The Skousen Family Goes Out to Eat

(I couldn't figure out a way to make the images bigger in this post, but please feel free to click on any of the pictures to make them bigger)

Abraham and Briar spent an entire Wednesday painting the house while I was at work and the kids were with babysitters. Abe didn't want the boys in the house touching the wet paint, so he proposed that we all go out for dinner so it could dry a little longer. It was getting late, so we decided to stay in town; Abe wanted something fattening, so we headed over to Arctic Circle.

I had a hankering for a good taco salad, but was a little taken back by the price. Six ninety nine for a fast food salad? When I could get a burger and fries for half that? But I decided to go ahead and indulge anyway and get the salad. Abe, of course, wanted a burger, and we got a meal for the boys to share.

Soren picked out a table and chose a seat.

Then he decided that, more than anything in the whole wide world, he wanted to sit where Liam was sitting. We pointed out that he could sit anywhere else in the whole restaurant, but that Liam's chair was Liam's.

So Soren threw a fit. This is pretty normal for him and it wasn't a HUGE fit, so we just tried to ignore it and get on with our dinner.

After a while he quieted down and moseyed over to me and climbed up next to me. I offered him some burger, but he declined.

Then he looked over the table at Liam. And apparently it looked to him like Liam was drinking HIS water. Oh, mortal sin!

And that's when Soren's soul left his body....

...and all hell broke loose.

Words cannot describe the sound that Soren makes when he has truly lost all his senses. Letters are inadequate to transcribe it. All I can say is that you need to image how a normal person might react were they to witness the brutal decapitation of a loved one. Then multiply that by five. It is a sound calculated to shatter eardrum and drive all within its range to madness.

That is the sound that next came out of Soren's body.

I tried to hold him and calm him down, but his wild body escaped my grasp. He kicked the tray on the table and my salad flew everywhere.

Horrified, enraged, and completely clueless as to the correct way to handle the situation, I gathered the child under my arm in a football hold and marched out of the restaurant. A nice family having dinner in the corner watched, mouths agape, while we exited.

The little girl of the family even pushed the decorative streamers in the window aside to watch and see what I did to Soren when we got out to the car. She must have been disappointed when all I did was lock him in and then slump against the door, defeated.

Abe brought Liam out to me to comfort while he cleaned our food off the floor of the restaurant. I cuddled him while Soren scrambled from door to door, still screaming like a rabid monkey. I wondered how much our insurance would pay toward a vasectomy.

After more screaming, thrashing, kicking, et al, we finally got the boys loaded up and began the drive back home. Abe was pissed. I just felt defeated and tired.

And then, from the backseat, it came.

Dear heavens.

Soren had just pushed the button to unleash all the fury of the angriest and most spiteful gods.

I held my breath.

And then, again, The scream. The Scream is about one million times worse in the confined space of a car. Liam began wailing too. I honestly began to fear for Soren's life.

I was finally able to persuade Abe that plugging his ears was much preferable to infanticide. We all arrived home whole. I uttered a little prayer of thanks when we pulled into the garage and whisked Soren off to his bedroom as quickly as I could, whispering to him that if he wanted to live another day, he mustn't show his face again that evening.

I think it will be a while before we try Arctic Circle again.

QIA: Routine Calendar

Soren is forever asking me, "What day is today? What are we doing today? Am I going to school? Who's going to take care of me today?" So I made him a little calendar to help him figure out his routine all on his own and learn to identify the days of the week.

(Please forgive the crappy photography. Also ignore the wrinkles and stains. The poor thing has been dragged all over the house.)

Anyway, it's basically just a table I made in Word using Clip Art and photos of our family. I laminated it with contact paper. Down on the bottom are little Velcro stickers and a movable Velcro Soren that he can move from day to day. Liam has one too.

Liam could care less but Soren really seems to enjoy being able to move himself to a new square in the morning and find out what's in store for him that way.

Mod Podge Project: From Empty Yogurt Container to Religious Supplicants in Three Easy Steps

1. I wanted to fancify an old yogurt container (right) to make a decorative container for our extra knives, kitchen scissors, and other sharp kitchen tools.

2. So I looked through our old magazines (mostly the Smithsonian and the Ensign) and cut out pictures that I liked.

3. I then mod podged them to the yogurt container.

The result? Now we have an oddly religiously desperate sharps container. It pleases me.

Backers

"Backers" is how Soren says "backwards."

