Pittsburgh Trip

So, at the beginning of the month, the kids and I drove out to Pittsburgh to keep my sister company while her husband was out of town for several days.  It was a long drive, but the kids did great.  Here are some of the highlights, as documented on my phone:

Penny and Ben on my Grandma’s little rocking chair that Rachael inherited:

And Penny on her own:

And here’s a little video of Ben and Ollie having a picnic together.  They got along pretty well, although Ollie was kind of sick.  Ben actually had a lot more fun with Owen.

And a couple of pictures of the kids playing with the play food.

Tobin and Penny with Ollie in the background.  Penny and Tobin sometimes played near each other, but it turns out that Penny is a bit of a bully.  She kept stealing Tobin’s pacifier, so he wasn’t her biggest fan.  Still they had a couple of cute moments together.

The four younger kids playing together.  Ben, Ollie, Penny, Tobin.  Owen was at school most of the time.  I’m not sure I have any pictures of him, but he was so cute with my kids.

Some of you may or may not know that while we were in Pittsburgh, Ben took a spill and split his face open right above his eye.  Here is an up close shot of the injury at the hospital before we got it stitched up:

And after the stitches, as you can see, Ben was very upset by it.  He thought it was pretty cool that he had “hairs” on his face:

Of course, he wasn’t that calm and pleased the whole time, but he was very brave.  He screamed when it first happened and was asking for his “boo-boo bear” which is a little kids ice pack we have.  Of course we hadn’t taken it to Pittsburgh, but we got him calmed down with a sucker.  When we got to the hospital, he actually recognized it as such.  He knows that daddy works at a hospital, and when asked what daddy does there, he says “he fix people”.  So as we were walking up to the emergency room he said “We going to the hospital mommy?”  I told him yes, we were.  His little lip started to quiver and I could tell that he was fighting back tears and trying to be brave and said, “I have owie”  I told him it was a hospital like where daddy worked and asked him what they do at hospitals.  He replied that they fix peoples.  I tried to reassure him that they would fix his owie too.  He perked up a bit and said, “Yeah, because they crash” and started making car crash noises.  Apparently, when Jon first taught him about hospitals, it was when they were passing some ambulances at a car accident.  The hospital was great and we didn’t have to wait at all.  He did really well.  Since the cut was so close to his eye, they had to strap him down to a little mummy board while they injected the anesthetic and put the stitches in.  He was not pleased about being strapped down.  He freaked out for the shot, but who can blame him, that part is extremely unpleasant.  Once the cut was all numbed up, he actually calmed down and was very curious and sweet while they did the stitches.  He was talking about getting more suckers and seeing Nammy (who was on a plane to Pittsburgh at that moment) and asking Grandma for a present (I may have mentioned that he could ask for a present to calm him down during the injection).

Here is one more close up the next day that my mom took with a real camera.

On to the rest of the trip.  Here is an adorable picture my mom took of Tobin.  Can you believe those blue eyes?

And a picture of Tobin and Penny being super adorable after their bath.  They are two such happy little babies, even though both of them were cutting their molars.  Yipes!

And a picture of me with Owen, Penny, Ben, and Ollie, all in our jammies

One day, mom, Rachael and I ventured out with the four little ones.  Here is a picture of Tobin and Penny in the cart at Sam’s Club.  Penny is using the car keys like a cell phone.

And here we are on the road.  These kids were such good travelers.

It was a great trip.  There were many more pictures taken by my mom, who is a great photographer, but she accidentally deleted them from her memory card when she uploaded them to Rachael’s computer.  I guess Rach will have to post them.

Phone Dump

I know it’s been a while since I posted, and that I still owe my loyal followers (if there are any of you left) documentation of important things like Christmas, Penny’s birthday, and our trip to Wisconsin Dells.  I’m still too lazy, and a little bit overwhelmed by our impending move to do so.  Sorry.  Maybe once we get settled in Iowa City, I’ll do some backlogging.  Oh yeah, that reminds me, Jon Matched!!! Yay!  We will be going to the University of Iowa Children’s Hospital in Iowa City.  I am feeling super pumped about this.  We took a trip to Iowa City, and it is a lovely little college town.  I think we can be very happy there.

