Thursday, July 16, 2009

Reverse Christmas. BWCA. Houseguests. Lunacy.

Every night when the girls finally give up the good fight and succumb to sleep, we go through the routine of scurrying around and scooping up the wide-strewn collection of toys. Blocks. Dolls. Frogs. Jagged plastic tchotchkes that pierce the foot when you step on them as you race around, leaving you bloodied and foul-mouthed.

I don't know exactly why, but I can't relax until the toys are picked up. I'm not an obsessive person, but with this there can be no exception. Those damn toys have to be put away, or the rest of the night isn't quite right.

The thought struck me tonight that every night is like a reverse Christmas. As soon as the girls have thrashed into whatever impossible posture they'll sleep in for the night, we do the opposite of what the good Kris Kringle would do. We put toys away instead of bringing them out.

That's it. There's no more to that thought, it just struck me as slightly humorous. Slightly.

Tonight we have our friend Krysta visiting from Colorado with her awesome daughter Tennyson. Tennyson is one of the most friendly, social 9 months old ever, so everybody got along quite smoothly, except when Lily would ocassionally come perilously close to crushing her under some heavy toy in her grasp.

So, I got some video and put it up on youtube. I was far too lazy to try and edit it for content, so it's 6 minutes long, and I have to admit: nothing terribly exciting happens. I'm going to put it up anyway. If you follow this blog and would geek on the prospect of watching 6 minutes of playtime with our family and Krysta and Tennyson, then have at it. If not, you might just want to skip to the 3:30 mark, where Lily attacks the camera like a mindless zombie.

Also: tonight will be the last post until Sunday at the earliest, but possibly Monday. The Gelseses are headed up to the very fringe of the BWCA with the Stalker clan for some car camping. We're excited. The kids are excited. The cat has steadfastly agreed to keep the house moth free for the duration. So while I feel bad for missing a couple days, I'll make it up with a full report on the girls' first outdoorly overnight expedition. God help us all.

Day one hundred and fifty one.

ps. Let me mention here that Abby's little freak-out tantrum that happens in the first minute is something she does when her rash is bothering her. It's just a small taste of why I'm so very very very sick of that damn rash.


Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Architectural Digest should not be allowed in Tires Plus

Let's lead with Jen, because dammit, she deserves it. The unsung hero of stay-at-home-mommyhood.

I hate cars. What I hate more than cars is having to spend money on cars. Right now, I'm driving Jen's Focus, which before today has always gone from A to B. After today, it continues its daily trek from A to B, only now its driver is $240 poorer. Herein lies the bitter pain of car care: I need to vomit money at the thing just to maintain the status quo.

Today we needed new tires. Okay, I get it, tires wear out. Off I went to Tires Plus. I was braced, though, for the inevitable alignment upsell, because, frankly, it is sorely needed. Before today, the Focus would shake on the highway. When I drove between 53 and 66 mph, the thing would vibrate enough to register on local seismometers. I've lost 3 fillings during my morning commute. It's bad. So, another $70 got tagged onto the bill.

The most grievous of repurcusions of this alignment is that I had to spend an extra 30 minutes in the waiting area of the least comfortable Tires Plus ever designed. In all, just over one hour of my life I left in that waiting area. A month ago I'd been at the same location to change the oil, and they'd had the day's paper; figuring the same would be true today, I left our Star Trib lying on the porch at home. This ensured beyond a doubt that there would be no paper there today. There was none indeed.

There was a tv, though, mounted up on the wall. It was off and looking neglected. I gave it a chance, having nothing to lose. It turned on to static. I flipped through a dozen snowy stations until I came across a channel with a beatiful, flawless picture. Perfect. Ten seconds of fiery sermon and solid gold pinky rings later, I realized it was a televangelism channel. Jackpot. My finger shot back to the channel button, and I kept flipping. More static, until another perfect signal, and another sweaty preacher. I could only laugh at this point. In all, I paid witness to almost 50 channels, only 3 of which came in at all, and all of them were flawless images of Benny Hinn knockoffs.

How can you program a tv to do that?

Tempting the very fires of hell, I shut off the tv and turned my attention to the magazine rack, a cracked and depressing number by the wall with two old copies of Architectural Digest and a weather beaten pamphlet on prostate cancer. I chose Architectural Digest, but only barely.

If you are ever sitting idly in your own personal purgatory anguishing over how many ramen noodle lunches can cover an extra $70 car bill, reading Architect Digest will not cheer you up. It may actually cause a homicide or two. I think maybe it has already. Has there already been an Architectural Digest Killer?

