Hungry, hungry hippos

Thank goodness for Hungry Hungry Hippos! That game has saved my sanity over the last two days. Even with the children behaving as well as they have, I still need to distract them every once in a while. They got dressed for church this morning and played while I got ready.



It seemed like all the children in our congregation had the wiggles today. During Primary closing exercises, it was next to impossible to get in a word over the babble of the small crowd of children that was in attendance today.



Trevor's eye looks worse, although I suspect that it is feeling a lot better. Anthony joked around the lunch table that Trevor wouldn't have to dress up for St. Patrick's Day because the bruise around his eye is already green.



Posted by Jeremiah on March 11, 2007 at 11:59-ish PM

Laundry

Nice. I think being two parents is bad for my health. I'm definitely coming down with something. I had a nap today, and it didn't help at all. When I woke up, I couldn't clear the cobwebs.

At least the kids and I had a fun time today. We started with breakfast at White Trash 'R' Us, I mean, Denny's. It never fails to amuse me to see the waitresses' eyes pop out when I bring in all my kids, and today I only had four of them. They were so well behaved, I think mostly because they were so busy eating.



Then we went to Mart of Walls. Boy, you can have so much fun when you have endless opportunity to indulge your eccentricities. I can't wait until we all know how to set the alarms on the watches in the jewelry department.



Well, the laundry couldn't be put off like cleaning the dishes. I can't wear paper underwear--not comfortably, at any rate, I'm sure. Styrofoam wouldn't be much better either. As a man, I'm just glad to pull underwear out of the wash that's not been pinkified. The kids were really great with folding and stowing the laundry, and they were rewarded with orange-vanilla floats. Yummy.

Doing dishes

How many days can one man and four children go without doing the dishes? Just two, it would seem. There were so many dishes to do that I ran out of space to put them while they dried. I started on the dishes while the kids were still eating breakfast and was washing until well past nine. My plan of buying new ones to eat off of has been on the backburner until next week.



I'm making new friends at work. Here's a couple million of them that I popped in the spectrophotometer this afternoon.



Trevor had another fun day at a friend's house. Here he is with his friend, Jordan.

Red Eye

Wow. Stayed up waaay too late last night to check in on Tamara after she got in to her parents' house in Utah. I will be going to sleep much earlier tonight, I think...

My mom says that the kids are already suffering from IMM syndrome (I Miss Mommy), and she's probably not far off the mark. While the discipline hasn't yet reached Lilo and Stitch proportions ("She disciplines me real good.... Sometimes five times a day! With bricks... in a pillow case..."), it was meted out hard upon the heels of our arrival home this evening. I told the kids that Mommy isn't here to tell me that I can't send them to bed without dinner. The sad part is that they believe me.

Trevor was looking forward with anticipation to his stay at "Yaizah's" house today. He was calling her name before we had even gotten on our way. Eliza and Trevor had obviously had a good time, as they were only too happy to pose for me when I picked up Trevor this evening. (And Trevor got a nap. Yea!)



Thank goodness for our neighbor, Luci. She has taken on watching the school kids until Daddy is able to pick them up after work. Her apartment looks like it's been devastated by Hurricane Joneskids.





What good helpers I have, and not just when threatened with banishment without dinner! The girls are helping each other wash their hair. The boys are playing together and setting the table. And everyone is putting on smiley faces for Daddy's pictures.



Of course, they're still kids, and don't always have the sense to eat food that really is quite tasty. Tamara and I are both amazed that they aren't crazier about the tamale casserole that I warmed up tonight. Even the sauteed green beans with onions were a bigger hit!



I am happy to report that Trevor's head is looking better today. If only I could find furniture that is as robust as my children. I don't feel as sorry for the coffee table as I do for my little son, but I do hope that he can go a little easier to the furniture from now on.



Time for bed. Gotta get rid of these bloodshot eyes.

Posted by Jeremiah on March 8, 2007 at 10:39 PM

Submit a comment for review/posting

Daddy's Cookin'!

Mr. Mom? That's me! Tamara and little Abigail left this morning for a week in Utah. Now I am running the show until she gets back. What kind of adventures await?

I have reached my goal for today--no deaths. Tamara has thankfully taken care of all the other particulars. All I had to do today was point the children in the right direction in the morning, microwave dinner, clean house, and make sure that everyone got to bed on time.

