Be Vewy,Vewy Qwiet, I'm Hunt'n Wudolph

Beak told me a fantastic story the other day, and I'm begging her to get the picture so I can scan it in.

Reagger's Daddy, Uncle C is a dedicated and ferocious hunter. Remember Gaston from Beauty and the Beast? The Dude that uses antlers in all of his decorating? That's Uncle C (If he was built a little more like me). Walk into his house and the first thing you see is a big ol' Honkin' bison head on the wall. Right now, it is festively attired with a large Santa hat. 'Tis the Season, after all.

In my vast experience with 4 year olds, I find that when they are not unintentionally destroying your sanity, they are trying desperately to please you.


*****We interrupt this regularly scheduled anecdote to bring you the following spontaneous migraine headache.....

Beak just walked in with Reaggers and Bub. She says to me "Reaggers asked on the way over if I thought they'd get to play music again today. Thought you'd like that." Then she left. Quickly. I don't blame her. It's her birthday today.

Reaggers Bub and Peff are now upstairs "playing" improvisational, Post-Modern jazz with baseball stadium and hockey rink influences.

At 8:30 in the A.M. Full blast.

Critically magnificent. Disturbing to the audience. Where the #$&! is that Tylenol?....Oh, yeah. Happy Birthday Beak. You are OLD!!!!!OLD, OLD, OLD!!!!!

We now return you to our regularly scheduled posting*****

As I was saying, the typical 4 year old is desperate to please their parents.

When the mood suits them.

Now Reaggers, like many children her age is something of an art prodigy. Her proclivities for modern cave-wall art are familiar to regular readers of this forum and do not need to be rediscussed here. And as the Holiday season approaches, her thoughts and inspirations seem to have turned to Christmas themes.

With this in mind, the tyke presented her mother with an Opus Magnum depiction of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

"Check out all the points on him, mom! I gave him an extra big rack!"

Beak assures me that she's talking about antlers. I, for one, am disappointed. But Uncle C, hunter that he is, should be smiling proudly. You gotta love a kid who loves what you do. If I get a lithograph print of the original, I'll copy it for all to enjoy.

Time to go. It's baking day and we are making sugar "plum" cookies. More later.

A Pretty Good Trade, Huh?

I got Squizzle to take a rare morning nap, and after a sick day at home for Reaggers and Bub, they have joined forces with Peff to get up to their usual tricks.

Last week, we did our annual pre-Christmas purge, going through the toy room with a snow shovel (I'm not kidding). It was an overdue chore that makes the house feel a thousand times better now that it is done. Since I have no access to a pickup truck, I had the city deliver one of their neighborhood clean up dumpsters to the drive way. They are free and you can schedule them twice a year. We opened the end of the dumpster, lined the kids up and gave them things to take out, one a time.

They thought the dumpster was the neatest thing since sliced bread. They should have found it the neatest thing since gamma-globulin shots, because I'm fairly certain that they all have tetanus, hepatitis, and possibly cholera for their efforts. But now that it is clean, the kids are up there playing. Peff is pounding on the organ, Reaggers is puffing on a recorder and Bub is hitting a bucket like a drum and playing a harmonica.

In the paraphrased words of Clark Griswold, "Hallelujah! Holy Crap! Where's the Tylenol?"

On a sad note, during the purge, I found yet another box in the storage room that had been destroyed by the great flood of '08. If you haven't heard the story, last summer, our 20 year old hot water heater sprung a leak. Since it is in a closet in the garage, it took who knows how long to discover it. The water dripped down a pipe access hole in the wooden floor of the closet and into the storage area in the basement. We didn't find out about it until the carpet in our bedroom got wet. About half the stuff we had in storage got ruined, including the Christmas decorations. It put a sour note on an otherwise very nice Christmas last year. The kids letters to and from Santa, all their school made ornaments, and some sentimental knickknacks were all destroyed (including my Simpson's Christmas village that we had spent years and more money than I care to think about collecting).