I just forgot to post a little bit about Halloween. First, I didn't mention that we went trick-or-treating, but we did. And it was adorable.

Secondly, much earlier in the month, we went to the U Pick Red Barn pumpkin patch. We wound our way through the straw bale maze, Soren rode on the train that circles all the fields (Liam did not wish to participate), and we each picked out a pumpkin to decorate.

This is how our Jack-o-Lanterns turned out:

Soren's pumpkin. He picked this one out solely on the basis of size. In this picture it looks like a Samurai warrior with heterochromia iridum, but he later rearranged/added other features that made the final jack-o-latnern look more like a schizophrenic alien.

Liam's. He's French.

Mommy's (left) and Daddy's(right.)
I like this picture because the headless me in it looks thin and strong.

Soren noticed this year that other people carve Jack-o-Lanterns with knives and declared, "We should do it like that next year." So this may be our last year of pleasant, goop-free Pumpkin decorating. For shame.

Happy Halloween!

For dinner tonight we had caramel apple slices with sprinkles as an appetizer. Then I whipped up THESE bad boys for the entree:

Pretty spooky, eh?

Then the boys dressed up (I'll skip the drama, but just imagine there was some. It's us, right?)

In case you couldn't tell, Soren is a pillow and Liam is a pirate.

Arrrrr!

And now, just to keep my blog from slipping too deeply into Mommy Blogdom, I thought I'd share with you my friend Nick's AMAZING Halloween costume.

Can you even tell which is Freddie Mercury and which is Nick? I thought not.

Milestone

Today when I was tucking him in bed, I kissed Liam and said, "I sure love you, little angel." And for the first time ever, with a big grin on his face, he said it back: "Iufootoo."

Twenty Minutes

In twenty minutes I can empty and load my dishwasher and vacuum the living room floor.

In twenty minutes I can fold and put away two loads of laundry.

In twenty minutes I can sweep all the hard floors in my house and clean the bathroom.

How do I know this?

I time myself.

It's really easy for me to look at a dirty house at the end of a day and say, "I will be picking up toys until I die. I can't do this." Suddenly the task of putting the house into order (I've realized what I do isn't so much cleaning as it is preventing the house from attracting the attention of the local health department) looms enormous in my head and I suddenly, desperately, want to sleep.

That's when I set the kitchen timer for twenty minutes.

"Just twenty minutes," I tell myself. "See what kind of a dent you can make in twenty minutes. Then you can go do something fun. This, too, shall pass. Just twenty minutes."

And I get to work.

Usually when the timer buzzes I've made significant progress on preventing the house from attracting the attention of the local health department and I usually feel motivated to keep going. Sometimes for five minutes, sometimes for ten, and sometimes I'll go hog wild crazy and crank the timer all the way back up to twenty.

My family thinks I'm kind of crazy, except for the kids, who are too little to know better. No one even bothers to check the oven anymore when they hear the timer buzzing. But I will tell you, people, it works. In fact, to date, not a single person has reported us to the health department. I consider this a homemaking triumph.

Mod Podge Madness

I've been thinking about Mod Podge a lot lately. I had two Mod Podge experiences within a month--my first Mod Podge crafting experiences EVER--and now I just can't get the stuff out of my head. Mod Podge...it's like a miracle paste. It's a glue, a sealer, and a finisher....ALL IN ONE. You can Mod Podge paper, you can Mod Podge fabric...you can Mod Podge things onto dishes, walls, wood, cement, ceramic, paper, possibly even children...

I kid you not, I am kept awake nights thinking of amazing things I could make using Mod Podge.

I want to do projects like this:

Except that I would do it on my kitchen cupboards and use some sort of rooster theme. You can Mod Podge something like this onto contact paper so it's not permanent-permanent too, if you're decorating commitment shy, like me. Pretty cool, eh? Eh?

Wouldn't this be a great gift for a grandma? Though I'm not super keen on the red ribbon. Or the close-upness of the pictures. But you get the idea.

Soren really loves puzzles and this would be such a fun challenge for him. Plus, it's six puzzles in one! He had some store-bought ones like these when he was a baby, and they were really cool. They've since been mangled and lost, but a new set--maybe with pictures from a magazine--maybe with pictures of the boys together--would be cool, eh?

Apparently I'm not alone in my obsession, because there's an entire blog devoted to Mod Podge crafts. I feel that you should check it out. And if you want to come to my house and get your Mod Podge groove on, come on over. The pasting is fine.