Everyone got to school, although I can't take much credit for that--Tamara was still here to help get them out the door. The dinner was easy. I took a container of enchiladas out of the freezer and warmed it in the microwave. Look at how happy the children are.



The dining room even looks pretty good still. See?



Ooooops. I forgot that there was one more thing--make sure that no one gets hurt. Yeah, that last one was going so well until Trevor ran into the living room, jumped onto the beanbag, fell off the other side, and banged his head on the coffee table. He put on a brave face for me, however, when I decided to document the damage.




I hope that things go better tomorrow. Right now I have to go upstairs and comfort Natalie, who is crying almost hysterically.

Something tells me this is going to be a long week.

Gay Feet

Over the last week my little family has watched two feature-length movies about penguins. Although one film was a documentary shot by some "slightly crazy" (their words--not mine) Frenchmen in Antarctica and the other was cranked out by computer, both spotlighted the intriguing life of the little tuxedo-wearing birds. My wife and kids all oohed and aahed over the fuzzy little baby penguins. We laughed at the funny gait of the penguins as they ambled over the wintry wasteland back and forth to the sea from their mating ground. Although the real-life birds couldn't dance or speak English, they just as ably captured our hearts.

What's the important difference between these two movies? I am not going to allow one of the movies to be seen in my home. I wish I had been more prepared before viewing the movie--because then my family would not have seen it in the first place. The movie, of course, is "Happy Feet"-- a movie geared toward children while somewhat subtly promoting homosexuality and disrespect for religious authority.

Wow! That's a pretty weighty accusation to put out on the internet where anyone could read it. I didn't want to believe that a major film studio could be brazen enough to put that kind of trash into a kids' movie. Maybe I hadn't heard right.

"Son, you can do this. It ain't so hard."

"Don't ask me to change, Pa, because I can't."

This dialogue between father and errant son takes place after the religious elders of the penguins have tried to get to the bottom of why Mumbles, the heterosexual leading man (or penguin), is so different. It turns out that he was just born that way, supposedly because his dad dropped him as an egg. While discussing Mumble's tendency to break out into dance instead of the traditional penguin singing, his father says, "It's just not 'penguin!'"

Okay, so I did hear it right, but is did the writers really mean to have Mumbles' bias for boogying be a metaphor for being homosexual? Maybe I'm reading into the script too much--I'm just sensitized to the "gay" thing because I'm a conservative who has had his voice on the issue of same-sex marriage squelched by an angry liberal minority. Maybe it's as simple as that....

But then my wife turns to me after the movie, and asks, "Was it just me, or....?"

And then, a few minutes later, as we walked into Walmart, some friends from our church knowingly asked, "Oh! 'Happy Feet.' Soooo, what did you think about....?"

Then I got online... wow! I began to realize that I had missed some of the innuendos. I had caught the false prophet's "I shall retire to my couch of perpetual indulgence. Okay ladies, who's first?" but had missed his implied f-bomb. (That would have been when I walked out with my family in tow.) Still, there's enough outright leftist propaganda that I want to ask, along with Jim, "Did they think Christians wouldn't notice? I suppose the creators just didn't care."



Now I've been working on this post off-and-on for four days. Let me just wrap up with this: Where was the mainstream media coverage of the darker side of "Happy Feet?" Why wasn't the homosexual agenda publicized so that parents could decide whether or not to take their children to see the film? Ahh. Just answered my own question.

Shame on Fox-Warner for engaging in deceptive practices in order to swindle me out of a few bucks. Shame on my for thinking I could trust a major studio. Well, one of us is wiser now.

Life's too short

Life is too short to stay grumpy...

Grumpy

Yeah, so today I'm grumpy. I got to "work" and realized that I didn't have enough time to get done what I needed to get done before I have to go make sure that my Intro Chem students don't kill each other in lab. I hate that. I had something all planned out, I am off by about half an hour in my calculations, so I have to scrap the experiment for today.

Wallow, wallow, wallow. Hit the desk repeatedly with fists. Stomp around the lab. Write a blog about being grumpy.

So, here's a picture of Trevor that I took while we were out shopping the other day. You can pretend that he was being a pill, but it's really just that he is so good at posing for me. He saw me pull out the camera, and decided to make faces. The one that turned out the best was his grumpy look.



This picture is my mascot for today.

A Day Full of Prognostication

I don't need some furry prophet telling me what's coming. Not being able to stomach all the cloy hype surrounding the Groundhog Day festivities, I turned off the television and looked for some portents that I could claim for myself. I came out of my burrow, and, unlike our little furry friend...

