All from one day last weekend… Practicing Her Guitar Hero-Style Hanna Montana Guitar Eating a Chip and Checking for Belly Fullness Riding the “New” Bike that She Got as a Hand-Me-Down from the Neighbors And Happily Recovering from a Spill on Said New Bike

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If you give a child an option to swap his bed with a bed from the basement, you’ll realize that it’s going to be a pain to dismantle the bed that was originally built for his older brother and was not built for portability. So… You’ll casually mention to his sister that his bed is [...]

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Julie taught Alana how to jump over things. She proceeded to spend the next 15 minutes practicing the skill down by the river (the pom-poms on the boots provided extra momentum I’m sure): That evening, Julie made a “Jump Up and Kiss Me” (sans pineapple juice — we really rough it when we’re on the [...]

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Last weekend — starting on Friday, actually — we got just over a foot of snow. That was enough to make for plenty of outdoor activity, yet not so much as to keep us truly snowbound at home. On Saturday after lunch, Julie headed down to the end of our street with our kids and [...]

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Several weeks ago, Alana and Grandma Marilyn made a Berenstein Bears picnic basket out of a brown paper grocery bag. Alana immediately got a wild hair to have a “picnic breakfast” the next morning. I told her it was going to be wet. She walked over to the front door, opened it, and pointed to [...]

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Alana headed outside a couple of times to “clean the snow off of Mommy’s car,” but, for the most part, she stayed inside — Grandma Pam is entirely too much of a draw, especially in sub-20 degree weather. On Saturday afternoon, she played some checkers with Julie: She’s totally up for a little smack-talk after [...]

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Last Friday was the first snow day of the year (and of the school year). Two of Benton’s best friends, Josh and Jack, came over in the afternoon and then spent the night (and then spent all day Saturday at our house and out sledding with Julie). On Friday afternoon, the three boys…and Alana…spent several [...]

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While my parents were here, we made the 45-minute trip out to Mad River Mountain for some snow tubing. It wasn’t very crowded, despite it being a sunny Sunday. Probably because the locals know that 15 degrees is awfully cold weather to be racing down a hill. Our next-door neighbors, the Homons, also made the [...]

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For a variety of domino-effect logistical reasons, when my parents arrived just before New Years, they brought one gift each for each member of the family. Alana’s gift was a set of Bendaroos, which I’d never heard of, but which Alana opened and then squealed, “Bendaroos!” She insisted that she and Boppa set to work [...]

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We’ve got several different cameras, and it’s not all that uncommon for one to quasi-disappear somewhere for a while — into a coat pocket, a laptop bag, or somewhere else. Yesterday evening, I got all of the cameras and emptied out their memory cards…and discovered some pictures from the fall of 2009 that were worth [...]

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