Okay, So I've Been A Little Busy...

Let's just start with my daughter being a robot. Frankly, she doesn't have a clue what a robot is (and if she did she would scream and run the other way), but she really likes to climb into paper bags. This is very irritating to the cats because they are usually trying to do the same thing and they simply can't all fit in there together. Jeff suggested a compromise by cutting out some "eye holes"-it probably saved her life.

Since the children came, we occasionally have one of the cats (prisoners) escape from the house (holding facility). On one particularly cold and wet day, Fritz was stupid enough to run across the street under a pine tree. I yelled from the garage, "fine, you idiot-you can stay out!" Sadly, however, I forgot that he was out and I went to town in a blizzard for several hours. These sad, muddy paw prints on the front door show that he tried to claw his way back into jail.

We have been sledding. This is a trip on an old runner-type sleigh. Sledding is fun for the kids, but not so fun for mom and dad. I miss skiing. I try not to think about how old they will really have to be for them to enjoy that...

Okay, so Jeff likes sledding...maybe it's just me.

Jack prefers something much slower and controlled.

This is our new red sled. The inside is slicker than the outside. This is Lachlan hanging on for dear life. We tried to get her to sit in the middle but she just kept sliding out the back...zero, traction.

Jack finds out just how slippery the sled is...face first into the snow. Sledding over.

So many of you have asked me about how hard it is to have two children the same age...well, let me tell you about the Cocoa Puffs Incident.

Children are playing nicely in the living room. I decide to clean up the bathroom. I grab the cleaning supplies and dash into the bathroom. Things seem to be going well, I peek out occasionally to make sure that they both still have their eyeballs and no chipped teeth. I continue to scrub the tub. When I finish with the final rinse I realize that it is suddenly VERY quiet in the living room. I stop. I listen. And then I hear Jack laughing...not just a regular laugh, but a gut bursting round of laughter unlike I've ever heard before...

Oh, shit.

I head to the living room. Children are gone. Laughter coming from the kitchen. Make that laughter, singing and some kind of foot stomping.

My discovery reveals that the children have broken into the kitchen pantry. Lachlan has pulled down a giant (think Malt O' Meal size) bag of Cocoa Puffs. She shakes a few on the floor and then dances around on the Cocoa Puffs and sings "Hello, Hello" (a familiar nursery/primary song). Jack is shoving puffs in his mouth as fast as he can, all the while laughing hysterical at his sister! This creates quite a chocolate mess because he doesn't have any back teeth to chew with so the laughing just makes it all drool down the front of him.

"Hello, Hello, Hello, Hello, me ma moo ma meeee."

After Lachlan dances around on the puffs, Jack lays down on his stomach and swims around in the crumbs. It is even funnier when Lachlan slips on the mess she has created and falls on the floor. This brings on another round of fitful laughter.

Granted, it was just wild enough that I had to get some pictures of the whole thing. It took about 20 minutes to get the crumbs off of the kids, off the floor...Jack kept trying to grab the puffs out of the waste scoop as I was sweeping them up.

This however, is my favorite picture. This is where I started laughing...about 15 minutes after the clean up I found the kids in the hall nearly passed out from the collapse of the sugar rush. They laid on that laundry pile for a good thirty minutes before they got their strength back!

And then there was the Sweet Potatoes Incident. Jeff left for church meetings and I ran down the hall to grab a bib...ironic really, since he grabbed the sweet potatoes container and I came back to find him drinking them.

No incident here. Just Christmas morning...Hostess Powdered Donuts are not a Murray Family approved food (as Aunt Susie would say), but on Christmas morning anything goes...and the kids ate about a dozen of them. Lachlan liked washing it down with Egg Nog. She still asks for it every meal. Fortunately for her, she's so underweight that she can have it at any given time. Can you imagine? A diet that consists of pats of butter, whole milk, Egg Nog and cheese. I'll never know.

Hum, what can I say about this hair lately? Probably nothing good. Those of you who know me, know that I have firmly lived by the resolution that good hair is very important. I have often dreamed of doing wonderful things with my daughter's hair...let me just say that, uggh, Lachlan may have the world's slowest growing, fuzziest, wild-out-of-control hair on the earth. This is a picture of what her hair looks like on any given day...all day, even two seconds after you brush it it looks like this, like a mix between the Heat Miser and Sanjaya (with his mohawk).

And now, please welcome my latest DIY project. I found these cool paper mache letters at Giga-JoAnns in O-Town. They were only a couple of dollars. I spray painted it white and then glued a variety of different buttons on the top to give it a bit of texture. It turned out so cute! It was so easy and I had been wanting to do something different in her room. Just for the record, I did get a KitchenAid mixer for Christmas. I made Double Fudge Mocha Brownie Cookies from the Martha Stewart Baking Handbook and Bobby Flay's Blondies from the Blondie Throwdown. They were both so good that I never even bothered to take any pictures. I'm sure that eventually I will post a full body picture and you can just take a gander at my thighs...it will make you instantly think of an overindulgence for baked goods.

And let's not forget that it's ELECTION SEASON...oh, my gosh, can you just shout out loud for the landslide victory that it would be for the Democratic Party if Mike Huckabee even comes close to the nomination. Here's a laugh out loud piece from the NYTimes if you aren't up to speed on this dude (Two Buck Huck). I am so excited that Obama didn't take NH last night. I really wanted to even the score so that I can have these two (vs. Clinton) whittle it out to the finish. God Bless the women voters who came out to vote!! It's about bloody time we took control of this system!

Oh, and one last thing, we are so excited for Lachlan to have a new cousin. Mike Tullis and his boys (and uncle Jason Murray) will be coming THIS SATURDAY from China with Kylie (Fu Kang)!! She is from the Guizhou Region of China. It's pretty far from Lachlan's hometown, but we are so excited for that special connection. I'll be sure to post some homecoming video soon.