Atlanta or bust! Wait, I'll take bust..

This is a photo I took. It is now in the internet.

I'd planned an awesome post tonight, as it will be my last for a few days. I'm off to Atlanta for work, to sit in ground school at Delta with a bunch of Delta pilots and hopefully get some good gumbo in my off hours. Since just the idea of being in the south is crushing my will to wax creative - not to mention that I'll be at least 6 states away from the girls - I am going to be handing the reins to Jenner until Friday.

My plan to blow some minds with this diatribe went south shortly after we put the girls down when we abruptly had to pick one up again. It was The Blonde One. Amazing, I mean truly disturbingly mistifying, that she wouldn't go to sleep, as both of them skipped their afternoon nap. It made no sense. I remember thinking, "Well, they didn't sleep this afternoon. Surely we'll lay them down like bricks and enjoy the evening's dinner on the deck." Nuh uh. Abby cried and cried and it got worse and worse. I went up to get her.

The exciting part: she was sitting up all by herself. It's the second time today she was in such a remarkable position when we went to fetch her from the crib. It just doesn't happen.

Despite that achievement of our wee featherweight, I was annoyed, because it wrecked the night a bit. We couldn't eat outside. And since she likes to watch tv when feeling insomniatic, we tuned in to nothing but horrific programming.

Finally, she went back down. I drank my second beer. This was a large and potent brew from our friends at Surly up in Brooklyn Park.

This beer affected me greatly.

I laid down on the porch to get back to my rereading of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, thinking this would help get my bearings. Instead I fell quickly and helplessly asleep. I was rousted an hour later by Jen for the sole reason that I could do the blog entry today. I'm still kinda loopy though. Surly is good beer, did I mention that?

Lovely day. Jen was busy during the afternoon, so we all went for a bike ride around the 'hood, looking for a good Powderhorn 365 photo. Found one. Ate crackers. Came back, played in the yard, did some stuff, blah blah. I love the summer, but it makes for boring journaling.

Adios for now, back on Saturday...all yours, J.J.

Day sixty two.

There was no reason for her to be this upset, I really only walked away to get the camera. Sigh. Sometimes you just can't win with kids.

Lily kept clapping for no reason, it was pretty amusing. Yay!

Our humble and moronic beagle Olly tries to burrow like a gopher.

Video! Beer! Bats! I love summer! Why am I yelling!?

Abigail smacking her lips on something tasty.

I'm making good on yesterday's claim to put up some video herein. Check below for a 4 minute little slice of life from the Gels household. To set it up: the girls hate being cleaned after meals. Before long we found that they liked it if we batted at their mouths while they made noise; they were pleased beyond belief. So that's what we're doing. It makes sense when you watch, I swear.

The girls are 1 for 2 on the swings. We headed to the west side playground at Powderhorn, and they were not fans of the swinging bit. Maybe it was the time of day. Maybe they were distracted by all the chaos of the playground. But there was much unhappiness, and it lasted only a few minutes.

After that, headed to Jakeeno's to splurge on meatball subs. Back home to eat with the girls, then put them to bed soon after. The best part of the day came on the heels of bedtime, when Jen and I retired to the deck for some beer and Farkle. As the last little shreds of light were being swept to the west, I laid back in my chair, drank some very tasty beer, and watched two bats fly psychotically above the yard. I love bats. Something about seeing a bat is, to me, very reassuring. I was pleased then when they kept disappearing over our eaves, leaving us with the notion that they might actually be living on our house. Jen was less than thrilled.

Day sixty one.

Repeat pictures from yesterday.

ps. please comment or email if the youtube video is a bust; I'm still new to the finer points of some of this. Thanks.

I had to include this, because Lily looks like a 48 year old sailor here.

Another look at our picnicy dinner yesterday. Good eats; fresh air. Yum.

This is what I've got planned for every summer night after 7:30.

I love holding Lily, it makes me so warm. No..too warm. Now it's hot. Oh crap.

Every 19 seconds, another parent is a victim of daughter-related pee abuse.

For god's sake, limit the amount of time you hold a naked daughter.