Wherein another friend takes pity on my abject craftlessness

Tuesday is my SAHM day. I love it. Love, love, love it. I bustle around the house cooking, cleaning, folding laundry, playing with the children, losing my hearing as a result of the world's loudest screaming being unleashed directly into my ear canals, reading stories, listening to soft rock (loudly, due to the aforementioned hearing loss). Liam and I go for a walk while Soren is in preschool. Our next door neighbors usually come over and hang out for a while. The children are provided with three nutritious meals in a single day. It's fabulous. I feel like I'm playing house and just completely rocking the hell out of it.

Today was even better because my friend Pam came over, lugging huge containers full of craft materials, including her Silhouette, and we had a wild crafting palooza.

The results:

Soren made this from a kit I ordered from Oriental Trading Company.

He also made this bug out of pom poms and pipe cleaners.

Pam was kind enough to let him use some materials to make this frightening display.

And we grown-ups made scary word... things. Mine would have been prettier had I thought through what black vinyl lettering would look like against a black and orange background. And if I hadn't put two blocks of the same size right next to each other. Also, as I scrutinize this picture I realize the "Y" is backwards. 'Cause I'm just that awesome. (I thought it looked kinda weird!) Anyway, Pam's was much cuter and said "BEWARE." (Possibly for BEWARE: RACHEL IS CRAFTING.) I think it's adorable anyway, though. Warts and all. Witches have warts, right? So it's totally appropriate for Halloween.

Thanks, Pam!

Soren Update: October 2011

Soren is already contemplating the Big Questions. For example, he recently asked, "Mommy, why do mean kitties exist?" He also posed the following quandary: "How did Jesus make the earth? The earth is bigger than him!"

Soren has inherited his father's inability to lose gracefully. We were playing Chutes and Ladders one Saturday and all was going well...until he hit his first chute. "Let's do something else, Mommy," he said, trying to close the game board. "Oh no you don't," I said. "You don't just quit when the going gets tough! Let's keep playing." At chute number two, he grew really quiet and tears started welling up in his eyes. Chute number three was the end: he had reached his breaking point and burst into noisy, sobbing tears. "Let's play a game where there are no winners or losers, okay, Mommy?" he begged. I couldn't resist those big blue eyes.

Soren recently asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. "A writer," I told him. "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I expected him to say "a farmer," which is his usual response to this question. Instead he said, "I want to paint people's houses for them."

Soren's best friend is our next-door neighbor Koen. They've gotten pretty good at playing together, and make up fun little adventure games that involve Good Guys and Bad Guys. They squabble a lot, though. Last week Soren called Koen a "stupid poopoo face" and wouldn't apologize, even with Koen following him around, saying, "Sowen, you awe my fwend." Soren had to go to his room; Koen had to go home. It was very dramatic. It reminds me of all the fights I used to have with my best friend Becky. We'd part in a huff and then the next day it was all, "Can Becky come over to play?"

When we took Soren to the fair this year we let him go on two rides. He stood in the line all by himself, holding his tickets in his little hand, and I almost wept. He just looked so big. And so small.


Soren has taken to big brotherhood, at long, long last. Does he still pick on Liam? Um, yeah. But he also looks out for him. One day he noticed Liam getting sleepy so he guided him into their bedroom, helped him onto the bottom bunk, covered up with a blanket, and tucked him in. "G'night, yeeyum." Another time Liam crashed down some cement steps and was screaming; Soren offered him one of his own fruit snacks as consolation.

Sometimes when Liam lies down for a nap I'll take a little nap too. I'll tell Soren not to talk to me until the timer buzzes, set the timer for an hour, and lie down on the couch. And he'll usually do really well at playing by himself. Once in a while he'll come over and move my hair out of my eyes and whisper, "There you go."

Soren is Soren. He's still intense and emotional. He still knows how to push every single one of my buttons until the machine jams up and I start flashing and making horrible noises. But he's also so sweet. So dear. So cuddly and trusting. I want him to be four forever.

(Photos taken by Andrea Rausch in April 2011)

Some Undestructive Creativity

When he's not busy destroying the house, Soren loves to make....stuff. He's constantly gluing and/or taping things together. Here's a sampling of some of the creations he's made over the past several weeks:

A scarecrow.

A gift for his cousin Tessa (acrylic paint and Popsicle sticks. If you tilt your head and squint, you'll also see two googly eyes hot-glued to the left hand side of the paper.

A fully furnished home for a family of crayons.

A gas station.