check this out

Last night, it was very late, I stumbled upon this website. Consequently, I stayed up even later than I had planned and now I'm blogging at 7am because Cameron hasn't learned that you sleep in on Saturdays. anyway..... www.complaintschoir.org Enjoy!

quirky

We have a quirky household. I like it. I like my dwight bobblehead prominently displayed upon the stereo. I like Darren's "filet de crap" from Romania on our display shelf in the living room. I like the framed picture of Cameron with chocolate frosting smeared all over her face in the middle of all the posed pictures. But most of all, I like that my husband likes the quirks too. In fact, he's a contributor. His latest contribution is an ode to Dwight Shrute. He made one of these for each of us and we use them as placemats. The beauty of it is that Cameron loves her picture so much that she has finally spoken her own name, "it's Cameron!" Except, it sounds like "cammen".

fru-nu

So, I'll admit that sometimes, Darren and I become very desparate parents. Our latest dilemma is the state of our children's diets. Our kids prefer to subsist on crackers and juice. They will occasionally humor us by eating yogurt, a pb&j sandwich or some applesauce. The other night we were disgusted by our kid's refusal to eat homemade macaroni and cheese. Yeah, noodles, cheese and a crushed cracker topping... sounds like awful kid-food right? Darren's response (after calming down and putting the kids to bed) was to create a game based on one of our current favorite games, Whoonu. Whoonu is from the Cranium folks. It's a game of ranking random items and scoring points and basically laughing at the ridiculous items you have to rank in order from least to most favorite. Jason loves to play this game. So Darren created Fru-nu. He took Jason to the grocery store, they picked out 8 fruits, 4 we knew we liked and 4 we had never tried before. Jason came up with the idea of tasting the with our eyes closed.... and he actually did it! We found a new language to speak to our son in, games. The results were great. We had a fun afternoon trying new fruits, Jason exhibited bravery in the face of new things and the kids ate something new. I really hope Darren doesn't invent Veg-nu because I would have to pass.

obsession

Hey gang, long time no blog.... sorry. I have been obsessed. About a week and a half ago I got the new Pottery Barn Kids catalog in the mail. I always take this on as a challenge.... how can I get the same cute stuff but for less? In this catalog I was struck by the Thanksgiving stuff, it was all so great and I never think to decorate for Thanksgiving. I really liked the scene where the kids are sitting around their own table, eating their dinner, wearing turkey headbands and looking really festive. I especially liked the banner overhead which read "giving thanks". Not only was it cute, but it was made of felt! Felt! Remember blog readers... I'm into felt lately. Anyway, on Saturday I was at a craft thing at church, talking to the ladies about craft trends (seriously, there are craft trends.... no joke). I mentioned felt and my Pottery Barn banner and a woman exclaimed, "wait right there, don't move, I'm going home right now to get something for you!". About 15 minutes later she returned to church with a huge garbage bag stuffed with felt. She told me that she had been given a ridiculous amount of craft supplies by another woman and she couldn't possibly ever use all of this stuff. She insisted I take some! Amazing! The great thing was that this bag contained a lot of old felt, with colors I haven't seen in stores (because they hadn't been in fashion since 1982). It was perfect for my banner. I went home that night (a little timid because somehow I had to stash a huge bag of felt in our small apartment.... and I had just been muttering that morning about our lack of space...oops) and immediately cut out the pennants. The next day I cut out the leaves and started hand stitching them on. Just yesterday I finished by printing out the letters on my computer and using the templates to cut out the letters. I decided to hot-glue the letters on because all the veins I had stitched on the leaves set me back a few days and I really wanted to get the banner up. I love it! Jason saw the catalog and persuaded me to make some turkey headbands too. Now we're ready for turkey day! Take that, Pottery Barn! I took your $49 banner and made it for free!

attention: Kadin

Would you like to name our new friend? He's been by to visit a few times. Ever since our tiger beetle, named Chocolate, rolled over and died we've been needing a new pet. How about it Kadin?

terrific twos

I'm trying to be optimistic. All weekend Cameron has been making comments about her shirt, only in two-year-old language the word "shirt" is missing the r. Also, she recognizes utensils at the dinner table. Unfortunately, the word "fork" is also missing the r. And so, as we drove to church this morning with Cameron babbling in the backseat about her pretty new shirt (minus the r) I prayed that my daughter would not inadvertantly swear at a sweet, unsuspecting church member. Mission accomplished. Time to work on our r's.

amazing race

"Oh my goth." Did you catch the first episode of The Amazing Race? What? Why not? "The Amazing Race is like a love letter to the planet." You have got to watch. Where else can you hear such fabulous comments like, "you pick donkeys like nobody's business, babe." Sundays at 8... be there!