Different Points of View

Last Friday night Back Seat Girl and I were walking home from the neighborhood pizza place. It was just the two of us, we had gotten separated from the rest of our group. We were walking up a hill on our street and the sun was getting low on the horizon. It illuminated all of the bugs flying from tree and tree and bush to bush. I noticed this after we had seen two ant cities that were teeming with millions of ants, with more ants flying overhead.

I thought to myself "Man, late August is a disgusting time of year".

BSG inhaled sharply, stopped walking, and looked ahead of her with awe. "Mom, look at all the magic!".

Suddenly late August didn't seem so bad.

Just another day

Me: OOhh, Little Man, you smell like poop.
BSG: Yea, when I was laying on the pillow and he sat on my head I could smell his poopy.
Me: He sat on your head with a diaper full of poop?
BSG: Yea.
Me: That's pretty gross.
BSG: Yea.
BSG: I was going to tell you that he had poop in his diaper but then I decided not to.

Sandbagger

I have been trying to get Back Seat Girl to write her name for a while now, but she has never really wanted to try. Every once in a while she'll give a half-hearted attempt to write an 'A', but otherwise it's been a no-go. I've never really pressed her too hard, she's not really into coloring, either. I've always had a feeling she could do it, though. Tonight we were just playing around in the playroom downstairs and she busted this out after I showed her how to do it once. ONCE. She's been walking around the house spelling her name ever since. Stubborn, thy name is our children.

What you've been waiting for

Girl loves her lures. After a while he started dumping buckets of water over himself.

Camping breakfast

I wanted to tell him that it will never get better than this--eating bacon and sitting on the potty.

He's totally ready for her to catch the big one.

Boys and fishes get the same reaction.

Yea, we were all grossed out.

Uncle Pat and Driver built a huge sand wall and then dared BSB to scale it.

"It's just a tiny baby perch!"

Camping is exhausting...

Holy Mother of God

Yea, yea, we went on vacation. We took a camping trip with my brother and we had all sorts of fun and I have lots of cute pictures. Maybe, one day, after I get done hyperventilating over the passage of time, I will post some pictures with, I don't know, maybe a few words. Words about vacation. Right now? I'm going to tell you what I did today, and what I'm going to do tonight.

Do you want to know what I did with my morning? I packed up my two adorable kids and went to a local department store and bought them clothes. I bought them clothes today for two reasons: 1. This department store was having a sale, and 2. Back Seat Girl needed school clothes. As in clothes she will put on her body, then go to school in. SCHOOL. With a teacher. And other kids.

Guess what I'm going to do tonight? I'm going to pack up my two adorable kids again, this time with my husband, and then we're all going to ride in the station wagon to BSG's SCHOOL for orientation. Where I will get a folder containing, I don't know, whatever school orientation folders for parents contain. How am I supposed to know what school orientation folders contain? How exactly did I get to a point in my life where I would need a school orientation folder that didn't have anything to do with me going to school?

I remember 4 years and a couple of weeks ago I had a baby girl. It was simultaneously the worst and best day of my life. Luckily, as I lay exhausted in that hospital bed holding a blanket wrapped BSG, I did not know about all of the times in the coming years I would become breathless thinking about how time marches on whether or not we are ready for it.

The Day After A Birthday

Happy Birthday Shotgun!
Yesterday was Shotgun's birthday. Not a particularly festive one . There was no party, you even had to make dinner, but it was your favorite and there were fresh flowers on the table. And for dessert, two free Coldstone sundaes (one for shotgun's birthday, the other for back seat girl's). But, lets not forget, after the kids were in bed, you got to experience a few fleeting moment of bliss, laying in bed with your new sheets, watching the Twins shut out the White Sox, and reading some food porn.
I've seen quite a few of Shotgun's birthday celebrations in the past 10 or so years. This has to be one of the smallest. Usually the days before and after July 28th are part of a days long celebration of the shotgun's entrance into this world. It's something I always look forward to. This year was a bit more muted, but I have no doubt that the Shotgun birthday festivals will make their return sooner than later.

I love you,
Driver

Scenes from a Birthday Party

Four years old

This morning when you woke up you forgot it was your birthday for a few minutes. After we reminded you and got a round of birthday hugs, you were baffled. For starters, your voice didn't sound any different. Your hair was still long. No major changes had happened overnight while you were sleeping.