In other news, I just dumped my phone’s memory card so get ready for a bunch of photos.  Here are some of the highlights from the last couple of months since I got my new phone:

The view from our back door in early February.  We had some pretty killer icicles. 

Mommy trying to get a good picture of us all nice in our church clothes.  This is about as good as it gets:

And this is what should be expected:

Daddy is a slightly more cooperative model:

Sometimes they get along:

and Ben lays one on his little sister (though he’s not always gentle in doing so):

Ben is learning to draw.  Here are some “peoples” he drew on his magnadoodle:

and a fire truck.  I swear he drew this by himself.  I gave him some directions on what shapes to draw, but he really drew it:

My camera doesn’t take great videos, especially if the lighting isn’t perfect.  But I have to include this one.  Penny likes to put this little cloth box on her head and walk around running into things.  It kind of reminds me of the kid from the Parenthood movie:

And here is Penny at one of her first attempts at feeding herself.  She actually does pretty well:

And Penny running around in her beautiful dress that Geri gave her.  Seriously, can you get any cuter?

I think I’ll end this post now.  I might post later with phone pics and video from our Pittsburgh trip and the rest of March.

Twilight

So I am currently waiting for some videos of my kids to upload.  My computer is painfully slow right now thanks to a problematic battery.  As a result, I have some time to post about silly things.  Prepare for a lengthy post without any pictures.

I’m sure you all guessed that this post is about Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight.  For the past several years (since about the time I finished reading Harry Potter in 2007) most women I know between the ages of 12 and 45 have been reading this series and telling me to read it.  I resisted.  A lot.

I had my reasons.  First of all: I like to read good books. Secondofly: I have a very long list of those books that I want to read, and I couldn’t bring myself to bump Twilight ahead of the likes of East of Eden and Crime and Punishment (neither of which I have read still) and Count of Monte Cristo (which I did finally read).  Third: It sounded like a romance novel.  I’ve unfortunately read a romance novel by a Mormon author once t wasn’t a mistake I was ready to make again.  Fourth: I sometimes like to pretend I’m more mature and refined than adolescent girls.  Fifth:  I hate vampires.  I don’t like stories about them.  I don’t think they have ever made for books that are anything more than glorified romance novels.

In spite of all of these objections, I finally decided I would make a compromise and see the movies.  If only because I kind of like Kristen Stewart from her other stuff and it seemed like something good to watch for a girls night with my mom and my sister.  So, when I was in Utah this summer, my mom and I rented “Twilight” and “New Moon” and set out to watch them.  My dad joined us because he is a good sport and there wasn’t much else to do.  Not surprisingly, mom fell asleep about halfway into the first one and I ironically watched the first two Twilight movies with my dad. 

Can I just say Yipes?!  The first one was tremendously bad.  It was boring and went pretty much nowhere until that last half hour or so.  If I had to watch Robert Pattinson make a pained expression one more time, I was going to have an aneurysm.  It was hard to tell if he was constipated, or just trying really hard to not look at the camera or something.  I thought Kristen Stewart was believable, but the character was obnoxious.  At least I got some joy out of some 24 alums.  Sarah Clarke (aka Nina Myers) in a small role as the mom and Billy Burke (aka Gary Matheson) as the dad.  The score was terrible and did nothing to fill in the gaps, which was unfortunate since the whole movie was gaps.

I actually kind of liked the second movie.  Possibly because Robert Pattinson and his painfully pained expression left shortly into the movie.  While Taylor Lautner is not a particularly good actor, he was adorable and likeable in Pattinson’s absence.  Kristen Stewart was again believeable, but the character was still obnoxious.  At least they did a quick montage to glaze past the months of her pathetic moping, and the music was a lot better.  Actually, I should give Kristen Stewart more credit because she really dominated the screen time and somehow managed to make me not want to kill her character, who probably deserved it.

