Why ask why...

Tonight's post made me think of the old beer commercials where they say, "Why ask why? Try Bud Dry." Upon researching this topic and watching a couple Bud Dry commercials I was amazed to learn that Bud Dry came out in 1990. This fact not only made me feel old, but made me question why I was paying attention to beer commercials at the age of nine. I guess that shows the power of a catchy slogan.

A second question that was raised was why would any beer have the word "dry" in its title. It turns out that "dry" beer is made with genetically altered yeast or rice, which creates a beer with less sugar. It also turned out that although dry beers typically have a higher alcohol contents, Bud Dry lacked any body and flavor. The absences of flavor led to an absences of customers which led to Bud Dry being replaced by Bud Ice (which probably also sucked) in 1994.

The reason that this slogan popped into my head is because Lucy has been asking the "why?" questions a lot. Typically she asks it at least three times in a row. It can start out with a simple, "Why are you eating that daddy?" And after explaining that I am eating because I am hungry and that it is breakfast time, she will wait roughly one whole second before saying..."why?" Then after explaining that I am hungry because I haven't eaten since the night before and that breakfast is a very important meal, she will process this information and simply again ask, "why?"

I know many you have inquisitive kids, so you have all had these conversations many times.

Recently we have had two situations where the Why Game got extensive and in one case simply, odd. First, we were watching Dora's Christmas Adventure (please just overlook the fact that it is still in the DVD player as we move into February). In the movie they reenact A Christmas Carol, and Swiper visits a Christmas past and a Christmas future. The Why Game got interesting when I attempted to explain time travel to Lucy. She couldn't understand why Swiper was with "Old Swiper". To answer her questions, I first tried fun responses and then I tried going with just the facts, but both just left her with more why questions. My current plan is to watch Back to the Future with her and see if "Doc" Brown can explain it.

The second situation where the Why Game got out of hand was when we found a headless rabbit in our driveway. When I went out to get the paper it was still dark and I spooked a bird, I think it was an owl, that was sitting on our driveway. Later in the day we were out and we spotted the headless rabbit. Lucy went into full on attack mode, and I don't blame her. "Why didn't it have a head?" "Why in the driveway?" "Why bloody?" This situation not only left Libby and I without enough answers for Lucy, but also doing google search for "How do owls kill their prey?" among others.

You never know where the inquisitive mind of a child may take you. Recently for us it has been time travel and headless rabbits!?!?!?

The Three S's

I concluded a post on 12/15/09, The Circus was in Town, about Lucy being a bearded lady by mentioning that after our beards where photographed we went in the bathroom to shave. I have included a picture of Lucy shaving to finalize that post and to use the image as visual evidence of a recent accomplishment. Due to this accomplishment Lucy will be referred to as "My Girl" throughout the remainder of this post.

The photo was taken on with a cell phone, sorry about the poor quality of the image. The razor she is playing with as plastic protection piece on. If it didn't I would be the first to nominate myself for worst parent of the year.

Without further ado, I am pleased to announce that “My Girl” recently completed all three legs of the 3 S’s.

What are the 3 S’s you say?!?!? Many of you many already know and to those who don’t I want to thank you for giving me the opportunity to us the Urban Dictionary. As defined by the Urban Dictionary the 3 S’s are what all men should do before going out or getting up. The first is an S-word for poop; the second is shave, and finally shower.

Now that we have laid some ground work regarding My Girl's accomplishments, I will take a moment to recap. We have documented shaving and I discussed Lucy's love of showering before a recent switch to strictly baths as part of her Big Sister Practice. By my scorecard that puts us at 2 out of 3!

My Girl completed the S-ing tri-fecta during a recent play session downstairs. She announced she needed to go poopie, which by itself is always exciting. The difference this time was that she insisted on saying she wanted to use the downstairs bathroom. From the department of way too much information, the downstairs bathroom is the one daddy uses (per mom’s request). After a successful use of the bathroom, I raised my arms in celebration on announce, THAT'S MY GIRL!

The critics may say that it doesn’t count because the events didn’t happen in secession, but I say they still call it the Tiger Slam although he won all the majors over the course of two years. Use dad’s bathroom one day, shave once a couple months prior, and shower with mom a couple weeks ago, I say NBA continuation...count it, and once again exclaim, “That’s My Girl!”

