Shakin' It

I, like most of everyone I know am deeply addicted to itunes. I've been having a great time spending my hard earned money on $.99 songs.

This morning we were rockin' out to my new collection of downloads while making breakfast. Chuk was teasing me over my music choice, as I had stumbled across some classic New Order. He was sticking his bum out and shaking it at me, Salem started laughing and yelled,
"Ewww daddy! Stop doing that!"
He turned to sass her and asked, "Stop doing what?" While dancing around her.
As she continued to giggle she clarified "That booty shakin!"

What time it is?

Mom sent me a funny Salem email that I thought I'd post:

Salem just informed Ed that it was snack time. He asked how she knew and she showed him the clock. "When the big hand is there," she said "Gramma said it is snack time". She is so smart.

-CHUK

An album cover waiting to happen.

I was driving Salem home from Mommo's house tonight and we were listening to "Queens of the Stone Age - Lullabies to Paralyze". The particular song it started on was instrumental/ experimental noise and was pretty creepy sounding. Salem listened very intently for about a minute before telling me in somewhat of a strained voice, "This song looks like a drippy drippy goblin snake that eats and eats the moon and when its done, it goes to find another moon to eat!". I sort of sat there stunned at her imagery. We fast-forwarded and listened to the next song, and she rocked out in her carseat. After the song was over I asked her what she thought.

"It was really pretty awesome!" she said.

-CHUK

Yard Sail...er...Sale Season

When spring hits, it's yard sale season here in my 'hood.

Salem: "Hey mom, what are the neighbors doing at their house?"
me: "Looks like they are having a yard sale."
her: "But, how are they going to get the sailboat in the yard? There's just all that grass and no water anywhere."

ixnay on the ake-up may!

For those of you who would like to give Salem a present in the future, please NO MAKE UP.

I have been trying to clean out a Jackson Pollock style paint splatter from a bottle of "Sparkle Diva's Hot Pink Glitter Nail Polish" from the carpeting in her bedroom to no avail. I guess we'll just need to replace it. Wah-wuh.

Along the same lines, Salem has decorated the bottom half of her best friend's bedroom door with the entire contents of several shades of sparkle lip gloss.

Honeychild's World

Just plugin' my best friend's new blog. She's a great teacher and an all around great person. Love you Steph!

http://honeychildsworld.blogspot.com/

You Think Robots Are Bad?

Okay, so my family has vivid dreams while I'm stuck with this one:

...I'm at my computer and I'm drawing a box in one of my design programs. Then it disappears. I redraw it, and again it disappears. this happens over and over again until my alarm goes off. Exciting!

I'm holding out hope for a zombie or a robot. Maybe one night I'll be lucky enough to get a snake woman. Bring it on!

Dreams II - Attack of the Robot

The woman didn't turn into a snake, she had two huge black snakes wrapped around her as she rose up out of the sand. She was repeating some cryptic phrase backwards and then told me "everything I knew was a lie"... The other rhythmically dancing desert people in the dream were faceless, and had intricately patterned body paint that continued from one person to the next. The paint pattern constantly flowed across the people, shifting and changing colors...

Weird that Salem and I had vivid nightmares on the same night. Salem woke up in a panic and I went and got her out of bed. She said she wanted to sleep with us because "a robot was attacking her." The next day we both had trouble waking up. Salem was still only partially awake, until I asked her about her dream. She then suddenly bolted upright and said:

"I had a bad dream Dad! I was in a factory, and there were lots of robots, and I looked inside a machine and a robot head popped up inside the machine and I screamed so so so loud that the robot head went back down again! Then another giiiiant robot came after me and it was so so so scary and then I was awake!"

Weird dreams.

-CHUK

Active-Imagination-Powers Unite!

As many of you already know, Chuk has an uber-imagination. He always has and his profession requires it. It comes as no surprise that our daughter has inherited this quality; between the two of them I’m constantly finding myself slack jawed at the stories that spew from their mouths.

Chuk’s colorful mind has always produced wildly strange and fantastical dreams. Usually he has nightmares consisting of zombies, sharks, or some sort of H.P. Lovecraft style monsters; all of which sound like they appear to him in high-def. If it’s not nightmares, his dreams take a more Jim Morrison style putting him out in a desert with witch doctors and rainbow glasses.

As you would have guessed, Salem’s dreams are extremely vivid and she too experiences nightmares frequently. Normally her nightmares are of spiders crawling on her while she’s eating popcorn or of some kind of purple painted monster with no feet.

