Stories of the Kids

A couple of stories and a couple of pictures. They're not really related at all.

The first day in New Mexico we took the kids to the park behind our house in our "scifi neighborhood". That's what I call it because there is all evidence of current human civilization except for the presence of humans. It's a little freaky. Actually, while we were at the park 3 other kids showed up, but they saw our two kids on this huge playground and decided it was too crowded. They went to the side to wait on the grass until we were done. "Scifi kids". Weird. Anyway, Ben was very curious about this new place called New Mexico. So I asked him to throw away a piece of trash on the playground and he responds, "Why? Because we need to keep New Mexico clean?" Later that night, while in the bath, I told him to stop splashing water out of the tub. He asked, "Why? Because we need to keep New Mexico dry?" He is definitely our question child. Katie gets after me all the time because I'll go to tell him to do something that she is afraid will start a barrage of never ending questions.



As you can tell from the pictures, the kids got new sunglasses to deal with the New Mexico sun, which is really not any different than the Utah sun, but whatever. There must be some difference though, because Katie keeps these kids lathered in sun block. I figure if there is a link between sunblock and cancer we will be the first to find it.



Anyway Katie got a little bit of a surprise tonight. Upon finding both kids in their rooms she asked if they were in bed already. "No, we're in timeout", they replied. "Why are you in timeout?", she asked. Ben wouldn't tell her but Kallie proudly (and loudly) proclaimed, "Because we said Penis!" Needless to say she got sent there because she was copying her brother and still didn't quite comprehend why she was there. This is because she is so close to her brother that she shares everything with him including his punishment. More than half the time when he gets in trouble and sent to time out she'll respond, "okay, I'm going".



Onto the Costco Card Nazis. Oh, yeah. They exist and they are real although they seem to be out of a Seinfield episode. At home we just walk into Costco no problem. I mean who can shop at Costco without a Costco card? Right? How many times is someone going to walk up to a register after shoping and not be able to purchase it? Apparently, it's a problem here because walking into Costco without flashing your card is like trying to walk into Fort Knox and walk out with a gold brick. They will stop and detain you. It gets better. Flashing a Costco Cash card isn't good enough either. I've heckled and harrassed them, but next time I think I'm going to pretend I just don't hear them and see if they'll really call security on me. I'm all for people being devoted to their doing a good job, but I'm completely against hiring devoted idiots.

This is home...for now

So here is where we are living. I really like the house and it is in a quiet neighborhood. (And the cool white van is Chris's rental car...Ben was upset it wasn't a convertible :)) In fact the street is normally lined with cars...but we never see any people...kinda creepy huh? But something happens around 8:30pm. People appear from no where...parks have kids playing, people exercising, dogs running. It is like a different world! There is a park behind our house. In fact if we didn't have a block wall the park would be our backyard. We have yet to see any kids play there...except for ours. I love that it has grass! Our front yard, and backyard, is just ROCKS and more ROCKS, so it is nice to see something green. While we were looking at houses we learned that you can only have 20% of your landscaped yard grass. So we don't see having a beautiful lawn like we have now at home in our future!

We live across the street from the community center that has a fun spray park that the kids love...and I love the price! It only costs me $.50 to take all four of us. Chris and I bought a year long membership for a whopping $13.00. Amazing huh?!? They have a great gym that we like to go to every night, and fun things like pool tables, basketball, yoga class, etc. It is a great place and we really like it. It makes the days fly by, which is also nice :)

Andrew

Andrew is such an incredible baby. He is so easy going and just fun to be around. People always ask us when he started smiling, and we both say the same thing...pretty much from the day he was born. My favorite thing to do is sit down and just talk to Andrew. He gets so into the conversation and really responds. His smile just takes over his whole face and he just lights up. Ben and Kallie are always fighting over who gets to talk to Andrew. We love Andrew and thought you all would like to see how big he is getting!

Check out those rolls! What a proud mom I am! I love big babies!

Yep, for some reason this little guy loves his tongue! In fact from the day he was born that is how we knew if he was really sleeping...his tongue would be out. (maybe that was the only way he could sleep with all those tubes everywhere and it has just stuck with him!)

