Lots of Cardboard, and a ridiculous amount of Duct Tape

Let me let you in on my newly-defined side career. I'm a castle designer.

It's true. On Saturday, Travis and I were looking online for a good craft idea, and stumbled upon this cardboard castle gem.

Please don't follow the above link to the Disney Family Fun website, and then come back to this blog and expect to see anything remotely resembling the pictures you saw there. I mean, we had fun, the boys love the castle, and I had a good time putting it together, but come on. I'm a left-brained insurance geek for pete's sake. I can muster up some creativity and artfulness every once in a while, but I keep my expectations pretty low here. (Now, if this had been a spreadsheet project, I'd have knocked it out of the park.)

Anyway, the castle is made up almost entirely of cardboard and duct tape. Well, the original instructions called for masking tape, but I didn't have much of that. I had duct tape.

So not only did we make this super-cool castle, but the boys learned a very important life lesson, which I made them repeat at least three times during our project: if it can't be fixed using duct tape....it's probably not worth fixing anyway.

Here's a picture of the boys with the finished product. The paint job leaves something to be desired, we only got one can of spray paint which didn't really cover the whole thing. But, it's better than the "oatmeal" and "cereal" and "tissue paper" labels which had heretofore marked up our castle.

By the way, I painted it while Travis was out at tae kwon do class, and got this picture when he got home. That's why he looks like he's wearing a bathrobe.

We duct-taped the finished castle to a large foam rectangle, and painted the front blue for a moat. Oh, and the red and yellow tower tops are leftover party hats from the dollar store. Pretty resourceful, eh?

Here's the inside of the castle. The stairs are a little crooked. I told you it wasn't perfect. But, there are two secret passageways, a hidden compartment, two slides plus the two towers, that little hidden room on the first floor, a couple egg-carton balconies on the front, and a look-out tower (water bottle) on the top. Pure heaven for a three- and six-year-old.

Here is Travis pointing to his favorite part, the slide leading from the roof to the second floor.

Here's Noah pointing to his favorite part, incidentally the same as Travis's. You can't see his other hand which is pointing to one of the secret exits, his other favorite.

The boys' new favorite thing to do is play with this castle with any number of their little Mario Brothers characters, many of which filled their stockings this past Christmas. Travis has designated the towers as warp zones, and he made me write "Bowser's Castle" on the front above the drawbridge. They are on a big Mario kick these days.

Oh, and what was Sophie doing while I was putting the finishing touches on the castle tonight?

Why, drawing on her face with orange marker, of course.

Not on top of my game

I'm somewhat under the weather. I've had a headache for three days, that at one point I thought was a migraine because it was accompanied by odd vision disturbances and a strange coppery smell. Now I think it might be some kind of bug because I've been hearing lots of stories about sickies with bad headaches.

It's my Wednesday off today, and I normally really do try to take advantage of my time with the kids on these days.

But, today, I mostly lay on the floor and let them crawl all over me and jump on top of me and otherwise have their way with me while I mostly whimpered and every once in a while tried to engage in some actual kid-friendly interaction.

I had planned to make a quick trip to the store to pick some essentials: red duct tape, carpet cleaner, tomatoes.

That didn't happen.

I consider it a victory that I actually fed the kids a real lunch instead of just tossing some goldfish crackers on the floor and letting them go at it.

While I was rolled up in a ball on the floor trying to will myself to get up and get my boots on to go pick up Travis from school, Sophie stuffed her coat full of little wooden blocks. I picked her up and about 12 of them clattered to the floor. She looked at me like, "Mom, what did you DO?!?"

Then later, after we got home, she built a little tower with those blocks and said, "Mom! I biwt a magic popsicle!"

Don't ask me.

Also tonight, I took Travis to tae kwon do, which he's missed quite a bit lately due to two weather-related cancellations, a ski trip, and one case of motherly forgetfulness. He's doing so great with it, really seems to enjoy it, it actually keeps his attention for the full hour, and he's definitely improved. He's learned all eighteen moves of his 'form' and is on his way to earning his orange belt. I'm quite proud.

Oh, and another thing, he's saving up for a Nintendo DS (thanks to his buddy Andy that he carpools with after school). He earned two quarters today. Couple that with the roughly three dollars that he's got in his Spiderman piggy bank, and he's only about one hundred and thirty four random acts of independence away from his dream.

