Optimus Prime: Destroying Decepticons, Winning Contests

First of all, who loves Joel's videos?!? Answer: Everyone!!!

Here is a montage of Aidan kicking everyone's costume-clad bottom the Halloween contest, including a close call with a mustachioed knight. Enjoy!

I don't even want to talk about it.

After much discussion and many failed efforts to fix some behavior issues, we decided to take Aidan out of his Italian school and send him to school on post instead. He had been having tantrums almost every day, and it just came down to it not being fair for Aidan to be so miserable and frustrated, or fair to the teacher and the other children for him to take up so much time and attention every day. Although the American school is farther away, cost three times as much, is shorter, and has a less healthy lunch, it just isn't possible to continue in the asilo. So, here we are.
I was so upset I cried. A lot. At the school, in front of the kids, teachers, and other parents. Humiliating. But, I think it's just the first of many times that I will have to face a situation where what I want to happen for my child just WON'T happen, despite my best efforts or my strongest wishes or my best laid plans. He may not make sports teams. He may not get into a school. He may be rejected by some girl who is not even good enough for him in the first place. And it's really humbling to know that even as the mommy, who has to make and enforce so many decisions on a daily basis, I can't always ensure that it works out the most perfect way (as imagined by me) for him.
When I was pregnant, I read something about genetic engineering and wondered if I would choose to make my child "perfect" or allow them to have whatever quirks they would normally have in order to face challenges and build character. I thought at the time that I'd opt for "normal" kids, but after having children, I know that I would totally do anything to save them from any sadness or pain- forget character.
So, I'm trying to focus on the positive, which is how excited he is to start "American school," and the fact that we were fortunate enough to get him a spot in the school- there is often a 6-month waiting list. His extremely social personality was pretty cramped by the language barrier, and I'm sure he'll enjoy talking with the kids in English and them understanding all of his stories and jokes and questions. And, although it sometimes feels like I want to believe this more than I actually do, I'm sure that this will all work out for the best and that it's all with God's blessing. I just wish he'd let me know ahead of time when these big changes were coming, so I could prepare myself...and not cry in public.

Happy Halloween!!

Unfortunately, Joel was not with us this year, and we do live in a country that doesn't really celebrate the holiday, but we still had Halloween last night!! The Army housing area held a really nice carnival and trick-or-treating. Here is Ava in her pink kitty costume (thanks, Grandma!):

She was a little tired by this point. Going backwards in time, here are some pictures of the costume contest last weekend. Guess who won a $15 gift certificate, redeemable for an awesome toy, for most unusual costume? I'll leave it up to your imagination...

I'm sure you need a close up of the finished costume-

Aidan and Ava had other events to attend, and it's sooooo embarrassing to wear the same thing twice, so here are Aidan and Ava wearing different costumes at a Moms' Club Halloween party. Aidan is a dinosaur/dragon (so is his best friend, Patrick, who is also in the picture) and Ava is a ballerina. Sure, she can't walk, but what does that have to do with anything?
So, that about wraps up the Halloween report. Make sure you send us your costume pictures!!! Thanks to Heller and Linda for already sending in their transvestite gondolier/K-Fed picture!

Don't tell Joel...

I went to the PX today to meet a friend of mine and give her a lasagna I made, since she is having a hard time. (No jokes about how she'll be worse off after eating my cooking, ahem, mom/Joel.) While I was there, I thought I'd innocently stop in and get another flannel pj set for Ava, because it gets pretty cold at night in this marble tomb of an apartment we live in. But, while in there, I saw that they were having a sale- by any 5 sale items, save an additional 25%; get 10 items, get an additional 50% off. What kind of willpower must you have to resist something like that? It's almost like you'd have to have some kind of sickness to NOT take them up on that.

So, I got $173.47 of clothes for a mere $53.17. What a deal. It's mostly pajamas, so the kids will be looking stylish 24 hours a day. Rah!

Tulanian alumni magazine, here we come!

Last week, Joel and I (and the kids) ran a Tulane table at the high school college fair. Joel was quite the salesman, trying to convince every one that walked by to go to Tulane on an ROTC scholarship. Aidan's favorite part of the night was when they started handing out pints of ice cream for some reason, even though the fall weather has definitely arrived and ice cream was probably the last thing anyone else wanted. For my part, I was primarily motivated by the $50 gift certificate all participants received. One of the funniest things to me was the Harvard table- does anyone really need convincing to go to Harvard??

The Great Pumpkin

Halloween is one of our favorite holidays, especially when we are able to crank up the smoke machine, but it has been a little subdued lately. Last year, we were en route to Korea, and had no pumpkin of our own. This year, we're in Italy, and while they do celebrate the holiday to some degree (mostly limited to bar parties) there's no trick or treating or yard decorating or any of the usual Halloween type events like in the states. So, we decided to carve one of our pumpkins early to get Aidan in the spirit.

Joel got the carving kit at the grocery store, and Aidan picked out a picture of a monster carrying a trick-or-treat bag. He was really into it at first:

But, he decided the insides were too gross and refused to help scoop out the pumpkin. No fear, that's mommy's favorite job!