...I saw my shadow.

I didn't have to go far. In fact, the first bad omen that caught my attention was the rubbish (that's New Englandese for "trash") spread along every foot of the bus route between my apartment and school. Soda bottles, a variety of cigarette packs, tie wraps off of some pallet or box, a few more cigarette boxes (I've counted four different brands so far), scratched off lottery tickets, napkins, cigarette butts a plenty, and other sundry refuse. There wasn't a point during my trip that I didn't look out the window without being able to see something that someone had neglectfully dropped on the ground.

As I reflect on events that I saw in the news this morning, I feel myself waxing more prophetic. In particular, the harbinger that a facebook.com group playfully calls the "Mooninite Invasion" has really got my vatic juices going--not that someone would have to possess cosmic powers to shed light on the rationale behind the publicity stunt for a cartoon made for adults that features such fine morals as "We don't listen to people who don't like us" and "We do whatever we want whenever we want, at all times." One needs only to see footage of the press conference with the Boston men detained for distributing the suspicious devices throughout the city to see that they harbor no remorse. These grown-up "kids" act as if the whole thing was just a game--see them laugh and crack jokes about a junky hairdo.

What do I see in these trashy tea leaves and arrogant advertising? An America where the average citizens want accountability from the government, from their neighbors, and from big business, but is not willing to lay any responsibility upon their own shoulders. My crystal ball shows me a world where it's okay to cast blame on others when they have erred, but where no apologies are offered for personal wrongdoing.

What? You think we're already there? You could be right, but I'll stick (for now) to my optimistic view that the "average" citizen is still not so blasé about their personal responsibility to make the world a better place, or at least maintain the status quo.



On a lighter note, here is a comic strip that made me laugh:
Ph.D. Comix

Breaking News

Tiny Untidy Terrorists?

Normal parenting activities at Mountain Village apartment 136 were set back hours today as parents stopped to investigate suspicious objects that had turned up around the domicile. In light of the recent anxiety in nearby Boston over suspicious (?) electronic parcels that had been found nestled in various high-traffic areas of the city, parents in apartment 136 were slow to dismiss the objects in question as innocuous.

"I was just on my way downstairs after changing the baby when I discovered one of the objects with my left foot. I was scared--I thought I was going to drop the baby!" explained Tamara Jones in an interview earlier today. She showed us the laceration on her foot where the object had actually broken through the skin. "I n't know what to make of it at first, so I called it in to the authorities."



Later that day a similar incident occurred as a local resident was preparing to leave for work. "I thought I was safe. I didn't give any credence to the earlier reports of a possible terror threat in the vicinity, so I wasn't paying attention. Then--wham! As I knelt by my bed to reach for my sweatband that had rolled underneath, a little hand jabbed my knee. I looked down and saw what looked like a little person. What was he doing with his hand? It was all a little weird, and I didn't want to take any chances, so I called it in."



Another resident, who only spoke on condition of anonymity, related his experience that same morning. "I was in the middle of [a shower] when I was attacked. A huge stack of colorful plastic toppled on top of me. I was almost buried. Oh, yeah--I was scared! I had heard about some other strange stuff that people were stumbling across in my neighborhood, and I thought to myself, 'Holy smoking [sic.]! Now they're going after the water supply!"



The parents in apartment 136 assured residents that they were safe as clean-up details were deployed to various sites to pick up the strange objects. Authorities have made no arrests thus far in their investigation, but sources close to the case say that evidence is piling up.

Trevor Makes Bed for First Time

In other news, young Trevor Jones made his bed for the first time today. At the request of his father, the hungry two-year-old applied all of his hand-eye coordination to pull off the feat. His mother was impressed, and high-fives were distributed liberally by all the members of the household in a celebration marking this rite of passage. Rumor has it that Trevor's dad had been holding breakfast over his head, contingent upon successful completion of the early morning task, but sources in the Jones household have yet to confirm this allegation.

Boston Sets Record for Least Amount of Snow from the Boston Globe

"In a typical year, according to the National Weather Service, Boston sees 21 inches of snow by the end of January. Last year, Boston had 20.4 inches of snowfall by the end of January. (Last February saw 20 inches, above the normal 10.5 inches for that month.) This year, including last week's dusting, just 1.5 inches of snow have fallen."

Read the entire article at:
Boston.com