Apparently, there’s a learning curve to this game that I just never knew of until now. The twins LOVE the idea of playing hide and seek. But no matter how many times I try to explain or show them how to play, they just haven’t quite nailed the concept yet.

Today we were playing outside and took a walk down to their tree, which is at the far end of the yard. Someone mentioned the game and I decided to take another stab at it. I told them I could count and they should go and hide so they thought Mommy couldn’t see them (and all the while I am thinking in the back of my head that someday in a store I’d be cursing the day I ever taught them this dumb game because they’ll finally get it and make me have a panic attack by actually hiding.) Then Adam and I would try to find them. I covered my eyes with my hand and counted to ten. I opened my eyes. They were standing about 3 feet away from me with their hands over their eyes.

So I tried again. I told them to hide and gave them some ideas, like behind tree trunks. I did the eye cover and count again. I peeked while I counted and they did both run to the nearest tree and “hid” by standing directly next to the trunk on the side nearest to me. So I kept counting and turned around so at least they’d be behind me and I could pretend to look for them at another tree first. I called out the whole “Ready or not, here I come!” thing and as I turned around, Alex came running toward me. Avery stayed put at the tree but was in plain site giggling like crazy.

I thought maybe it would work better if Adam and I did the hiding. So the twins counted and I hid on the far side of a tree trunk from them. They got to 19, 20, 19, 20, 19, 20 and came running for me. With their hands over their eyes, of course. Strike three.

I decided to go back to them hiding. We played about four more rounds of the version where they stood next to a tree on my side of it and then came running at me as soon as I said “Ready or not, here I come!” They don’t get the game AT ALL, but they were laughing, happy, silly little things and we were having a blast, and that’s what matters most.

So I packed up the kids and drove to the local party store today hoping to find two cute cow costumes, since that’s what the wondertwins have declared they’d like to be for Halloween. (Well, first Avery wanted to be a giraffe, but a cute giraffe that looks like a giraffe costume is even harder to find than a cute cow, so I nipped that in the bud.) And on the way to the store, we passed by a new Mexican restaurant where we ate last weekend. The food there was awesome. I had steak fajitas. The twins had a chicken quesadilla, some tortilla chips with guacamole, and several bites of a seafood paella they begged from Daddy. Adam just had a bottle of milk. The building for the restaurant is sort of distinctive, but I never would have thought they would recognize it after only one visit. But sure enough, when we were driving past, Alex pointed out the restaurant and we had a fun five minutes of them asking what everyone ate and trying to pronounce foods like fajita, guacamole, quesadilla, and paella. Fast forward a couple of hours to when we got home and I asked them what they’d like for dinner. Of course, his very serious sounding reply was, “Paella.” Clearly he doesn’t know who he got for a mom. He got leftover chicken and scalloped potatoes from a box! Yesterday we were at Uno’s for lunch and Don asked Avery to eat a pepperoni on her pizza and she looked at him and said “Actually, Daddy, the pepperoni is kind of spicy.” We both cracked up, and Don had to ask me if he had heard her correctly! Do normal 2 year olds speak like these two???

Oh, and the party store had no cow costumes in their size. I’d very much like this one but it doesn’t seem to be available in their size, and I don’t really like either of the two that do seem to come in their size (2T or 3T,) so if you happen across a cute one somewhere, please show me!

As you’ve noticed the site has a new look to it.  What you may not notice at first glance is that our photos page has changed.  I’ve changed out the underlying functionality that pulled pictures from our photo sharing site.  The new version will be much faster, more stable and just plain cooler when it comes to looking at the photos.

I am still in the process of uploading older photos to our new image sharing site (Google Picasa).  So hang in there as I get them online.  All the photo gallery here on the site does is pull in the images from my Picasa web albums (RSS feed for you geeks) on our blog.  This saves you from having to remember to check here for posts, there for pictures, etc.

For those of you that are interested in going to our photo sharing site directly, there are some cool things that you can see there that you won’t see there.  For example, as my buddy Bill explains, Google has recently added some very cool face tagging technology where it picks up on who is in your pictures via face recognition technology.  As you can see here, you can browse my albums by who is in them (again, as I add more pictures this will become more useful).

Anyways, I figured I’d share some of the details on the new stuff here.  Stick around, I know we’ve got a few good posts that we’re working on and lots of fun stuff to share!  Hope you all had a great holiday and are ready for another football season!

