terror in a onesie

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

I was asked to pray during our church’s Easter Sunday service this year. I was a bit nervous about it, especially since I wanted to keep the prayer short while still touching on the themes of Easter week, from the darkness of the Friday crucifixion to the wonder of the Sunday resurrection.

Returning from the pulpit to the pew, I saw Eli beaming at me, and I was excited that something in my prayer had touched him. When I sat down, he leaned over to me. I bent down. He whispered in my ear, “Daddy! I like your tie!”

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

“So I press Tivo Man and that brings up the menu. Then I do ‘Now Playing’ and press select. Then I find ‘Wow Wow Wubzy’. Then I press select. Then I pick a show and press play.”

It occurs to me that Eli will never know a time when you couldn’t choose what TV show you wanted to watch when, or when you couldn’t pause and rewind TV. He also is used to the idea that you can listen to whatever songs you want anywhere in the house, or even if you’re riding in the car. And for him, phones aren’t things that are fixed in place.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

by Eli

Once upon a time, there was a green-headed robot. He was lonely and very sad. But…he had no friends. But then one day, he met a purple-headed robot, Joe.

“How do you do, Joe?” said Sparky. (Mom, the purple-headed one is Sparky.)

“Good!” said Joe.

“Good!” said Sparky.

“But we don’t have any more friends!”

“You’re right!” said Sparky.

“We better go to the enchanted grove to get one.”

“Let’s go!” They said. And off they went.

When they got there, they found two other robots. The yellow-headed robot was Speedy. The blue-headed robot was Eddie. So they became best friends. Really best friends.

The End

Thanks to Kat for the cool make-your-own robots. (Boy do you know this kid or what?)

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

After the success of outsourcing last year’s birthday party to JumpZone!, we decided to do something similar this year. We let you choose where we’d have the party, which is how we ended up at Chuck E. Cheese’s. You’ve been a fan of the pizza rat for a while, even if his restaurant makes your parents’ heads hurt, so we said yes. You were so excited, and you had so many tokens to spend!

Ten minutes later you’d spent all of your tokens and were miserable.

This has been the Year When You Learned to Read. You’d been showing signs of reading for a while, but we weren’t sure whether you were really reading or just reciting from memory. On our Christmas trip back to Arkansas, you and I got into Pop Don’s car to go to the grocery store. You saw the Calvin sticker on the back of his truck and said, “Look, dad! That says ‘Fords suck!’” And thanks to you reading, your mom and I can now sleep late. You happily go to the kitchen, grab the giant tub of pretzels, take it back to your room, and read quietly to yourself while scattering pretzel crumbs everywhere. This is what we call “advanced parenting”.

I don’t know if it’s due to your reading, but your story-telling tendencies have really increased. One morning you came into our bathroom while I was getting ready for work. You opened a drawer and found a three-pack of floss. “Look!” you said. “This floss is green, and this one is a different kind of green, but this one is white.” You hauled them all out and onto the counter. “The flosses are going on a trip. Look, here they go, they’re going up Scope Mountain.”

Your creativity extends to re-writing the rules to board games. You got May to play one boardgame with you. She sceptically asked, “Is this really how you play the game?” after you explained how the pieces all had to hop over each other and then you spun the spinner and then you got to take all of the game tiles. “Oh, yes,” you said.

Most every night, after Liza has gone to bed, we play videogames. I say “we play,” when what I mean is that “I play videogames, and you tell me what to do.” Sometimes you even let mom play. Your love of story above all else has helped decide what we play. You loved Psychonauts, but had no interest in Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz despite its much higher monkey-to-gameplay ratio. We’re working our way through Kingdom Hearts now, so all of your questions are about the Heartless and why that skeleton guy is so tall.

Even though you’re now five, you still need naps, even if we can’t convince you of that. Whenever you are tired or hungry — or both! — then you grown twenty extra arms and can’t be still. If we could keep you from sleeping or eating for two days, I’m convinced you’d develop superpowers and go on to have a dramatic and fulfilling life until finally merging with the Speed Force.

