cat named pig

People have been asking for pictures of Elliot’s haircut. While it’s not thaaaat dramatic, it is quite handsome, in my completely unbiased opinion.

Here are a few that I took with my phone when it occurred to me halfway through the appointment that hey! this first-haircut-ever-in-his-life-besides-that-one-awful-time-at-home-with-the-nail-scissors might be something to document! You know, with a photo.

Here he is getting a sucker after the haircut was done:

As soon as we got outside, I tousled it up to get rid of the side part that looked a little too 1950’s salesman for my taste, and it hasn’t been styled again since.

What else is there to say about it? He sat in the chair like a champ, probably because he was watching Elmo. He said “thank you” for the sucker. And ever since the big day, he’s been loving the attention from friends and family who were relieved about the wispy mullet’s demise. (Full disclosure: I still sort of miss the wispy mullet. It was cute. See below for a “before” picture of the full wispy, party-in-the-back-and-on-both-sides glory.)

Are you wondering what’s going on in this picture? He explained that he was playing Duck Duck Grey Duck. With the Fisher Price Little People and two dinosaurs. Because, why not? Incidentally, that was when I decided to home school Siena and never let her leave the house again. This poor little guy needs someone to play with. Someone alive — it’s hard to make a triceratops run around the circle.

And then he lined them all up.

Because I am in a great mood, here’s a little Sunday night round-up of things that fall solidly in the plus column:

• It’s officially Chili Season — a bigger deal to me than Football Season, although they definitely overlap and both go well with beer. We kicked the season off this year with the classic vegetarian chili recipe we’ve made so often we can do it without thinking. Or while watching football, as Matt did this weekend. (I would argue that’s the same as not thinking; he might disagree.) Sunday nights and one other meal a week are now accounted for, from now until spring — wahoo!
• It’s also (duh) Pumpkin Season — I made these on Friday night and they’re almost gone. And if I’m honest? I’m totally having one for breakfast in the morning. (For lunch I’m eating the leftover cream cheese frosting with a spoon.)
• Sara and Avery were in town from South Dakota, and the girls didn’t even destroy anything while Sara and I sat around and talked about foods that taste good. We also enjoyed a pumpkin ale, because, you know, ’tis the season.
• This weekend we went to: the farmers’ market, Trader Joe’s, and Rainbow Foods. We are ALL SET, grocery-wise. We won’t need to leave our house for a month. Which is fine, since it’s supposed to snow again soon. And that cuts my will to leave the house in half every time.
• In a burst of Martha-esque inspiration, I threw my customary laziness to the wind and worked on our holiday cards for this year. IN OCTOBER. We might just send them out BEFORE the holidays this year, instead of just pretending they were supposed to be “New Year’s Cards.”

Wow, this is a fairly boring list that in no way justifies how happy I feel right now. I think this sudden joie de vivre is mostly due to the fact that I was sick earlier in the week and then a miracle took place and now I AM NO LONGER SICK. I CAN DO ANYTHING. (If you read this blog last winter at all, during the Great and Tedious Chronicling of Minor Unwellness, you might understand why the simple fact of recovering from a cold feels miraculous. I AM HEALED!)

(Whoa. Calm down there, Self.)

Here are some pictures of kids with pumpkins. Happy mid-October!

When you’re paying someone to take pictures of your family, do you really want to end up with this many  photos of your kids dancing with hands in their armpits? Perhaps we should have intervened and made the kids stop goofing around (as if they would have listened to us). Then again, has the Chicken Dance ever been documented so beautifully?

[Note: we are not criticizing Rob, who just shot what we gave him to shoot. And what we gave him, apparently, was a lot of Chicken Dancing. But there were many great pictures in the 100+ that he sent us -- these just happened to be the funniest. Maybe you'll see some real ones on our holiday card. ]

Sioux Falls happens to be within excellent road trip distance from Minneapolis: the drive is long enough to feel like you’ve really gotten away wish you were dead because the kids won’t stop asking if we are there yet OMG I thought that was a just a comic strip cliché I didn’t think kids really said this WHY DID I HAVE CHLDREN? But it’s not too far to drive for a weekend visit with friends. (If said friends have to insist on living there, and not here in Minneapolis where we think they belong.)