I woke up this morning to her slapping me in the head as she was rolling over in our bed while asleep. I didn’t remember her getting in bed with us last night. Chuk woke up and immediately started enthusiastically explaining another one of his insane dreams. I had to stop him to ask if he remembered her getting in bed with us.

Chuk: “Oh yes! She was in her bed last night calling out to me…”
Me: “I totally slept through that! I didn’t even hear her, poor baby!”
Chuk: “Well, I went in there and she was having a nightmare and talking in her sleep.”
Me: “Aw! I can’t believe I didn’t hear her! What was wrong? Was it the spider dream?”
Chuk: “No. She said she was being attacked by robots….But hey! I want to tell you about my dream, I was in a desert and I met this woman and she turned into a snake and…”

Like father like daughter.

Freak Out

I turned on the TV to start the 517th viewing of The Nightmare Before Christmas, Salem's movie de jour. The volume was up really high for some reason and it took me a moment to negotiate through all the remote controls to find the one with the volume control. Just love modern living. While I was fumbling around with the volume, Salem was screaming,
"Hey! That noise!! IT'S FREAKING MY EARS OUT!!!"

Blue Bowl

Like I have said in my past posts, we spend the majority of our weekends at other kids' birthday parties. They are usually held at some kind of jumpy place or indoor swimming pool with one thing in common, they always have cake.

Salem LOVES cake. When she gets invited to a birthday, the first thing she screams is "We're gonna have CAKE!" The funny part is that she doesn't eat the cake at all, she just licks all the icing off making the uneaten cake shine like an 8 ball.

We were at our friend's 3 year old's party this weekend at, you guessed it! A jumpy place. Only this place was actually appropriately named 'Jumpy Place', I guess to avoid any confusion with the tractor parts and feed warehouse next door. The kids jumped around on the inflatables for an hour or so and then they got to consume a large volume of Capri Sun and pizza. They finished off the bash with a very impressive Thomas The Train birthday cake.

This cake was huge. It stood about a foot tall and was shaped just like a train buttered with blue and black icing. At first, I thought something had gone wrong, as I was making my way back from the potty and noticed all the kids were quiet. On further inspection, their mouths were unearthly black holes, like characters out of a zombie film. I was relieved to find that it was just the icing turning our kids into ghouls. Man, that was some blue and black icing. Gross.

The next day, Chuk took Salem over to see his family and have dinner. Salem's aunt was playing with her and having a wonderful time. She took Salem to the potty before dinner then in a few minutes exited the restroom in distress.

auntie: "Something is wrong with Salem!! Chuk! Come here!"
chuk: "What? What's wrong!"
As discretely as she could, she described that Salem had gone on the potty and she was going to help her clean up. As she was doing so, what she found in the toilet bowl was a strange shade of blue. Chuk looked into the bowl for himself and pondered for a second and then shouted, "Thomas the Train Cake! No worries! It's the blue icing!!"

He knew what they were dealing with as this sort of thing has happened before. We took Salem over to get an ice cream at Maggie Moo's. They have a 'birthday cake' ice cream flavor that is just as blue in color as the Thomas cake. I suppose that particular blue dye really should be left out of food.

The Sound of Snacks

We live in a house where everything is all open, one giant room for the kitchen, dining room and living room. I love it, it's very spacious and is great for entertaining. (We have people over all the time.) But there are drawbacks from not having many walls. One thing--I don't have an official pantry. You know, the closet where you keep your dry goods, cleaning supplies, boxed foods and maybe a broom? Yeah, don't have that, it kinda sucks.

I use an under the counter corner cabinet housing two vertically stacked lazy susans as my 'pantry'. These shelves are packed with all the crap a three year old needs to sustain life: Animal crackers, Multipals bars, tubs of individually packaged applesauce and mandrin oranges, spaghetti, cereal and mac and cheese boxes, some cookies for treats, ect. I've got all the lighter stuff on the top tier and the heavy canned goods on the bottom tier. When I open the cabinet and turn either lazy susan, they are stacked with so much bounty that they make a terrible screeching noise.

This morning I was putting away some items that were leftover from yesterday's snack. I suppose she heard the screech of the turning lazy susan and came running over to me with a big smile on her face.

"Mom! I hear the sounds of yummy snacks and treats!!"

It's kinda like when you're looking for a cat hiding in the house and you shake a bag of treats and wait for them to come running. I'm going to try that next time she's knee-deep in a sponge bob episode and isn't coming to dinner; I'll just open the cabinet and rotate that shelf like a DJ scratching a record.