TMBG

One of the girls' favorite bands is They Might Be Giants. Convenient, considering Jason and I like them a whole lot, too. In fact, a couple of longstanding 'lullabies' have been ZYX and Road Movie to Berlin. So we all jumped at the chance to go see them live at a concert especially for kids.


Well, the pictures aren't great, but there were no cameras allowed in the Music Hall and all that. Thankfully, they weren't interested in actually stopping anyone from taking pictures. I wasn't the only one I saw doing it. For the record, Jason left his cell phone and Leatherman home in case the TSA was on security duty.

Violet and I spent a while yesterday making our own version of concert-tees for the entire family. We didn't get a perfect picture of the four of us, so in case you can't see it, Stella's shirt says "They", mine says "Might", Jason's says "Be" (he thanked me for making his shirt the one that is quietly philosophical) and Violet, who got first choice, got to be "Giants". And even better? Drummer Marty Beller signed it for her with a Sharpie I conveniently had in my pocket. (wink) That foam hand she has? Every kid was given one at the door. Cool.

Violet's verdict on the whole thing? Much too loud. She would just as soon watch TMBG on DVD at home. Funny how the things I think to prepare her for aren't always on target. Remember bowling? I told her it would be loud, but really there were way too many lights. Well this time, I made sure she understood that we were going to see the real live John and John, not the puppets she is used to watching. Never occurred to me that it would be loud. Or rather, it never occurred to me that she wouldn't know it was going to be loud.

And yes, they did play some adult-pleasers like Particle Man , Birdhouse In Your Soul and Istanbul (Not Constantinople). I was seriously hoping for Cow Town, but you can't ask for everything, can you?

Disclaimer

Jason told me today that my blog looks just like everyone else's. Apparently it screams "Take a look at our idyllic life!" I want to make sure everyone knows that our life/family/home falls quite short of idyllic. It would be more accurate to say it falls under passable-with-enough-moments-of-splendor-to-keep-us-going. Here's some photographic proof of that. This, THIS is our living room.


Now on to better things. Like Easter eggs, and Easter bunnies, and Easter candy. Today we went to the egg hunt in Portsmouth, NH. The temperature was about 30, but the wind chill was wicked. The upside of this is that the people running the show were incredibly prompt. Jason brought his two favorite bunnies along.

When the signal was given, Violet was off like a shot. She really 'got' it this year. She was determined to get the most eggs the fastest. Stella on the other hand, was happy to model for me. Her basket was a little pocketbook.

After the hunt I managed to get a picture of the two of them together.

There was an actual Easter Bunny there, too. As an aside, Violet saw the Easter bunny at the mall one day and went up and talked to him about his garden "These are nice vegetables you have. They're turning." Indeed, the bunny had a spinning garden.

Look carefully at the man on the left in the above picture. He's from the Portsmouth Herald. He asked us for Stella's name and age, so maybe she'll make it into the Sunday paper. If she does I'll link it up here. (update - Stella made the online version of the paper. She's in the little slideshow. Click 'zoom photo' above the picture of the kids on the egg hunt and you can see her. Personally? I think my picture of her and the bunny is better.)

When the action was over we hightailed it over to the sunroom at the library to check out the loot.
So there you have a little bit of idyll. And here, you have a little bit of normal to top it off.

Birthday partying

Violet had her first bowling experience this weekend. She was invited to her friend Ashton's birthday party at Vacationland Bowling. I had prepared her for the noisiness of the bowling alley, but even I wasn't prepared for the blacklights, the disco ball or the flashing lanes. Bowling certainly isn't like when I was a kid.


Fourth birthday parties, however, are much the same. Though it seems not one of these kids knew how to play duck-duck-goose. The mother patiently tried to explain it, but in the end they just did what they wanted. Violet was not the only one who would get up randomly, run around the circle and sit back down in her seat.

Glow in the dark necklaces make a very good game, too. Violet keeps up pretty well with the boys. The one in back is Caleb, the one in front is Aman; both of them are in her preschool class. She can just as likely be found holding hands with one of them as swinging at them.

But when asked what her favorite part of the party was she replied "the horse ride". This would be the 50 cent horse ride I let her take after the party because she had been begging to ride the whole time we were there.