Especially if you really, really like that shirt.

I've spent the past 3 hours figuring out what I can imagine millions of other people already know: uploading videos to YouTube is a gargantuan hassle. Here's how the process went.

Capturing video to computer: easy.
Editing video: simple.
Putting on the interweb: excrutiating.

I was planning on skipping all the jibber jabber tonight, and letting the home movie thing speak for me. However, my 4 minute video took just short of 38 hours to put on YouTube. Who has the time to put up the 10 minute videos that I've seen? Why does it take so long to upload and is so fast to download? Why isn't anyone answering me!?

Finally it finished, then I found out that, after upload, it needed to be "processed". Umm...what? Are we in Russia circa 1982? What the hell is that about? Whatever it means, it's still happening - possibly it's held up in the Ministry of Information - so it's not yet available. The hour has gotten late, I'm sick of waiting, so it's off to the proverbial sack for me. I'm giving up for the day. Be prepared, though, I will hopefully have some real live (video) girls ready tomorrow.

Today was so nice, we couldn't resist taking our meal al fresco style, hopefully the first of many such events. I'm glad I'm writing this, because it just reminded me that I left the high chairs outside. 11:30, and I'm still picking up after dinner.

Day sixty.

It was very bright and cheery and warm, but a little too bright, until the sun ducked behind the house straight west of us.

Abby enjoying some perfectly proportioned watermelon.

Mommy can always get a laugh out of Lily.

Throwing down, Lily-style.

Lily and Mommy, fresh from the bathity bath.

My favorite new pastime: making sure Lily does not get her way. Her frustration management gene has morphed into something older, more "mature", and far more amusing. I know this is wrong of me, but I just cannot help myself.

Recently, when she became miffed ("for no reason whatsoever" makes up the strong majority of instigators for this), she started flailing herself to the ground, her pale little chunky self collapsing in a pile of shuddering disbelief. It is such a Kid thing to do - as compared with a Baby reaction - and we were struck by its appearance. Jen and I exchanged some 'uh oh's and shared a worried glance at this latest development.

So she's starting to push those boundaries a bit. Most commonly, this little Lily of Fury appears when she wants attention from someone who's otherwise spoken for. Lily of Fury loves to strike during Abby's diaper swap.

When Lily embarked on this new phase, she would throw herself to the floor in frustration, and would do so on whatever surface she was standing on, with no forethought as to the consequence. As a result, her slight annoyance would jump to outright bawling when she decided to throw down on the wood floors. Thump! "Waaaah!" Whatever was below Lily - toys, sister, cat, etc. - this item would bear her full and furious force. Normally she led with the head, which is a calamitous strategy, but then again there's not much strategizing when all becomes pure frustration.

This has been over recent weeks. In the past couple days, she has learned from her erroneous, head-thwapping ways. This is the adorable part. Now her annoyance will build to a head, and she'll prepare to do her Fury dance, but she will stop with calm and poise to make sure her landing area is clear and soft, THEN she will throw herself down and declare her displeasure.

How can it be so right to deeply enjoy something of pure misery to your kid? Sometimes I feel honestly bad when I laugh at her when she's upset, like I'm hard wiring her synapses wrong, programming her to believe that I'm a miserable jerk. Is this how character flaws begin, when parents respond incorrectly in certain situations? Is my daughter bound for a penal facility?

Day fifty nine.

I've been meaning to get back to the Music to Dance Your Kids' Socks Off, so here's the latest:

Here Come Tha Police - Vicious Vicious

It's been a while since we rocked out to this. We're long overdue.

Abs at play. She was trying to pick up as many coins as possible, which was really impressive in both dexterity and planning. Smart little monkey.

Crocolily, looking like she just ran a half marathon.

Another shot of Lilypad.

Interesting photographic point: these last two were taking moments apart, with Lily in the same spot, which was kinda in the sun. In the first the sun was behind me, and the second it was behind her. I always like taking multiple photos with varying points of view, and seeing the different result.

Then again, I'm a big big nerd.

How not to be furious at your kid.

