How Come Making It Myself Always Costs More Than Buying It?

This year Christmas stockings have moved up a notch on my priority list. This means it’s time to get rid of the dollar store stockings we’ve been using, but I’m not ready to fork out $7 each for new ones. So instead, I just spent $20 on fabric to make some.

Two broken sewing machine needles and a few hours later, my stockings look like they were made in first grade art class, and I keep finding white fuzz all over everything.

Santa and Satan: Practically the Same Word

Ever since we tried to make Liam sit on Santa Claus’s lap last weekend, he’s terrified of the guy. Now he can’t even look at a coloring book picture of Santa without shouting, “Scary Santa!” and turning the page.

Last night I was humming Christmas songs in the car, and without thinking, I started to sing, “Santa Claus is coming to town…” I didn’t even know Liam could hear me, let alone understand what I was singing. But as soon as the words came out of my mouth, he looked at me and yelled, “No! He’s not coming!”

Early Morning Comedian

In the past five minutes I’ve had two conversations that made me realize why I love two-year-olds so much. They went like this:

8:49 a.m.
Ben: “If it’s not too late, I think I want to get Rock Band for Christmas instead of Guitar Hero. There’s one that comes with a guitar, drums, and a microphone.”

Kim: “How much is it?”

Ben: “$169.”

Kim: “Oh, I see how it is.”

Liam: “Oh, SNAP!”

8:51 a.m.
Liam: “I want to play with trains.”

Kim: “They’re still in the kitchen from when you were playing with them last night.”

Liam: “The kitchen…?”

Kim: “Do you know where the kitchen is?”

Liam: “He’s at lunch.”

Cold and Thirsty? Try Some Hotch Locket.

If your kid asked for some “hotch locket with smash-mallows,” would you know what he was talking about?

Don’t worry…I figured it out.

What the Fudge?

I just spent 20 minutes researching hundreds of fudge recipes on the Internet (heaven forbid I waste my time on a recipe that only got 4 stars), only to find out that the exact recipe I printed out was on the back of the marshmallow creme jar. Eerie, no?

Just come over in four hours if you want some 5-star fudge.

Greetings from the Twilight Zone

It all started yesterday morning when I picked up the phone to call Ben at work. Along with a faint dial tone, I could hear loud crackling noises on the line. I made the call anyway, hoping the crackling would go away, but instead I got an additional treat—a woman speaking Spanish between rings. She was loud enough that I said, “Hello?” and assumed she would say something back, but she just kept talking.

After a quick chat with the Spanish-speaker, the crackler, and Ben, I hung up the phone and picked it up again. This time, instead of a crackling dial tone, all I heard was a crackle. Thinking it must be a problem with the cordless phone, I picked up the corded phone in our office. Still no dial tone. In fact, now all of the phones were saying, “Your call cannot be completed as dialed…please hang up and try your call again,” no matter how many times I hung up in between.

Each time I picked up the phone after that I got a random busy signal, a recording, or silence. Ben did some investigative work when he got home and still couldn’t figure out what the problem was. We decided we would call the phone company in the morning.

Then, at 10:00 last night, the police came pounding on our front door. They said they had received a 9-1-1 hang-up call from our house, and that nobody answered when they tried to call back.

WHAT?!!

We’ve already established that the phone is freaky, but freaky enough to call 9-1-1 on its own? We apologized to the cops and told them we would call the phone company immediately. After setting up an appointment for someone to come check out our lines in the morning, we picked up the phone one last time and heard this: “Thank you for calling KWED…”

And He's Never Even Been to Småland

Liam knows how to spell his name because he has the wooden letters L, I, A, and M hanging in his room. The only other word he knows how to spell is Ikea. Don't ask me why he knows that one. I swear we don't go that often.

The other day I asked Liam where he wanted to go that day. Here is his response:

Lesson Learned

Last night Ben wanted me to feel how cold his contact solution was after staying in the freezing car all day. Only instead of saying, “Hey Kim, feel this,” he just squirted it on me. Obviously I had no choice but to drizzle face wash all over him.

He didn’t think that was a fair trade-off.

In His Dreams

Everybody’s best friend Rebecca came to town last weekend, so we had a Sunday dinner party in her honor. Liam had so much fun while she was here, he wanted to leave home and be adopted into his dream family with Becca G. as mom, Dan V. as dad, and Maggie Q. as big sister.

Being a Mom Has Turned Me into a Sissy

I just got back from our local high school's production of Beauty and the Beast. I'm a little embarassed because I cried at the end. But instead of crying when the Beast turned back into the prince or when Belle and the Beast kissed, I cried when Chip, the little teacup, turned into a boy.