Architectural Digest is a beatiful, glossy full-color manual on the many ways your life can suck. I did appreciate its stab at inclusionism, though: "How many times have you found yourself flummoxed by the weighty decision of what style to build on 39 acres in the Umbria region of northern Italy? Well, so and so was in just such a pickle last year..." After two cover-to-cover experiences with this periodical, I feel like a total jerk for being the only person in the US without 120 feet of Puget Sound shoreline and an infinity pool the size of Vatican City.

I liked the "subject/homeowner as victim/hero" motiff that underscored a few of their articles. One in particular was about a New Orleans banker who bought a 15,000 sq. ft. French Renaissance manor just-barely-pre-Katrina, then wrastled with the question of whether to rebuild just-barely-post-Katrina or not. He did. In the eyes of Architectural Digest, this was an act of unparalleled humanitarianism, and this banker's likeness is currently being chiselled into a rock face by Lake Como.

I'd stored up some more acerbic and trite observations on Arch.Dig. as I whiled away my time, but now that I've summited the midnight hour, they're all evaporating. I'll sum up: that magazine is filled with douchebags. Man, I should have just said that in the beginning...

Day one hundred and fifty.

Sometimes a missed shot has a great aesthetic that you never would have gotten with a normal shot. And yes, I realize that "aesthetic" is exactly the type of smarmy word that Architectural Digest writers would use to punch up their copy.

Twin power!

A rare smile this evening. She skewed cranky during the pre-dusk hours.

Tuesday, July 14, 2009

I think this happens when I get tired.

I had one of those moments today when I was looking at the kids and suddenly couldn't believe that I had two kids, I mean, really it seemed impossible, and then none of my life seemed possible, then my brains started to hurt and I felt like I was going to explode. Do those ever stop happening as kids get older?

Day one hundred and forty niner.

ps. Abby recognized an apple in a book today and said, "Apple". Or something close enough to make us proud.


We are working on brushing the teeth. Fortunately, the kids absolutely love it, and seem to understand it preternaturally.

But it doesn't mean they have to be cute when they brush.


Recycled photos from the weekend. Abb-solutely Fabulous. Hilarious play on words on my part.


The girls rule the world when they wear sunglasses, so it's nice that they're starting to leave them on for longer than 1.3 seconds.

Monday, July 13, 2009

Jenny files.

When Daddies and Lilies collide...blood is spilt.

I was goofing around with Lilypad, and accidentally kinda smacked her awkwardly in the face. I say this just as an interesting fact and not by way of trying to excuse myself, but I baaaarely hit her; Jen can attest to this. She cried a bit, so I picked her up, and it was only by a fluke that Jen walked behind me and saw that she was pouring blood onto my shoulder. She's had a few nosebleeds during the night lately, so I'm starting to wonder if that little nose is home to some thin and surrender-prone capillaries.

Imagine my fatherly pride later in the evening when, in a moment of back-turned-distraction, Lily managed to fall off the couch. Thud. Wail. I didn't exactly do a great job of protecting the kids from harm today.

At the very least, I can honestly claim that there were no scorpion stings. 100% success on the scorpion sting front! And nobody was carried off by an eagle or lost in a nuclear power plant meltdown. I'm trying to be positive.

Jennifer stepped up to the proverbial plate and made a log of the day to put up here. A blog log, if you will. Peer now into the murky depths of the daily comings and goings of our resident stay at home mommy of twins:

6:20 - Abby up
7:15 - 1st breakfast
7:25 - Wake Lily for purposes of keeping her schedule tenuously similar to Abby's
8:30 - At this point, 4 diapers have already been changed. 2 were poopy. The other two were filled with licorice and butterflies. Hoo-ray!
8:45 - Lily's 1st breakfast, Abby's 2nd (important, since Abby apparently burns 12,000 calories a day)
10:15 - snack and 15 minutes of Sesame Street ("Aaahh ah ah ah!" says The Count)
10:30 - nap / Mommy tears headfirst into a paper for school
1:10 - Lunch
1:30 - Outside to play
2:00 - Walk the dog
2:45 - Head off to Target, a local general store and apothecary
At some point in target - Snack
3:30 - Back to the Gelsenhaus (I must interject here to explain that Jen and I always joke about giving our house a name like pretentious people do (Let me interject again and apologize if you're one of those people). If you have any cool house names you'd like to lend us, please share.)
3:45 - Snack (how are these kids not any bigger?)
4:30 - Kids fell asleep while playing..off to a nap.

