January 2007 Archives

Today's tragedy: The Dishwasher.

That's right, our heater went out yesterday, the dishwasher went belly up today. What a great week we're having.

The only up-side to all of this is that our stove and microwave are pretty much brand new. So the only appliances that could join in the suicide pact are our water heater and fridge. And those are cheap to replace, right? ;)

Of course, the day I sign on to do my first paid freelance writing gig in years, the blower on our heating unit goes out.

It started making a rattling sound last evening, so I called the repair service first thing this morning. They asked if the heat was still working. When I told them that it was, though it sounded like it was going to blow up, they said that they wouldn't be able to get to it today because they had a backlog of people who were actually without heat. They scheduled an appointment for Thursday morning.

Later in the day, Alecia called me at work to let me know that the heat had gone out. I called the place back to see if they could fit us in, now that we were in the more urgent "without heat" category. I couldn't believe what the girl told me:

"Sorry, but we had such a slow day that our technicians went home early."

WHAT? That made absolutely no sense, considering they'd already put us off earlier that morning because they just couldn't fit us in during the day. The girl promised she'd try to get one of the guys to come back in and head to our house, and she did. He had just finished his work when I got there. A blown motor. The repairman informed me that if we'd gotten him out earlier, before the thing totally blew, he may've been able to fix it. Thanks, Jack. Maybe you should explain that one to dispatch, not to me.

Anyway, his visit only cost us $75, so that wasn't so bad. Of course, the estimate on the motor is around a grand (and we need to replace our thermostat while we're at it, so throw in another hundred). And he won't be able to get the parts he needs until AT LEAST tomorrow, maybe Friday, meaning we're spending at least one night without heat.

It's not cold here like it is up north, but we are having weather in the mid-thirties overnight. And when you live in a thirty year-old home with crappy insulation, it only takes a few hours without heat before the whole house begins to match the outside temp. We were most worried about the girls, so we bought a "safe heater" for their room. Alecia and I will either sleep on their floor or cuddle up under our own pile of covers. It could be a cold night, but I think we'll be alright.

This crap happens to us EVERY YEAR, though, and I'm getting pretty sick of it. We always make plans in our heads about how we're going to spend my bonus or our tax refund. And they're not always frivolous expenses, either. We plan to pay off loans, make home repairs, put some in savings, etc. But each winter/spring, our budget is blown open by some random bad luck. One year it was the brakes on the car. Another time it was random dental surgery. Then there was a transmission that went out. It doesn't matter how flush with funding we seem to be, there's always something crappy to sweep in and steal some of it away.

Please refrain, by the way, from telling me "welcome to being a homeowner." We're almost two years into that, so I'm not quite the whining rookie I may've been a year ago. Now, I'm a whining veteran. Just because I know what's coming, doesn't mean I have to take it well. :)

Anyway, I have to go dig out some wool socks if I'm going to get any work done in this room tonight...

Maddie is potty trained. We still have a few accidents going #2, but she goes pee without any reminder and has slept in her panties, without a pull-up, for the past few nights with no accidents. It was apparently just a matter of will: 3 weeks ago her friend Grace came over to play. Maddie saw her go potty and from then on went by herself. She even wore her panties to ballet this week.

Now Josie has jumped on the bandwagon too. She insists on wearing pull-ups instead of diapers and has let me know each time she has to go potty. It's usually after the fact, but she tells me and then goes to sit on the potty. "I peepee on the potty!!!!" I'm wondering if we might have a two-for-one deal here.

Yesterday, Josie and I were walking along to meet up with Bill and Maddie. When she saw Bill she said,

"That's my daddy. His name is Bill. Your name is Alecia."

I nearly stopped in my tracks. She didn't talk for a while, but she's definitely catching up!

Maddie walked into the room just know, came right up to me and said,

Don't you want me, babyyyyyyyyyyy!
Don't you want me, ooooooooo-oooooooh!

