Valentine's Day Flowers

So, I'm not the world's best flower buyer. I'm not proud of it, but it's true. This year I didn't do too bad, though, and I actually got Sally flowers before Valentine's Day so she could enjoy them over the weekend before. In our house we have a dozen dried roses from who knows how long ago, and Sally decided to dry the new roses and ditch the old ones. The first mistake came in putting the dead roses within Ella and Caleb's reach. There were dried roses pretty much EVERYWHERE. :) The second mistake came when Sally hung the new 2 dozen roses to dry within their reach. Caleb understood the rule not to touch them. Ella may have understood it, but her little 20 month old impulses are a bit too strong to be overcome by Mommy's rules at this point. :) The following is the resulting mess. Some people count in order to calm themselves down before getting after their kids when they disobey. We tend to just take pictures. She looks so sweet and innocent, doesn't she? She's actually saying "cheese" in this picture. She has recently started covering her cute little face with her hands and standing very still when she gets caught doing something she knows it against the rules. Ha! The girl is a doll.

Our Life in Videos

It's definitely not complete, but the next videos are a good intro to what life is frequently like. We don't tend to take too many videos of ourselves, just the kiddos. Maybe we'll try to do a bit more of that.

This is a cute one of Ella, but Caleb shows a bit of his little personality, too. He's always joking and teasing a bit. Tonight I was swinging the kids on our swing set (it's a bit old but they love it...good enough for residency :) and I started tickling them as they would swing up to me and away. That's when Caleb started saying, "Daddy, you are a Jarker!" I couldn't quite figure what he meant. At first I thought he was calling me a jerk, and I got a bit worried that I'd actually taught him that word. And then I realized (and he confirmed) that he was saying "Joker." Phew! The kid has a great vocabulary which is nice because he's the one teaching Ella how to talk, it seems. She copies pretty much everything he does now. It's really cute. They're going to be awesome big siblings. :) Also on the swing, I asked Caleb what he thought about having a new baby join our family. He proceeded to tell me, "I'm gonna hold it. I'm gonna feed it." Sweet big brother in the making. :)

Ella pretty much loves anything messy. This last Saturday we started refilling our garden boxes with compost to attempt to get a decent garden this year. She was out there the majority of the time scooping up dirt with her little shovel and spreading it pretty much everywhere but inside the box. Just before I recorded this, she was laying in the dirt. Oh well, she loves helping. You kind of gotta encourage that. :) We love our little girl.

A Romantic...at 3?

We visited Joe's brother Ross & his family in the middle of January (which happened to be Caleb's 3rd birthday) to attend the blessing of their new baby. As we left their house to go home, 3-yr-old cousin Anna walked in wearing her new Snow White dress. Caleb stopped, dropped his pirate sword and slipped off his hat, and asked her to dance. No kidding. And then they danced. It was so sweet :)

And Joe recorded the dance...

I guess he's really learning something from watching all those Disney movies :)

We think our children are hilarious :)

You may have wondered what happened to our posting. Well, we currently have a problem with our computer's memory being completely full, so we can't upload pictures to post! This is frustrating, because we don't want to just keep writing stuff without pictures to illustrate. Hopefully we will solve this soon, and not too expensively :S

Anyway, I am intending to post some random video or other to go along with the title of this post--as soon as I can get one uploaded, or find a good one already on here--but for now I'll just explain.

Joe and I enjoy sitting together in the evenings from time to time just looking at pictures and video clips of the kids, on his phone or on the camera. We laugh and laugh! We really think our kids are so funny :) and it sure makes being parents that much more enjoyable. We watched a clip the other night of Caleb playing in a box, and he didn't come out and didn't come out...and I guess you might have to see it to think it is funny. OR, you might still not think it is funny, because you are not us. :) In my view, my kids are the cutest, funniest kids ever--I am guessing all parents feel that way about their kids; and heck, I used to think that about my nieces/nephews before we had kids, so I guess it is all about the family bias :)

Hopefully I can get that box video clip up soon!

Tropical Pork Chops - Yum.

I get in such a rut with cooking dinner each night, and I really do have plans to do some "meal planning", filling out a calendar with at least a week's worth of meals at a time, so that at least I won't have to think of something to cook each day. (That is the hardest part, usually.) Hopefully I'll do that soon.

But in the meantime, tonight I pulled some pork chops out of the freezer and realized I did not want to cook them in the same old way I always do. So, I checked with our old reliable friend, AllRecipes.com, and found a dish I had ingredients for, more or less. And they turned out YUMMY. If you are interested, check the recipe out here: Tropical Pork Chops

Isn't the Internet great? I can't believe how easy it is to find anything, anything--I often forget that, such as when I'm wishing I had a recipe for the most delicious lemon bars I have ever tasted, made by a girl I knew in college but whom I cannot find on Facebook or anywhere. Maybe I'm getting old, but it really wasn't that long ago that we didn't have such amazing, wonderful, and convenient technology at our fingertips. Just amazes me. Wow.

I guess those are my thoughts for now :)

Gardening!