Possibly one of my favorites of Abigail to date.

It may not be readily obvious, but she is crawling here. Crawling like a mad woman. What made this little post-bath Crawl-o-Rama so darn satisfying is that she instigated it herself (she wanted to crawl towards - and attempt to electrocute herself with - the humidifier, just to my left), and also it was a joy for her. Efforts at crawling have so far been exactly that: efforts. It is by no manner a desirable event, plopping her down and prodding her miniscule little butt to scoot. She cries (see picture two from a couple days ago); we get annoyed. It repeats. This time, she went up and crawled, and fell, and crawled again, and repeated, goofball smile pasted on her face the whole time. She is a goofball.

Now that I've lauded my little girl to lofty heights, lets bring her crashing right back down. She's changed her schedule on us, with no apparent motive, and certainly without consulting us. Bedtime is still remaining dependably in the 7:30 neighborhood, but her wakey time - normally 7am - has abruptly popped its unwelcome self up to 6am.

We were blindly hopeful that this extra hour could be passed playing quietly in her crib, which they have been known to do from time to time. That's not the way it's shaking out.

Our strange arrangement now is to wake with them...oh yeah, it's Them, because Lily does not allow these transgressions to go unpunished. She wakes the moment our toes hit their floor. She could probably sleep another hour and a half, but not when there's action in the room. So we do the prudent thing: make two bottles, feed them both, and put them back in bed for another hour.

It's not a great solution, and I'm not sure what the long term answer is.

This morning, I was groggy and annoyed at getting up. Very tired, very cranky. The truth is that Abby only woke me (us) about 1o minutes before my alarm anyway, but I did not let that fact cloud my annoyance at her. It's so much easier to be mad at a bawling kid, and she was bawling at that point because we tried to let her put herself back to sleep for a few minutes, which only increased her furor. So we went in. Lily bolted up like a moron springing a trap (I believe I've written about this earlier), and we set about feeding them.

The entire bottle I dozed in between fits of frustration. Look at the clock...zz....so ..mad...zzzz...let the bottle drop, whoops....let the cat drink whatever just dripped on the carpet...zzzz

It's easy as well to be ticked off during the bottle. She's getting what she wants, while I can feel myself aging by the minute.

She finished her bottle by throwing it down. She sat up quickly and reached for my shirt. I was wearing an ancient, threadbare Section 7A track meet t-shirt that my siblings bought for me; I'd placed first at the meet my senior year, sending me off to the state meet in Blaine, so they bought it for me as a memento. Abby loves the shirt, loves the writing on the front of it; it's purple, and that seems to please her intensely.

I am, of course, still mad as hell and tired beyond words.

Abby runs her dainty little sausages over my shirt for a few seconds, then looks at me and laughs (reference the picture below for an idea), and belts out a "da daaah!" Da-da.

I laugh. It's one of these laughs that I've never known until parenthood. It's a laugh that shoots out like a dam crumbling away, a laugh that surprises me how closely it stradles the line of a cry or a swear word but ends up as something better. It's the laugh of my life snapping back into focus. My annoyance fades like the clang of a baseball bat off a metal pole. Abby senses that she's dispelled the fog, so she laughs again, and this is how my day begins.

Day fifty eight.

I'm not sure you can start pole beans inside, but I'm trying anyway. This eager little beaver looked to me like a guy jumping up out of the soil. "Ta daaah!"

Abby Elizabeth enjoying the bath, waiting for the avocado mustache to be wiped away.

Lily Ellen, crazy for the fun stream of water that Mommy's got going on.

Do not go to ECFE and operate heavy machinery.

Our little bloomer-head.

I've gotten nothing but hate mail and death threats for the new bloggity garb. Hang on, naysayers, and hopefully it will grow on you.

Tonight during ECFE I think I dozed for a moment. Truth be told, it probably happened almost ten times. I'm not sure that I slept outright, but just had some of those hallucinatory moments of tingly unconsciousness. Those brief and wonderful samplings of sleep always bring the most vivid dreams. Just this morning I dozed for a moment before Jen woke me for good with a swift kick, and in that span of maybe a minute or two there played in my noodle this very detailed dream where I took my nephew Oliver to Jamaica so he could be in a production of West Side Story. I can actually remember wondering how he could fake a Jamaican accent, because, my god, he's only three years old.

