and told him to bring the car to pick us up, and bring lots of towels and wet wipes because all I had to mop up with was tissues.

Kaelin got totally freaked out by the amount of blood and decided Koren was bleeding to death.  Therefore, the most appropriate course of action was to panic and run around screaming about the amount of blood and AAAAGH AAAGH AAAGHGH!!!

Koren cried.  But by the time Jens showed up with the car and accessories, he was TOTALLY.  OVER IT.  He was done with the crying and ready to return to the playground.  After we wiped up the blood he left on the slide, we tried to bundle him into the car and he was having NONE OF IT.

So we let him play for a little bit before I took both kids home in the stroller.  Later, we took him to the emergency room to have his mouth checked out before the weekend, and everything seemed to be fine other than the small gash on the inside of his mouth, and the cut on the outside.

It healed amazingly quickly.  After that day, it didn’t even seem to bother him.  In about 4 days, you could hardly see the wound on the inside of his mouth, which was where most of the blood had come from.

Later that day: Silliness undeterred by mouth wound.

In 2001, I had a joint bridal shower with one Bethany McNichols in Seattle.  We were both to be married that summer to our respective fiances, whom we met in the Theatre department of Seattle Pacific University.

We laughed, exchanged gifts, socialized, ate, and somehow ended up dressed in gowns made of wrapping paper and bows.

It was the beginning of the next stage of our lives.  But I have a feeling that at that time, if you had told us that less than 9 years from then, we would both live in Texas and be hanging out with our combined 4 kids, we probably would have laughed in disbelief.

Funny how the times change…

The kids are really starting to reach that age where they can enjoy each other.  Koren thinks Kaelin is just the coolest thing since string cheese, and Kaelin is a dedicated, if bossy, big sister.

I love walking into a room to find them doing something like this when nobody is watching.  Kaelin doesn’t have this book memorized, so she makes it up as she flips through the pictures.  Koren got to hear all about Snow White’s mean, MEAN step mother who didn’t love Snow White like she should have because she was jealous and that’s NOT NICE.