Fortunately the tree and Mom's knitted Christmas socks were in a box that miraculously did not get wet. Now I bring this up for two reasons. First, I found that other box during the purge (and I will get back to that, I promise). Second, just last week, the Boss and I were at the store looking at decorations. The subject of the lost ornaments came up; in particular one little Pillsbury Dough Boy riding a spatula that the Eldest picked when she was not quite one for her first Christmas ornament. It broke the Boss's heart that it was gone, and I tried, rather lamely, to convince her that what counts with those things is the memories they represent. The times from early in our family when the Eldest was small, the kids first Christmas's and the like. "It's gone," I said "and there's nothing we can do about it. We just have to keep the memories and forget about the things." The Boss agreed and we dropped it.

Until the next day when we pulled out the decorations box. While the kids were hanging ornaments, I found a little knickknack box in the bottom. It was hidden by some Christmas table cloths. Guess what was in that box?

I'm all in. Whatever you want, Lord. No one can tell me that Father in Heaven does not answer the prayers of a mother's heart. Moses didn't part the red sea, no one walked on water or healed the blind (yet), but you can not convince me that the silly little Dough Boy ornament was not a miracle on par with any of those. It was quite the thing to experience, and I'm grateful for it because it steeled me for the rest of the week.

Which brings me back to the box of destroyed stuff I found. When I cleaned up the storage closet after the flood, I wound up tossing about half of what was in there. I checked everything else and put it back into storage. I must have missed this box, because it was pretty well destroyed. And it contained the bulk of my mission stuff. Two or three photo albums, my Chinese scriptures, my discussions, my language cards, and of course, my journal. I'm still not sure how I feel about that. On the one hand, I have to (and want to) keep the advice I gave the Boss last week. It's the memories that are important, not the physical representation of them. On the other hand, a journal is recorded memories.

For years, I have said that I am grateful for my mission, but if I never see any of those I served with again, I'll be ok. I don't miss them. I learned what I needed to learn, and I moved on. It has not escaped me that none of them has tried to hunt me down, either. More importantly, I'm not that guy anymore. If someone were to read those pages (and trust me... no one could read them now if they wanted to), the man writing this post and the kid writing that journal would have no clue as to who the other really was or has become. So while I may have lost a memory of what I was, I have lost nothing of what it made me.

And this leads me to two conclusions. First, I prefer a blog to a journal. Now if the house burns down, a flood rises up, my computer crashes, the apes take over or whatever; I can't lose the next chapters of my life the way I lost the first (Even Nephi lost a few pages off the front of his record, that's not bad company, is it?).

And second?

I'd trade every picture, letter, journal and souvenir of Taiwan in order to see the Boss light up again like she did when that Dough Boy fell out of the box. It was a fair trade I'd take any day of my life. Thanks again, Lord.

Merry Christmas!!

Soap Poisoning

Ahh, I love Christmas. That time of year when we celebrate the birth of our Lord. I love most everything about the Holidays, from Marshmallow Popcorn to spending time with family. From giving gifts to acts of service. But my favorite thing about Christmas has to be Christmas movies. I love 'em. All of 'em.

I think this has a great deal to do with the fact that I have lived a good deal of them. Every Christmas for the last four years, every wise-acre who knows me suddenly becomes a board-certified eye surgeon who is convinced to their inner most core that Kerataconus is a fancy Latin term for soap poisoning. And I suppose that may be it. Though I was never allowed a BB gun (Even with good eyes, would you want a somewhat less mature version of me with a semi-lethal firearm?), I did want one.

And I admit that my language has been, shall we say, "J. Goldenesque" (If I wasn't home, I was in a locker room). But I sure knew better than to cuss in front of my mother. And on those occasions when I did mess up, nobody bothered with soap. I just got my teeth rattled. So no, fans of Ralphie; I don't have soap poisoning.

We did get a flat tire on the way to a Christmas party once and I was tempted to call the eldest out to help me change it, but thought better of it. And that same year we had a Grinch steal Christmas right out from the locked trunk of our car(The only person who knew there was anything in there was the mechanic who replaced the tire. Hmmm....). Whoever the Grinch was must not have heard our "Who singing" (Puzey does a fine Cindy Lou Who impersonation), because we never got anything back. Oh well.

