Haircut

Dear Laney,

We woke up to a beautiful sunrise at our house this morning, then drove into town where we went to the hair salon, waited out turn in the front window, and took turns getting our hair cut. The end.

(Sometimes, there's just not much of a story there). 

Love,

Mom

Sweet Boy

Big Texan

Dear Hagen,

There's a restaurant in Amarillo, TX called The Big Texan Steak Ranch. Here's what it's known for: If you can eat an entire 72 ounce steak in under an hour, you get it free. If you take a step back, it's a ridiculous idea...We're gonna give you this colossal slab of meat. If you eat it, you'll probably be sick for days. Your colon will hate you forever and your heart might explode. No charge!

I think I'm going to take you there and let you have a whack at it.

Boy, you can eat more than anybody I know of any age or size. I can fix your plate and in the time it takes me to walk back to the kitchen to pick up Laney's plate, you're done. I watched you inhale peach slices yesterday without chewing.

For the infant/toddler class at your school, the teachers fill out daily information slips for the parents to take home.  This is what your slip looked like earlier this week:

Sounds like a nice day. But then I started running the numbers. You only go to school from 9a til 3p. If you took a two hour and 45 minute nap, that means you were only awake at school for three hours, give or take. And in three hours, you were able to work in corn puffs, milk, fry bread, chicken curry, a banana and some pretzels. Dang.

Last night, I needed you out of my way so I could fix dinner, so I plopped you in the sink. Not wanting to let any opportunity to eat pass you by, you grabbed a smoothie off the counter and started to multi-task.

Your dad says I need to limit your servings, because if I put food down in front of a Burbach boy, he'll just think it's a challenge that must be conquered.

It's that kind of mentality that keeps The Big Texan in business.

Love,
Mom

Dreaming and Scheming.

Thanks For Coming. Tip Your Server.

Dear Laney,

At the library last week, we checked out a book called Pinkalicious: Tickled Pink.  In it, a girl named Pinkalicious has a joke book, and tells jokes to her friends on the playground, like:

- Where does a cow go on a date?
- To the mooooovies.

On the way home from the store yesterday, you got around to asking me, "Hey mom, what's a joke?" They always say the fastest way to kill a joke is to start explaining it, but just try explaining the concept of a joke. It's the death of comedy.

So in the car, right then and there, you wanted to practice telling jokes. And here's the thing: you have great comedic timing. You know when the punchline should happen, and how it should be delivered, even though your material makes no sense. This is fine - in fact, it's the preferable problem to have. Worse would be if you had great content and couldn't deliver it. Instead, you have incomprehensible material, and you sell the hell out of it.

Here are some of the jokes you came up with from the comfort of your car seat:

Laney: How does a chicken ride a cat?
Mom: I don't know - how?
Laney: By wishing it was was a dog!

See? Makes absolutely no sense, but the structure's right on.

Or:

Laney: How does a bird fly over the South Pole?
Mom: I don't know - how?
Laney: On a house!

But this was my favorite, which happened right after I explained how "knock knock" jokes work:

Mom: Knock knock.
Laney: Who's there?
Mom: Boo.
Laney: Boo who?
Mom: Why are you crying? (ha ha ha)
Laney: Because nobody is coming to my house. (frowny face)

For a second, it was like you had channeled comedian Steven Wright, famous for telling depressing jokes like, "I spilled spot remover on my dog. He's gone now."

I see great promise in your future comedy career.

Remember: Always Vegas. Sometimes Reno. Never Laughlin.

Love,
Mom

Beautiful

Don't You Talk That Way About My Family

Hey y'all -

There's an unwritten rule in the South that you can talk about your family like they're a bunch of mangy no-good dogs, but God forbid someone outside the family says something ugly... then, you have to defend those same no-good morons as if they should be in the mix as the Vatican chooses the new Pope. My favorite example of people talking ugly about their relations happened a few years ago, when I was watching a "Behind the Music" special on CMT about the country music duo, Montgomery Gentry. The narrator, in his professional baritone, was talking about how Eddie Montgomery had fathered some children in a previous marriage. Then, they cut to Eddie's mama, who looked straight into the camera and said, "You know he wadn't no kind of daddy to them children." I mean, who does that on national television? But I'm sure if anyone from outside the family said the same thing to her about Eddie, she'd'a shoved one of her pink curlers up their nose.

Lately, we've been getting a lot of calls to show our house. I know it's a necessary evil, but it's really the worst, because I first have to find a way to get you two out of the house.

Then, I clean until the very moment the realtor and his clients get here. Since I work from home, I typically take a walk as they're looking at the house and sometimes from the other side of our densely-wooded circular driveway, I can hear what they're saying. 

I know everything that's wrong with this house. I could make you an itemized list that would barely fit in a big-ass binder. But that doesn't mean I want a bunch of strangers standing in my driveway sharing their opinions on its relative weaknesses. When I hear them complain about how our well doesn't get enough gallons per minute, or the road is too bumpy, or they laugh about how small it is, I want to get Thor's rifle and tell them to get the hell of my property. Because this house, just like my family, might be screwed up ten ways to Sunday, but it's mine, so hush your mouth. 

The moral here is that I should probably drive somewhere far away when people come to look at my house. 

But today, when someone wanted to show the house, Dad took you guys to town while I finished cleaning, and then I took a walk down the road with my camera and practiced shooting things in manual focus:

Shooting pictures of the neighborhood is way more productive and legal than shooting screechy Yankees with your daddy's gun.

