Lemon Quickies III - The One Where M Gets Pregnant

Before you say it, I know that I've been neglecting my duties on this blog thing.  Hopefully this one makes up for my absence.  There's an underlying theme with this one.  I have sprinkled subtle clues throughout this post hinting as to what the surprise might be.  If you can't figure it out by the end, all will be revealed to those who never caught on.

So starting with some new toons of the kids, I recently took Ash with me to get my haircut.  When Ash goes to get his hair cut, we usually cut it really short and there's a chance he will come home with a mohawk.  Well he thought it would be funny the throw out some direction to the lady who was cutting my hair:

Needless to say, I wanted to keep it long, Ash wanted me to have a mohawk, so we compromised and I had it cut short.  For the record it is way too short, but it will grow back...oh yes, it will grow back.

As the kids grow older, you really start to see the differences in their play styles.  Yes, they both still like to play Horsey and Moon Ride, but they are starting to disagree on the more gender related games during their make believe sessions:

Poor Ayris, all she wants is to play Princess and marry a handsome prince.  For her sake, I hope the next one is a girl.

Now that Adler is teething, we've been feeding him more solids.  The exciting part for me is I get to try everything we give him to make sure it tastes good.  I recently tried some of his banana flavored puffs, which tasted exactly like those bland, melty wafers churches serve during communion.  Obviously I had to get M to try one of these too.  Since she's going through this phase of strange food cravings, I thought it would be better if I masked it as me trying to give her communion:

I chased her all over the house trying to feed her one of these puffs without success.  Ah well...more for me, I mean Adler.

We recently celebrated some milestone birthdays in our household.  As you may have seen in previous posts, Ayris is now 5 and M just turned 30.  One morning Ayris was commenting on how her neck was hurting after sleeping in an uncomfortable position all night:

Apparently one of them is aging more gracefully than the other...

For one reason or another, M seems to be going through this phase where she has to clean...almost like she's nesting or something.  Unfortunately, this also comes with a high frequency of forgetfulness (like the blood that is usually going to her brain is going someplace else now):

To be fair, schools and government offices seem to have more days off than they are actually open.  "Happy National Bacon-Pants Day!  We're going to take the rest of the week off..."  Actually now that I type this, I too would proudly stand up and celebrate a day dedicated to pants that were made entirely out of bacon!

M seems to be going through a phase where she is constantly tired.  It's almost like her body is working overtime or building something.  All she wants to do is sleep (mostly) and she doesn't want to have special time with her special man anymore:

It's getting so bad, she doesn't even want to lavish me with admiration like she used to:



And even worse yet, the Joneses are starting to catch up to us:

Then of course, there's her inability to keep a secret:

Thankfully my aunt Tammy realized that M was too trusting of the intimate privacy known as Facebook wall posts and deleted the string before anyone caught on (thanks Tammy!).

So there you have it.  Did you figure it out yet?  That's right, M is Facebook friends with my aunt Tammy, she's always tired and she still doesn't find me funny.

Oh yeah, and she pregnant...again!

-Cheers!

Have an AWESOME Day!

When I was in high school, I used a clock radio as my alarm.  I would set it to play music which would calmly sooth me out of my nightly slumber.  Unfortunately, the noises from the outside world sometimes make their way into my dreams which could cause a lot of bizarre "plot twists".

One of my first memories of this was when I was having one of my reoccurring nightmares of being chased by Barney.  For some reason, that purple dinosaur scared the hell out of me and in my dreams he would chase me down trying to become my friend and turn me into one of his mindless minions.

Creepy stuff.  But this one morning when my alarm went off:

The strangest thing happened in my dream:

That's right, Barney stopped chasing me and we started singing together.  To this day, I still have trouble listening to Motley Crue's Home Sweet Home without a chuckle (or a shudder).

While turning a bad dream into something sort of freaky and funny was fine, I knew I had to make a change when it started to interfere with my good dreams.  When I was 17, I was madly in love with Alyssa Milano (as were many teenage boys my age at that time).

One day, that stupid radio alarm ruined it all for me:

And here comes the alarm:

That was the end of it all for me.  I have never used the radio as an alarm since.

So here we are in the present day.  Alyssa is now a distant memory and Barney no longer haunts my dreams with cruel intentions of brainwashing or duets to rock ballads.  But I am still hearing noises in my dreams.  It's usually Adler since he's still getting up several times a night to be swayed or adjusted or someone to rub his head and assure him he's not abandoned or alone in the Universe.  On one particular night recently, he was having a hard time with things.  Not sure if it was his ears or his teething or he was growing and hungry or what, but he was getting up more often than usual. 

The strange part of this night, was somewhere hidden within his pile of toys came a message I had never heard before:

It's not uncommon for toys to jump out of their restful state and come to life with one of their programmed movements or recorded messages (my friend Sean calls these "random toy encounters"), but I had never heard this one before.  I had no idea which one of Adler's toys was even making this confidence boosting comment, so I just decided that it was meant to be.  That this night (knowing it was going to be a rough one) was actually supposed to be AWESOME and I should give thanks to whatever toy it was that was making it so.

Unfortunately, as Adler continued to wake me up, my enthusiasm starting to ween as the night/morning went on:

So where am I going with all of this you may ask (or maybe you're not, but whatever).  Well, going back to my previous part about noises interrupting my dreams, it happened again with this toy.  Since I had AWESOME on my mind apparently, I had a dream about Chuck Norris (for those of you new to the internet, Google "find Chuck Norris" sometime).

