Speaking of Tackle Soccer

I like to brag about how super-advanced Jack is in the realm of sports knowledge. So I probably shouldn't share this one:

Jack kicked a basketball into his new soccer goal and yelled, "TOUCHDOWN!"

Tackle Soccer

I just finished playing tackle soccer with the bossiest tackle soccer player that you will ever meet. It was mostly kicking the ball from one end of the basement to the other and tackling the other player when you got there. You'd think that would be pretty simple, but a certain 2 year old seemed to think I needed a lot of direction.

"Momma! Kick it. Now run. Go go go Momma! Yea Momma! Good job. Now tackle me. Fall down, I tackle you. Get up now please. Run! Kick it!"

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Did I mention that he made me wear a fire fighter helmet the whole time? Every time I tried to chuck it somewhere, he noticed and made me put it back on. "Put on fire fighter helmet, Momma! Helmet on!"

And yes, I predict certain anonymous commenters will say I had this coming.

Parenting Tips: Learning to Read

Here is a little story for you about little preschool aged MetaMegan and little MetaMegan's mom on a walk one day.

Little MetaMegan looking at graffiti: Mom, what does that say?
Little MegaMegan's Mom: Oh, that? That says TRUCK.
... pause... pause... pause...
Little MetaMegan: Mommy? That word started with an F. So it must have said, "FRUCK".

Parenting Tips: Learning to Read

I am walking a dangerous line here with Luke and his reading. Here it is: I cannot stop myself from laughing when he gets a word wrong. "The woodpecker uses his beak to hemmer... hemmer... hemmer.. hemmer? hemmer?!? hemmer? hemmer. Ohhhhhhh. Hammer." (snicker, snicker.)

100% of the time Luke is laughing, but I fear for the time it doesn't happen. It's just so so funny to me.

I am an awesome mother!

First: The Cake

I was changing Jack's diaper the other day and discussing, sort of over his head, that he may be susceptible to bribery in exchange for some potty training.  Possible M&M's.  Possibly.  As Dave ad I discussed it a light-bulb went off over Jack's head.  He grabbed his stomach and started writhing around and shouting, "I hungry!  Choklat!  I hungry, choklat!"  

And hence, the idea to make a chocolate cake for Jack's birthday was born.  I went to my fave food blog and looked up chocolate cake, and I came up with two contenders.  One was too complicated and the other had coffee in it.  I went complicated.   Mmmm.  Complicated:  Chocolate cake with peanut butter icing underneath another layer of chocolate and peanut butter.

Due to the snow, I knew my favorite peanut-o-phile wasn't going to brave highway 93 to join us so I sent her pictures of the cake throughout the day to torture her.  Good thing, because I can't find the card reader today so we have to rely on the phone picture. My phone takes some good pictures! 

OK, I know everyone wants the recipe.  So here you go.  High altitude readers:  I subtracted one tablespoon of flour, and  I used one 1.75 teaspoons baking soda.  However, I have also made another cake from Sky High before, and I didn't adjust it at all.  

For the record, blogging about the recipes I make from a food blog that I read, is sort of meta.

Happy Birthday Jack!

I'm planning ahead with the posts today (Saturday) so I'll have something for Sunday without having to log into my computer at all. You will have to wait to see the birthday boy on his special day for a few days, and I'll be sure to share some cake (pictures) then too!

So, without further ado..

Happy Birthday to Jack, who has grown so much in 2 years!

From Babbling

We love you so much!

The Sun Will Come Out.. Tomorrow!

Things are looking up! We bought a new coffee maker today, and it is programmable, so tomorrow should start off well. I ran 5 errands in 47 minutes today: A New Record!

All that is left to do is make a really complicated 3 layer-with 2 types of icing- birthday cake for Little Baby Jackie's birthday party tomorrow. Yes, nothing can possibly go wrong now!

The Dummening: In the Form of Clumsiness

You'd think I would be really calm, and not at all jittery to the point of dropping things and breaking things now that I really can't make coffee. Yeah, I recently broke the coffee carafe. It wasn't that big of a deal because we could just use the french press until I search every store in the tri-state area for a replacement carafe. That worked until I broke the french press. There was also an incident where someone knocked a glass into another glass in the cabinet, causing massive breakage, but I am not claiming that. I swear that was Dave.

Regardless, now that I am unhappily giving up caffeine, it's odd that this sort of thing keeps happening. What sort of thing you ask? The sort of thing where I say, "Oh great! There is the perfect amount of salad left over to make a really big salad for my lunch tomorrow!" And then I followed that up with, "I'll just take a picture of this with my camera."


A few nights later I was making a fritatta for dinner.

In case it isn't clear, that is a picture of four eggs* on the floor. Luke took a look and said, "Crack an egg on your head, let the juice run down."

On the bright side, the frittata did turn out to be delicious. There weren't any leftovers. (I took the picture before everyone had seconds.) Happy Friday the 13th, everyone; I hope you enjoyed your week of dummening! (And since the week was about The Dummening, I am sure no one will care that it was only 5 days long!)

* I did not use the eggs that fell on the floor.

Work Dummening

I blame all my work dummening this week on the fact that I absolutely had to solve a problem before I went to sleep on Tuesday night. Did I say Tuesday night? Because I guess I meant Wednesday morning at 2:30 am. That pretty much threw off the rest of my week.

Then today, I needed to create a database link, but I didn't know the password and the person who knows the password was at physical therapy, so instead of connect to user identified by password, I used connect to user identified by values ' '. And that apparently can trigger a bug that causes ORA-0600 errors. (ORA-00600: internal error code, arguments: [kzdlk_zt2 err] to be specific.)

Oh, the hilarious and wacky adventures that I get into at work. I bet you are all wishing I talked about it more often. The reason I am evening talking about work at all, is that I was one dummening story short for the work week, and I am saving a good one for tomorrow. But really, if I start getting hits from people searching on kzdlk_zt2 err I am totally turning this into a DBA blog and I am going to get rich off the add revenue.

Until tomorrow...

(Oh - to you DBA suckers, you need to get rid of the quotes and use the real password. See metalink note 456320.1)

Smarty Pants Revisited

I already mentioned how I did some dumb things while making my smarty pants outfit. I mentioned ruining the shirt and the end table. But did I mention that at one point I sewed the front and back of the pants together? I did do that. But it still turned out to be a cute outfit. Dave thought I was going to sew the smarties on individually, like sequins. That may have been cool, but I never could have done it while watching our new TV obsession, The Wire.