State of the Union

No I am not going to breakdown the real "State of the Union" address last night. Although I do enjoy politics I believe it is more a topic of discussion over a cold one, then something you need to deal with while trying to enjoy a blog. Last nights address did get me thinking about speeches and famous quotes. I decided to comb though some quotes on parenting and discuss some that stuck out to me:

"The quickest way for a parent to get a child's attention is to sit down and look comfortable." ~Lane Olinghouse

This quote has rung true at our house many times. Weather it is announcing that she needs to go to the bathroom as the first fork full of dinner is being raised to our mouth, busting into the shower to turn the five minutes of quiet in to merely 30 seconds, or when one of us sneaks downstairs to use the elliptical for a workout and Lucy insists that she needs to works out and comes within inches of being clipped by the elliptical pedal.

"Don't handicap your children by making their lives easy." ~Robert A. Heinlein

This has been an issue that I have wrestled with, and probably will continue to as Lucy gets older and starts to deal with bigger life issues. As a parent it is difficult to see your child struggle with anything. With that said, it is also important for them to learn some things on their own. When to step back and when to step in will be a learning experience for me as a parent.

"Sing out loud in the car even, or especially, if it embarrasses your children." ~Marilyn Penland

Lucy, I am going to take this opportunity to apologize in advance to you on this one. What I am sure of is that I will be the source of some embarrassment for you. I am optimistic it will be the ha-ha funny embarrassing, not the show up to your band concert in a pizza stained shirt and sweatpants!?!?!

"The guys who fear becoming fathers don't understand that fathering is not something perfect men do, but something that perfects the man. The end product of child raising is not the child but the parent." ~Frank Pittman, Man Enough

This quote reminds me of when Libby and I started discussing the timing of having kids. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to be a father. In hindsight there isn’t a perfect time or a time where you have everything else in life figured out. No doubt I have changed and developed as a person through being a parent.

"No matter how calmly you try to referee, parenting will eventually produce bizarre behavior, and I'm not talking about the kids." ~Bill Cosby, Fatherhood, 1986

I have enjoyed watching other parents interact with their kids in public. It makes me laugh when I hear a mom say something with a baby voice to her kid or a dad tries to make a kid laugh by making a funny face. As a parent I not only a new perspective on this practice of bizarre behavior, but a lot of experience doing it. The picture below is an example of some bizarre behavior of my own during a recent painting project at our house.



"Life affords no greater responsibility, no greater privilege, than the raising of the next generation." C. Everett Koop

Regardless of your political associations or feelings about the state of the union address, we can all agree there is a lot going on in the world around us. “What we leave for our children” needs to be more than a political catch phrase. As parents, what we do at home to build an educated, health, and thoughtful next generation will be our biggest contribution and our legacy.

Big Sister Practice

With the due date roughly two months away we have ramped up baby preparations around the house. Lucy, never being one to miss out on anything, has also stepped up her game. She frequently asks mom the how the baby is doing, when we are riding in the car she asks where the baby will sit, and she has taken an even stronger interest in her baby dolls (she has always liked playing with them, but she seems to sense that will be showtime soon!)

She has also taken it upon herself to test out a couple of the baby items we have brought out of storage. The first item is the baby bath. Lucy has been strongly anti-bath for about a year and had resorted to showers with mom or dad to get clean. That is until the baby bath showed up. For over a week now we have taken a bath every day, some days two, and we have given her new baby, Luke (more on Luke soon), multiple baths. She wants to take baths more than Ariel from The Little Mermaid wants legs!**
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What started out as giving Baby Luke a bath in the baby bath quickly escalated...
Soon she was in the baby bath too...
and ever since we have been taking baths in the big tube, with of course Lucy insisting on sits in the baby bath. Just making sure it is going to work for the new baby!?!?

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She has also started carrying her dolls and stuffed animals around in the baby carrier. I am glad that she is practicing this because we will definitely be having our two year old carrying the baby around!?!?! Although that is not true, it has been very cute to watch her prepare and get excited about her sisters arrival.