We talked about going back there with Jason and Stella to try out the quiet bowling area, which seemed really nice. And as a bonus, you don't have to remember back to 9th grade phys ed to do the scoring. The nice computer man behind the pins does it for you while he's setting the pins back up.

More snow

What do you do when there is yet more snow the week before spring?

Artwork

Though she loves crafts, Violet doesn't often draw. But every once in a while she will spontaneously create these glorious animals. Most of the time, she draws pigs. She has a long history with pigs. So the other day she drew this pig on the inside of the box top of a game we had borrowed from a friend. I am so sorry she didn't choose a more preservable place to draw it.

Then she drew this one. Do you know what it is? Yes, it has the tail of a pig, but more importantly it has spots. It's a cow.

And while this isn't my favorite one visually, there are a couple things I love about it. One is the sheer number of legs. The other is, while it does have a pig tail and pig snout, it is certainly not a pig because of all that fuzzy wool. Yes, it is a sheep.

More later about Violet's history with pigs.

School Vacation

Yes it really has taken me a full week to recover from vacation. Okay, that's not quite true. I'm not sure any of us has completely recovered .

Friday, at the end of my endurance, I loaded the kids into the car and said "Here's your camera, here's the map, we're going on an adventure." The only rule was, we weren't allowed to go anywhere we had been before. Easier said than done.

Violet was very excited about documenting our adventure for about 5 minutes. It always amuses me to see what she thinks are the important parts. The map. She took no less than 30 pictures of the map.

Stella, asleep. This is Stella's general state in the car.
Boots. Boots on the seat. Muddy boots on the seat.
Mommy on the phone talking to Auntie Karen. Auntie Karen said "Why don't you go see the big boot at L.L. Bean?So we did. I had actually seen the boot before, as had Violet when she was too young to remember, but Stella had never been there.
And it had been so long since I had been there, they had time to build a cool trout stream that you can pop your head into via a dome.And they have a cool big fake rock for trying out hiking boots. But all we found there were other quasi-hippie mamas and kids.
And because it was vacation week, there were some extra perks - face painting and L.L. Bear, who was actually one of the least creepy human-size-puppets I have ever seen. Good job, L.L. Bean.
The real adventure in all this was that when I saw the shrimp truck, I said "Hey Violet! You've never had shrimp, that will be an adventure." I bought 5 pounds of shrimp at the truck for $5. FIVE POUNDS! For FIVE DOLLARS! Then I opened the bag and found out why. They were whole. Not just whole so I have to break their little heads and beady eyes off. Whole as in also filled with eggs. Whole as in legs and antennae sticking out every which way. Of course Violet had to have one. How pensive is she with this shrimp?

I tried to clean them, I really did. But I just couldn't. Then I tried to give them away on Freecycle. Here is my ad:

One pound of whole shrimp I just bought off the truck in Yarmouth .
These are WHOLE shrimp, not peel and eat. I have tried, but I'm just
not up to cleaning them with the wee ones crawling around on the
floor, climbing on the counters and playing "shrimp family" with them.
No, you canNOT take them in the bathtub with you! Please, if you can't
come get them for dinner tonight or have never faced a whole, real,
veined and headed shrimp before, don't ask for them. First come first
serve.

Can you believe there were no takers for the shrimp? Notice I mistakenly said I had one pound rather than 5. I did get several nice e-mails, though. One woman told me to just cook them with the heads on and it would be fine. Well, it was not fine. Not really.

The same woman also convinced me to let them go in the bathtub with Violet. Violet enjoyed having them for company, but they weren't allowed in the tub to swim. She just wanted them to sit beside her. When she got out of the tub she asked me for 4 towels. One big towel for her, and three small towels for her pals.

In the end, I peeled a couple shrimp and she ate one and I ate one, but they were just awful. So on the last day of vacation we had cupcakes for dinner instead. Pink cupcakes. Pinkaliscious.
I suppose as far as lessons go it was a cheap one, but it made me so sad to see all those shrimp dead for no reason at all.

Happy Valentine's Day

From Superflier and Baby Superflier.



We play a lot of Superflier around here.



Did I mention Superflier is quite partial to pictures of herself?



She's also quite terrifying.