::A Gem::

I've been meaning to post this for a while. It's an absolute gem that I found a couple of years ago when I developed a couple of rolls of film that were shot on my old point and shoot. In my family we got a camera for our birthdays when we turned 8. It was way cool.
So here's a fabulous tea party.

I'm not sure what the event was here, but it does look fancy. I'm not going to name any names here, in order to protect the innocent, in case they want protection for some reason, but you know who you are! I will say though that I'm on the far left, in case anybody can't tell. And Charlotte (my favorite sister) is the one closest to the camera in the foreground.
Anybody in the picture remember what we were doing? Char? We're certainly all dressed up very fancily--hairbows, dresses, etc. We've got candles lit, we have the quilted placemats out, as well as napkin rings (wow!) and it looks like we're drinking coolaid.
Anyway, looks like fun. I'd do it again tomorrow with all the same old friends if I could!
Can you see my clarinet in the background standing on the hutch (or sideboard or whatever you like to call that piece of furniture). This must've been in 1992 or so, which is when I was teaching myself to play the clarinet. It stood around the house all the time because I liked to pick it up and play it whenever I was in the mood. You know, a swingin' version of twinkle twinkle little star brightens up the day. I should probably try that nowadays.

.:.:Tasks:.:.

The haircut pictures aren't uploaded yet so....going along with yesterday's theme of Max going stir-crazy here's another post. You can probably tell that I've been thinking a lot lately about how to keep Max occupied, productively. I think that we don't give him enough stuff to do, like tasks that he feels are important and so he gets bored sometimes and acts out. Maybe. That's just one theory.
I know Max looks angelic in all these pictures, and so maybe it's hard for some of you to believe that he can be a bum, but believe me--he can be REALLY bummy if he wants to.
So anyway, I've been racking my brains trying to come up with tasks he can do that challenge him a little bit and that might be slightly helpful for the household. That's tough. So far I've come up with one task. Putting away the silverware from the dishwasher.

In my household growing up this was always a task that was given to the youngest person in the family, as long as they were big enough to actually do it. In fact, I remember doing it when I was really small. I enjoyed the sorting aspect of it.

I'm not sure how Max feels about it. I think he likes feeling important and useful,
but he doesn't bother to concentrate long enough to make sure that each piece ends up in the right spot. I think he's just a little lazy. But we have a good time. I just have to remind him what he's doing every two seconds. I think (and hope) it'll get better with time.

So it seems to me that it's about time to be trying to teach him a little responsibility. I probably should've been doing this long ago. We're going to try to work up a small chore chart with stickers, something that he can see his progress on, so he can feel like he's accomplishing something.
Any suggestions from you people out there? What are some other tasks or activities I could use? What can a almost 4 yr old really do that's even slightly useful to the household, or is all the benefit just to him? Help me out here!

::Props to Kari::

We're going a little stir-crazy here in our house because of all the cold weather. And when Max gets stir crazy he tries to think of everything he can possibly do that's against the rules, or that would make me mad.
It's not a good thing.
So I've been trying to come up with good activities and interesting things for us to do, inside, in the afternoons. Because of course, who wants to play with billions of cool toys? What's the point of even buying toys? Sometimes I wonder.
So anyway, Kari (Kris's sister) made us this great family concentration game last Christmas, and I almost forgot that we had it because a lot of stuff got put away in our move last spring and has never been pulled out. But I found it the other day and Max was really excited to play it.

Kari's got pictures of every member of our immediate family (including Sultan) on these cards, and on the back it says "Max's family matching game." He was especially excited that the cards had his name on them, since he recognizes his written name nowadays.

I just love the whole concept of this game. Since we live so far away from most of the family it's really good to review everybody's names. That's not a problem for him right now, he pretty much remembers everybody just fine, but last Christmas he didn't, so it was great to get to talk about everybody.

So thanks to Kari for having the great idea to make this game, and for taking the time to make sure everybody on both sides of the family is on it.
We'll be spending some frigid hours playing it waiting for spring to come. Anybody want to come and play it with us?

.:.:In Dire Need:.:.

This is my cute little friend Max.

He's pretty cute, isn't he?

Does he look like he's in dire need of anything in particular to you?

He insists that he doesn't need a haircut, and tells me that he really really likes having hair in his eyes. In fact, when I brush it off his face he quickly brushes it back into his eyes.
For some reason his long hair makes him feel cool. Wow, whose kid is he? Could he be related to Kris Hendricks who is always trying to grow his hair out?

I'm just afraid he's going to trip on something, or run into the wall. Hah, not like he doesn't do all that already!