In this dream, we were playing lots and lots of table hockey:

When suddenly this happened:

Strangely enough, I have yet to find which toy it was that was speaking up that night, and even stranger, it has stopped talking altogether.  But for what it's worth, I definitely did have an AWESOME day that day.

-Cheers!

Grown Man Watches Cartoons

For those of you who don't know me very well, I like to watch cartoons.  That's right, I said it - I like cartoons.  And not just Sponge Bob, Family Guy or The Simpsons, I like Futurama, South Park, Venture Brothers, Metalocaplyse,  Robot Chicken...the list goes on (I know that Robot Chicken is more stop motion than cel animation, but let's just put our "pretend hats" on and think outside of the norms for a second m'kay?).  Cartoons are no longer for just children.  In fact, there are several of the ones I just listed I would not allow my kids to watch.  Cartoons have become a fun medium in an otherwise stale world of craptacular television programing.

Earlier this year, I went to Vegas with some of the guys for our friend Jim's bachelor party.  Since I had an assload of frequent flyer miles, I decided to use some for the trip.  While Delta has a decent frequent flyer program, they don't allow you to upgrade your flight to first class if you're using your miles to fly.  This was fine because it was an empty flight (had the whole row to myself) and my friends Jerry and Jim were sitting right behind me.

After takeoff, it was time to settle down for the long haul to Vegas.  I pulled out my PSP and started watching an episode of Family Guy.  I was about ten minutes into the show when the flight attendant wandered by.  She was an older woman who appeared to be in her late 60s.  She glanced at my little movie player and bent down so she could get a closer look at what I was watching.  All of a sudden, she jerked back like someone just smacked her in the face.  She then turned to me, shook her head and walked away. 

About five minutes later, she comes back with the following comment:

I was shocked, I didn't know what to say.  Before I could react, she strolls away, up the aisle, leaving me dumbfounded with confusion and soon to be brewing angst.  I was thinking to myself, "Dude, what the hell?  Haven't you ever seen or heard of this show before?"  I then realized that while I may know adults who watch cartoons, this woman apparently didn't.  I was starting to feel a little silly about my initial reaction to one person's opinion about cartoons, but then I started thinking about it more. 

There is a lot of crap on TV these days.  Yes, there has always been crap, but we're really starting to flat line cater to the lowest common denominator in all of us.  Awful "talent" shows that make 3rd rate, one-time famous "stars" attempting to do off the wall activities just to not get voted off by the viewers.  Seriously, we are about two Nielsen points away from Farting with the Stars. 

Other shows like Biggest Loser can be motivational / inspirational, but I feel a sharp hint of guilt every time I sit down to watch it.  While I understand the premise of the show and that really hasn't changed, I can't help but think that the network execs are doing nothing more than pitting large, overweight people with low self esteem against each other for my entertainment...and what's worse, I enjoy it.  Yes, the finale is always emotional which is full of "good for you" type moments, but throughout the season, I can't help but roll my eyes when the trainers make someone cry just to build them back up again with new found sensitivity and tough love.

But what's worse than this (and I am guilty of it too), are these fake "reality" shows where fake "real" people, go through fake "real" situations and the cameras just happen to be there to capture their fake "real" emotions, reactions and outcomes.  You know these shows, the ones where the women can't hold onto a single thought and blink at the same time.  Where all the men are meaty douche bags who love themselves more than anything else and where everyone talks about their fake "real" problems and how "hard" life can be.  Like I said, terrible stuff, but I'm just as guilty of watching as much as anybody else.

I digress, back to this flight attendant and her arrogant comment.  After thinking about all the rest of the crap that is currently polluting our televisions, I started to realize that cartoons are not the root of all evil and a grown man watching them is NOT the sign of the apocalypse.  Throughout the remainder of the flight, I continued lamenting about my lack of response to this obvious calling out of my maturity and challenging my role in the Universe.  I had a series of those "I should have said this..." type moments which made me start to feel a little better about letting this one go and not retaliate.

My first thought was to be kind, sincere, and intellectual about the whole thing:

That was a good first try, but I could come up with better responses if I gave it some more thought.  I then decided that since this was a flight to Vegas and I wasn't sitting in first class, she probably thought I was some infrequent flyer that she can say anything to because who cares what "Joe Flies Once a Year" feels about the hospitality of her airline.  I then wanted to pull out my Delta Diamond Medallion Sky Miles card and shove it in her face while I act like a total prima donna:

If my status with the airline program didn't mean anything, I thought I'd follow it up by bragging about my overall banked miles/points:

Course, since I was heading through all the stages of my downward spiral, I couldn't rule out the offensive and unoriginal, but always effective:

But I think my friend Wheeler had the best comeback of them all:

Yeah, I should of said that!

So there you have it.  One comment almost ruined my Vegas trip.  While I'd like to say I got over it quickly, I was still fuming about it as we got off the plane.  I cordially said goodbye and wished the flight attendant a good day and never looked back.  20 minutes later, Jerry, Jim and I were having a beer in the Vegas airport waiting for Derek's flight to land before we could begin our fun filled weekend of Vegas excitement (or Vegacitement).

Incidentally, on the way home I got called up to the ticket counter before we start boarding.  The ticket person told me she had never seen this happen, but I was somehow upgraded to first class for the flight home.  Not sure how that happened either, but for what it's worth - thanks Universe!

-Cheers