Digging in the dirt is good for the soul :)

The kids & I have been sick all week, and we are all starting to get a little stir-crazy from being stuck at home! In fact, by Tuesday we were getting a bit of cabin fever, so Caleb & I took advantage of a sunny afternoon while Ella napped, and we went into the backyard for some sunshine.

While there, I started pulling weeds out of our overgrown garden boxes (which we haven't planted anything in for...close to 2 years I think!). It felt good just to dig in the dirt :) And the great news is, we found lots and lots of worms! I'm pretty sure those are good for the soil, so I am looking forward to some good garden produce :)

We will be simplifying from the garden we planted 2 years ago--last time, we did everything good I could think of: tomatoes, eggplant, zucchini, butternut squash, bush beans, climbing beans, carrots, asparagus, cabbage, onions, potatoes, cucumbers, etc., etc. Most of it didn't do too well, I think because I was afraid of fertilizer and so I neglected to use any. At all.

This year, Joe wants to just focus on tomatoes and beans, and we are throwing in a pepper plant and pumpkin plant, because our sis.-in-law was kind enough to give us one. I also want to add butternut squash (because I love it & didn't get to taste any last time), and zucchini (because of an amazing Zucchini Chocolate cake recipe from my mom), but we'll see if there is space. We took out the boxes that were just behind the house, I can't remember why. Now we just have the ones along the fence, like so:

This is Day 2 of clearing out the weeds.

Notice the overgrown (invisible) box behind me?

Still gotta clear that out...

Some Randoms

The following pix are from moments in December that we never got around to sharing. I found them tonight, and wanted to share.

Ella is one cute little 19 month old! Her hair is one of the cutest and most crazy things about her. :) This was a day when Sally enlisted one of her friends to help teach her how to do Ella's hair. It has been really fun. I (Joe) have even learned a thing or two. Nothing impressive, but at least I try and occasionally I even get two thumbs up from Sally. It's kind of like when I dress Ella. I'll usually pick at some random things I haven't seen her wear before and try to mix and match. Then I send her scampering across the house to find Mommy for her approval. Most of the time that trip ends with Sally laughing and sending Ella back for a new outfit. She loves looking cute and changing her clothes, so it works out. They both put up with my funny attempts at trying new things. Just like the hair, though, on the rare occasion I get a satisfying gasp of approval from Sally, amazed that I actually succeeded making our Ella look cute for the day. I love being a Daddy.

                                               

Below is a family stamp party...another one of Sally's random fun activities she comes up with for the kids. Again, butcher paper on the table and tons of ink and stamps and fun. The kids loved it. Ella was the first to stamp her hands and arms, and Caleb, of course, followed suit a bit. Mostly they just had fun seeing Mommy's random collection of stamps.

Of the three, this was my favorite moment. I got home post-call (after being at the hospital overnight), but I had slept a bit at the hospital. Sally had a few things planned for the day (I forget what exactly), so we did some quality Daddy and the kids at the zoo time. This is the train that circles the huge park next to the zoo. Caleb LOVES it. He always asks to go and I rarely give in. So this time I caved, and we went. It was a chilly 20 minutes, but they got so excited about everything from dead trees to stray cats in the park. Below Ella was most enthralled with my iphone as is obvious by her cute little stare. Caleb is just the king of photogenics. He loves flashing that smile. On that note, a funny story that happened yesterday...

...we were at Sea World for the first time EVER as a family this weekend, and we were riding a Sesame Street ferris wheel. So of course, being the typical Dad, I'm trying to take pictures (I don't do it incessantly like I'm tempted...I try to put it away sometimes in order to just enjoy the moments together :). So I hold up the camera and say, "Caleb smile." He then rewards me with the biggest frown possible. So I follow suit and frown huge to make him laugh, snap the picture, and right at the last minute he flips his frown into the cutest grin of all time. Classic Caleb. So now I look like the grumpy one in the picture. He got me good. ;)

Caleb's Breakdown

I just wanted to share a cute moment from getting ready for bed tonight. Sally made her homemade chicken pot pie for dinner (did I mention she cooks pretty much every night? Probably, but she does. I'm a lucky guy), and afterwards she had to run off to a play that one of her girls from the youth group at church was in. So, the natural thing to do was try to get the kids in bed ASAP. :) They were both so tired. Ella has been rubbing her right eye all day, and it was starting to look irritated. She has eczema that flares up now and again, so I decided to give her a bit of Benadryl tonight to stave off the itching so she can sleep. Caleb wanted to help me, but I was a bit concerned about teaching him to give her medicine. So I told him no. The sweet boy lost it. He cried and cried. I tried to just hold him and explain why it was important that only Mommy and Daddy give Ella medicine in order to keep her safe. He just kept crying. At one point, he turned to me and walked over and hugged me as he sobbed and said, "I just need to go to bed!" in his cute 3 year old voice. That just made me laugh. At least he knows what he really needs. The best part was, he and Ella didn't fight bedtime at all. A good night for tucking in. One point for Daddy. :)