Because Sharing is Caring?

Yesterday I was attempting to go through my phone and figure out what was important and worth saving (very little) and what was extraneous crap that needed to be deleted (the vast majority).  Amongst all that, I found a number of things that I meant to share with you, but never did.  Stills and images from our family life of great importance, such as this one:

Remember Flat Adelaide, that school project our daughter did last school year, where she sent a flat version of herself down to my family in Kansas?  I never ended up telling you how that turned out, because I am a horrible blogger sometimes, but the above is one of my favorite images, sent from my aunt Sherry, who clearly appreciated the humor to be found in an overly amorous cow welcoming Flat Adelaide to their farm.

How about this picture that I remember taking on a run in a park twenty miles north of here?  I saw a bright swath of green through the trees alongside the trail, and I had to stare at it for several seconds before I realized it wasn't grass.

That is a body of water.  One I would never want to swim in, although it is possible you could walk across that thick layer of scum and make your friends call you Jesus.

This was from our last trip south, where my sister and her husband got our boys Nerf guns for their birthdays, and the adult men proceeded to play with them more than the children.  Here they are preparing for a good, old-fashioned duel, minus the holsters and Colts.  Real men use Nerf Zombie Strikes.

This one's from that same trip, where Adelaide and I discovered our new favorite piece of playground equipment:  A saucer that tilts and spins and whips you around if you can get someone strong and fast enough to get some momentum going.  Atticus was up to the challenge, spinning us until Adelaide began to experience dizziness and nausea, which I think is the object of any good spinning toy.  I do so love to spin.  

Another one from that trip:

Derek loves Ed, and Ed loves Derek, and I love reminding anyone who will listen that Ed is a cat so hardy that he survived being run over by my mom.  In a car.  The back of her property line butts up against he back of a vet's property line, so I remember her hollering for Kelli and I to fill a laundry basket with old towels from the linen closet (because even after running him over, she wasn't going to let us use the regular towels for him, a fact I now find hilarious), then we had to run poor, squished Ed across the long backyard to the vet's office.  When I think about how boisterous we were with our baby sister Steph in that same laundry basket while whipping her around the house, I feel bad for Ed, because that had to have been one heck of a rough ride.  My childhood was a series of one dead cat after another, with only two, Ed and his predecessor Pete, being sturdy enough to survive our household and the lure of the suicide highway that ran, temptingly, right in front of the vet's office.

I just took this one yesterday.

I'm a little worried about our neighbors; the two snowmen I found constructed near our house over the weekend were this semi-creepy one lurking right around the corner, and a full-on creepy one with apples for eyes and a gaping hole for a mouth two streets over.  I'm telling you, winter does strange things to people.

And I'll leave you with this one.

If Caedmon is home and Derek is home, this is a likely scene to stumble upon when coming around any corner, as I did here a couple Sundays ago.  Caedmon will tolerate a hug from most people, but from Derek, the man whose dirty laundry our youngest used to make nests out of to curl up in when his father had the temerity to be gone at work all day, well, Caedmon will cling to him as long as possible.

A Hipster, Daughter, and Husband List

• Our nearby big town of Ames was listed as the #2 city for hipsters last week by CBS news.  I already knew this, as our church is chock-full of them.  This doesn't bother me in the least because I can think of very few other groups as a whole who are easier to make fun of, a practice that has brought me... well, maybe not hours, but certainly minutes of entertainment.  Do a Kenickie-inspired run through your gelled hair with your imaginary comb, throw your imaginary scarf over your shoulder, strum your imaginary banjo with a pensive look on your face, and you're there, friend.  I do this all in a spirit of Christian loving-kindness, of course. 

• I talked to my mom yesterday and thankfully she is running with this whole Flat Adelaide thing.  Flat A has been to see a totem pole and attended a funeral and Mom was talking about making her poor On the Job Training student construct tiny defibrillator paddles so they could resurrect Crashing Flat Adelaide when she goes to work with my mom this week.  This is all good news because three-dimensional Adelaide and I spent some of spring break brainstorming for her King Tut costume, during which we discovered a few creative differences in opinion, namely that I think her Egyptian headdress should be constructed from scrap fabric, whereas Adelaide thinks it should be made from paper and is likewise wrong.  The yellow satin I found does seem to be slowly swaying her to my side, however, apparently because her only real problem with my scrap fabric was that "I thought you were going to force that horrendous egg-yolk-puke-colored felt down my throat, when everyone knows King Tut did not wear yellow, he wore gold."  Never one to pass up a chance to make as many of our children unhappy as possible, I also requisitioned Atticus's toy snake for her costume, to be returned to him after this fiasco of a presentation is over.  I believe the only reason he did not throw a fit over this is because he knows there is a good chance I will use this snake to strangle our daughter if she says "Mom, don't you know anything about the ancient Egyptians?" just one more time. 

• Derek was on the radio this morning, being interviewed about his library documentary because he just won a bunch of fancy awards for his work because he's amazing.  I asked him around thirty questions about his appearance on this radio show before it occurred, and he was able to answer right around two of them, brushing off the rest with appalling nonchalance.  He reminded me about the whole thing last night before bed just so that I'd remember that I needed to get the two A's to the bus stop today, and that was it.  This illustrates a fundamental difference between Derek and me:  If it were me going on a radio show for any reason, any reason at all, I would have freaked. the heck. out.  It would have been the de facto topic of conversation in our house for days, whether anyone wanted to hear about it or not.  I would have written posts on here about it.  I would have texted at least four friends and told them to pray for me lest I die immediately.  I would have paced around the house, flapping my hands.  Derek?  "Hey, I've been asked to be on this radio show.  They want to interview me about the library doc."  "OH MY GOSH WHEN?"  "Monday morning, at 7:15.  You'll need to take the kids to the bus stop."  "OH WOW THAT'S SO EXCITING!"  *crickets*

I'm pretty sure this is why Derek kept showing me all these t-shirts when that whole "Keep Calm and..." thing was trending.

From Etsy

From here

Both of the previous slogans could represent my entire psychological outlook with astounding accuracy.