I wanted to tell you that no, these changes don't happen suddenly. They sneak up on you. First you're the tiny baby we brought home from the hospital, the first baby, the baby we sat and stared at and wondered what the hell we were doing. Then you were the tiny toddler who could talk in full sentences and start conversations with total strangers wherever you went. Now you're this little girl. A little girl who can't wait to go to school. A little girl who loves princesses and pink, yes, but also fishing and bugs. A little girl who really isn't scared or intimidated by much of anything -- except maybe thunderstorms.

So, Back Seat Girl, while you're terrifying us with all of this growing up, we want you to know how much we love you, how much you've taught us, and how much we can't wait to watch you grow and learn in the years to come.

Love, Mom & Dad (and your little brother)

For another great shot of BSG, click here.

Toilet water and its many uses.

The days that I don't work here's how the mornings usually go around here: Kids wake up, I make breakfast, we eat, then they get down and run around the house in various stages of undress while I clean up the kitchen. They are always very good about entertaining themselves during this time, so it's easy for me to, hmm, I don't want to say "lose track" of them, but I definitely don't have an eye of them every minute.

Monday morning they were playing while I did dishes and talked to my mom on the phone. Suddenly I heard BSG say "Oh, [Back Seat Boy]!" from the bathroom in a very disapproving voice. I turned around to find BSB pushing the play mop in front of him, happily pretending to clean the floor, but this time, the mop was actually wet. "[BSG]" I called, "is that water from the toilet?" "Yea", she answered back. "Did you flush the toilet when you were done going poopy?" "No."

One word. Gross.

So I hung up with my mom and walked into the bathroom in time to see BSB plunging his mop into the toilet again. Luckily BSG's poop was very small and well-formed, so the mop wasn't actually touching poop, but still. It was touching toilet water than contained a turd in it. I took away the mop and put it where I thought BSB couldn't reach it, then flushed the toilet and started washing the trail of wet left behind by the mop.

I was in the kitchen on my hands and knees when I heard BSB's familiar little staccato steps behind me, and turned around to see him holding the mop over his head while drops of water fell into his hair. Awesome.

8 Years

Happy Anniversary, Driver!

Can you believe we aren't driving home from any vacations or camping trips?


From those crazy college years, to those care-free DINK years living in uptown, to the small children and mortgage payment years, I wouldn't change a thing.

Cicada

It's summer, I can't think of anything to write, here's some pictures

Hi there-Man have I been neglecting this blog lately. We've been too busy around here going places and doing things and trying to wring the fun out of every last drop of summer this latitude will allow us.

It doesn't help that Mama Wonder is on maternity leave, so we've been hanging out, and every time we go anywhere I forget the camera.

Here are some pictures from the 4th of July, which we spent at my parent's house in rural WI. Bonus: my brother and Driver's sister were able to join us!

If she could roll her eyes, she would

Back Seat Girl passed gas the other night, and me, being the immature person I am, immediately started laughing. BSG looked at me out of the corner of her eye and smiled. When it became apparent that I wasn't done laughing, she stopped smiling, put her hand out at me and said:
"Mom, it isn't necessary to laugh when I toot".

Then she left the room.

I lied

Remember when I said I had NO pictures from the great camping disaster of '08? I do! I had exactly two. Here is the only one with the tent in it. Here is Back Seat Girl and her friend playing in our tent. Since I was posting pictures I also included the one we took during our hike this past Saturday morning, and the rest are eating smores with the Wonders in the backyard.

A sign I may not be the best person to teach them how to play sports

This evening I got frustrated when my 1 and a half year old--who just started walking--and my 3 year old couldn't play baseball with each other.

I had to actually tell myself to take a step back, breathe, and think about how ridiculous my expectations were. Then I realized I will probably live longer if I just buy another whiffle ball bat and big bouncy ball.

We could have just put the tent up on the edge of a really high cliff and then all of my deepest fears could have been faced

This past weekend may classify as the least successful camping trip of all time if by successful camping you mean to actually camp the nights you had planned on. Instead, I found myself in a hotel room at a well-known Wisconsin Dells resort re-heating chicken ole (a camping favorite in our family) on a camp stove sitting on a countertop while watching the weather channel. This was actually an improvement on just a few hours earlier when I was in a handicap/family shower at the campsite strategically planning the best place to put the kids so I could throw my body over them if the worst happened.