This year we took you to the theatre for the first time. We saw Wall-E, which you loved because ROBOTS. Even before the movie you were fascinated with robots. You have robot t-shirts. Mom made you robot thaumatrope invitations for your birthday party and robot buttons as gifts for everyone who came. Every morning, as I leave for work, you tell me, “Be careful! Don’t run into any robots!”

I’ve been fascinated watching you become a more independent person. You play on your own more, and there are times that you shoo your mom and me away. You’re learning how to deal with your emotions. Temper tantrums have become a regular fixture, as have demands and threats. It’s all we can do to keep from laughing, though, when you tell us, “If you don’t do what I want, then I’m not going to play with you now!” That threat is emptier than Pellucidar, coming from a boy who has trouble breathing if people aren’t watching him do it. You’ve also started talking back to us. “Whatever,” you say, channeling your thirteen-year-old self.

Say, did you know you have a sister? Liza now walks and talks and forces you to interact with her. She idolizes you, you know. And there are times when you are lovingly, achingly sweet towards her. Two minutes later you’re picking her up and dragging her around like a sack of wet cats. “She won’t get out of my room!” you yell over her shrieks.

I’ve been hard on you a lot this year. I’ve been tired and sick, and too often I’ve taken it out on you. I think that’s what happens to parents. When I’ve been really strict, I look at you, see an echo of how you looked when you were one, and realize that you’ll be gone before I know it.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

I’ve had the raw video of Eli reviewing “Super Mario Galaxy” sitting on my hard drive for forever, so I decided it was time to do something about it.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Today, while watching Duke’s basketball team feed Maryland’s into a wood chipper face-first, Eli started doing play-by-play announcing.

“Duke’s got it, and then other Duke’s got it, and he throws it in the air, and it hits the front and falls.

“And a red guy’s got it, and now another red guy, he throws it but Duke grabs it and now there’s another Duke guy, he throws it and it goes in!”

Sadly, I’d still rather listen to him than Billy Packer.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

“That says ‘player’s handbook’. There’s a woman on the cover. Why is she holding some fire?”

“I guess because she thinks it looks cool.”

“Oh, look! There’s a dragon and he’s holding a thing to fight with!”

It’s also nice to see Wizards of the Coast returning to tradition and placing a woman with semi-covered breasts on the cover.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

We had driven from Grayton Beach all the way to Montgomery, with a several hour stopover in Brewton to see my grandmother and aunt. It was past dinnertime and Eli and Liza were hungry and tired, vibrating at frequencies that make experienced parents nervous. There was a Red Robin next to our Montgomery hotel, so we all piled into the restaurant.

Red Robin is an upscale burger joint, which means it piles all kinds of toppings on hamburgers. It’s very kid-friendly, with balloons at the front and waitstaff who know to bring fries out early so your children don’t melt into a puddle of distress. Liza got a balloon and squeezed it until it popped in her face. She looked up to see if the balloon had floated away, looked down to see if it had fallen to the floor, and then burst into tears because her toy had vanished. Fortunately, Red Robin has a lot of balloons.

To distract Eli and his cousin Sam until the fries appeared, my brother and I took them to the front of the restaurant, where the video games and gumball- and toy-dispensing machines are.

Eli is obsessed with those machines. His greatest joy is to feed quarters into a machine, turn the knob, and have a small toy in a plastic capsule fall out. Quarters are the highest currency known to man, and the little green aliens and small grey robots that come from those machines are loved and played with for weeks. Whenever he loses one, he mopes and sighs as if he’d lost the one thing that gave his life meaning. He has a lot of those little toys, and he has my ability to put things down and forget where they are, so there’s a lot of moping and sighing to be had in any given week.

He’s also in love with the claw machines. He would happily feed $100 into one of those machines one quarter at a time while he tried unsuccessfully to nab a toy. We don’t let him play with those machines, since they’re the kid equivalent of Vegas slots. He’s been known to cadge quarters off of innocent bystanders after we told him we wouldn’t give him a quarter for the machine. I worry that, if we let him play with it, ten minutes later he’d be slumped next to it, dark circles under his eyes, dirt smeared like beard stubble on his face, sipping from a root beer bottle wrapped in a paper bag.