Love,

Mom

Rounding Out The Weekend

Hey y'all -

Dad was out of town this past weekend at a search and rescue conference with the Civil Air Patrol in Helena. Occasionally, I am tempted to knock him in the head, blindfold him, and drop him a hundred miles from nowhere just to see if he can find his way back, and thus prove that I'm getting my money's worth out of all these survival conventions he's been attending.

Since Dad wasn't going to be around, I decided we should have a sleepover at Sue's, because honestly, the idea of keeping a fire going at our house just seemed like too much work. I have not been attending survival conventions.

On Friday, I picked you guys up from school, and watched Laney push Hagen in his stroller all the way to the park.

We played at the regular park for a while, then went to the water park (see yesterday's pictures), then ate tacos. All of Laney's favorite things.

The next day, Hagen took a nap while Laney and I went to the carousel and playground. We played hide and seek, and this is how Laney sometimes hides:

It makes her furious if I find her in under three minutes, so I have to pretend to look for her, talking out loud to myself the whole time while she giggles about how dumb I am. This is the most exhausting use of my drama degree thus far.

Then we rode the carousel. Laney is almost always the youngest kid riding by herself, but that doesn't keep her from striking up a conversation with all the big girls around her, even if they have no idea what she's saying because there's a pipe organ blaring at volume 90 in the background.

The carousel in motion - Laney's in there somewhere.

And then just for fun, as we were walking around from one fun activity to another, I took some pictures in Grandma Sue's neighborhood:

 We all had a great time doing fun things in town, but boy were we all excited when Dad came home.

Love,
Mom

Friday Night At The Indoor Water Park

At The Drive-In Picture Show

Hey y'all -

Over the weekend, I discovered that I'd lost three days worth of photos on my camera, which included Laney's gymnastics class, my Valentine's celebration with your dad, and Hagen trying to feed Ella sweet potatoes. All I can figure is that I put my camera in my bag while it was still on, and something in there bumped against the "delete" button a few times. It's not like it was the photos from someone's wedding or anything, but still - I've been in mourning.

On Valentine's Day, your dad met me after work with a lovely card and a bottle of wine. On the front, he'd written a cute note about how he'd "jump in all over again," and on the back, he'd taped a concert poster of Pat Green, because we met at a Pat Green concert. BUT, he'd chosen an advertisement for Pat's upcoming show on August 5th in San Diego, so when I saw it, I clapped and squealed, "We're going to San Diego?!?" Uh...no. So that was a fun little roller-coaster ride of emotions.

We went out to a lovely dinner. We wanted to do something fun after, but I'm opposed to going to the movies. I know I sound like a cranky geriatric, but I can't stand paying $30 for two people to see a movie that's going to be out on Netflix in a month or so, when I can watch it from the comfort of my own couch. Also, the older I get, the more irritated I become by humanity, and I swear if I go to one more event just to watch the person next to me type text messages on their brightly-lit screen the entire time, I'm going to go out of my gourd. YOU DON'T NEED TO LIVE TWEET YOUR ENTIRE EXISTENCE, YOUNGER GENERATION.

So, going to the movies was out.

Here's what we did: We went to Big Dipper Ice Cream, where I got a hot fudge sundae, then we parked outside Grandma Sue's house (close enough to pick up her Wifi). We turned on our seat warmers, put the iPad up on the dash, and enjoyed a drive-in movie on Netflix from the comfort of our own front seat.

Perfection.

Love,
Mom

Producing Preschool

Hey y'all -

So, we've banded together with a few other parents in town to teach a rotating preschool class - three hours every Wednesday at one family's house. Every fourth Wednesday, it will be our turn to host, and today was our first time.

To prepare, I searched a lot of preschool blogs looking for activities. Scratch that. To prepare, I called Thor and old him he'd best plan on taking the afternoon off work, because if he thought I was going to entertain multiple young'uns in our house all by myself, he had another thing coming.

Here's what I learned today: preschoolers enjoy an activity in inverse proportion to how much time you spent planning it. If, say, you've planned a craft that required you to spend hours cutting out a bunch of pieces of paper for the kids to assemble, they'll think it's lame. If you say, "Um...I've got some food coloring in the pantry. What if we mix it all up in jars and see how it looks?" they'll proclaim it awesome.

I had the idea that we'd have a loose theme of "Things that Fly," since Thor was going to be home and could talk about planes and being a pilot. We made paper airplanes and launched them off our second floor. The kids got to play with Thor's helmet and turn on the microphone light and try it on.

Her name is Cedar but you can call her Maverick.

I made marshmallow launchers out of paper cups and balloons. No one cared.

I put mason jars on the table with vinegar and food coloring and said, "Well, why don't we take this ten pounds of white rice and turn it different colors?" Everyone loved it.

Yep, she's dying the marshmallows from the last project. 

When the girls wanted to paint and Shea didn't, Thor taught him how to tie knots and they practiced lassoing a moose, which is actually a useful skill here in Montana.

When it was over and the kids had gone home, I got a call from my friend Will, asking me how it went. Will and I are great friends and have been in the TV business together for 12 years or so. I said, "It's tough, because they get bored so quickly, so to keep them from wandering off, you have to keep throwing out new ideas and coming up with crazy ways to capture their attention." "Sounds like network executives when we're pitching a show," Will said, "You don't like that idea? Try this one? Don't like it yet - here! We'll throw in a monkey. Do you like it now?"

Exactly. Preschoolers and Network Executives: Loud and self-obsessed, with the attention span of a gnat.... but you wouldn't be half as entertained without 'em. 

Five minutes after the other kids left.

Love,
Mom