The Other Half

My husband is a pretty masculine guy. He's the outdoorsy, camo-wearing, deer hunting type. He loves camping & fishing and anything with the description "off-road". He's a beer-drinker, grillmaster, action-movie watcher. The idea of hair salons baffles him (you mean you actually TIP those people?!), and he couldn't find his way through a spa if his life depended on it. His work in the kitchen usually involves a sandwich of some sort, and while he can make a good meal, a recipe containing more than four steps sounds like a ridiculous project to him. He can tinker with just about anything and does minor electrical and plumbing home repairs with ease. He handles all our household and car emergencies (as well of those of my mom), and snowblows everything in sight. He loves sports, is reasonably athletic, and will drop anything to play in a pick-up basketball game. He couldn't dance his way out of a paper bag. He suffers through romantic comedies because that's the only kind of movie I won't fall asleep during.

In other words, he's a guy's guy.

But.

He is NOT afraid to love on his kids.

He snuggles with them before bedtime. He never fails to tell each of them he loves them at least once every day. He tickles and cuddles and kisses them regularly. He puts them to bed and regales them with stories about his childhood that have them in fits of giggles. He tosses them in the air and swings them around. He hugs them and squeezes them and loves them with reckless abandon.

He's the best dad I know, and his kids love him to pieces.

Here's to you, Ben.

A Package of Rainbows

Today, Sophie came up to me as I was working in the kitchen. In her hand she held a little pouch of Shout Wipes.

(I swear by Shout Wipes by the way. My life would be meaningless without them.)

She holds it up to me and says, "Mom, you open it? You open it? I want a rainbow!"

How sweet is that? I wonder what she thought she would get when I opened it up. A package of rainbows.

Fully Charged

Noah was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich the other day.

The jar of Meijer-brand peanut butter sat on the table.

He pointed to the jar, turned to me, and said, "Mom? Is that the iPad?"

He had a hint of a twinkle in his eye, I could tell he wasn't serious about this question. I mean, is a jar of peanut butter the iPad? Where does this kid come up with this stuff?

I laughed, and said, "I'm pretty sure it's not the iPad! How would we plug it in?!"

Noah giggled, and said,"But look! It says 100%!"

I looked. He was right. The jar of peanut butter is 100% satisfaction guaranteed, because we all know how seriously Fred Meijer stands behind his merchandise.

Now I get it. He's so attuned to checking the charge level of the iPad, and plugging it in until it gets to 100%, that anytime he sees that symbol, he immediately associates it with the iPad and jokes that whatever he's looking at must actually BE the iPad.

What a jokester.

And also, a fort

Tonight at the Boys and Girls Club, I ran the spinner on a game of Twister for six eight-year-old girls, and helped an 11-year-old boy figure out Minesweeper.

Yes, Minesweeper. Seriously.

Boy did that throw me back to the days in my dad's upstairs computer room on that old Packard Bell.

Ben told me recently that all the kids at his high school are still into Minesweeper. That game just rocks.

Let's see. Nothing else of much import happening these days. Right now I am struggling with.....

a) getting Noah to sleep in his bed all night long. He's gotten much worse about this lately. We'd made some headway and have now completely regressed. By about 1 or 2 a.m., he's curled up next to me in bed, and I mostly don't even notice until later. (Ben always asks me in the morning why I don't just carry him back to bed? Ummm, duh, because I'm SLEEPING.)

b) laundry. This will never change. Not unless we either 1) find the elusive laundry fairy that hides at the end of the rainbow (under the pot of gold, you know) or 2) move to a nudist colony.

c) remembering to use just one space after a sentence instead of two. That is a hard habit to break. And so unfair. I trusted my typing teacher.

d) discouraging Sophie from her utter fascination with the toilet, without forever ruining her with regard to potty training. I mean, I'm tempted to tell her there are scary alligator-monsters that live in the potty that might reach out and bite your hand off, and that is why you should NEVER EVER dump pocket change, or laptop cords, or sliced bread into the toilet. But I have a sneaking suspicion that may be mildly traumatizing for her.

e) putting air in my tires. They seem to need it a lot more than normal tires. And I can't ever seem to remember and/or find the time. I dropped Travis off the other day literally driving on the rim.

f) my mini-marathon training. Running is hard.

g) De-stressing. I mostly feel like I'm only kind of good at a bunch of things and not really good at anything, whether that's work, parenting, wifing, housekeeping (let's face it, I'm not even kind of good at that), keeping air in my tires, you name it. I tend to rate myself on this ridiculous scale that I feel like should add up to 100,000 points in all categories but I'm only actually scoring about 80. 110 on a good day. (Meaning a day that I ran the vacuum.) (Which is not every day. Not even close.)

h) cutting my caffeine addiction. I'm trying, but it is HARD. I get all gung-ho about it, and then I get thirsty and the only thing I can think about it is a fountain soda. Oh, how I love fountain sodas.