I’ve seen this on a couple of friends’ blogs and thought it’d be fun to post. Then I realized I haven’t read many of these “classics.” I really am a pretty well read person, but recently I just don’t get the time I wish I had for it. And I’m hard to please, too. Lots of times I’ll pick up a hyped book and think to myself that it’s not all that. Also, I’d argue that Night by Elie Wiesel belongs on the list. Anyway, here goes:

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read. (I’m including any books I’ve started but haven’t finished. Has anyone I know ever finished Ulysses? Please speak up so I can bow at your feet …)
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE. **I can’t figure out how to do this. I am officially a blog-tard.)
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who’ve read 6 and force books upon them

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman Have read the first of the trilogy, but not the rest.
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller6
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger (started, couldn’t get into it)
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown – didn’t like it much
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

After Alex went over the crib again last week and limped for three days, we thought it best to either put on the crib tent or convert his crib to a toddler bed, which meant just removing the front and replacing it with a small rail to keep him from falling out. So Saturday morning, Alex & Daddy brought out the tools and put on the rail. We also gated his room off so even if he opened the door, he wouldn’t have the run of the house. Here’s how the transition went.

Saturday: Nap was perfect, and so was bedtime. He climbed right in and stayed there. I was beyond shocked that it was this easy.

Sunday: Just like Saturday. So I was thinking this was going to be a breeze. No adjustment issues for MY son.

Monday: Nap was great, but somewhere around 2 a.m. it finally occurred to him that he could get out of the bed whenever he wanted. Like 2:00, to pee. And 2:10, to say he had to poop when he didn’t really. And 2:15 to open and close the bedroom door a few times. And 2:17 to play with books and stuffed animals. By then I said forget it about getting up and putting him back in bed - let him play and he’d eventually fall asleep, be it in the bed or on the floor. But I was tired, so I went back to sleep.

Tuesday: Woke up around 7 and stood at his door, saying “Mommy? Mommy! Assah wake!” Another good nap. And finally, a night when it took him a while to fall asleep. I am not remembering anything in particular, but I am sure he didn’t just stay in bed at bedtime.

Wednesday: Alex woke a little earlier than usual and knocked the gate down to come into Adam’s room and tell me he was awake. I made a mental note to tighten the gate. Naptime was fine. Bedtime was nuts. We could tell he was probably out of bed, but were letting it slide. Finally, at around 9 I went back in to tell them both to stop giggling and go to sleep. I found Alex sitting outside Avery’s crib, laughing, and Avery sitting on top of every freaking book they own. He’d thrown three little crates full of books into her crib. Oh, they thought it was hilarious. She couldn’t have gone to sleep if she wanted to - there was no mattress even visible. So I cleaned them out and put him back to bed and told the kids to GO TO SLEEP!

Thursday: Alex woke before 7. I snuck into the shower and planned to get him once I was clean. The gate was extra tight to prevent him from knocking it over. So, showing great ingenuity, he hauled over a chair and must have stood on it and gone over the gate, because he greeted me in the bathroom, and the chair and gate greeted me at the door to their room. Lovely, no worries for broken legs there, right? (Which is what the whole bed thing was about in the first place.) No nap because we went to the zoo. At bedtime, they were so exhausted, they did pretty much go right to sleep. But at 8:45 or so, Avery cried out, so I went to check on her and damn near stepped on Alex when I went in. He was crashed out in the middle of the floor with his binky in his mouth, so I moved him back to bed and he stayed there.

I cannot imagine trying to do this with them both at the same time. For now, I am thankful that their new pet fish, who live on their dressers, haven’t been upended in his wanderings. I’ll worry about Avery being in a bed in, oh, a year or so. And Adam will never have this transition because at this rate, he’ll be sleeping in a swing til he leaves for college.

No, we’re not wasted away in Margaritaville. But a mom can dream…

Earlier this week, we had a playdate at a friend’s house and rushed home just in time for a quick lunch for the twins. Adam was very tired, so after plunking the twins down at the kitchen table with some munchies, I took Adam to his room to feed, rock, and put down for a nap. It’s a quick and easy job when he’s so sleepy, maybe 5 minutes. And the twins are used to eating on their own at that table while I deal with the baby. They’ll wander in with messy hands to tell me if they need something usually.

In hindsight, I should have known it seemed too quiet in the kitchen, I suppose. But I enjoyed the peace and time with Adam. I walked back into the kitchen ready to wipe them off, hit the potty, and do the naptime routine. But I found piles of salt. Everywhere. Like a whole shaker full. On the floor. On their plates. On the table. On their clothes. On their hands and faces. In their hair. Oh, and they were sooooo pleased with themselves. And they were already headed for a late nap even before the mess.

“Who did this????” I asked.

Avery proudly replied, “Avery and Alex did this!” Huge smile. She was thrilled.

Alex added, “Assah needed peppah sauce.”

Oh, well, that explains it.

The real problem is that the salt shaker had been clogged. And I clearly remember last week when Don went to salt something on his dinner plate, found the clog, and cleared it. A little too well, I guess.
Lesson learned.