And I know what it feels like to be both Cousin Eddie ("The gas money gave out in Gurney, we coasted into town on fumes") and George Bailey ("I wish I had a million dollars..."), as in recent years the Boss and I have been the undeserving objects of many of Santa's best honorary elves. I can't really explain what it feels like to be thirty five years old and find yourself re-evaluating your belief in the Head Elf.

A few years ago, it was like one of those cartoons when Elmer Fudd chases Buggs Bunny behind a door, and when he opens it there is nothing in the closet, then he opens it again and there is something, and he takes it and closes the door and when he opens it again, there are two somethings, and then four somethings, and then eight. Every time I opened the door we found that someone had been thinking about us at Christmas time. All of it was anonymous, and it was plainly the work of several people working independent of one another. They had to be causing a traffic jam in front of the house. It was (get the soap ready) the damnedest thing I have ever been blessed with. When the Lord says he will open the windows of heaven and pour out a blessing that you won't have room enough to receive it? I get that now. So I get George Bailey. I really do.

It occurs to me that some of you loyal readers probably had more than something to do with that, and if so, thank you. You'll be glad to know that this year, the Boss and I are square with Santy Claus, and things are a little more "White Christmas" around here. But I look forward to being an Elf again soon.

Merry Christmas!

Snuggies

Peff was helping with the cookies when I hear him say, "I just gave Bub a Snuggie". Instantly suspicious, I turned and asked him what a "snuggie" was. "This", he said, wrapping Bub into a headlock and delivering what I had always heard called "Knuckle nuggies". I guess snuggie is close enough. For demonstration sake, Peff and Motor took turns. Bub just took it with good grace, he's the smallest.

Hey, Uncle Fatdaddy, Does He look like a present?

I guess they thought the blanket was pretty good wrapping paper.

Chubby Bunny Cookies

When I was a 17 year old punk I once went to a Young Men's activity where we played a wonderful little game called "Chubby Bunnies". We had two large bags of giant marshmallows, and the object of the game was to put a marshmallow in your mouth and say the sentence "I am a chubby bunny". Whoever could say the sentence coherently with the most marshmallows stuffed in his pie hole was the winner. After about 5 a piece, things started to get....slobbery. The Young Men's leader had a wife who had a thing about teenagers drooling on her carpet (there's no accounting for taste), and provided us with a cookie sheet to catch drippings and expectorated marshmallow goo.

When we got done we had this incredibly disgusting tray of ooze. Someone (It wasn't me) got the brilliant idea of turning it into Marshmallow Crispy Treats. This was the extent of our baking prowess at the time, most of us having spent the semester of home-ec that is required to learn to make Orange Julius and Marshmallow Crispy Treats.

Once we got started, though, it was (as all church related youth activities tend to be) all downhill from there. The inevitable dare, double dare and triple dog dare insult matches took place until someone (I'm not going to say it wasn't me) got the clever and amusing idea of taking them to the church where the Young Women were meeting. "They'll never expect it, 'cause they aren't brownies!" said an anonymous moron (who may or may not have been me). No youth in Utah would eat a brownie back in the ancient days of my youth as someone had discovered you could make them with chocolate ExLax. We were a little meaner back in the pre-political correctness days.

Now this wasn't entirely as mean spirited as it sounds. Looking back, I think it was a really pathetic attempt at flirtation. You know, show them how clever we could be, demonstrate our domestic skills, (good thing I practiced those, huh?), let them see our thoughtfulness, that sort of thing. Come to think of it, it now makes sense why none of the ward girls wanted much to do with us.

Our wet blanket leader heard our devious plot and put the immediate kaibosh to it. He threw them away, making them at the same time both more unavailable and more desirable to give as "gifts". I still wonder if we'd have gotten away with it if we'd just....