Um.

I can't think of a segue to my next topic. So, here's a picture of the fort the kids and I made tonight. Sorry the lighting's not so good. It is a fort, after all. Forts aren't well known for their stellar illuminating qualities.

It's Never Easy

Ben and I "won" one-half of a set of four tickets to a Notre Dame men's basketball game at a silent auction last month. The game took place last Wednesday night, and promised to be quite an exciting game given that both Notre Dame and their opponent, Louisville, were nationally ranked within the top 20 teams. At the time of the game, Notre Dame was ranked #8 and Louisville #16. (ND has since moved up a spot, hooray.)

Justin and Erin held the other two tickets, and due to babysitter and other timing issues, we decided just to meet them at the game rather than ride together.

The remainder of the night was a comedy of errors. I told Ben that hey, at least it will make a good blog post.

That's our catch-phrase anymore.

Oh, Sophie just jammed four full rolls of toilet paper into the toilet? Ha ha, that will make for a good blog post.

You mean the mail carrier isn't delivering our mail anymore because the path it took half an hour to snowblow to the mailbox isn't good enough? We'll laugh about that years later as we reminisce about it in the blog.

Hee hee, you practically knocked yourself senseless and probably had a concussion? Sounds like a funny story for the blog!

At any rate, here's the condensed version.

We lined up a babysitting strategy that included someone picking Travis up from taekwondo class and bringing him back home. Meaning, one babysitter at home, and another (my mom) running pick-up duty.

Babysitter cancelled at the last minute. Back to square one.

Backup babysitter (again, my mom) graciously agreed to fill in, handling both portions of the job (babysitting and Travis pick-up). But, because of the treacherous nature of our steeply sloped driveway, and because now mom's job included loading up two young children to go pick up the third, we agreed to move my car to the street and park mom's car in the garage.

As our plan included us dropping Travis off at taekwondo on our way in to the game, I was loading Travis into the truck and also hollered to Ben to go grab the tickets from the mail center in the house. In addition, I handed Ben the garage door opener from my car so he could put it in mom's van.

As Ben is going back and forth from the house to the garage, the dog escapes.

Ben traipses through 2 feet of snow in the neighbor's yard. His knee has been bothering him from his newly defined snowboarding pastime, so it's kind of slow going. Plus the dog, by now, knows full well that this process of dog-retrieval does NOT include, upon completion, vast amounts of loving and/or dog treats. Couple that with the fact that his absolute #1 favorite thing to do is romp with the Parker's dogs in their backyard means that this endeavor is not terribly simple or at all fast-paced. Regardless, Ben finally retrieved the dog. Unfortunately, he also lost the garage door opener in the process.

We decided the garage door opener is just not a priority at this point. We leave without locating it.

On our way to drop Travis off for taekwond0, we realize we do not have the tickets. Yes, I'm serious.

Travis ends up getting dropped off for class a little late. We have no choice but to head back to the house to find the tickets. I'm convinced that, because the garage door opener was also misplaced, they were probably together. Ben surmises that he might have set them down in the snow in the neighbor's yard as he was picking up the dog. Not good.

We get home and search for the tickets (and garage door opener) for ten minutes. We find the tickets in, of all places, the mail center. Meaning they had never been grabbed in the first place. Garage door opener still lost, perhaps in the snow somewhere. For once, thank goodness for Ben's distractedness. Tickets in the mail center = much better than tickets buried in the snow in someone else's yard.

We leave the house again. We miss the green turn arrow at a particularly bad stoplight, so Ben opts for a "short cut".

Naturally, as per our luck of the evening, the short cut leads to dead end. Two cars have parked on either side of the side street we were using to connect back to the main street. The massive amounts of snow piled at the curb of said street, coupled with the poor parking ability of these idiots, meant we could not squeeze the truck in the gap between them. We honked nastily, which I'm assuming made those horrible car owners feel justifiably shamed, but because our indignant honking did not lead to drivers scrambling from the nearby houses to rectify the situation, we had to turn back around, losing valuable minutes in the process.

We arrived at the arena one minute before tip-off. Well, I mean, we made it to the street just outside the arena. Bad news, we were stuck in a ridiculously long line of cars traveling roughly one millimeter per minute into the parking lot. I'm assuming all these other drivers also had lost pet and forgotten ticket disasters, otherwise they are just a bunch of procrastinating jokers.