So there in Red Robin he gazed longingly at all of the machines and punched buttons and twisted knobs. One of the machines involved shooting small rubber balls at targets. If you hit enough targets, you got a prize. If you didn’t, you got a small rubber ball.

At one point I turned around and he had one of those balls. “Where did you get that?” I said. He pointed at the machine. I blinked. “Okay, how did you get that?”

He promptly opened the flap that covered the place where the prizes fell, reached his small arm in up to the elbow, and triumphantly pulled out another ball. “See? My hand fits back in there and I can get one!”

We let him keep the balls, but we quickly ushered Sam and Eli back to the table before an employee discovered his larceny. It’s a little disturbing how well Eli lifted those balls, but given the state of the economy, it’s comforting to know that he can be Oliver to my Fagin if I need.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

I suspect this will surprise my friends, but when I was in middle school and high school, I was very reserved. When I was young I was gregarious and outgoing, but between those two points I folded on myself like a Venus Flytrap. I had trouble dealing with people, and mostly avoided them.

I say this may be a surprise because the pendulum has swung back the other way. I’m now very outgoing, and given a choice, I gravitate to where there are people, and I’m often one of the last people leaving a party.

When Eli was born, I wondered how he’d deal with others. I’d had such a rollercoaster ride; would he?

Last weekend I took Eli to Pump It Up, a warehouse filled with inflatable trampolines and slides that wisely has yet to partner with either Elvis Costello or Missy Elliott. One of his friends was having a birthday, and the place was filled with Eli’s four- and five-year-old friends. I had to pull him aside at one point for breaking the place’s rules and climbing over the walls of the inflatable obstacle course.

“Dad,” he said, sniffling, “it’s no fun out there without me.”

“Oh?” I said. “But are you having fun?”

“Yeah. But not when I’m alone.”

If he goes all emo on me when he’s a teenager, at least I’ll know that that phase won’t necessarily last.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

We were full of the busy yesterday and I managed to get photos of big chunks of it.

First thing was playing with the doll house:

Click the photo to see more pictures.

In the afternoon we were off to hang out with our friends at Hallie and Remy’s house. I made all the girls t-shirts that say “Future Huntsvegas Girl Scout Troop”. They turned out pretty cute, if I do say so myself.

Click the photo to see more pictures.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

One: Eli continues his habit of becoming distraught over all kinds of random things. He’s like a Victorian maiden who just so happens to have brought her fainting couch with her. Earlier this week, Misty wouldn’t let him get in bed with her early in the morning. This is not cruelty, it’s self-protection. When Eli says, “I want to get in bed and snuggle with you!” what he means is that he wants to get in bed and then flail around madly. He’s like a bag of ocelots that someone just hit with a stick.

I was getting ready for work, so the first I knew about it was when Eli stumbled past me, shoulders slumped, blanket dragging behind him. “What’s wrong?” I asked.

“Mom won’t let me snuggle,” he said through his tears.

I picked him up and hugged him, getting my shirt all damp. “You going to be okay?” I asked.

“I’ll try,” he sniffed. “It’s hard.”

Two: When I pulled my new-to-me first-gen XBox apart, turned it into a media player, and put it back together, I got several XBox games to go with it. Nothing says “I am a gamer and I am into your gaming culture” quite like getting a bunch of last-gen console games and playing them. Unless it’s playing them with my good friend Jack Thompson.

Anyway, one of the games I got is Psychonauts, and if you have an XBox or PS2 and haven’t played it, it’s because you hate things that are good. I started playing it while Eli was napping, and after the first hour told Misty, “You know, if Eli sees me playing this, he’s going to want to play it, too.”

Wouldn’t you know it, he saw me playing it. Now it is in the rotation along with Super Paper Mario and Lego Indiana Jones. The other day I heard him making up a story involving Peach, Mario, and Bowser collecting Psychonautsish luggage tags and pairing them with mental baggage. What can I say? He’s a wee little fanfic generator. Just wait until he discovers Torchwood.

Three: Yesterday morning, Eli came bopping into our bathroom while Misty and I were getting ready. He picked up three of Misty’s lipstick tubes and asked, “Which one can I put on?”

Misty calmly looked at them and popped one open. “Here,” she said. “Don’t twist it out any more.” I watched as Eli calmly painted his lips. He looked a little like a toddler Joker by the time he was done.

“Here you go,” he said, handing the lipstick back to Misty. He grabbed some toilet paper, wiped all of the lipstick off, and went back for a second tube. I was surprised to hear Misty say, “Oh, not that one. You tried that one yesterday.”

He’s awfully young to be getting into lipstick. I at least waited until I was 18 before I started with the makeup. But Eli is awfully precocious, and I suppose it’s true that children are growing up faster than ever these days. I can’t help but think, though, that with his lipstick and his singing and dancing he reminds me of someone.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

When I was in middle school, I was–well, “pudgy” would be the kindest word for it. I weighed about what I weigh now, but was half a foot shorter. I resembled Jerry O’Connell in Stand By Me. When I went to Space Camp, staffers took a picture of me in the Moon gravity chair. I look like a young Old Elvis, all pasty white and bloated in my blue jumpsuit.

Unsurprisingly, I was not great at sports. The bane of my existence was Physical Education. The PE instructors didn’t help. One coach made us play a version of dodge ball where all of us students ran around the gym’s perimeter while he hurled balls at us. The last person standing won. Given that the coach once knocked a student unconscious, I guess what you won was freedom from a concussion. Later on he was fired for making advances on 12-year-old girls, so he was an all-around good guy.

One day we ran relays. Our whole class was divided into teams. I don’t remember if the coaches running the class did the dividing or if they picked relay leaders who in turn picked their teams, but either way, my team wasn’t happy to have me on it. I was fat. I was slow. I was not going to help our team win.

We were all sixth graders, with the social skills that implied, so my teammates were happy to tell me that I’d better run fast, that I’d better not lose the race for them. Eventually something snapped inside me. I smiled at all of them and, when I was handed the baton, sauntered down the length of the gym and back like a debutante strolling into a ball.

One of the coaches pulled me into his office. “PE may not be a perfect example of how life works, but it’s the best one we’ve got,” he told me. While I was still puzzling out what he meant, he spanked me with his fiberglass paddle.

I’ve thought about this episode a lot while watching Eli play soccer. In games, especially those played in the morning, he loses focus. He’ll run vaguely in the direction of the ball, or stop and hope the ball comes somewhere near him.

On the one hand, I want to tell him to keep his mind on what he’s doing and play as hard as he can. One thing soccer can teach him is the need to follow through on what you say you’re going to do — in this case, playing ball as part of a team. On the other hand, as my checkered athletic career taught me, there’s a big difference between intrinsic and extrinsic pressure. While I’d work as hard as possible if the sport interested me, if it didn’t, I wasn’t going to waste my time. I expect Eli to do the same. On the third hand, he’s four. As long as he’s having fun running around, he’s good. I’m stockpiling worries for the future, I suppose.

But if he ever gets punished for walking in a relay race, I’m going to smile and tell him a story.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

We were outside at the playset one afternoon this past week and Eli requested I tell him a story. He’s always making up stories so I guess he decided he needed a break from all the work and wanted to hear someone else’s made up stuff.

I might be crafty with a glue gun and paper or even upon occasion fabric or other materials. I think I can cook decently and do a few other things nicely but I am not a storyteller. I guess it is the practical gene in me. Don’t get me wrong, I love to read. I just don’t seem to have the ability to make this stuff up.

So I started telling him the story of a boy named Kreeli who fought a dragon and saved his friends, LukeDuke and Burwill, and his sister, Bliza. Yeah, after that story I was out of juice. I didn’t have much to begin with but I was tapped out after the dragon.

But as in all things with kids, the thing that you most want to disappear becomes the most favoritest thing they can imagine.

Every night this week I’ve had to tell a Kreeli and Bliza story. Sometimes I slip and say Eli and Liza and he reminds me that these kids names are Kreeli and Bliza. I guess he has to maintain the wall or something. I’ve tried to keep the stories fantastical but the last couple of nights they’ve deteriorated into rehashes of the day or previews of the next day. He doesn’t seem to mind as it netted him pancakes this morning since Kreeli had pancakes last night in his story.