I'll spare you the details, including the part where we were driving to said bathroom in what felt like the dark of night and since it was the first time I had my back to the kids I started hyperventilating, which sparked Back Seat Girl to ask "Mommy, why do you sound like that?". Other than that instance I felt I kept it together pretty well for them. Had it just been Driver and I I'm pretty sure he'd still be trying to scrape me out of that shower. (If you're wondering what I'm talking about just google Lake Delton. That is the area we were camping in this weekend. At least tried camping in this weekend.)



Either way, we have exactly zero pictures from this weekend. Zero. Which means this is the first camping trip we've ever taken where we don't have a picture of the campsite or anything. It also means I don't have a picture of the giant orange tent, which, by the way, stayed up and relatively dry even after we abandoned it. Also-it was awesome. I can't wait to use it again. I think even people in campers were jealous of us. That is, of course, until we all fled. When Driver went back to the site on Sunday to pack up all of our stuff so we could come home he said the park was eerily quiet. He didn't see anyone.



Moral of the story: I lived through a severe thunderstorm with the threat of tornadoes and flooding while I was camping with the kids, and I feel like I should never have to do it again. You hear that weather gods? NEVER.

The big orange monster

We here at Station Wagon Tales are a camping family. We love to camp, and take at least two camping trips every year. Driver and I thought it would be nice to buy a camper while walking through the fair last year. Not a big one, just a little pull-behind, nothing too fancy. Then we realized that we only have the ability to save up for one big purchase at a time, and a new house takes precedence, so we decided to buy a new tent instead. Our old giant tent had a bunch of broken poles, and to be honest, was bought for about $40 on Amazon.

So, we ordered a new tent a couple of weeks ago, and long story short, it arrived yesterday. I went out to the front porch anxious to see it. I bent down to pick it up, and realized it was too heavy for me to just pick up and carry into the house. The thing weighs a ton! I'm not wuss, but I ended up having to half drag, half roll it into the living room. We set it up last night in the yard, and even though it's only a foot wider than our old tent, it seems so much bigger. The walls are not sloped, but high, which makes it much more roomy inside, but also makes it look like we're setting up a small cottage to stay in. We're going camping this weekend, so I'll make sure to take some pictures to post later. Oh, yea, and did I mention it's orange?

Here is a bunch of pictures from May. There is no rhyme or reason to them, but I needed to slap them up there because Back Seat Boy is not going to take a good nap and I've got some major packing to do.

From the spring gymnastics show. She's the one in the middle with the navy blue and red leotard on. This picture does not do justice to how much smaller she was than eveyrone else.
In case you were wondering, yes, it is hard to be Back Seat Girl.

Where did the top of my head go.

Holding a leech!

Driver took the kids on a little nature walk one weekend while I was working, and after he showed me the pictures I said "Do you realize that BSB's shirt is on backwards? The buttons are supposed to be in the back." I still don't think he believes me.

BSB LOVES the sandbox.

He seems surprisingly taller

I would like all of you to know that today Back Seat Boy WALKED into the living room. Back Seat Girl and I were in there picking up toys, and all of a sudden BSB walked in with a proud look on his face like "check me out, ladiez!". To my credit, I didn't completely freak out, but I wanted to.

He has been using those little legs more and more lately, but these last two days, and especially today, he's been walking much, much more. That's not to say I'm about to put him down at Target and see what he can do, but I am relieved he's decided it's not a bad way to get around, this 'walking' thing. He's still one hell of a crawler, though. Man, he should teach lessons.

Also, we were at Bruegger's eating breakfast this morning and there was a man at the table next to us in business attire enjoying a bagel and coffee, when BSG points at him and loudly exclaims "That guy looks like Icabod!".

And then I died. The End.

No-Pants Lance

Last night when I put Back Seat Boy to bed, he was wearing jammies. Both the pants and the shirt. This morning when Driver got him out of bed, he wasn't wearing any pants. When I saw BSB, I asked Driver where his pants were. Driver looked at me with confusion and said "I thought you did that".

Upon further inspection we found his jammie pants in the crib. I really hope he doesn't figure out his diaper.

Hey, I know this guy

I went to highschool with this guy. I really don't know what else to say, but click here and here, and try and tell me he's not the coolest guy you don't know.

Edited to add: I know the first link doesn't work, and now the stupid "Lawrentian" won't let me look at any articles without signing up, but if you click on the second link, just do a search and you'll be able to find the original article.