I watched the third movie by myself.  I liked it.  I’m sort of ashamed to admit it, but I did.  Taylor Lautner grew into his role, Robert Pattinson was grimacing less, and Kristen Stewart was good.  It helped that Bella was less obnoxious.  I liked the vampire family (except for Rosie).  I really liked Jasper and Emmet and Dr. Cullen.  The music was actually really fun, and the villains were interesting.  The middle was still painful to get through, though.

I decided I had to find out for myself if the characters were any better in the books, so I finally broke down and started reading them.  I also told myself that I was also really skeptical of the Harry Potter books and made fun of people who read them.  I was way off on that one.  I sort of skimmed the first three since I had seen the movies.  I was just trying to find the stuff that wasn’t in the movies.  While they were quick reads, and I didn’t absolutely hate them, I have to say that I was right about them. 

The characters lack depth and don’t really function as real heroes or protagonists.  Edward is definitely more likeable than Robert Pattinson makes him, but even then, not until the back end of the third book.  Bella is an annoying, love-stricken teenageer, which would be fine, since that’s normal for a girl of that age, but she’s supposed to be mature and an “old soul”.  I think Meyer just said that about the character so the reader could get behind her falling so desperately in love with a guy she barely knew and be so sure of it, even after he took off and came back.  Note: It’s hard to really get behind a teenaged girl finding true love with a creature that is, by all accounts, built to make people fall for him.  I never quite got what made her infatuation with him more meaningful than every other girl who would have dropped everything to be with him, other than the fact that he noticed her, as well.  Which is another problem, since he really only noticed her since her blood smelled super delicious to him and he couldn’t hear her thoughts. 

The writing is straight forward and unimaginative and tends to drag in all of the books.  They are driven in good part by internal monologue, which doesn’t work very well when the writing is bad and the characters are uninteresting.  Stephanie Meyer has a bad habit of making sure nothing really interesting happens until the last 10% of the book.  Even when interesting stuff happens in the middle of the book, she manages to make it seem boring.

Ultimately, the books had a couple of chances to be good and maybe even have some substance, but missed the mark.  I guess I shouldn’t have expected more out of books for young adults, but I sort of did after reading Hunger Games.  I kept waiting for there to be anything thematically of value, but it just didn’t come.  It really is just a love story about a girl, a vampire, and a werewolf.  I can see how people like it, as it is better than most other love stories for that age group, but it’s unwise to look for anything else out of it.  I guess I’m glad I read them, because it definitely did add something to the movies.  The characters are easier to understand, and the vampires are given more depth and back story.  Also, I can now honestly say that I don’t particularly like them and have it be an informed opinion.  I have to say that I agree with Stephen King’s take on Meyer’s place in the juvenile literature worl: "the real difference [between J. K. Rowling and Meyer] is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer, and Stephenie Meyer can't write worth a darn. She's not very good."However, King understood the appeal of the series, adding, "People are attracted by the stories, by the pace and in the case of Stephenie Meyer, it's very clear that she's writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books. It's exciting and it's thrilling and it's not particularly threatening because it's not overtly sexual." (Link to the article)

That is all. Look below for really cute videos of Ben and Penny, as a reward for making it through this post.

Cute Videos

So, here’s a cute video of Penny walking.  She’s really getting good at it.

And here’s a super cute video of Ben reading with Jon.  He loves this story and he loves when Jon reads it with him.  It’s kind of fuzzy looking because of a smudge on the camera lens courtesy of a very curious Penny finger.

Quick Little Penny Video

So, I know I still owe people pictures and video from Christmas, Penny’s Birthday and a lot of other things.  To make matter worse, I have a loaner phone that has a terrible camera on I, so I haven’t been texting pictures either.  So here is a quick video of Penny being silly to tide you over.  Oh, and FYI, there is an adorable video of Ben helping Jon read the Three Little Pigs on the horizon.

Penny being her cute, silly self. Sorry about the bad picture, there was a nasty smudge on the lens.