The nicest part of this is that it allows me to reinforce stuff we’ve discussed during the day. Kreeli never kicks other kids on the soccer field. He’s kinder than that. Kreeli always watches out for Bliza and takes care of her. Kreeli always does the brave thing, the kind thing, the smart thing. So while in the beginning it was annoying for me to do, it’s starting to grow on me.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

I’m feeling a bit overwhelmed today. I realized this afternoon that I have about 17 frying pans in the fire and I’m trying to keep my hair from burning as well.

School has started back and I always forget that, even for pre-school aged children, the wheel starts turning again come fall. Eli and Liza had their two days of Mother’s Morning Out this week. Things were great except for lunch time, which I always thought was the easiest subject. We bought everyone bento boxes while we were in Japan. Cool, right? Wrong. Eli’s cup leaks so bad he isn’t allowed to return to school with it. The teachers in Liza’s room were confounded today by how her bento box stacks. I’m only slightly worried about the stacking training Liza is receiving from these sweet ladies since her box is keyed and will only fit together one way. I guess next week I’ll just go back to good ol’ American plastic bags and hormone-coated sippy cups.

This week also brought our first week of soccer practice for Eli. We returned home on Monday from Kansas City and Stephen took Eli straight to soccer practice. I took him tonight since Stephen needed to do some work at home. I think Eli’s going to have fun and I’m completely impressed that the coaches are teaching them actual fundamentals of the game, but I can already tell that the schedule is going to kill us. Games are on Saturday — wait for it — at 8:30 a.m. Everyone groan in chorus with us. I know that soccer is going to be great for him and he will make some friends that he will hopefully go to school with next year, but holy cow, 8:30 on a Saturday. And that’s what time the game starts. We have to be there between 8 and 8:15. I guess it’s also good practice for getting him up for school next year.

We also brought a lovely parting gift from our trip. All four Granade children have colds. Liza had it first, so I’m guessing it’s from when she licked the floor at the Nashville airport. Now Eli has it, and even Sam and little Noah have it. When I talked with Joy today, she wondered if we would be able to get together and not share germs before the kids are 15. I’m guessing it ain’t gonna happen. When Eli sneezes he sounds like a squeaking mouse. When I told him that in the car on the way home from soccer practice this evening, he nearly fell out of the car laughing.

Stephen is preparing talks for Dragon*Con. His involvement gets larger every year. I expect in about five more years he’ll have staged a coup and taken over the whole system. I’m guessing that when that happens, there’s going to be a sharp increase in the number of SciFi authors invited. I’m proud that he’s found his niche there and is having a good time, but the alternate schedule around our house for July and August while he is prepping makes for some crazy late nights. That schedule in combination with the above mentioned children’s colds is not a good thing. You might ask, “Misty, why are you staying up with him? You aren’t going to Con so why not get some sleep?” My answer, this Con anyway, is “Michael Phelps and Beach Volleyball.”

Next is work. Wha? Yes, I have some work going on right now. Some is Dragon*Con related; some is regular church stuff. Today I spoke with some folks for a new short term freelance job which I’m hoping, if I do a bang up job, will turn into more freelance work. Regardless, this first piece is cool and I’m excited to get to work on it. I actually used this morning while the kids were at MMO to do work. I sat at the computer for multiple hours in a row and worked. It’s amazing how much I can get done when I’m not tending my chicks.

Lastly, I have turned into a one woman craftapalooza. I’m working on the birds. Still. I made the first batch and then realized that I wanted to give a few more. Then I added to that list and then I just wrote down the names of pretty much every woman I know because I thought it would be a nice gift to get so I wanted lots of you to have one. So if you haven’t gotten a bird yet, you probably will. Be patient with me, though. I’m working on them off and on since I am also making a purse (pictures forthcoming as progress is produced), cloth bookmarks, paper bookmarks, storage containers from recycled tins (if you have any, I want them!), a new DIY planner for myself, and I’m in the process of updating my work portfolio so it looks a bit more cohesive. My latest brainstorm is to collect plastic lids off of bottles (soda, OJ, milk, etc.) so that I can carry them to Eli’s school for an art project. (OK, so I saw this on one of the crafting blogs, but I don’t remember which one so don’t yell at me for not having a link.) I’ve always found it funny that when I am busiest, I feel energized to work on projects for myself.

