It's great to be eight.....

...just ask Tanner.

His birthday started with a request for breakfast in bed, which Dad made for him. French toast and juice in a sippy cup! (We don't usually allow food out of the kitchen/dining room to avoid messes!)
There was lunch with Dad and Marc was excited because Tanner actually wanted to go somewhere besides McDonalds or Burger King. When they left, the plan was to go to Taco Bell. While that would not be my choice if I could go anywhere I wanted, it was his. But, when they came home they told me that had gone to McDonald's after all. Tanner said it had been a year since he had a chicken patty! Marc took the camera but forgot to actually use it!

We then had a great party at Lazer Kraze, a local laser tag place. Great for me because all I had to do was send the invites and bring the cake!

Mary enjoyed the arcade.

So did Sarah.

The cousins inside the arena.

The army man cake.

After the party, we invited the family back to our house for dinner. Tanner's request? Hamburgers and french fries. I think that means Marc had the same meal twice in one day.

After dinner everyone joined in for our inaugural playing of Beatles RockBand. I think grandpa may have enjoyed in the most.

A little info about Tanner at eight.....

• He is SO smart.
• He LOVES Legos.
• He is a voracious reader and prefers non-fiction, especially wars and military books.
• He is a Cougar fan (of course) and roots for the Steelers as well (just like his dad).
• He likes spending time with friends , but I think he secretly prefers his family, especially when we play games or do fun things together.
• He has a great giggle.
• He is a thoughtful brother and son.

Christmas

I wish I had my own personal photographer who would come and capture Christmas morning on film and allow Marc and I to just sit and enjoy the children and all the excitement. Ella woke up at 3:30, blaming the wind for waking her up. Marc and I are not sure she went back to sleep. By the time everyone else woke up, around 8:30, she was almost too excited to contain herself.

I think the kids enjoyed their presents from Santa and from Mom and Dad. There was lots and lots of smiling! Enjoy the pictures.

Okay, no smiling on this next one, but I needed to include a picture of Rylee. Isn't the hat cute?


Santa left some clues leading the children to this gift in the basement.
Mary would have been completely satisfied with a stocking full of Hershey Kisses. Once she found the chocolate, she could not have cared less about the rest of the gifts.

It's finally Christmas Eve

Our children have been counting down for a long time for this day to come. We had lots of fun. Here is what we did. We made an assembly line to finally get some Christmas cards out. Daddy licked the envelopes, Ella stamped them and Tanner did the address labels. I had not put the stockings on the mantle. One, because I wanted to decorate it how I wanted to and also because I thought those heavy stocking holders would just be begging for Mary to pull them down on her head.

So part of our day was getting out the stockings and putting them on the mantle.

I think they had been up about 5 minutes when one was pulled down but the victim wasn't Mary, it was Sarah.

We decorated sugar cookies for our eagerly awaited nighttime visitor.

At grandma's house, we had our own little Christmas pageant. The wise men brought baby Jesus a really lovely wooden box full of poker chips!

And we came home and opened our new jammies!

The kids, especially Tanner, were SO excited about Christmas, but all fell asleep really fast. It was a fun, fun day.

Favorite Rylee pics

I been meaning to post these pictures since my last post. These are some of my favorite pictures of Rylee but they didn't have her toy so they needed their own post.

I believe this is her first Christmas. She made out like a bandit.

Here is my little Rylee burrito.

Sheer joy with bubbles.

Just cute.

Just a perfect smile and actually looking at the camera.

I don't know what happened here.

OK, this one isn't so good of Rylee, but look at that hair! Oh, the memories.

It's raining men!!!

Rylee has always had only one toy that she will really play with. We call it "Mr. Happy Face" and other than the church hymnal it may be the only toy she will crawl across a room to play with. Over the years we have lost several Mr. Happy Faces but a couple of years ago we stopped being able to find it in the stores. The one she has now is one I found on ebay a couple of years ago. Recently, she has chewed off one of his "ears" so he looked more like a Van Gogh toy but with a sunny disposition. Kenna and I began to wonder how we were going to find another Mr. Happy Face. It is made by the Sassy toy company, so I went to their website and found a "contact us" form and explained our situation. A couple of days later we got a call from a company representative saying that they no longer make that toy but she had gone through the warehouse and found three toys stashed back in some unused corner and while they weren't in perfect condition we could have them if we paid for the shipping. We very happily paid for shipping and just a few days ago they showed up, much to her delight.



Well, this got me to thinking about when Mr. Happy Face joined our family. And so I started digging through old pictures to try and find his origins. Try to find Mr. Happy face in the following pictures.