Oh Yes, She did it

Kallie has the most beautiful curly hair I have ever seen (can anyone tell where this is going?). It is just starting to get long enough to do fun things like french braids. In fact this was her hair 3 days ago.....

Beautiful huh?? I was actually going to do a post on how beautiful and fun her hair is to do now.....

Well yesterday we had a great day. We went to church, looked at a few homes, and then came home and took a family nap. I love family naps, and after the busy day on Saturday (zoo pics to follow soon) that we had everyone needed one. There is just one thing I don't like about naps....the night the follows. It was horrible. Ben and Kallie just had too much energy to sleep. So as soon as Andrew went to sleep Chris and I fell asleep and left the other two to play in there rooms. I think they crashed around midnight. I woke up this morning and was really impressed how well they did just playing in their rooms and that they actually fell asleep on their own. So this morning I was running my hands thru Kal's hair as I told her how proud I was that she was so good last night. Then something strange happened. A BIG clump of hair came out with my hand. I asked her what had happened to her hair. She said she cut it last night...her words were "I made myself into a princess mom!" Apparently while she was being so good she found a pair of scissors in her room. Well anyone knows Kids+scissors+no parent=haircut! I was really proud of myself. I just told her not to do that again and that she had lost privileges with scissors for today. She was fine with that and we started breakfast.

After breakfast was bath time. Kallie washed her "princess hair" all on her own. When she got out I was brushing her hair and to my horror another HUGE clump of hair came out. Yep, she had cut more than I had found that morning. I was shocked to discover that she had cut her hair in multiple places. Luckily she had really curly hair, so I don't think I will have to cut it to even it out. Here are the pictures of the big glob of hair and how short it is now.

I decided this was defiantly blog worthy so I headed upstairs to post. What is that I feel on my feet in her room? Yep, more hair...sigh. Good Bye french braids! See you in a few more months!

The Final Leg!!

While K updates you with little stories of what is going on at the moment, I will continue to deliver a chronological monologue of our trip and experiences. The last day of our trip to New Mexico was a great day and I hope I can remember enough of the details to adequately satisfy the most gossipy... sorry, inquiring minds.

We woke up the next morning a little too early. This was evidenced by K who, though she awoke cheery, did not quite make it through breakfast. This was mostly due to Kallie who did not quite make it through breakfast herself. K took the two kids down to eat while I stayed in the room with the still sleeping A. Not 5 minutes later I get a call on the room phone for me to come pick up Kallie at the elevator. Apparently, in that 5 minutes Kallie managed to spill two bowls of cereal over the table and floor, throw-up, and have a kicking and screaming-at-the-top-of-her-voice fit in the middle of the breakfast area. I was so proud. She really is talented. So K finished breakfast with B and came back and then I got to go eat. For K's sake I'll tell you it was the worst breakfast ever. I was all alone, nobody sat at the same table as me, nobody asked me to get them anything after I had just sat down or spilled their food or wanted half of what I was eating. Just calm and peaceful and serene. It was horrible.

After that I took the kids swimming because I am the greatest father in the whole world. K just begged me to let her take them so that she would have to deal with... I mean get to spend more time with them, but I said "no, I'm going to take them swimming no matter how hard they cry." Actually, they were dying to go swimming, and K couldn't have taken them anyway because she "conviently" (read "purposefully"?) packed half of her swimsuit in our suitcase and the other half in some nebulous container in the trailer.

We finally got on the road and we were on our way to Meteor Crater. For those of you who are less educated in the geology of meteor sites, Metor Crater is not only the most well preserved meteor crater on the planet, it was also the first one proved to be from an actual piece of rock from outer space. (Most craters have been created by volcanic activity.) We half suspected that it might be a hoky tourist trap just off of I-40 in the middle of nowhere, but it was actually pretty darn cool. They had quite the little museum and even a fun movie in a nice, but small theatre. Our kids have recently adopted habit of sitting on the VERY FRONT ROW of movie theatres and in their not-so-soft-voice they love to comment on the movie we're watching. (Katie blames me for this, but I don't know what she's talking about...) They have a bunch of astronaut and space shuttle stuff there because back in the day before it was a tourist destination astronauts used to train there just in case they got to go to the moon. (Upon landing on the moon, I believe Neil Armstrong's first words were actually "Hey, this is nothing like Meteor Crater!").