Then he took a rest while Joel worked on the design.

The finished product- pretty awesome!!!!

Unfortunately, this pumpkin totally rotted away in a few days, due to us keeping it inside in the warm house and lighting it every morning during breakfast and every night during dinner, at the request of one little boy. No problem; there are four more pumpkins outside our front door, waiting to be carved!

More, please!

At Ava's 4 month check up, the doctor suggested that she could start to eat some solid foods, starting with rice cereal. Always one to rely on the advice of a medical professional, I started her on milky cereal...over a month later. But, she has caught on and is eating well. So well, in fact, that we don't really have any of those classic baby pictures with tons of food on her face and clothes. She's actually quite mannerly.

I'll have you know I'm really a Romanesco Broccoli

I found this at the commissary the other day, and although I have absolutely no intention of actually eating it, I bought it anyway with the sole intention of showing Joel (and you, the viewing public, of course). The little sign at the store said it was a green cauliflower, but I looked online and the pictures I saw of green cauliflower actually looked like green cauliflower, not like 3-D edible fractals. So, I don't even know if it really IS green cauliflower, or some disgusting mutation from a cauliflower and a broccoli mating. Just looking at it and thinking about eating it really creeps me out. Anyway, now it can just sit in the fridge and rot and slime up my crisper like all of the other vegetables I buy. Good riddance, freaky nubby space veggie!

Transformers Update

There's a costume contest coming up this Saturday for the kids on post. So the heat is on for me to wrap up this Transformers costume. Tonight I finished up the details on the shoulder pieces and constructed the foot sections. Here's a peek at me handiwork:





Should have the finished product done sometime tomorrow or Wednesday. Tune in for the exciting conclusion!

More Transformers

Worked a little more on Aidan's costume this weekend. Time's getting short and I need to wrap it together soon. There's a contest next weekend that we want to have him enter with the costume. Maybe we'll win that gift certificate to Cinnabon!

Anyway, worked today on getting the autobot stencil for the shoulder pieces. As everyone knows, Optimus Prime has two autobot decals on his shoulders. No self-respecting Prime costume would be without them. I got the design from an autobot picture off the interwebs. Then I traced it over in Adobe Illustrator and printed it onto cardstock. A little work with the Xtaco knife yielded a workable stencil. Here's a quick test run. Pretty sharp, I think.

Jump Around

Every year around now, all the retail outlets start trotting out the holiday crap for everyone to start choking on. My personnel favorites are the dancing santas, snowmen, and elves that sing holiday songs or other popular tunes.

Aidan and I were at the PX on post today and came across one of these singing things. This one was a penguin choir that sang a little tune and danced and shook around. The choice of the song, however, was a little odd. It was not a Christmas song, or even a holiday song. It was the 1992 House of Pain hit single "Jump Around". Now, why these penguins were singing Jump Around, we may never know. However, Aidan got a kick out of the singing penguins and took their decidedly un-holiday anthem to heart. I was there to capture all the action. Check it out.

More than meets the eye

First off, big thanks to my parents for turning around a package to me very quickly. I had ordered something from Amazon (you'll see it in a minute) that they wouldn't ship to Italy. What might this piece of contraband be that Amazon, in their unrelenting corporate responsibility, saw fit to prohibit from shipping to Italy? Explosives? No. Demolition how-to manuals? Of course not. High end computer technology? Closer.

It's the Optimus Prime voice changing helmet, of course! What would happen if this fell into the wrong hands? Here's Aidan, totally enamoured with his new toy:





Wow. Pretty cool. And it can be adjusted to fit adult heads too. As soon as Halloween is over, this baby is mine. Which brings me to my next issue: Halloween costumes.

This year, I took it as a labor of love to make Aidan's Halloween costume myself. I enjoy making stuff like that, and thought this would be a good opportunity to flex that creative muscle. So at the beginning of the month, when Aidan asked for a Transformer costume, I knew I had my work cut out for me. After two weeks spending some free time in the garage, I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. After having cut and fit the chest plate, shoulder, and arm pieces from scrap cardboard, last night I went for the initial paint. Here's what that looked like:



The chest piece is laying flat here, but it folds up to make an Optimus-looking body for a 4 year old. I covered the cardboard in clear packing tape, because the paint coated it well and gave the tape a glossy metallic look. More robot-y. I'll have more pics as I get it together and have Aidan put it on. But once that happens, we might not get it off of him again.

Email Follow Up

Joel hit on most of the funny emails we were checking out the other day, but he did forget to mention one idea, which was to come up with the most confusing email address possible. We came up with this, which is (not surprisingly) still available: number1dot.@gmail.com or even mynameatgeemaledotcom@gmail.com
Also, I don't know if it was clear from his post that I started taking a dance class, so there are some emails making fun of my tap dancing mixed in with simpsons jokes and also my catch phrase, "I don't like that." And, while I do really like "This American Life" and "Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me," even checking into npr.lover was a total joke. I'm not an anything lover, which is the problem, I guess- if only I was really, really into something, I could announce it to the world via my email address, unashamedly. But, here we are. Perhaps widespread.ennui is the most appropriate...

