Buh-Bye

While Our Dumb Lives will continue until God gives us pink slips, Our Dumb Blog will be shutting its virtual doors.

We've decided that our kids may not appreciate having their childhood broadcast to the world.  I know that I personally would be horrified (and super creeped out) to know that some random dude in Russia was reading about my potty training successes and failures at age two.  But we didn't have the Internets back when I was two...  we had scrapbooks with fairly low readership rates,  and my mom's couponing/refunding club where neighborhood moms would swap stories (and $avings!)  The information was controlled and contained.  So I never had to worry about it.  But now we have the Internets, there are (in fact) random dudes in Russia (and around the world) that read this blog.  

I know, right? 

I appreciate their interest, but I am also creeped out by their interest.  

So in an effort to protect our kid's privacy and shield them from (blog-related) future embarrassment, creeped-out feelings, and random Russian dudes - Our Dumb Blog is no more.

Thank you to everyone who read along these many years.   Yeah, even you Russian dudes.  It's been fun.

Now it's time to fade to black...

The End. 

And stop reading....

NOW. 

ne·glect

tr.v. ne·glect·ed, ne·glect·ing, ne·glects

1. To pay little or no attention to; fail to heed; disregard: neglected their warnings.

2. To fail to care for or attend to properly: neglects her appearance.

3. To fail to do or carry out, as through carelessness or oversight: neglected to return the call.

n.

1. The act or an instance of neglecting something.

2. The state of being neglected.

3. Habitual lack of care.

---

I know, I know, I know.  You are probably getting cobwebs in your hair just looking at this blog.  For the past two months we have completely abandoned ODB.  This started with some technical difficulties, but then that became more of a scapegoat for good old fashioned laziness.  The laziness generated some apathetic inertia which rolled into a gigantic ball of tumbleweed, which you will see blowing by here any moment now.  

As the kids get older, I am seriously beginning to think they may not want their lives (as adorable as they are) broadcast to the universe.  Yes, that is how far reaching our readership goes... the entire UNIVERSE.   However this too may just be a scapegoat for good old fashioned laziness.  And you know what that leads to...

Enjoy two extreme close ups of the kids eating ice cream while we consult the magic 8 ball on the future of ODB.

OK, here is what our consultant told us:

*sigh*... consultants....

Where's the penny?

Ava's latest joke goes a little something like this...

She holds out both of her hands, balled up into little fists.

Ava: Where's the penny?

Unsuspecting Adult (aka "the mark"): Your right hand?

Ava: No (she opens her right hand to show there is nothing there)

Unsuspecting Adult: OK, how about your left hand?

Ava: Ta-da! (she opens her left hand to reveal... nothing)  I don't have a penny!!


(end scene)

She thinks this is pretty funny.

Here she is workshopping new routines with her comedy mentor:

(PS-Yes, we are still having techno-malogical issues. These pictures were taken and sent to us by someone with fine photo skills. Thank you, Kim!)

At Least He Know's He's Three

Alexander likes the song "Proud to be an American"... except when he belts it out, he has his own take on things:

"And I’m proud to be an American,
where at least I know I’m three."




Technical issues continue. Pictures/videos someday soon. I swear it.

D'oh!!!

I'm beginning to think this is divine intervention... although, I didn't think God even read Our Dumb Blog. I mean, I followed Him on twitter for a while but His tweets were always so high and mighty. Also, He had an annoying habit of ending every tweet with "LOL", which got annoying.

But, anyway... here is the deal. Our camera is broken. Yeah, so never mind about those promised adorable pictures and video.

*sigh*

This dumb blog is officially on a dumb hiatus.

Thingie Located!

So I have finally located a thing for the deal so that I can download pictures on this here computer. Get ready to pop some popcorn and season to taste because next week we'll have lots of pictures and videos to share.

Here's a helpful tip and timesaver from ODB. If you don't have time to read the news online (or if you are are a member of the elderly or fan-of-antiquities demographic, something called a "newspaper"), you might find that reading t-shirts will keep you reasonably up-to-date on world events. Works for me!

Party Pooper

Ava and Alexander like to turn on the radio and yell "Dance Party!" while swaying/hopping/rolling around to the music.

Yesterday, Ava turned on the radio. She said "Dance party!" and started dancing. Tim started dancing too. "Nooo!" Ava said, "Daddy's too big to dance!" Tim, refusing to let the words of a not-yet-two-year-old put an end to his groove, kept dancing.

Ava was not pleased. She stopped dancing, curled her lower lip into a pout, and plopped down on the floor with her arms folded. She looked at her Daddy and said very slowly, and with great emotion, "The party is OVER."





PS- pictures coming soon. Fer real. Still haven't unpacked the cable that connects that one thing to that other deal.

Well, that's one strategy...

Alexander still has to be reminded to use the bathroom. For reasons only compelling to a 3-year-old, he sometimes REALLY doesn't want to go. Today, when reminded and guided to the bathroom he said "No! That's not a toilet. I can't use that. It's just a pretend toilet for decoration."

Why did we buy a house with toilets that are purely decorative? I'm surprised that wasn't caught during the inspection.

Fine Dining with Alexander

Tim took Alexander out to eat in a restaurant that had a lot of counter-height seating. Alexander looked around and loudly declared "All of these people are sitting in high chairs!"

So, he was initially a little put-off that all these adults were sitting in high chairs, but the situation was more than rectified when he was served his dinner and said (i.e. screamed) "This is the biggest chicken nugget EVER!"

(file photo of Alexander doing fish impression with unnamed fish)

The Highly Distracted Singer

Ava had an ear infection that had gone bad...er, badder. Yesterday was a hurlfest. Today Ava and I celebrated her surviving Barfageddon. We stayed in our PJs all day and enjoyed Ava's newly rediscovered puke-free lifestyle. It smells much better than her previous lifestyle choice.

It's been a while since I had Ava sing for the camera. Since I am now able to get videos on the computer again, today seemed like a good day to do it. At first she was reluctant:



She agreed to my second request, but it almost cost us our puke-free winning streak.



She was happy to sing the ABCs, but this ended abruptly when she realized "colors fall down! See?"


Yeah, I should just come out and acknowledge at this point that our house is a total mess. We are in the process of moving. Here is a shot of our moving crew in action:



We pack a box, they unpack it to use it for a spaceship/race car/house/anything that isn't a nicely packed box. Anyway... back to the singing.

Finally, I had Ava trapped inside the art easel. Here she sang "Twinkle Twinkle." She was *this close* to putting it on "continuous play."


I'm not a doctor, but I'm thinking she'll be just fine. She's a tough cookie, even when she's losing her cookies.

Irony in Action

We have a new property management company we have to deal with for our association. I just went to their website and see this:

Excellence isn't just a goal... its our standard

Its your standard. Really? Wow. That is excellent.





I am seriously not one of "those people" - a self-righteous proper grammar enforcer. I overuse acronyms, abuse ellipses, and misconjugate verbs until their own mother wouldn't recognize them. But, this struck me as extra hilarious that a mistake like this was made in a slogan for a company promoting itself as generally superior in every way. Of course, guess who will be laughing when I have to write a check to them every month? Me. Again. Because who write checks? What is this, 1982?? Oh, so funny.

The moral of this blog entry: Everything is funny if you deprive yourself of enough sleep.



Oh, I should also mention that the reason we have a new property management company to deal with is because we are moving. But that news seems really unimportant in light of this hilarious grammatical error. I don't know why I'm even mentioning it.

*insert sound of crickets here*

This blog has been temporarily suspended due to lack of enthusiasm.


Actually, we've just been really busy AND my computer is still in repairs.


But updates and adorable pictures soon.


Really.


For reals.

darndest

OK, so it seems all my posts lately could be filed under "Kids Say the Darndest Things." First of all, both Ava and Alexander have a lot to say, so the odds of saying something "darndest" is high. Second of all, I can't post a lot of pictures right now because our computer died and is getting repaired. You may wonder, then, how I'm typing this. Well, that's for me to worry about.

Last night, Alexander was afraid to go upstairs. I asked him why and he whispered "it's too quiet. There are monsters up there." So I had to launch into the whole 'there are no such thing as monsters, monsters are just pretend' speech which ended with me reassuring him there were absolutely no monsters in our house. Here is the conversation that followed:

Alexander: Really? There are no monster in our house?
Me: Right.
Alexander: (thinks for a moment) Are there monsters outside?
Me: No, there aren't any monsters outside.
Alexander: What about up in the clouds? Are there monsters in the clouds?
Me: Uh... no.
Alexander: What about on the moon?
Me: Um...
Alexander: Or the sun? Are there monsters on the sun? Or on Mars?

I don't know where he got the idea of monsters to begin with. I blame this guy:


And, yeah, I would be scared if he were upstairs too... or on Mars.

New Local Comic

The other day, Ava and I were taking a car ride and Ava began requesting songs. (Fun fact: there is surprising overlap in the Venn Diagram of mothers and jukeboxes.) Ava's little voice was calling out from the backseat "Sing, Mommy! Baa Baa Blacksheep AND Row Row Row Your Boat! Sing, peeeeeeeeze!"

So I told her we'd do a mash-up and sing both songs at the same time. It went a little something like this "Row, row, row your sheep..."

This was comedy GOLD. Ava couldn't believe it. She was laughing so hard, she could barely squeak out "Again! Again!"

Well, we got to our destination and went on with our day. Later that night, as I was putting her to bed, I started to sing a lullaby. "Hush little baby, don't say a word..."

Ava's eyes suddenly popped open and she interrupted "mama gonna buy you a SHEEP!"

She then started to laugh like crazy at her own comic genius and effective use of the "call back" technique. In case it was over my head, she stopped laughing just long enough to say "that was a joke!"





(file photo of Ava longing for a career in comedy... or perhaps just longing to play in the snow.)

Odd Beverage Request

Tonight Alexander said he wanted "Chinese Milk"... yes, he clarified, he wanted milk from China.

Maybe this is some kind of youthful rebellion against his parent's generation's obsession with buying local and organic. I mean, he nailed the opposite of that.

Kids these days.

Bub the Builder

We recently unearthed a DVD that I got many years ago for my nephew to watch when he visited - it's called Bob the Builder. Since both Ava and Alexander seem to have an interest in construction equipment, we decided to give it a whirl.



For those of you who don't watch toddler TV, Bob the Builder is a stop-motion animation series. It's kind of craptacular. I haven't bothered to google it or even watch to credits to confirm, but the voice of Bob sounds a lot like Greg Proops... which means he's a pretty effeminate sounding construction worker.




Greg Proops is hilarious, and I assume very successful. So, it probably isn't actually him but just someone that sounds like him. Not since The Village People have possibly light-in-the-loafers construction workers been so celebrated.

Anyway, Bob has a battle cry of sorts. He shouts "Can we fix it?" and all his trucks shout back "Yes we can!" He shouts "Can we build it?" and the response is "Yes we can!" (While this may sound like a political message, BTB came up with this slogan long before Obama used it in his 2008 presidential campaign. If only Bob had trademarked it! Obama would have to shell out millions and he'd be rich - maybe BTB could even afford more than 3 facial expression for their characters.)

So Alexander picked up on this battle cry. The other night he yelled "Can we fix it?" then "Can we built it?" and then, to our surprise, he added "Can we pay for it?"

We literally LOLed. Or is that LedOL? Stupid acronyms making grammar so complicated...

We're trademarking the phrase "Can we pay for it?" right now. It's just a matter of time before that becomes a campaign slogan. Cha-ching!

Holiday Highlights

Alexander showed major improvements in his sprinkle control. (As far as cookies go, anyway.)


He also decorated a fine gingerbread house, pretty much up to code by local standards.


Christmas morning, the kids were excited to see some big guy had broken into our house. Santa put a cell phone in Ava’s stocking. She immediately called to thank him.


Santa also gave Ava a hat…


Which had the strange (brew) ability to turn Ava into Bob McKenzie.



"Take off, eh!"

In case you are in serious need of remedial work in the classics, here is Bob McKenzie:


Alexander received an unexpected promotion to Fire Chief.



Being a nice brother, he worked out some sort of a job-share arrangement with his sister.


It was a good time to have firefighters in the house, because suddenly it seemed that everything was on fire. These were strange fires that only Alexander and Ava could see with their super-trained firefighter eyes.

I don’t know what’s going on here, but this picture captures the spirit of our Christmas morning nicely.



Then we put a frilly dress on Ava and went to spend the afternoon at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. When the kids saw Grandma and Grandpa’s tree, they were like “whoa”.




...And it slowly dawned on them that their mother is an extremely lazy house decorator. Well, they’d learn that sooner or later. Sorry, kids.

Over many extended days of holiday funtoonery, presents were opened, big meals were eaten, and the kids got to spend time with their cousin and aunts and uncles and even their great grandma. Ava enjoyed the opportunity to nap on one of her favorite comfy spots.


Overall, the level of happiness experienced by the children this holiday season is show here:


(And, yes, they did receive new toys for Christmas, but apparently none are as fun as our old and curiously scented cat scratcher.)


Here's a fun fact*: according to the Chinese calendar, 2012 is the Year of the Yar. So strap on your yarbelts and get ready for a yarry ride of your life. Yar!

Happy New Year!




*for maximum accuracy, replace the word "fun" with "fictitious"