Maddie insists on listening to female vocalists lately.

Anytime there is a song on by a male artist, she tells us to turn it to "girl music". Actually, her words are "girl muse-kick".

We were at a birthday party over the weekend. Maddie and Josie were playing with a Noah's Ark Little People set.

Josie: {holding up Noah} Santa Claus!!!!!

Mommy: No, Josie, that's Noah.

Maddie: {holds up boat} Yeah, Josie. That's Noah and this is his architect.

The girls are currently in the living room playing a game of licking one another's feet.

So much for all the toys they got for Christmas.

Apparently, my resolution to post more was not met with an equal resolution by family members and friends to read more. If I stop typing, I can hear cricket sounds coming from this blog.

Anyway, although no one seems to be reading this stuff, I still want to share.

Here's a quick piece of video shot while on an expedition to Target last weekend. It demonstrates exactly why mommy hates to take the girls shopping (and why daddy loves to).

Yes, they are running wild in a store, and that's totally daddy's fault. But I find them so entertaining that they make shopping fun. And that's saying a lot.

The girls see their first movie at the theater. They saw Happy Feet and loved it.

Christmas and the holidays in general were so much fun this year. The girls are getting old enough that they understand a little of what's going on and their excitement over all of it was contagious. Even Josie, who doesn't understand as much as Maddie does, seemed to feed off the anticipation of her sister.

Santa Clause brought the girls a doll house for Christmas this year. Maddie woke up well before Josie and couldn't wait to come into the living room. We had to make her wait just a minute so we could wake up Josie as well. They ran into the room and Maddie's face just lit up and she ran to the doll house to take a look. Josie, on the other hand, was in such shock and so excited that she just stood there shaking. The poor baby just couldn't take it all in. Unfortunately for Santa, the girls are now more interested in the little people that came with the house than the house itself. They haven't touched it in the last few days at all.

New Year's was pretty low-key for us this year. We had planned on letting the girls stay up to ring in the new year, but the excitement of the previous week left them exhausted and they actually went to bed pretty early. Bill and I just hung out on the couch watching Dick Clark. Lucky(?) for us, our neighbors across the street started celebrating with fireworks at 10pm. I guess the excitement of everything was getting to them as well. That, or they needed to do a practice run before midnight.

Josie is now talking so much that it's surprising. As my mom mentioned, she talks as much as Maddie. And, well, knowing how much Maddie talks, you can understand that Bill and I don't get much of a chance to get a word in. It has been interesting as well to see just how much she knows and understands. For example, she knows her ABCs. We had no idea until just the other day when she was singing them. She still has problems enunciating her words, but she's improving every day. She is also incredibly funny. She's quite a little clown and loves to do things to make us all laugh.

Maddie is becoming such a little grown-up for being only 3 years-old. She definitely knows what she likes and wants. This includes everything from eating only peanut butter and jelly for every meal to insisting on wearing a tutu every day. She's pretty opinionated about her clothing choices and, as you can see from some of the latest pictures, she has quite a knack for, um, putting together outfits. Speaking of tutus, she started ballet again a couple of weeks ago. She was so happy to see her Miss Mary again. We didn't realize it ourselves, but she has changed so much in the past 6 months that Miss Mary didn't even recognize her at first. Ballet, of course, has led to much dancing at home. Maddie does pirouettes at least once every half hour. Even Josie pretends to do ballet though her moves mostly consist of running around and occasionally lifting one leg. Maddie will be playing soccer again this season too, but it doesn't start for another few months. Her ballet classes and soccer will only overlap for a couple of weeks. We've made some progress in potty training too. It's mostly two steps forward, one step back, but she insists on wearing her panties every day. Unfortunately she doesn't always like to take a break from playing with her toys to use the restroom. We've used the steam cleaner quite a lot the last few weeks. We made a breakthrough yesterday, though, when her friend Grace came over and used the potty. The rest of the afternoon and today she has gone by herself without prompting from me. I joked that we need to have Grace over every day.

In all, it was a great holiday season. We're looking forward to Josie's birthday in a few weeks. She'll be 2 years-old already. That's more upsetting to me than even Maddie turning 3. What happened to my baby? The girls have been incredibly cute lately too. They insist on cuddling together on the couch and they love to hold hands when we go places. It gets awwwws from random people but we also can't help feeling that way ourselves. They're protective of each other too. Whenever one is getting in trouble the other will speak up and tell Mommy and Daddy not to be mean to her sister!

February will be a busy month as we have Josie's birthday, Valentine's Day (the girls will be staying with my mom for a couple of days) and Bill's birthday. I'm sure we'll have lots more to write about then.

Remember that short film I directed? Well, you want to see why I wasn't in my own film?

Check this out.

Yeah, that may be my finest moment as an actor on stage and screen. I did this for my co-worker Susan, and yes, it did involve taking my clothes off in front of people I hand TPS reports to every day.

The funny thing about it is that I also appear on the poster for the movie. (Yes, we had professional posters made--I'll share both later.) And since it pretty much got the most laughs out of any of the films in the festival, it's the one I became known for. All week, people kept saying, "Your film was SO funny, it had me crying. It was hilarious!" And every time they said it, I knew they were talking about the one in which smoke comes out of my ears, not the one I spent a month stressing over.

Oh well, I'm glad I was involved with both films, even if one of them may be used to someday derail a potential political career. I learned a lot from my experiences, not the least of which is to stuff your shorts with an extra tubesock if you plan to walk around the office in just boxers for a day.

I didn't write New Year's Resolutions. I don't have a great track record with those (for example, 2006 was supposed to be the year in which I finally LOST weight), so now I eliminate the chance of failure by just not writing them in the first place.

That being said, if I did write resolutions this year, one of them would be to post more on this blog. Ideally, I'd like to post at least weekly, if not more often than that. The main reason for this is that I'm terrible at calling and emailing our friends and family. So this will be a way they can make sure we're still alive and kicking even when I won't answer my cell.

Also, I don't take as many pictures as I should and don't keep a journal, so maybe posting more often on here will help me catalog some of the milestones and great moments we've had with the kids. In the least, it will keep you guys informed of that stuff, which we need to be better at since we don't send out a year-end summary letter with our Christmas cards, as so many of our friends do. (Heck, we didn't even sign them or hand-write the labels this year! Hooray for automation!)

Speaking of Christmas cards, by the way, I should add that there are still several of you out there who have cards coming your way. With the exception of the ones intended for my sister Sherri and my brother Mike, this is all my fault. For those two, we somehow sent them to the wrong addresses, so they came back. That's especially embarrassing in Mike's case, considering that we've successfully sent several other things over the last few months, so I'm not sure how we've all of a sudden started using an outdated address. Anyway, those two cards are being re-enveloped and resent. (You can tell we love you guys by the fact that we're paying for stamps twice just to send these cards to you!)

As for the rest of you who haven't gotten cards, I'll repeat that this is entirely my fault. Alecia asked me to collect some addresses for various people, and I just never did it. I said I would do it, but the idea got pushed out of my brain by all of the holiday specials, colorful Christmas lights and thick, creamy eggnog that I overdosed on this past season. (The whole "she asks, I forget" thing is pretty much our relationship in a nutshell, by the way. That poor, poor woman.)

Anyway, if you get a Christmas card in mid-February with two cute ragamuffins on it, that's neither hand-labeled or signed, know that while we may not have sent your card by December 24th, that doesn't mean that you weren't in our thoughts over the holidays.

And if you don't get your card by Valentine's Day, you should really stop checking the mailbox, because it's not coming. By then, I'll be busy seeing how many candy hearts I can stuff into my mouth, and I'll have totally forgotten all about this once again.