As yet unclaimed emails

Call me Johnny Bandwagon-Jumper. Yesterday I signed up for a Gmail account and I'm in the process of switching over from my old Hotmail address. It seemed like a good idea, so I was trying to talk Jessica into switching her old Yahoo Mail address over to Gmail too. She's been wanting to get a new email in the hopes of thwarting the penis enlargement spammers that have somehow been targeting her.

She's been meaning to switch for a while, but a critical requirement for her is having a cool email address. Currently, she's rocking standardlines, which is from an indie song lyric that she liked. She was trying to get awesomej, which is her Wii nickname. Unfortunately, that was taken by someone; perhaps someone more awesome.

So we were playing around on the Gmail sign-up sheet with trying to find another equally cool email address. As we were trying out different names, we were surprised to find out which names were available and which weren't. We explored a couple of different themes and tried out different logins within that framework. For example, Islamic extremists:

Available
- jihad. mamma

Unavailable
- i.heart.jihad
- mohammad.jihad

Another discovery was that certain words were not allowed in any address. Like the F-word, for example. This eliminated a whole series of great emails, like:

Unavailable
- f***.a.monkey
- monkey.f***

We tried a number of Transformer related emails, mostly for my entertainment.

Unavailable
- optimus.prime
- megatron

Available
- megatron1000000
- i.heart.megatron
- i.heart.optimus
- optimus.rulez

We hit a couple of other themes, but were unable to decide on a good handle for Jessica. Any suggestions based on these results?

Unavailable
- androids.dungeon
- NPR.lover
- i.dont.like.that
- shuffle.hop.step
- 742evergreenterrace
- areyouhavingalaugh

Available
- horn.of.gondor
- tiptapscrap
- miss.springfield
- little.dog.lover
- edna.krabapple
- widespread.ennui

League Night

I come from a family of hard-core bowlers, so it was no surprise that Aidan would pick up the sport so easily. Note the avante-garde pin arrangement.

Fall Arts and Crap

My "friend" Mandy once described my decorating style as "arts and crap," but I prefer to describe it instead as having Martha Stewart-aspirations. I guess there's not a lot difference, only the skill level. Anyway, I had Aidan work on some fall decorations I wanted made (one more reason to have children: slave labor). Here is the centerpiece we made by cutting leaves out of construction paper and painting them.






We first got the leaves wet and crumpled them, then let them dry before proceeding to step two, the paining. I like to call this the "dirty water" technique: Aidan got the paint brush wet and then dipped in about five colors of water color paint. It made the leaves look really mottled. And awesome.





Here is a wreath Aidan made, using the same technique, except not crumpling first. We glued the leaves on a cardboard circle. Cheap!

Tiny Soccer

Aidan has started soccer season. I am really surprised they even let 3-year old kids play soccer, or any other team sports, but here we are. Mostly, the kids chase the ball around like it's an ice cream truck on the hottest day of the summer.










Here is a close up of my sweetie. He has started making an awful, over-the-top smile face lately, so this natural smile is really appreciated. his team is the "Green Dragons," even though Aidan had offered another name. "I think 'The superheros who use powers to get bad guys' is a little long for our team name, Aidan," his coach said as she gently let him down. If only- I have to say that would have been the coolest team name ever!

All aboard for Switzerland!

To continue with the Family Adventure Series while Joel is gone, I decided to take the kids on a trip to Switzerland and a ride on the St. Moritz Express.
The little red train takes an unbelievably beautiful route through the mountains, from Italy to St. Moritz. There were lots of tunnels, covered bridges, scenic overlooks, and a famous 360-degree turn. Such a fanciful thing would never be built in this day and age.



St. Moritz was really beautiful and scenic, but we didn't have much time there before we had to get back on the bus for the return trip. This was a convenient photo-op next to the tourism office. Hmmm... convenient place to put a wooden chalet...

Ca'Bruzzo Winery tour

While Joel is off in Bulgaria becoming a bigamist, I am dumping my kids off and getting smashed at the local wineries. Just kidding... sort of. Here are some pictures from the winery tour I went on with the post travel office.

First, we went on a tour of the vineyards. This is a family-run, organic winery- no pesticides, no fertilizer, no irrigation. It's amazing anything grows here at all! They grow a few different types of grapes here, mostly purple ones. As you can tell, I am a real wine enthusiast now, with all the lingo down!

Of course, some old woman on the tour has to go and make an ass of herself and, by association, Americans, by asking the farmer if he's ever heard of these great Concord grapes that we have in the U.S., and why don't they make wine from those? They make a great jelly and grape juice! she says. I did learn something pretty cool- ALL of the grape vines in Europe are grafted onto American roots, due to a pestilence that attacks the vines; apparently one of our varieties is resistant.

Here is a close up of some of the grapes- beautiful!! They were very sweet, because they have been on the vine so long.

For the grand finale, the owner smoked a cigar while he played guitar and sang songs in Italian. We relaxed and ate cheeses and salami on wonderful bread and drank the wines. Who could ever get tired of this??

Monte Berico

There is a Basilica here, Monte Berico, in Vicenza that has a really awesome view. I drove over there and took some pictures the other day. Peep this: