Fender Bender

I feel sorry for all those other parents out there who think their kids are the greatest, because they're clearly deluded. My kids are the greatest.

I've not blogged much about Sophie (or blogged much at all, lately), which is unfortunate because her personality is just exploding. She has personality oozing out her ears. She's such a good-natured, happy baby (....or toddler, I guess, now that she's a year old maybe I can't call her a baby anymore), but there's just something special about her. She's becoming very social these days. For instance, I took the kids to my backup babysitter's for a few days while my mom recovered from emergency gallbladder surgery. Melody said that Sophie was in a great mood all day....until her husband Tom came home. He was covered in sawdust apparently, thus couldn't pick her up, and Melody said she just melted. This week we were in the waiting room while Travis was in speech therapy, and she really took to this guy that worked there...just kept walking up to him and smiling and blabbering and waiting for him to pick her up and cuddle her. She's got this attitude of, "if I walk up to you and smile, I know you're going to love me. You have to. I'm impossible not to love."

So I rear-ended a guy in the mall parking lot this month. Just what I needed. I was going to the mall to spend my Abercrombie gift certificate that I got for Christmas (thanks Virginia!) ... I never go to the mall so decided to do it on a Sunday evening at about 5:30, after I'd spend most of the weekend in the emergency room with my mom (re: aforementioned gallbladder issue). Knowing the mall closed at 6, I knew I'd have to pretty much get in and get out, which is my kind of shopping. I'm not much of a shopper. Anyway... I get to the mall, am driving behind this ridiculously slow driver so its taking forever and I'm getting a little annoyed. So he stops at a stop sign, I stop behind him. He begins to pull out into the intersection to turn left, I'm following, only instead he just creeps forward a little bit and does not actually turn. Bam, I run into his bumper. Now, mind you, I had not even hit the gas, merely let off the brake. I was probably traveling a quarter of a mile per hour, if that. His bumper was a little scuffed. He gets out of his car (a 2010 Lexus SUV by the way, I sure know how to pick em), examines his bumper, comes back to me and says we need to file with insurance. Yep, no problem. We pull off to the side, I gather my insurance information, bring it to him, and he says "we have to call the police". Now I didn't want to be argumentative but that seemed a little ridiculous to me. I said, I thought we would just exchange insurance and contact information? But he insisted. So, okay, police are called. The officer takes a look at his bumper, kind of snorts, and explains that there must be $1,000 worth of damage to file a crash report and there's clearly nowhere near that amount, so yeah, we just exchange insurance information and move on. Of course, by the time all this has happened, it is 5:58 and the mall is nearly closed. No Abercrombie for me.

Better luck next time.

Not just a hat rack

The other day, Travis bumped his head on something and was whining about his forehead hurting. As I normally do, in my oh-so-sympathetic way, I asked if he wanted me to cut his forehead off (hey, I'm not raising any weenies). Now, normally I'll do this if he's stubbed a toe or something...imagining a forehead being removed is a little complex for a 5-year-old, but he responded, as per usual, "no, mom, i need my forehead!" The remainder of the exchange went something like this:

Me: Are you sure? What do you need a forehead for?

Travis: It holds my brain in! If I didn't have a forehead, my brain would fall out!

Me: Ahh. Well, what do you really need a brain for?

Travis: For thinking!

Me: Oh, yes. Well, what do you really need to think about?

Travis: .... well .... what if I have to think about where I left the iPhone?

Hmm. He got me on that one. We could NOT live without the iPhone.

still here

no, I have not fallen off the face of the earth. We're still here, all five of us, just not had much opportunity to blog. This December really kicked my tail.

I now have a one year old, and a five year old, and two birthday parties to prove it, along with multiple Christmases and a New Years party and some ski trips and other random stuff all since I last posted.

I'm working on a video of Sophie's 1st birthday party, but the Flip software "flipped" out on me and then our computer became inaccessible due to reasons primarily fully in my control but that I'd rather not talk about since Ben is still kind of mad at me about it. I'll give you a hint....unfinished drink, left in Sophie's proximity, near a keyboard. So Ben must fix the keyboard before I can finish my video project. And in the meantime we of course had Christmas and Travis's birthday pary that both also need recorded for prosperity.

So, let the countdown begin. T-minus 59 days until my ski trip to Italy.