The paint in the background is a project that is near completion to redo Lucy's room. Libby's Aunt Suzie,who is extremely talented, offered to paint the room as a baby gift when Lucy was born. With a plan to move, we waited until we were in this house to take her up on the offer. Thank you Suzie! I am sure more pictures will be posted on Bebe's Corner when the project is completed.

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This past weekend we went to meet our college friend’s new baby, Luke. Lucy was very interested in looking at Luke’s fingers and legs. She was amazed with how little he was, and frankly so was I. Once you get use to hauling 30+ pounds around 8 pounds seems very light. After Lucy’s enjoyable meeting with Luke, she did what any good friend would do and named her new baby doll (one that can go in the bath and was purchased as a result of the new bath obsession) Luke.

We have enjoyed watching Lucy enthusiastically embrace the idea of becoming an older sister. I am excited to witness how Lucy will continue to transform and grow as she welcomes in an additional member to our family.

**The Little Mermaid reference was to denote that we have entered into the world of Disney at our house. She remains diverse in her tastes: SpongeBob, Dora, Seseame Street (especially Elmo), The Sound of Music, and now Ariel, Eric, Max the Dog, Flounder, and Sebastian. Although this is our first Disney film, I am certain it won’t be our last.

The big 3-0, and I am talking weeks

This Saturday the 23rd will mark the completion of week 32 of the/Lib's (real dilemma on what word to use there. “The” seems to be more inclusive in regards to the fact that Lib isn’t alone on this whole baby thing. “Lib’s” seems to be more appropriate since she is currently doing all the work, yet it sounds a bit like it was just her crazy idea. This dilemma is to show appropriate support for Libby not to interject myself into the sentence. Any feedback on appropriate word use would be appreciated!) pregnancy.

Since I am already a week and a half late with this post another moment delay can’t hurt. So I will take a moment to wish MLB Daddy and Hilary from Suburban Zoo each a belated happy 30th birthday. It seems appropriate for two reasons, first I do hope they each had a good birthday and second, we are talking about the big 3-0 with today’s post.

During this pregnancy Lib’s been having trouble finding anything that sounds good to eat. To celebrate the 30 week milestone I tried to make a meal only of foods Lib has enjoyed during the pregnancy. The challenge here is that her tastes have been changing like the weather, except faster and more frequently. Faster as in, she wants a grilled cheese and by the time I make the sandwich, it doesn’t sound good anymore.

The menu:
1st course: Cinnamon toast
2nd course: salad with craisins, sesame sticks and three cheese ranch dressing
main course: grilled cheese, turkey and cheese panini, or pizza rolls
dessert: no bake Oreo cookie pie.

Real gourmet, right!?!?!? Not to mention quite the combination of flavors. I don’t think I fully thought through the fact that although she has liked all the food throughout this pregnancy, it doesn’t mean that she eats them all at the same time. She was very polite though and I appreciated that. Much like the time we made my dad breakfast in bed and served him an egg roll to go with his cheerios and coffee and then stared at him until he tried it!?!?!?!

As you can see from the large empty space on the plate in the picture below, and true to form throughout the pregnancy, none of the main course options sounded good. The meal was concluded with a second order of cinnamon toast and a conversation about the pregnancy.

Here’s to the final two months Lib. Thanks for all of the sacrifices you are making to carry, develop, and grow Baby Johnson #2. Lucy and I are excited to do our part of baby care whenever she shows up. Until then Baby Larry could not be lucky to have you taking care of it!

What do you want to be when you grow up?

The work is definately seasonal. It is very tough to sustain the job during the heat of the summer. After a good moist snowfall the barriers to entry are very low, so you can expect a lot of competition in your work. The pay is very low and you can expect lots of long days doing nothing after you start, but if being a snowwoman is really what you want to do we will do what we can to help.

**disclaimer: this was not a real discussion, but the below picture made me think she was thinking it. I am not sure if it was the insistance on wearing the snowman's hat or her wanting to stand there with her arms out that made me think she was thinking it.

Either way we are just glad to be able to be able to play outside again after a roughly two week cold streak. For the non-Minnesota readers among us, here are some specifics on the cold according the weather.com...six of the first ten days of the year had single digit highs, 1/2/10 took the prize in the Twin Cities with a high of zero and a low of -19, these temperatures are without windCHILL. During the cold we still tried to get outside, but it was usually for about five minutes and our goal was to see if we could make it to the end of the driveway and back.