Never mind. The reason I retell this saga of lost youth is that today is baking day! We made peanut butter cookies with chocolate kisses smashed into 'em. Now Bub has a peanut allergy. It gives him what the Chinese call "hot stomach". And the last thing in the universe that I need right now is to be potty training a child with "hot stomach". So Bub was not allowed anywhere in the vicinity of the dough. Instead I put him to work "peeling" the Kisses of their foil wrappers. After a moment of supervision to make sure he had it down, I went back to mixing dough.

When I checked up on him a minute later, I caught him popping a kiss into his mouth.

"Don't eat that!" I hollered. "Those are for the cookies!"

Being a diligent and obedient tot he pulled it back out of his mouth and attempted to drop it back into the bowl of peeled kisses.

"Argghh!" I said, eloquently stating my feelings as I snatched the bowl away. I checked the bowl for soggy Kisses and found none; but the point is (and I know I have disappointed my favorite Auntie) that I can't be entirely certain that these cookies have not been "Chubby Bunnied".

I'm sorry. Bub is sorry too. But we will make it up to you soon. I'll start right now by not writing a joke that is both really funny and really gross, even though I want to and that way I won't ruin your appreciation of these delicious cookies.

Now I've got to go, the boys just found a bag of large marshmallows. I'm not kidding. I wish I were.

Fatdaddy's Guide to Potty Training

Since Beak refused to chicken out and wait, Bub started potty training over the holiday. The diaper bag has been transformed into a mobile Bub wardrobe. It's hilarious. I think Beak just dumped the contents of his dresser drawers into a bag.

And I love it. I don't have to worry about clothes, just making sure he doesn't have an accident. Yesterday was not so good as its been a few years since we did this with Peff, and I forgot several important rules. For ease of reference, I have compiled my ages of wisdom here in a little piece I like to call "Fatdaddy's Guide to Potty Training.

First, all toddlers are LIARS!!!!!!
Ask one if they have to go, and the little monkey will look you dead in the eyes and shake their little head as fast as they can. "No!", they will say, firmly and with conviction. And it's true, they don't have to go. Because you got your verb tenses wrong. They don't need to go, they already went. In between the time you confirmed they were dry and when you asked the question.

Remedy: Don't ask. Just take them every half hour and sit them down until they go. Don't take no for an answer, but do take a book. As long as there are no other runts destroying the house behind your back, you can usually get a chapter in before they go or you are sure they don't have to.

No sooner than I finish writing this than Bub tells me he has had an accident. "Oh, Come on!" I said to him. "We just went!" So I check him and he has not, in fact had an accident. He looks up at me, laughs and runs away. LIARS!!!!!!

Second,when you move, move fast.
I have seen with my own bad eyes, children who wet their pants while I was putting the seat down. Peff was the worst. He'd stand there looking at the bowl and pee down his leg. You can't yell at 'em, they don't get it, but wow! All you can do is pull your hair out, which once again explains why I am bald.

Remedy: Don't bother putting pants on 'em, just let 'em run around in their drawers. It saves time, reminds them constantly of what is going on, and frankly, it gets the boys a head start on their Man Cards. This is because one of the initiation requirements for Manhood is to spend an entire week hanging out (pun intended?) in their underpants. Mothers, of course do not understand this requirement. Particularly those mothers who were raised with only sisters, but there is no clepping out of this step. Fathers are also required to take a refresher course on this requirement on those rare occasions when tact and public decency laws allow.

Third, remind them often.
Keep it on their minds, so they don't lose track of what they are doing. FOCUS!!! Ask every 10 minutes, and take them every half hour (see rule 1). Frequency and consistency are the keys to the potty training engine.

Remedy: the best tool in your kit is a motivated sibling.
This is a new tip, courtesy of Beak's ingenuity. Most parents are familiar with the old, "go in the potty, win a prize" game. B.F. Skinner was right, who isn't motivated by treats? I know for a fact that this little gimmick worked wonders for one of Uncle K's kids, though it cost my brother about a third of his yearly wages in Hot Wheels cars.

