George Washington

Holy Cow!!! I had no idea how long it has been since I blogged. I really like to blog and just ramble on. Then its fun to edit it into something I think people will find amusing. Not that many people read this.

Life has gotten busy now that every one is in school. Taylor is in 11th grade. He has the normal sixteen year old attitude, but other than that he is so awsome. He makes me laugh alot. He is so unafraid of what people think of him. In a good way. He has a project that his class has to present in front of the other students. He said he wanted to dress like George Washington. I gave him a $15 budget and off he went. He and his friend present their reoprts on different days, so they are sharing a costume. They went to Goodwill, Walmart, and the Party Store. Last night at dinner my husband received and email to his phone and the picture below was attached. Needless to say we both laughed pretty hard. It brings a smile to my face every time I think about Taylor in that outfit.





The next time he is completely ignoring me, only takes out half the trash, or leaves 35 gross dishes in his room, I will think of him in that outfit and he may get off a little lighter.

10 things you do not want to hear from your kids!

1. This was due yesterday. (any school project).

2. Just hear me out completely before you say any thing.

3. If I tell you something do you promise not to be mad?

4. One child saying I'm gonna tell mom, and the other child frantically begging
them not to tell mom.

5. Mom, how do you use the carpet cleaner?

6. Does the remote still work if it gets wet?

7. Why is that squirrel eating our chair?

8. Conner's mom (neighbor boy) will be here in a few minutes to talk to you.

9. Timmy's bleeding.

10. SILENCE!!!

Oh my goodness!!!

I have one question. How does someone so tiny do so much damage? Anyone?...Anyone?...

Here is the story. I am up stairs cleaning out drawers. Timmy is down stairs watching Backyardigans. All seems peaceful and calm. Then I hear CRASH!! THUD!! and a kinda POOF!! all in 3 seconds. I yell "what was that"? Then I hear these words..."Oh my Goodness, mom we have a problem". That is not what you want to hear come out of a four year old's mouth.

So what could it have been. The typical options would be, he dropped the milk, or knocked over the toy bucket, or ran into the screen door and took it off the track (happens alot in warmer weather) or even knocked the shelf off the wall while diving off the stairs into a pile of pillows. These are common causes of loud noises in my house.

Okay, so, back to my post crash noise question "what was that"? And his reply was..."the fireplace fell out of the wall. Let me repeat...THE FIREPLACE FELL OUT OF THE WALL!!!

I was just kinda dumb founded. What could that mean. Some ash blew out, he knocked a door off? So I get up to see what happened, and he meant what he said. The fireplace fell out of the wall. There was insulation and ash and the whole front portion of my firplace on the floor of my family room.

As soon as I made eye contact with Timmy he said "well, you see mom, I was...." the rest is still a blur. I just had to laugh. In his mind he had a completely logical explanation. It had to do with his sword and bad guys and his imaginary friend Matt.

A mess like this just had to be looked at for a bit. We had PB&J's for lunch. All while gazing at our lovely mess. I just laughed every time I really thought about it. Only one of my children could accomplish this.

The fire place was not to hard to fix and the ash and stuff just vacuumed up. Two things were learned because of this situation. Timmy will not be using the fireplace doors as a "sword holder" anymore, and I should clean the ash out of my fire place more often.

The Blank Pages

My family has a new Family Time activity. We love Rock Band. If any one reading this has not tried it, I am telling you, you need to try it. It is so much freakin fun. It comes with a Microphone ( which doubles as the tamborine), drums, and a guitar. If you get an extra guitar, you have a bass guitar. We gave it to the kids for Christmas. My husband said after watching the kids for a few songs, "let me try". He was hooked. I kid you not, they all played Rock Band for 8 hours straight Christmas Day. Grammy and Poppy even got in on the action. I usually just watch. I only sing for the band when there is no other alternative.

They, have gotten more serious now. See, as you play songs and do well, you get scored in Stars on your performances. If you do well it opens up more venues and you get more gigs to play like a real band. Are you following all that? They all tend to practice alone sometimes between band sessions. I do have to say it is quite amusing to come down stairs at 1am and find my husband in the dark, in his boxers, playing a toy guitar. "what are you doing" I ask. "Practicing, I just need to be able to 4 star this song" he answers.

I am just glad they all have an activity they can do together and have fun. Let me know if you would like to swing by one night and catch The Blank Pages in action. Its a sight to behold.

Love your little Natives.

A while ago I read an article about the digital age we live in. We all live in it whether we like it or not. But, how did we get here was the idea. Are we Digital Immigrants, or Digital Natives. The basis of this is that people born before 1980 are all Digital Immigrants and people born 1980 and later are Digital Natives. People born after 1980 have never known an undigital world. There are some of us like my self, born in 1970, that even though I do not fall into the Native status I feel like a Native but I still know too much of the "old world" to truly be of the Native mind set. Even though the Natives have seen some of our primitive devices in a closet or out in the garage or in old pictures they have never experienced or used any of them. Here is an example, try to follow it may be confusing at first...