In addition to acting like snowmen/snowwomen, the first day we got outside we celebrated the new warmth (15-20 degrees) by digging holes in the snow all the way to the grass, saying "Hi grass!" then filling in the holes and saying, "See you in the spring!" Mom will be so proud when she hears that today we dug holes then filled them in!?!?!?

Thanks to the Retica family for building the snowman!

Extra Steps

Lucy, like most kids, is into everything. She loves to help with laundry, making coffee, shoveling, cutting up veggies, and many other common tasks around the house. I am often impressed with her ability to focus once she starts a task. For example, she usually won't stopping until the entire Tupperware cabinet is cleaned out or every last book is off the shelf. Our approach, which isn’t different from many parents, is to having her participate in hopes that it helps her learn how things work.

My concern is that she is going to think that a broom is needed to make a pot of coffee or that when you shovel the driveway if you pick up snow and put it where dad just shoveled that is cool or the latest extra step in an otherwise normal process…that you can’t wear any clothing when you start folding a load of laundry!

Of course I know that all of these extra steps will go away as she gets older, but I have to document some of our current processes. We will certainly not be winning any operational excellence awards or qualifying for Six Sigma stuff. Productivity often isn’t nearly as fun!?!?!
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Making coffee starts with Lucy spreading coffee grounds throughout the kitchen(grounds on the counter and floor are pictured). Usually some coffee even gets into the filter.

While the coffee is brewing we take care of the additional step in our coffee making process...sweeping.

Folding clothes has taken on a couple of extra steps. Pictures below show Lucy trying on each piece of clothing including dad's shirt and shorts, mom's tie-dye socks (made by Lucy with love), and dad's socks on her arms. Not pictured is the refolding process, which often is a re-refolding process depending on what she wants to wear and when.

Toby Keith and the family tree

I would have to say that I am not a huge country music fan. I enjoy listening to music, but I am not the type of listener that always listens to the same thing or has ever fallen in love with a particular group or band.

Regarding country music the things the bug me include all the talk of losing your dog, truck, etc. and the disproportionate number of songs that are about high school. With the average life span in the US being about 78 years, there seems to be way too many songs about being 18ish.

As I was typing my last sentence I remembered that Tim McGraw has a song about being 30, so maybe I know more about country then I thought. In addition to that, I do love me a good “Standing Outside the Fire” by Garth Brooks, and apparently somewhere in my mental jukebox I have some Toby Keith. More specifically, the Toby Keith song “Who’s your daddy”. Fortunately or unfortunately, depending on your opinion of this song, I have passed this tune on to Lucy, although she likes to sing it a bit differently.

The refrain of the song goes:

Who’s your daddy, who’s your baby?
Who’s your buddy, who’s your friend?

Lucy often responds to me singing this by singing (with her best Toby Keith voice (which isn’t very close, yet very cute))

Who’s your daddy, who’s your mommy?

As Lucy gets older maybe we will be able to use this song to help her learn some of her more distant relatives. I am not quite sure if the below has the same ring to it though:

Who’s your daddy’s great aunts husband, who’s their baby?
Who’s your mommy’s cousin’s sister, who’s her dad?

We will work on it!?!?!?

In the meantime, based on a 30 week ultrasound where we opted to find out the gender of baby #2, we will work on Lucy started to saying, “who’s your sister?”

For the full Toby Keith song, check out below; for the full details of us having another girl, check out lib’s blog.

First name I got called this year...

Guppy, and next year it will be minnow.

I guess technically in the second video posted by Scott, a friend of the people I jumped with, he called us all stupid around 7 AM on 1/1/10. I think he had a point!?!?! It was about 2 degrees with a bit of a wind, and we jumped into water that they needed to cut away over 12 inches of ice to access.

Lib’s uncle (pictured right before me around the 1:20 mark of Scott’s video) has jumped into Lake Minnetonka six New Year’s days in a row. With each jump you move up the food chain. As you can see in the video (in addition to my red snowflake bathrobe, thanks honey!) my hand was marked with a G to signify that I was a Guppy or first year. Next year I will be a minnow, then a walleye, musky, baracuta5, baracuta6, 7, 8, 9, and then after 10 jumps you are a shark. There are special robe that the Sharks wear. It is really quite the event.

