I’m not sure if I was lucky or unlucky today, but I can say that I had fun regardless of my fortune. A few weeks ago my wife had me pickup a work table for her. Well, it was really a solid core that had four 4 X 4 posts attached to it as legs. She really wants to add counter space to our kitchen and felt this was a good way to do it. The only thing was the table was about nine inches too wide.
A wide table is a useless table. It had to be shortened and the only way to do that was to run it through the table saw. Which is not really a difficult thing to do. When your saw is set up. But mine was still in the box it came in. Which meant I got to become Bob the Builder for a time.
The nice thing is that the assembly of this saw was not rocket science. It did take some time, but it wasn’t hard to do. In fact it was easy enough that I was able to set it up almost completely before we had to take a small break and head out for a little while.
See, three of my daughters were performing in a recital. So we had to head to Hayward in the middle of the day so they could awe the throngs of parents (all 10 of us) with their magical fingers and playing prowess. A nice little surprise in the midst of all this was that my daughter Alaynah was on the performance list. I had no idea she would be singing. And it was awesome.
The kids did great, the parents had fun, and after a little bit of snacking and mingling it was time to head home so I could get back to work on the saw. It didn’t take long to get the saw completed. I wish I could say that for cutting the door.
The door, as I said, was a solid core door. It was heavy. And it didn’t want to be cut. At least not by some small little table like the one I have. Don’t get me wrong. My saw is fine for cutting smaller pieces of wood. But for solid core inch and half think doors, making a seven foot long cut is probably too much to ask it to do.
In the end though the saw won. It did what saws do and it cut that door. And I was able to assemble it and give my wife the counter space she has wanted for a long time now. Plus I was able to to play with power tools. Heck, I was able to even build the power tool I used. Throw in the fact that I was able to watch about three minutes of football and I’d say today was a pretty cool day.
And if nothing else I now have even more surface in my kitchen to stack crap that never gets cleaned.
Today is my daughter Adriannah’s birthday. She turns eight years old today. Another birthday (and thank God the last of the year for our family) is upon me and I could swear that is was January 1st just a few weeks ago.
I don’t know about you but it seems that the years are beginning to move a lot faster than they have in the past. It is already almost month 10 of the year 2008. Uh, huh? Not only is already October practically, it already 2008. Wasn’t it just last week that we were worrying about the Y2K scare?
Anyway, I will spend time later trying to figure out where the heck my life has gone over the last eight years. For now I have a little more pressing of an issue… wishing my daughter a happy Birthday.
Happy birthday to you;
Happy birthday to you;
Happy birthday dear Adriannah;
Happy birthday to you.
Today is a birthday. I really cool one.
It belongs to my daughter Rebekah. But it also belongs to my daughter Alaynah. Yes, they were both born on the same day. Six years apart, but on the same day. And almost at the same time, being born 12 minutes apart.
I remember the days pretty clearly. Mostly because the entire last four days or so was almost identical. The day of their births (which oddly enough fell on exactly the same day of the week) I woke up and got to work at about 7:29 (I started work at 7:30 in those days). Sandi was awake when I left the house and I asked her if she needed me to stay home because she had been having contractions all night.
She said that she would call me if she needed me to come home. So I left for work, got in, checked my email and voicemail and as soon as I was done with that, about 8:15 or so, I got a call that I needed to come home because we needed to get to the hospital.
Anyone who knows me and my wife knows that her deliveries have all gone very fast so there was really no time to waste. I got home, we took the kids to wherever they were staying so we could get to the hospital and we took off, getting to the hospital a little after 9:00.
A little after noon our kids were born.
They even looked alike when they were born, both having extremely thick dark hair. Facial features looked remarkably similar as well. It was uncanny. And it is still fresh in my head.
So to you my beautiful daughters I tell you Happy Birthday. Thank you both for the memories and for the joy you have brought to my life just by your existence. I am so blessed that God chose me to be your daddy. I love you immensely and I am glad you are my daughters.
A letter, of sorts, to my son:
So this morning, at 7:42 AM, you turned three. That is huge. It is like an entire 1 more than 2. You are all growed up, at least as far as a three year old can be, and are all kinds of big boy now. Yet is still feels like just a few days ago that you were born.