Tori: Hey mom we were at Sammy's grandma's house an we found this thing in the closet it was so cool.

Me: What was it?

Tori: It was like this box thingy, it had buttons, , but the box was like a key board, it plugged in but it did not have a screen so we could not see what it did.

Me: Tori did it have a black roller thing at the top, kinda in the box part?

Tori" Yea, how did you know?

Me: (now try to imagine the confusion and amazement all at the same time in my voice) Tori it was a typewriter.

Tori: What's that? (and she truly was not kidding)

So then I had to explain typewriters and answer all the questions that followed. "So you couldn't save anything? How do you back up and fix an error? how do you spell check? what if you need more than one copy? How did you add pictures?" I was not about to try to explain how we digital immigrants actually created the phrase "copy and paste" by actually copying and pasting.

Oh my gosh, this was such a wake up call for me. So, now when I see her texting away on the phone or Taylor typing 120 words a minute (he really does type that fast) all while listen to their ipods and answering 3 IM's and editing the digital movies they just made to up load to YouTube, I need to remind my self this is all normal in their world.

Just like my mom used holler across the room, "scoot back from the TV its bad for your eyes, or is that phone attached to your ear"? I find my self telling my kids they are going to have carpel tunnel from texting or rot their brains from to many video games.

It starts so young now. My 4 year old, Timmy, is definitely of the next, more advanced generation of digital natives. His generation will probably make fun of Taylor and Tori's devices just like we look back and laugh at how big cell phones used to be. He can almost out do Taylor(16) on most video games and can already get on and off the computer all by himself. He is smart in reference to what he thinks I want to hear too. The other day I walked in to the room and he must have sensed that I was going to tell him to turn off the games now. He quickly put up his hand and said "wait, wait, wait,... Mommy, this game is not bad for my brains". I gave him 10 more minutes and apparently his brains were tired. I came back and he was asleep mid game.




Well that's all for now. This may not be bad for my brains, but I only type about 20 words a minute so my fingers and brains are tired.

Best Buy 490

The Best Buy that Mitch works for did this and sent it out to all the other Best Buy Stores. This guy is really singing. All I could say was WOW!! Have a listen.

Merry Christmas!!

Gracefully...

Wow, it has been quite a while since my last post. All is well in the Page house at the current time. I will settle for that. With 7 family members you never know who will have the next crisis or illness so a good day is an accomplishment. We do have to go get Taylor's bracket reattached at 3:30, hmmm, wonder how that happened, Jolly Rancher anyone? If that is the worst thing today, we'll take it!



Well my new obsession is Myspace and Facebook. This is probably a predictor of the down fall or the process of becoming uncool for these web sites. When a 37 year old suburban house wife catches on to something, its probably on its way out or at least its shelf life with the younger crowd is diminishing. ( I can't believe I just typed "younger crowd", I am getting old) . Anyway, I love these outlets. I am reconnecting with old friends and can see what family members are up to. I browse alot, looking for more people to reconnected with. Its always fun to see a person's page show up that you never expected to have a page and its a really cool page at that!!



One thing my Myspace and Facebook pages have made me realize is that I am getting old. I understand 37 is not really old, but it sure as heck is not 17. Some of these people I have not seen since high school. I mean I still look like me right? So why don't they look like them? I got up in the attic the other day and brought down my yearbooks. Now when I get a message from a friend from high school I can figure out who they were if I don't remember the name.

Most people look really good, and once I match their high school face to their current face I can totally see it and I have the "Oh Yea, I remember you" moment. I wonder how long it takes them to figure out who I was/am.



Tori walked up to me while my year book was open. After starring at the page for a good while, she asked, "Which one are you?". She did not even recognize her own mother. I said "Oh Tori, I love you but go away", then Tori screeched with excitement, "There you are, no way, Oh my gosh, you had a mullet!" I corrected her "No I did not, boys had mullets, I, had a BI-LEVEL. It was VERY in at the time." I recently pulled out Mitch's picture where he had the Flock of Seagulls hair cut. I thought she was going to pee her pants laughing.

Oh well. I guess we all loose our high school face, and I can only do the best I can with my current face. At church the other day I said to my friend Brenda in the bathroom, "look, I have neck wrinkles". Then I proceeded to show her what I wished I could pull up, pull back, or reput here and there. She so wisely said, "No Kristy, we are just going to age gracefully." Fine, what ever.

Yes I guess I will try to just age gracefully. Actually, I ought to look that up in the dictionary first to see what that really would mean or if there are any variations of 'gracefully' that could work.