When I jumped in the water the cold really took my breath away. The most unique part was when I went to dry off my hair it was frozen! Ultimately I enjoyed the unique way of kicking off the New Year. I like the symbolism of jump starting the New Year by alerting all the senses and kind of saying here we go to 2010. Well, here's to guppy being the worst name I am called this year and the Ice Dive being the numbest brained thing I do this year.

http://www.startribune.com/video/80480777.html

Photographer in the house

About a week before Christmas Lucy really got into taking pictures. We had an old camera that she made her own. After taking multiple pictures of her own face, she figured out to turn the camera around. She eventually developed her skills enough that after taking a picture she would look at the screen and analyzes the picture. Common phrases said while analyzing a picture included “Looks Nice” and “Actually, pretty good”.

The final phase was organizing pictures. She spent a lot of time telling everyone where to sit or stand during our Christmas with Nana and Papa (Lib’s parents). A couple of times she even stopped playing with whatever she was working on, yelled “wait, wait, wait” to whomever else was in the room and ran to grab her camera. I guess when you envision a good shot you don’t want to miss it.

Below are two shots from Christmas Eve when we were trying to get a family photo. Whenever cameras where being used Lucy had hers ready and she insisted on taking them versus being in them.

With her new found passion for photography she couldn't have received a better Christmas gift...her very own camera. Thanks Nana! Although the camera pictured below does not have much of a flash or a zoom, its durability and color (pink) makes it a huge hit.To conclude the post about Lucy the photographer I thought it would be only fitting to include a couple shots taken by her on the new camera. Oh ya, it comes with a cord so you can upload the pictures. Moving forward I will try to include some more images from the "Lucy Cam".

A picture of my two sisters, Aunt Beth (left) and Aunt Emily, during a visit last week.

A photo of the Lucy and I during some AM play time.

Family photo

Punctuality has never been a strength of mine. In the past I have said that I was born on my due date and have been late for everything since. (In a related story, Lib and Lucy were also both born on their due dates. Hint, Hint: baby #2, who I currently refer to as Larry (Larry Johnson, aka Grandmama), is due on the 20th of March. Don’t forget to get your guess in on Lib's blog.) With that said here on January 4, 2010, I have decided to post a quick picture of Halloween. Looks for shots from Thanksgiving in April and from Christmas by late summer!??!?!

Lucy dressed as a monkey and has continued to refer to herself as a monkey ever since. Recently Lib told Lucy that she is a real “piece of work” while they were playing and Lucy responded, “No, Lucy a monkey.”

That is me dressed as Spongebob or “Spongy” as he is referred to around our house. We moved into a new house in September and one of our first house projects was to redo a bathroom. I kept the box from the new toilet with turning it into SpongeBob in mind.

In addition to punctual, another thing I am not is an engineer. I am not sure if my first mistake was under estimating the length of the box or over estimating my wingspan. What I am sure about is that I compounded the arm issue by cutting the arm holes roughly 12 inches too high. I have never been so happy that Lucy has the attention span of a two year old. I am happy to report (now that we are over 60 days removed from Halloween) that I have regained most of the feel in my arms from our ten minutes of trick-or-treating.

The Blog Effect

I am not sure how she does it, but Lucy seems to be following my blog. She can’t even read, yet listed below are a couple examples of things she has done after a post to communicate she is following along. Shortly after my post about her only tip toeing into potty training a switch flipped in her brain and she said she is all in.

Below is a picture of her smiling on the potty. I wish there was more of a story to tell about her potty training. We spent some time (couple weeks) talking about it and introducing the concepts and when she was ready (I suspect after reading the blog) she went for it. She loves wearing big girl underwear, even when we go out and for naps. We have only had one accident in the last three weeks and that was when we where hosting on New Year’s Eve. She was very distracted at the time. As you can see, overall she is very happy with her new skill.

The second example of her following the blog was the YouTube clip. The morning after I posted the Elmo video I tried to show it to her and she wasn’t interested. It was like she was saying that was so 2009. Her new favorite is listed below.



Happy New Year everyone!