Anyway, the friends in question — Sara, Ryan, and Siena’s BFF Avery, of blue-painted-butt fame — moved to Sioux Falls in June and got a dog named Bindy shortly thereafter. Which means that pretty much every day since June, Siena has asked me, “Mama, what do you think Avery and Bindy are doing right now?”

In other words, we had to get out there to visit them.

The trip was perfect, aside from the drive*. The kids played, Bindy tolerated all of their “affection,” Matt and Ryan watched sports and Sara and I drank wine and said things we thought were funny. Pretty much the usual for all of us. Oh, and there was food. Lots of it. We ate ourselves silly and then had more snickerdoodles, just because they were there.

BFFs and hat models.

At the actual falls of Sioux Falls. Matt and Ryan were back at the house watching sports while Elliot napped. I guess the World Series was on or something.

…..

* I’m not even kidding about the “Are we there yet?” business. We pulled into the parking lot to get cash from the ATM five blocks from our house, and Elliot clapped his hands in excitement and asked, “Are we in SOUF DATOTA NOW?” OK, so that one was funny, but when he and Siena had repeated that question a billion times each, it became less amusing.

It’s 11:26 p.m. and when you consider what time Elliot is going to wake up in the morning, there is no good reason for me to even be awake right now, much less online. Maybe the FREEZING COLD RAIN all day has made me extra alert, or maybe Fall gives me insomnia. (Note: BREATHING gives me insomnia, so this is plausible.) Whatever the reason, I am not remotely tired but should probably force myself to STEP AWAY FROM THE INTERNET and go to bed.

Before I do that, I thought I’d quickly post a few pictures of Elliot and some maps. (Taken by Matt, on our recent trip to Portland.)

Because who doesn’t like a cute little guy and a map? Enjoy your Friday.

The other night we went to Fat Lorenzo’s for pizza. It was crowded, as always, in the tiny little entrance/waiting area/gelateria, but somehow we lucked into a few chairs. Elliot, however, had no use for the chairs as they interfered with his plans to run around like he was being chased by angry bees. After about thirty seconds of that — enough time to bump every single person in the area at least twice, and by “area” I could mean either the space we were in or a certain “area” of the anatomy and the sentence would be accurate either way — I pulled him onto my lap and whispered that I had a story for him.

He leaned in and miraculously held still while I made up the following cautionary tale, in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm but with a happy ending:

Once upon a time there was a little boy named Elliot. He was at a restaurant with his family and he was acting very wild, running all over and bumping into people. And nobody liked that. Then the door opened and a man came in with a very large backpack. He scooped Elliot up and stuffed him into the backpack, then zipped it shut and took him far, far away. When he unzipped it again, Elliot looked around and said,

“Where are my mama and my daddy and my sister Siena? Please, take me back to them!”

The man said, “I will take you back to them, on one condition. You must not run around in the restaurant ever again. You must go back and sit nicely, and then you must eat your pizza nicely when it comes. Do you promise?”

Elliot promised to be good, so the man brought him back to his mama and daddy and sister, and they all ate a huge pizza and lived happily ever after.

Laugh as you may (yes, this is why I stick to non-fiction in my writing), Elliot loved this story and asked me to repeat it five more times before we were seated. Tonight at dinner, he asked me to tell it again. Siena laughed when she heard it and Matt, well, Matt probably thought it was dumb. (To which I would say, “Yeah? Dumb? It got him to sit still didn’t it? So is my story dumb, or is it dumb like a FOX?” Or something. I haven’t worked it out yet.)