We do have a haircut scheduled for him tonight. We'll see how it goes. He's only recently allowed us to convince him that no, haircuts don't actually hurt.
We would've had him in a lot sooner, but the girl who cuts our hair was supposed to come into the dental school so Kris could do some work on her. She stood him up twice and after that we had a hard time wanting to go and pay her to cut our hair. And I don't like to take Max to places like Great Clips because they cut off his cute side curls.
So we just decided to be brave and go back to the girl. I'm sure it'll be fine. Max, however, isn't so sure he's going to be fine without his long hair.

::My Song::

While playing the harmonica one day, Max announced that he had written me a "Christmas Song". I was delighted of course, and later had him play it for the video camera.
Here it is for everybody to enjoy. The only bummer is that Max got ahold of my little video tape and almost ruined it. He did some really weird stuff to it, which resulted in the actual tape getting ripped. Kris put it back together, so luckily all the content was recovered, but I think the Christmas song cuts off early due to the rip.
However, please feel free to enjoy what's there!

-> Yikes <-

Does this picture scare anybody else?



It's a good dad that lets an almost four year old "use" his drill. Well I guess he's only a good dad if he doesn't let the almost four year old drill off his face, which Kris didn't.

= Monkey Mouth =

Kris's sister Kari gave me the heads up to this great Monkey Mouth toy, which I got Max for Christmas. It's a perfect toy for Max right now. It's a gorilla head with a whole bunch of empty spaces for his teeth. There's a tub of like play-dough to be used in some teeth molds, as well as an assortment of plastic dental tools.

Max's favorite tool is the battery powered drill. (It's the slowest moving drill you could ever imagine.)
Kris and Max sat down together to do some serious work on the monkey. Max is wearing Kris's thousand dollar loupes here. It made me a little nervous, but he felt seriously cool.

Max kept saying. "It's ok Monkey, don't be scared."

This is obviously a really fun toy for us because it's what Kris does all day, but I would imagine it would be a great toy for any kid who has been to the dentist before or will be going soon. I think it helped Max feel a little more comfortable with the whole dentist thing. Although I don't know how it could with the rate they were yanking out the poor monkey's teeth!








It was fun to see them working together. The drill didn't move fast enough for Kris though, he couldn't handle it. He just pulled teeth, Max did the drilling.

Here's Max fixing his other monkey's teeth.

and his own:

yum yum!

* A Heads-Up *

I had several fun posts planned for this week, but because I've been really sick with some sort of flu-ish type thing Kris brought us I haven't been able to do much. Kris was really sick two weekends ago when his parents were here visiting, after they went home they got sick, really sick. I thought I was going to be able to get away without getting it, but unfortunately not. This bug has made me sicker than I've been in a really long time.
So anyway, now at least I'm feeling well enough to sit up and type. And I thought I'd give all your blogsters out there a heads-up.
If any of you like to read a good amount of blogs regularly and aren't using some kind of RSS reader, this post is for you! I recently starting using google reader, and it's the greatest thing. (thanks for telling me about it mom!) It keeps track of all your blogs and tells you when new entries are posted. It's really nice not to have to click around to a billion different blogs just to find out that most of them haven't been updated.
So maybe you all already knew about that, but for those that didn't, head over to google reader .  You'll like it, I promise!

> Mixed Feelings <

Today is the first day of the last semester for my master's degree (MBA). (I'm not a superstitious person, but I do hate to make statements like that. For those of you that care, I just knocked on wood a tiny bit.) I have mixed feelings today. I'm really really really looking forward to being done with school. Even more exciting is the fact that Kris and I will be finishing at the same time. It will be such a wonderful thing for our family to finally be done with school, dental school especially. It's been a long road for us and not too easy. So I'm glad to be starting with the last semester, finally. But I don't want to go!! I'm so tired of school. I've really enjoyed it, but I'm tired of it for sure. And not even really just tired of school, but just tired of having so much to do all the time. I always have way more stuff to do than I have time for. And I know that's just life, but it will be nice to have the school/work load lightened a bit so that I can actually get to some of the incredibly important family and household things that are always calling my name.
So wish us luck in our last semester. Hopefully my classes won't kill me. I have my capstone class which is supposed to be some huge group project (yick) and then another class I know nothing about. Kris is going to have to do about 7 crowns and various other stuff in order to be done in time for graduation. I know we can get to the end, we've made it this far, but I'm just a little worn out.
So there are my thoughts for the day. They're january kind of thoughts, a little grey, a little depressing. Good thing spring is coming, it's still a little ways away, but it's coming!