Any time not accounted for (maybe 12 minutes in the morning) was spent playing on the porch or living room and generally acting like monkeys.

Jen's favorite moment of the day came at the close of their first nap, when they woke and begain conversing with each other. Jen opened the door undetected (being undetected is a vastly underrated skill as a parent), and bore witness to a good 3 minutes of talking and giggling that passed between them. When Abby eventually caught sight of her Mom, she burst out laughing. Lily, still looking at Abby and having not seen Jen yet, also exploded into fits of laughter - just because Abby was doing it.

Jen's second favorite moment: Abby was trying to crawl through the front door while Lily happened to be right in the threshold, and Lily stooped down and gave her sister a few gentle pats on the back to try and get her over the door sill.

Day one hundred and forty eight.


After the nosebleed, I found out something I guess I should have known already: kids are idiots for ice cubes. Making the best of a bloody situation, I one-upped the single cube I'd given Lily and dumped a whole tray in a bowl for them to play with. It's like Christmas in July at Chateau Gelsenkirchen.


Self portait from the sculpture garden. Notice Jen looking at me with exasperation: that's what makes this one my favorite.


Kid #2 from the sculpture garden.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Our kids as tourists.

Blondie.

I took 244 pictures today, and I have to be honest, I spent most of my energy just going through all those. Let's hit the highlights and all turn in for the night, m'kay?

- Found ourselves at the sculpture garden today. There's an element of lame out-of-towner-ness to going to the sculpture garden because it's such a touristy place, but I'll use the girls as an excuse. Are they not from out-of-town? (deep question) Thanks to the guise of showing the girls the town, we can go ogle all the Minneapolis sights we're normally too embarrassed to go see: the grain belt sign, the Foshay tower, the stone arch bridge, the hollidazzle parade, the megamall. Okay, maybe not the megamall...I like that place on its own.

- Yesterday we implemented a "no more bottle" policy. We've banished all nipples from the house, less the normal 4 of ours. I don't count the girls since they so tiny! Little tiny nipples! So, yeah, the bottle-less life has been smooth sailing (jinx, I just screwed ourselves), probably because we did it gradually until the nighttime bottle was the sole fix. That got the heave last night, and we've had nary a complaint. This is further proof: we rule at parenting.

- A random observation: turmeric is the most staining material in the world. Our friend Emily tipped us to its benefits as a spice - they are many - but we quickly found out that any food containing it would wreck whatever outfits the girls had donned at the time. It's ruthlessly effecient at marring textiles; I implore you, wear a lab coat or rain jacket or biohazard suit. Turmeric, when dropped haphazardly into your lap, will immediately stain your shorts and the shorts of your 19 closest friends and relatives. I only mention it because a piece of chicken glanced off my shorts during lunch. I sprinted into the kitchen without pause, scrubbed 2 tons of cold water through them, and there's still a neon-yellow spot on them. Damn you, turmeric!

- Girls were in a good mood today. Though I should mention that Lily was dead-set on sprinting into the pond under the spoon-cherry bridge this afternoon. She seriously just ran straight at the water, and there's no transition, it's just grass-grass-putrid water. She would have gone right in, and I would have had to take the plunge to drag her to safety. I carried her away from the pond...she shrieked, as expected. Put her down - sprinted towards the water again. You get the idea. So we repeated that a few more times, until I carried her away for good and she had a nice little fit until she found a pine cone and was instantly (and I mean instantly) distracted and perfectly happy. Sigh.

- Had a really nice dinner at Papa's (aka, my Dad's) house. We were lucky enough to have my Aunt Betty and Uncle Jerry in town, so we got to spend some Q.T. with them again just a week after we visited them in Cincinnati.

- Lily had her first corn on the cob. I say "had" and not "ate", because the thrill here was for her to just hold the thing and laugh like a mad scientist. Oh, and she kinda sucked the butter off too, which was lovely.

That's about the best of it.

Day one hundred and forty seven.

If only this was as easy as it looks. Lily is a shoddy stroller pusher.

"Uhh....where'd that red sculpture go???"

She's got style. She looks a little like she's a gesturing Italian: "That's a what I told tha guy; no pancetta!"
ps. I forgot to mention yesterday, but check out that shot of the girls on the couch together and note the difference in feet size. Amazing.