And then. . . Elliot announced that he wanted to tell a story. The following is an approximation of what he told, minus a whole bunch of adorable and hilarious that doesn’t quite translate to the written paragraph:

One upon a time, there was a girl named NANA [this is what he calls Siena]. And she real bad and a big man came and put her in he backpack. And threw her in the GARBAGE. And Nana say, “Where mine mama and daddy and mine little brother EL-LI-OT?” And he taked her out of the garbage and she seed her mama and daddy and her brother El-li-ot and dey all eat pizza.

He totally needs to take over this blog. The GARBAGE twist puts my version of the story to shame.

I feel like I fell asleep in mid-July, woke up long enough to hit “snooze” in early August, blinked, rubbed my eyes, and now it’s almost October. In other words, whoa. Slow down there, Time.

On the other hand, I’m surprised how quickly we’ve settled into our new fall routine — it feels like we’ve been doing the whole elementary school thing for much longer than three weeks. Siena loves kindergarten, which we expected, but she also gets herself ready every morning without any coaxing, hand-wringing or muttered cursing on my part, which no one expected. For the first time in our lives — and for once I am not exaggerating — we seem to be consistently getting out the door on time and on speaking terms with each other. Preschool last year, though only three days a week, was much more challenging in this regard.

So I spend my days alternately shaking my head in bewilderment at how summer can be over already and crossing my fingers that the mornings continue to go this smoothly, that we’re not just experiencing a “honeymoon period” where everything to do with school is great and easy.

Meanwhile, Siena and Elliot continue to grapple with the notion of time in their own ways.

Elliot wakes up every morning (earlier and earlier, I might add, which makes no sense when you consider that the sun is rising later and later) and announces, “I wake up at TEN MINUTES again.” We don’t know whether he means after ten minutes, or that he slept for ten hours, or that he’s been awake for ten minutes already and WHERE’S MY CEE-YAY-YUL? But he is emphatic and consistent enough with this phrase that now we just respond, “Oh, you woke up at ten minutes again, huh? Well, how about some cereal?” and that seems to go over pretty well.

Siena actually has a pretty realistic sense of what time of day things take place, what day of the week it is, and even how long it will be until something happens. Sometimes. Other times, her flair for drama interferes with her ability to comprehend. Or to be more accurate, she chooses drama over comprehension, because the drama is, I don’t know, louder.

For example, the following conversation takes place in some form several times a day:

“Mama, when are we going to [insert any fun thing here -- visit Avery in South Dakota/see Beauty and the Beast the musical/get my driver's license/eat candy, etc.]?”

“Well, today [is Wednesday/is in September/you are five/it's not even dinner time yet] and you’ll do that [next weekend/around Christmas time/when you're sixteen/maybe for dessert], so, you know, not right this second.”

“WHAT?!?! You mean I’m NEVER going to [see Avery EVER AGAIN/see a musical EVER/drive a car EVER in my LIFE/eat candy EVER AGAIN]?!?!? This is TERRIBLE!!!”

“Yes. That’s exactly what I said.”

*Sigh.*

While we don’t have the results here to post yet, we just completed survived our third year of family portraits with the talented Rob Mueller. I should say now that any credit for artistic framing and/or simply getting everyone to look at the camera at the same time goes to Rob. There are, however, a few things we’ve found that make the photo session easier, in addition to finding a good photographer:

1. Jettison all concept of personal dignity. If you are a parent, you have probably already done so. Or at the very least you are making great strides toward no longer caring how you are perceived in public. Which is key for picture-taking, because when you are not in the shot yourself, you will be required to

a) dance like a monkey,

b) make monkey noises, and

c) yell things like “Take your hand out of your pants!” in order to get decent shots of your kids.

2. Choose a public place for the photo shoot. (Only  recommended if you have successfully completed Step 1 above.) While this will lead to inevitable distractions, you can also make the distractions work to your advantage. We did our pictures at the Farmer’s Market this morning, and had no shame about repeatedly yelling for Elliot to “LOOK! At the PUPPY! Right behind Rob’s head!” even when there may or may not have been an actual puppy walking by. (Another tip: scrupulous honesty is not necessarily your friend here.)