If I have two coherent thoughts to string together after all of that (and my usual child rearing and house chores) all I want to do is watch Dr. Who or sing songs from Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog. I find it really funny that my two favorite actors right now are men with very expressive foreheads. I’m sure that says something about me but I don’t think I want to examine it too closely.

Anybody else out there obsessing about anything or enjoying their own chaotic life?

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Until this Sunday, church involved us leaving our kids with other people while we went off and were all godly. That’s changed now: Eli is old enough to sit in church with us.

More importantly, Eli is now old enough for Children’s Church.

A quick primer on Children’s Church. In our particular flavor of mainline Protestant Christianity, there’s a tradition of having the preschool children come to the front of the sanctuary to take part in a very short lesson before they’re bundled out of the sanctuary for their own time of instruction. In part this is because they are too young and full of energy to have learned to sleep through the sermon. It’s also because kids will say anything that pops into their heads, and in doing so provide the opportunity to laugh at the parents.

You know, I always enjoyed that last part until yesterday.

Eli did wonderfully through the first part of the service. He loves music, and the flute and oboe duet that served as the prelude held him rapt. I sat on the pew and held the hymnal while we sang hymns. He even stayed silent through the first congregational prayer.

Then it came time for Children’s Church.

I realized what I was in for when Eli marched up to the steps up to the sanctuary stage and, rather than sitting in front of the ministry intern who was teaching the lesson, sat down right beside her. That, of course, meant her lapel mic picked up everything he said.

“Today we’re going to talk about treasure,” the teacher began.

“Oh, I already know what that is,” Eli said, his tiny voice amplified into something much louder.

He kept up a running commentary throughout, only stopping after the lesson had ended and the teacher had prayed. “That praying time was much shorter than the first one,” he said as he hopped down and came back to sit by me.

We sang another hymn before he left the sanctuary for the full kids’ lesson. And as he marched back down the aisle and out of the sanctuary, I could see time marching in lock-step beside him, marking his passage into a new stage of childhood. He walked past a row of camp chairs that our church gives to new 7th graders when they join the youth group, and past the pile of rolled-up camp chairs that go with the graduating seniors who are headed off to college, and all I could think was, there is his future. It’ll be here tomorrow.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Eli loves a set of nesting dolls that Stephen’s mom has. So when I saw a set of Dharma Dolls in Japan, I knew it was the right gift to bring home for Eli.

As Eli was playing with them one day, he began telling me of his adventures in Arkansas. While he was staying with my mom, she took him to my college roommate’s house for a visit. So he named his dharma dolls after the Krebs family.

Red=Mr. Brett
Brett, he so wanted the red one to be Missy and the pink one to be you! I changed his mind… You’re welcome.
Pink=Miss Missy
Orange=Grace
Yellow=Morgan
Green=Lydia

He calls them his Grace, Morgan, and Lydia dolls and carries them everywhere. Missy and I joked after he was born that maybe we should go ahead an arrange a marriage between him and one of the girls early. If the amount of time he spends talking about them is any indication, I don’t think he’s going to have a problem with that.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Eli lumps time into two big buckets: now, and next week. Whenever we tell him, “Your friend Josh can’t come over right now,” he says, “Can he come over next week?” It’s kind of like how dogs live in the eternal now.

That’s right, I just compared my son to a dog. It’s just the kind of loving parent I am.

This makes talking to him about time interesting. On our most recent car trip, he launched into his cover of the popular kid’s song, “Are We There Yet?” “When will we be in Memphis,” he asked.

“We’re almost there. We’ll be there in 15 minutes.”

“How long does 15 minutes take?”

The only answer I hit on was, “It’s like thirty nows from now.”

Eventually he’ll get a better concept of time. With luck, we’ll then be able to teach him to stay in his room while we sleep in.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Where’s Waaaaaaall-E? I don’t see him.

Why is his shelf swinging?

Is that Waaaaaaall-E’s cricket friend? Why did he leap around?