The next leg of our trip deserves a small intro. The night before I was sitting in the hotel room looking at our trip the next day when I realized I-40 passes straight through the Petrified Forest National Park. I believe my words at that point were, "This is so cool! We HAVE to go to the Petrified Forrest tomorrow!! It is so neat!" I had been there once as a kid when I lived in Arizona. Katie got very excited about it also when I told her how there were these fossilized trees that had turned to stone over millions of years, and we decided we would go to the petrified forrest. What could happen from there right?

Well, my description of things might have been a little TOO colorful, because Katie was envisioning a FORREST. Like, a REAL forrest. Trees hundreds of feet in the air that had turned to stone. A slightly scary and spooky place: the natural world's analog of a ghost town. A freak area in the middle of the desert where a prehistoric forrest had defied the forces of time. Oops.

Let's put it mildly and say she was furious. As we approached the national park her eyes were scanning the landscape and horizon. By the time we drove through the south entrance and paid our fee with no forrest in sight she was starting to warm up. As we parked at the museum and visitor center she was furious. "It's just desert!!!!" were her exact words. This is the only time I have ever looked at my beautiful bride and could imagine her actually swearing in her mind. Not realizing the deception that had taken place, I was a little confused as why she was reacting this way but I was in no way confused about how she actually felt.

She hopped out of the car and started snapping pictures of mostly nothing to mock document my excitation of visiting the petrified forrest. "Look kids its a rock. Look kids its an ugly desert tree. Don't walk off the path kids, rattlesnakes will bite you and kill you." I know when to keep my mouth shut, but the kids are now deathly afraid of snakes and the desert.






By the time we walked into the museum I finally figured it out. "Did you think we going to visit an ACTUAL forrest?" I asked. A park ranger overheard and jumped in to explain what the petrified forrest really was and how thousands of visitors a year come there with the same confusion. By the time it was through, Katie was sitting in the museum laughing so hard streams of maskara were running down her cheeks and collecting on her chin. The ranger didn't understand and thought she was still upset, which only made it funnier.







Of course they had a little movie, and of course the kids wanted to sit in the very first row and comment on it. In the end we had a lot of fun. By the time we drove through the park back to the Painted Desert and I-40 Katie was in pretty good spirits and admitted it was a pretty cool, and beautiful place.




Again, for those of you who are geologically unschooled, the petrified forrest had its roots over 250 million years ago when the earth was in a formation known as pangea. That is, all the continents were stuck together as one super continent. At that time Arizona was actually in prime position to be a tropical forrest. Trees along river banks that managed to fall in became water logged, sank to the bottom and were covered in volcanic ash. The ash infused silica into the wood, which replaced the cellulose. Over millions of years crystals were seeded by the silica and grew in the presence of the various minerals necessary for the creation of valuable gems. Rings of quartz and amythyst and other precious stones slowly replaced the actual trees. Over time, geological activity along with erosion brought the trees back to the surface. The area was exploited for a long time before it became protected as a National Forrest. Even today, the park estimates that over 1 ton of pretrified material is stolen from the park every month. As a testament to that, the park has an incredibly impressive collection of letters of apology that are continuously sent in along with the stolen specimen. They are pretty serious about prosecuting people too. As we were driving through the park we saw that rangers had stopped a car and had the family sitting on a fence while they ransacked through their stuff looking for petrified wood.

We were finally on our way to Albuquerque. After a dinner stop at McDonald's in Gallup, we arrived in ABQ at about 9pm. What a day!

Last night we took the kids to the park and as we were getting in the car, Kallie said "Mom, I have a sandbox in my shoe!" No wonder she was walking so slow!