My real point here is that I'm tired, and I was going to take the night off and be done by 9 pm. Instead I found myself perusing other people's blogs, which are so astoundingly creative, offbeat and entertaining that I think I want to shutter my whole production entirely. So now it's past 10, and I'm musing on the irony that, in searching for inspiration, I instead found myself deflated to the haggard core.

Day fifty seven.

ps. old pictures again.

Abbygator.

Crackers = peace, every time and without exception.

Check out Lily's new twittering skills!

Two rugrats decked out in their best Easter garb, flecked with bits of cheerios.

Jen is accusing me of being a conformist for switching the blog layout. It's not an unfounded accusation; this new style does smack of many others that I know of. But I'm sticking with it. The old one was picked in a last-minute hulabaloo of frantic late-night computery, and in time I learned to hate it because:

1. I've never really been comfortable writing on non-white backgrounds.
2. I hated how thin the old one was. This one is wider. Fair enough.

There's not much by way of ready-to-type blog templates to choose from. I did a cursory search for 3rd party templates, and quickly surmised that such a search project would suck counteless minutes away from my life. That I took the time to photoshop a new banner for this one is testament to my dedication.

So: if you see this blog, and you have a blog, and they now look eerily similar, I apologize but I think we are victims of circumstance.

Let's segue this psuedo-techonological topic into something related to toddlers A and B. I'm becoming grimly aware that they may already be more tech-savvy than I am. There will be a day in our hazy future when they will roll their eyes at my incompetence, and this day may come sooner than I thought. Today Lily was playing with my cell phone. It's a flip phone, and I gave it to her closed, and I was warm and fuzzy in my belief that such a situation wouldn't lead to any billed calls to, say, Irkutsk (thank you, Risk). While preoccupied with some other pressing task only seconds later, I was suddenly hip to the fact that:

1. Lily was crawling towards me
2. She had my phone
3. My phone was making sounds I'd never, ever heard before.

Curious, I scooped her and my phone up to find that she'd connected in some manner to the internet. This amazing task had taken her no more than about 52 seconds or so. I quickly snapped the thing shut like it was possessed. Lily found this all amusing beyond belief, and I'm anticipating a $1,209.34 bill from Verizon in a couple weeks. I didn't even know my cell phone could connect to the internet. Maybe I should google her; she might have a competing blog up, scribbling about what it's like to be a twin with two morons for parents.

(I actually did just google both of them, and all the hits were related to the word 'gels', as in plural of 'gel'; a common result when trolling for our surname.)

The interaction of kids and technology fascinates me sometimes. I recall a couple years ago when we had some family over to the house. Everone was outside, and my niece Maya, who was 3 at the time, had borrowed my camera and was taking pictures studiously. I forgot about it. Days later I uploaded the pictures, and found that she had taken a number of very good pictures, and had taken one frame that was nothing but a completely perfect, consistently orange hue. It was a curiosity at first, until I started thinking, "You know, I doubt I could take a photo like that if I tried." Sure enough, after a few tries I couldn't do it. Not even close. I became a bit obsessed trying to figure out how she did it, without ever coming up with a workable hypothesis. And she wasn't talking. It's a magical mystery.

Lately, Abby has been able to make one of our toys - a leapfrog activity center platform deluxe thing-a-whatzit - make some sounds that were totally new to me. She did it once, I thought it was a fluke. Now she can practically do it on command, and even though I've tried many times (you see where this is going, don't you?), I can't do it.

These kids are making fools of me.

I'm actively encouraging them to hone these skills so they can infiltrate our day care provider's computer system and adjust our rates.

Day fifty six.

At what point does "encouraging your newly-crawling toddler" become "asshole-ism"? Right here.

Lily re-enacts the very last 5 seconds of The Blair Witch Project.

Is there any less subtle way of telling me to retire the camera?