Why did that explode?

What are those red lights?

What is that? Is that a rocket?

What’s that robot’s name?

Why is Eeeeeeva flying around?

Look, I folded up in my seat!

What does die rective mean?

What’s wrong with Waaaaaaall-E’s eye?

I need a drink of water.

Why is he holding on to the rocket?

Why is Waaaaaaall-E floating?

Is Eeeeeeva sick?

Why are those people in chairs?

Does Eeeeeeva like Waaaaaaall-E?

Why did her suit turn from blue to red?

Look, I can bounce in my chair!

Why did Waaaaaaall-E bust through that glass?

Why did that man say that he knew Waaaaaaall-E?

I miss Liza. I want to go home.

Why is Waaaaaaall-E climbing up like that?

Is his name Otto? Why is his voice so deep?

Why did Otto spin like that and then everyone slid off their chairs and piled together?

Why did she say “get ready to have some babies”?

I liked that. I want to come back to the theater.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Left to our own devices, Misty and I tend to sleep late. Even after having Eli and Liza — and isn’t that a lovely phrase, “having Eli and Liza”? As if we invited them over for dinner one night and they never left — we still occasionally got to sleep until 7 or 7:30.

That’s all over now. Eli gets up with the sun, often at 5:45, or as I call it, “oh, c’mon, kid, we stayed up late watching episodes of Angel”. As soon as he’s up he wanders in and starts talking to Misty.

Even if we could convince him to stay in his room and play without coming and telling us that he’s going to stay in his room and play, we’d be foiled by his colon. Eli has taken to pooping every morning at 6:15. It’s like he’s only eating a mix of beans and bran cereal topped with Metamucil, when in fact he’s only devouring crackers and our patience. So every morning at 6:15 I get to wake up and help him.

Even that wouldn’t be so bad if we could keep him quiet. Liza often wakes up around 6:30, but if undisturbed will go back to sleep for a while. This morning, I heard Eli’s high, piping voice as he excitedly told Misty about Zack and Wiki or Word Girl. Over the monitor, I could hear Liza stirring. Please go back to sleep, I thought. Please go back to sleep.

Then Liza said, loudly and clearly, “hewwoooo!”

Hey, friends who aren’t parents, don’t you want to have kids now? I have two I could loan you.

Originally published at Live Granades. Please leave any comments there.

Due to Stephen’s LOLprowess, our site now has enough Diggs or Technorati gold stars in heaven to rate us being approached by marketing firms. The first couple of times we got emails, I was like, “Huh? They want to do what? What’s the catch?” The catch is that these companies want to send us free stuff in exchange for us giving them shout outs about their products or services. Apparently this phenomenon has a name: “Word of Mom.”

The nice part of the deal is that they send us free stuff but we don’t have to talk about it unless we like it, mostly, I’m guessing, because they don’t want the bad word from us moms. But it takes the pressure off of me because I don’t feel obligated in any way. I can pick and choose what is interesting to me and talk about only those things. Isn’t the internet a powerful thing?

Most of the email traffic has come from the PR firm representing the Turner TV channels. The first round of swag was disappointing, mostly because I didn’t read the email carefully enough. I thought she was sending me new shows of Saving Grace and The Closer. I was having puppies over the prospect of new episodes (and early, no less) because I love those two shows. In actuality she was sending me the greatest hits collections of those shows and a few others in the hopes that I might be interested in them and willing to plug them on the blog. Oops, I think I played right into their hands there, didn’t I?

The second round of swag was a book called The Best Old Movies for Families. This book is very cool. It’s funny and well written, and it’s made me want to further my own movie education as well as introduce my kids to a whole range of movies that don’t involve Dora, Diego and the dreaded Disney princesses.

In the intro, Ty Burr suggests to use the book as reference material to get you started introducing your kids to old movies. But I found the book so readable, I was well into the fourth chapter before I thought to get the remote and set up the TiVo to record some of these shows coming on TCM this summer.

I’m excited about watching some of these shows (most of which I’ve never seen) with Eli. Especially the musicals, because I have a feeling he’s going to love those. And it’s always pleasant to think Dora and Diego aren’t the only options.