3. Opt for a mix of posed portraits where everybody (ideally) smiles at the camera and more candid shots of the family interacting, as a family. Important note: this will happen whether you want it to or not, so go ahead and decide in advance that you want this mixture. That way, you won’t feel frustrated when half your photos turn out looking like these, from last year:

Or this one:

[Siena: I'm so over this. I'm hiding behind my hair until we can leave. Laura: This is FUN! Stay ENTHUSIASTIC everyone! See how ENTHUSIASTIC I can be?!? Elliot: Get me outta here. NOW. Matt: I'm smiling, but I'm also gritting my teeth. Into a fine powder. I will spit tooth-dust into the grass as soon as this is over.]

4. Let go of the little things. Like looking normal. I let Siena wear a ballet tutu this year because I figured she’d be more cooperative if she got her way early on in the wardrobe negotiations. I drew the line, however, at Elliot’s chicken costume. (Apparently I still have some tiny scraps of dignity left somewhere.) He did get to pick his orange striped socks and he seemed happy enough with that in the end.

5. Ease up on the caffeine beforehand. See: every single picture of my gigantic smile above.

6. Be sure to reward everyone when the pictures are done. Last year, it was a round of mini-golf at the artist-designed course outside the Walker that we had been eyeing all summer. Followed by naps for the kids, and some recreational Vicodin TV and internet time for the adults. This year it was chocolate chip cookies and Oktoberfest beer samples at the market. Followed by dancing to German music for the kids and more recreational Vicodin beer samples for the adults.

Now we just have to wait and see how they turn out.

And that’s exactly what I would say, over and over, if I were hanging out in your living room right now. Side note: why does my blog voice sound so Valley Girl sometimes? But, like, seriously, you guys, it’s all just kind of hitting me now. Kindergarten.

Maybe it’s because we had so much going on the week she started school (travel, a wedding, a new city’s public transportation to explore), or maybe it’s because she got sick last week and had to miss two days (no, it was not H1N1, but don’t think I didn’t ask). Or maybe it’s because she just hops on the bus so casually every morning, like she’s been doing it for years.

Whatever the reason, it really just hit me tonight that Siena has started kindergarten. I have a kindergartner.

A kindergartner who carries a backpack,

who gets taller by the minute, who picked out an awesome sparkly Super Girl t-shirt to wear on the first day of school,

who hugged us all tightly at the bus stop that first morning but then today just gave me the quickest of squeezes and a slightly exasperated “Mo-OM!” as I tried to hold on a second longer.

…..

Which, I guess, pretty well sums up this whole experience.

…..

…..

I’m trying to stop holding on so much, I promise. But, you guys, it’s like, totally hard to let go.

…..

I got a pay check on Friday (!) and, since it’s been a while since that happened, I was pretty excited. I think Matt was too; he even took a picture of me holding it. (If only it had been one of those giant novelty checks — that would have made for a better picture.)

Matt was a little less excited about what I told him next.

“We bought Elliot’s Halloween costume today. He picked it out, and it was on sale so I just bought it.”

[Eye roll. Matt is allergic to buying stuff.]

“Don’t you want to see what it is?”

[Shrugging.] “Sure.”

I reached into the bag and pulled out. . . a giant, puffy chicken costume.

“What? I told you he picked it out!”

“And you actually bought it?”

I think he has some concerns about how I’m going to spend the rest of that check.

[Photo kindly taken and e-mailed to me by Old Navy Store Manager, who was either a) just overwhelmed with the hilarious cuteness of it all, or b) attempting to capture my e-mail address in order to bombard me with SPECIAL OFFERS! and GREAT DEALS! Either way, I'm cool. This image will warm my heart for years to come, particularly when Elliot pretends not to know me as I take him shopping for an outfit to wear to a junior high dance.]