Half an hour later, we finally got parked, and raced into the arena. I mean raced quite literally, because the weather was frigid and we were parked approximately three hundred miles from the arena entrance.

Exciting game ensued. Notre Dame won handily in overtime. We enjoyed ourselves and got free t-shirts. No complaints.

After the game, we ran back out to the truck, only to wait another half hour to leave the parking lot. We were so low on fuel that we actually turned the truck off between our spurts of movement.

We did make it home without running out of gas.

The garage door opener is still lost, though.

Budding Musicians

So, it's not exactly pretty, but, hey, they're working together.

We'll go with it.

A Kick in the Head

This weekend we loaded up the kids and our overnight bags, and drove an hour and a half to visit some friends for their son's 2nd birthday party, and also some fun adult time after the kids went to bed.

The trip started off with a bang, literally. I was standing next to the truck, bending over to help Noah zip his coat. As I stood up, I banged my head quite squarely on the open passenger door behind me. That may not sound like a big deal. It was. I struck right at the base of my skull, I think on the corner of the door, and immediately developed a goose egg the size of a golf ball.

I stood for a moment in some type of shock, then belted out a strangled "AUURRRRGGGHH!" and then dropped to the ground. Now, understand, I wasn't knocked to the ground by the force of the impact. Instead, it was some kind of instinctual move. I told Ben later that I just felt like it was important that I get down as low as possible. So I ended up half in and half out of the truck, my upper body laying on the floormat on the passenger side, my legs in the driveway, one foot planted firmly in the snowbank.

I laid like that for a minute or so, moaning strangely and still somewhat dazed. Ben, who had been buckling Sophie in on the other side of the truck, and who was not able to come over to my side because of the combination of both doors being ajar and the massive snowbank alongside the driveway, called to me stupidly. "Diane? Um, Diane? Are you okay?" as I lay groaning amidst the discarded straw paper and random loose change on the floor of the truck.

Finally, I stood up. Ben still didn't quite understand what had happened. He tried to ask me, I started answering him, and then burst into uncontrollable laughter. I seriously couldn't stop laughing. At the same time, I started feeling like my tongue was too big for my mouth. So here I am, laughing hysterically, still trying to answer Ben's questions, and rolling my tongue in and out of my mouth like a flipping idiot. I looked for all the world like I had lost my marbles.

A few minutes later, I was able to compose myself. That's when we discovered the gigantic knot on the back of my head, and Ben wondered aloud whether he should take me to the hospital. Really nothing they would have done for me there, except warn me about a concussion and tell Ben not to let me fall asleep for the next few hours, so we decided to forego any medical care and foraged on our way. I had a raging headache for a few hours, but overall nothing too bad.

Birthday party was a success, kids and adults had a very nice time, and I didn't pass out or throw up or anything.

Victory.

Travis, Noah, Katie, Sophie, Holly, Ganon, Tanner

Edited to add this picture of the kids at the party, watching a movie before bedtime. How cute is that?

All Mixed Down

Sophie's suffering from a little condition I like to call "preposition confusion".

She routinely asks to be picked "up" when she really means she wants "down". For example, I might be carrying her downstairs when she catches sight of Avery, the cat. She wants to chase Avery. She says, "Mom, I want up! I want up! Let me up, PLEASE?!"

She generally does not have this problem in reverse, i.e., with her requests to actually be picked up.

She also routinely confuses "on" and "off". As in, "Mom, my sock came on!" or "Mom, you put my boots off?"

It's endearing for now. Unless she turns into one of those people that uses "of" as a verb. Then we'll have problems.

This is my prayer

Dear God,

Part of the joy that accompanies having a daughter is supposed to be the ability to apply fancy, cutesy hair styles at will. Hair bows and ponytails and bouncy curls should be an established part of my routine by now.

I'm being robbed of that indulgence.

Sophie is nearly two months past two years old. Yes, she's cute as a button. Yes, she's spunky and engaging beyond belief. Yes, I love her dearly, as does anyone that knows her. No, I could not imagine a world without my Sophie.

But her hair is ridiculous.

It's thin and fine and barely holds a hair band, let alone a barrette. It's long in the back and painfully short in the front. It sticks out at odd angles all over her head.

In her infant months, this didn't matter at all. As a one-year-old, it was just plain cute. But when, oh when, God, will my baby girl get a real hairstyle? One that isn't reminiscent of Joe Dirt or perhaps Rod Stewart?