But Beak, she took it to a different level. If Bub goes, Reaggers gets a treat too. This has resulted in not only motivating an indifferent subject, but also a bossy and demanding older sister (She is too bossy and demanding. All sisters are bossy and demanding. It is their nature; as it is our nature to run around in our drawers. We learn this in Man School). There is nothing as consistent as Reaggers when she wants something. "Bub! Go potty! now!" It's the "My way or the highway" method. Reaggers is going to get her treat, come hell or high water. The kid is right out of Max and Ruby.


And there you have it; Fatdaddy's Guide to Potty Training. If you follow these simple rules, you will find success, and find it quickly.

Yesterday, under the tutelage of an out of practice, out of patience uncle, Bub went (again, pun intended) 0 for 2 with one of the accidents being the dreaded #2 (for tips on this, see the section titled "Mothers, Their Responsibility").

Today, under the experienced watch of an assured and repentant uncle, we are 4 for 4 with no accidents. That's a Hall of Fame average for any boy!

Well, that's all for now. I have to go see why Bub is standing in a puddle of lemonade.....Oh, damnit!

Thanksgiving Pictures

PIctures: Pumpkin Cookies

Just realized I never posted about the pumpkin cookies last Wednesday. They are really easy. Mix one big can of pumpkin with two packages of spice cake mix, add chocolate chips and spoon it onto a greased cookie sheet. So simple even we couldn't screw it up. There's a bonus pick of my mashed potato assembly line. Fifty pounds of spuds mashed into 4 crock pots. How Irish can I possibly get?

So Much to Write, So Little Time...

Well, after an excellent long holiday weekend, I'm recharged and ready to go.

First, a little business. It would appear that thanks to a less than enthusiastic response to my "Pick the treat, win the prize" competition, My Aunt will be getting a plate of peanut butter kiss cookies and I won't bother to put it in a poll. How we get them to Kamas this week is something we may need to work out still. The rest of the December treats have been planned and I'll release the information as necessary.

Next, a report on Thanksgiving weekend. Wow. Mom and Dad had over thirty people over for dinner. Since we were all at a loss as to where to put them, Dad got the excellent idea of dinner in the garage. He left the turkey fryer on and that bad boy heated up the whole room in only a few minutes (Quick safety note, don't try this at home without your own personal safety professional to supervise).

I got some pretty good pictures of everyone lining up and with the unpainted walls in the garage (though it is the cleanest garage, ever; much cleaner than my house)it did sort of look like a line at a soup kitchen. Everybody was responsible for bringing part of the meal. Mom and Dad had 50 pounds of bird cooked and because Aunt M and Puzilla do not care for turkey, they added a ham. Puzey was really excited about that until she decided that it would be bad manners for her not to eat the whole thing and she didn't seem to think she was up to eating that much meat. Grandma assured her that it was okay for her to only eat as much as she wanted, but by that time the poor little bug had worked herself into a pretty hefty migraine and wasn't very hungry. Aunt L was a real helper as she understands the pain involved with migraines and she was very kind to poor Puzilla.

Beak did an excellent job with the rolls, and I got to make 50 pounds of mashed potatoes. It was brutal. I woke up at 8 and started peeling, dicing and boiling spuds. I started to feel like Beetle Bailey. Seriously, there was nearly 10 pounds of peels in the trash when I got done. I wasn't sure if I should toss 'em or call my neighborhood bootleggers.

I added butter and milk and hit 'em with the ol mixmaster. I made two textures. "Whipped like a Circus Monkey", and "Bumpy as a Good Looking Girl". I personally prefer the Bumpy variety, but that might be because I just got my Man Card back.

Perhaps the most interesting discussion over dinner was when we all began teasing Uncle R's friend Tony about putting on weight. It was a little like Irishmen calling a Russian a drunk. Tony said he wanted to loosen his belt and Uncle K offered to lend him a pair of sweatpants. Uncle T said that you knew you were getting fat when you just gave up and wore sweats to dinner. I said you were getting really fat when you had to take the drawstring out of the sweats so they'd fit. Then Grandpa mentioned that you'd reach the top when you wore suspenders with your sweats. Very funny stuff and it was good to get everyone together to be thankful for the many blessings we have all had this year. It has sure beat the last couple for me!


I'll get the camera set back up and unload a few pics when I get the chance.