Here he is at Grandma Wilson's house guarding Rylee from Kobe the dog, or is it the other way around?

Here he is in Canada whale watching with Tanner.

Here he is watching a Fourth of July Parade in Washington, PA.

This is a tough one, but if you look close you can find him posing with Grandma and Grandpa Wahlquist.

This is in black and white but you can still make out his button nose (no pun intended). A pre-marine Uncle Scott was trying to cut in on the action.

Here Cousin Cameron seems to have succeeded where Uncle Scott failed. This picture was taken in April of '01. The lambs later testified against Calvin in the ensuing custody battle.

Here he is getting ready to go for a swim in the pool with Rylee and Tanner. Keep your legs comments to yourself, thank you.

And this is the earliest documentation I could find of Mr. Happy Face. He seems to have joined our family on Christmas day 2000.

Thanks, Mr. Happy Face, for being Rylee's bestest friend for so many years!

Iron and what?!

The following conversation took place over the dinner table a few days ago:

Tanner: Dad, did you know that Grandma has a book about iron and sex?

Me: .......uh......what?

Tanner: Did you know that Grandma has a book about iron and sex?

Me: .....uh.....what?

I had no idea how to respond to that question. I was trying to think about what such a book would really be about. Tanner is very interested in history so maybe it is a book about the start of the iron industry and the first iron tycoon's sultry wife, or maybe an adult themed coffee table book. I am not one to judge what type of literature another person reads but if grandma did, in fact, have a book about iron and sex why was she showing it to Tanner?

Tanner: Dad? Dad?

Me:

Tanner: He said something else but I wasn't paying attention because I was flipping through a coffee table book in my mind

I was finally able to get to the truth without having to answer any questions about what I thought he said. Thank goodness.

mmmm, Fritos...

Last week I got a haircut and every time I go it seems like I get the lady who is fresh off her cigarette break. I know it seems rude when she trying to make polite conversation but I can't really respond because I'm holding my breath the whole time. Well, this time when I walked in the "salon" (can you really call BoRics a salon?) I could see all the way through to the open back door where there was a girl sitting outside on an empty milk crate. As soon as I walked in she got up, came in, took my name, and told me to sit down in her chair. As I walked over to her chair I began to practice my deep breathing. I quickly realized that she hadn't been smoking but did just polish off a bag of Fritos corn chips. I just can't win.

I have mentioned my problem to Kenna who has suggested I go to her hair stylist who has a no smoking policy for her employees but she charges more than $20 for a haircut. I'll be honest, for me to sink a lot of money into hair care is like paying into social security. Something tells me that when I retire neither one is going to be there for me. At this point the "stylists" spent most of their time on the "perimeter" of my scalp anyway. What is really annoying is when they wander off my scalp completely and start messing with my ears and eyebrows.

What I don't understand is that in the morning when I look in the mirror this is what I see...

But that may be because reality is just too hard to face.

Take me out to the ball game...

Last week I took the middle three kids and went down to a Cincinnati Reds game. They were playing the Washington Nationals and so I figured we wouldn't have any problem getting seats. The kids were very excited and Tanner brought his glove "just in case."

So, what was the highlight of the game, you ask? Was it quality time together?

No.

Was it great seats (honestly, there aren't any bad seats in that stadium) with nobody behind us so the kids could run around a little bit? No.

You'll notice Sarah is covering her ears. That is because there were 5 or 6 Cincinnati home runs hit that resulted in a mini fireworks display each time. Was that it? No.

It was this glorious sight that suddenly popped up in front of us like sunshine on a gloomy rainy day.

THE COTTON CANDY LADY!!!!

But then the clouds crashed back in front of the sun when I just couldn't bring myself to spend almost as much on cotton candy as I did on the tickets so I only bought one and split it among the three of them. Ella had been following the cotton candy vendors all over the stadium and by the sixth inning was convinced that they were never going to come over to our section.

But the kids had fun and so did I. I much prefer to watch baseball in the stadium than on TV. Then as a bonus on the way home we stopped and got everybody (mom included) a milkshake, so the evening ended perfectly.

Cincinnati Zoo

Marc took a couple of days off so we are trying to check off the last of our summer to-do list. Marc took Tanner, Ella and Sarah to a Reds game but I will let him blog about that. He is much wittier and creative. Yesterday, we went to the zoo. Ella and I tried on a shirt made to fit an adult gorilla, a 42-inch neck in case you were wondering. We watched a really fun bird show, featuring a bald eagle.

We of course rode the carousel. Sarah is just coming into the picture on the left.

And we rode the train.

The zoo is also a botanical garden and the flowers are so pretty. I had to take a couple of pictures.