Amen.

P.S. I'm not a horrible mom. I do really like Sophie's hair. It's cute. In a "can't-do-anything-with-it-because-I-don't-have-fancy-cutesy-girly-hair" kind of way. I'm just concerned that if she doesn't get some style-able hair sometime soon, I'm going to start applying bows and frills to poor Noah's head. Now that kid's got some hair.

Cookie Monsters

All three kids were sitting at the kitchen table.

I had just poured each of them a glass of milk.

Noah retrieved from the counter our Ziploc bag of chocolate chip cookies. He took one out and handed it to Travis.

It was then that I noticed that there was only one cookie remaining in the bag.

Noah took the last cookie out of the bag. He looked at Sophie, looked in the empty bag, looked at the cookie in his hand, looked back at Sophie.

The situation was rife with meltdown potential. I didn't jump in. I waited to see how this would play out, and who I would need to placate most.

Noah calmly broke the cookie in half and handed one half to his sister. And proceeded to happily devour the remaining cookie half. Sophie said, "thank you, Noah" and did the same with her half-cookie.

Well played, Noah. Well played.

Exit Here

Noah's beginning to expand on his reading abilities. He's pretty good at word recognition, like reading words he's familiar with on iPad games or Kinectimals and whatnot.

The other day, about two weeks ago, we were picking Travis up from school, waiting outside his classroom. Noah pointed to a sign in the hallway and asked what it said. It was an EXIT sign, pointing the direction to the doorway. I informed Noah of that. He nodded solemnly and repeated "exit" quietly.

Since then, he's been obsessed with EXIT signs. Driving down the toll road, he screeches, "EXIT! Mom! I saw an EXIT sign! Did you see that EXIT sign?!?" In Meijer, he hollers, "Look, Mom! EXIT! Do you want to EXIT?!" And of course, at Travis's school, he never fails to point out the original EXIT sign with delight and excitement. "E - X - I - T spells EXIT!"

Last week, I was upstairs putting laundry away, and Noah was playing in his room. He said, "Mom! You have to come see this! It kind of looks like "exit"!" Interested, I followed him to the CD player in his room. He pointed to the "Next" button, exclaimed, "look, there is an 'E X' just like in 'exit'! What does it say?!" We sounded it out as I explained to him that it said "next", which does indeed contain the "ex" sound just like in "exit".

Then he surprised me by saying, "what does this button say? I think it says "back" but I'm not sure." And then, "Look, this one says Stop, just like a stop sign!" He was right on both counts.

When I went to pick up the boys from my sister's house, after they'd spent three days there while Ben and I went skiing, Noah was in a pretty sour mood. I think he was mostly sleepy, but he cried and wailed as we left and during most of the car ride home. What finally cheered him up? As he was whimpering in the backseat, he suddenly spotted his favorite word along the side of the toll road, and shrieked, "Mom! Exit!" and was in a squeaky happy mood for the rest of the trip.

Similarly, he had been in a funk one afternoon when I picked him up from my mom's. There is exactly one Exit sign along the road on our route home. Once Noah saw it, he said, "Oh, look. An Exit sign. The only thing that makes me happy is Exits and bo-bos. And Slinky dog."

Well okay then.

It's the End of an Era

It's kind of ironic that I posted my last blog about the one "constant" of our ski trips - Ted's Carhartt attire. Not ten minutes after we arrived at our cabin, Ted informs me that his lovely wife, Alison, had purchased a pair of ski bibs for him. Literally ten straight years of Ted in Carhartt bibs on the ski slopes, and this year, he wore ski bibs.

I guess it's true. The only thing you can count on is change.

Never fear. We've discovered another undeniable constant about our ski trips: the Davidsons forget to bring shampoo. Pretty much every year, we have to stop at the one little gas station-slash-convenience store a few minutes away from our cabin to buy shampoo. And Cheez-Its. This year was no exception. So go ahead, Ted, graduate to normal ski-wear if you must. I'll forget the shampoo. So there.

Shawn being goofy because, well, that's what Shawn does.

Me and Ben

Flat land is tough on the snowboarders. Ben improvised a solution.

Ben got some good jumps in.

As did Shawn

Ted

I didn't do so good with the jumps this year.

Tiffany and Ted

Ben found himself knee-deep in the snow and minus a ski.

Thankfully, he found it, and made his way out safely.

Here's Ben. I unfortunately didn't get much good footage of myself as I did lot of the videography.

The gang, minus Chip

And finally, here's the link to the annual video. Enjoy.