Today was a weird but special day for you. Through an odd scheduling snafu mom scheduled a day out with Yolanda today. That meant that you, me and all the girls would be home today while mom was out wine tasting. Except, at the very last minute this morning your momma decided that she was not healthy enough to drive herself to Millbrae so she asked me to take her. Which meant all of us were going for an early morning drive this morning.
Momma threw you all in the truck (figuratively of course) and we headed to Millbrae. We dropped mom off and Greg invited us over to his house for breakfast (actually, he invited us out to breakfast but since you and your sisters were hastily rushed out of the house this morning all of you were in your jammies and none of you had shoes). Breakfast was awesome and you and Preston had a great time playing around the large open living room at their house. We stayed there for a good while and finally got home around 1:15.
About 15 minutes later auntie Katie showed up to wish you a happy birthday and she ended up treating us to lunch. We came home, ate, talked, ate some more, played and ate some more. Then Auntie Katie had to go because we had to go get some stuff for your cake tonight. Since mom was not here all day she wanted to be able to do cake with you tonight. But we needed a cake and some toppers to go on it. Which is why we went out to get that stuff.
We got home right around 4:30 or so. I put a movie on for you guys while I got the coals ready for steaks. I got dishes washed and everything ready to cook and got to it. While I was cooking you and Alaynah were playing out in the yard. Playtime seemed to go on forever for you two, but it actually ended at about 6:00 when we had dinner. A little while later mom got home.
Just after that we had your rainbow cake with Diego toppers and “A” and “J” candles. It was awesome. We got you wired on all sorts of buttercream frosting then turned you lose on the front room to open your presents. You got a pretty big kick out of most of them, playing with the little spirally Go Diego Go car slide. In fact, you played with that up until it was bedtime.
Which is why I am writing this so late. You see, in the hubbub of what was your birthday I had no time at all to even tell you happy birthday here. So I am taking this time, after you are asleep and after I have taken a shower (because Lord knows I needed one). I just want to tell you again son… Happy birthday. I love you and I am glad that God chose to bless me with your existence in our family.
You are an amazing kid. You learn incredibly fast, you are very smary naturally and you are all boy. I love watching your maleness come screaming out of you as you develop into a little boy. You are already well on you way to that and I am certainly glad that I get to be a part of that with you. So today son, as you sleep off the effects of a very busy Sunday, I just want to let you know again how much I love you and how glad I am that you had a happy birthday.
This entire weekend, starting from this past Thursday, has been a blur. It was busier than any weekend should be and was more entertaining that many have been.
The real entertainment started on Friday night when the kids performed some of their piano pieces at the LINKS home school talent show. It started with Sarah and Rebekah coming together to perform the song “Part of your world” from the movie “The Little Mermaid”.
My daughters can sing pretty well. In fact, musically, they can do a lot of things very well. But I have never seen them do this before. I was pleased by their ability to work together to perform.
After their team performance, later on in the show, Sarah was allowed to perform a few more songs. Rebekah did not want to perform anymore so Sarah finished things up.
Saturday… well, Saturday was entirely too involved to repeat here. But today was a nice little respite (not really, but I am not going in to that right now) and it ended with a great little music recital for all of the students of my daughters’ piano instructor.
So that is how the day went. With a little extra time taken for Costco runs, food preparation, kid playing, eating, driving and server messing around with. But for the most part, I can say…
THANK GOD THIS WEEKEND IS OVER.
Today was a day to end all days of soccer momming, driving, taxiing and shuttling. Wow. Did I ever drive today!
It started out not driving, but still having some responsibility to get things done for the kids. Blueberry pancakes was the order of the day and as is usually the case when pancakes are called for it falls on daddy to do. So I did. And they were you-uh-me. Or so I was told.
There was not enough blueberries for a full batch of pancakes to be made with blueberries. In fact, I was only able to make half the pancakes with blueberries. So I did. 22 total pancakes, 11 of which has the little blue orbs of goodness and juiciness that is the blueberry.
And with five kids in my house, two of whom are blueberry fanatics, you can imagine that 11 blueberry pancakes do not get very good mileage. So I had the regular ones.
After that it was time to start working on some technical stuff I needed to do for my clients. I was able to spend all of five minutes on that if I remember correctly. From there it was time to get the kids ready for their events of the day.
My two oldest daughters had a party in San Jose they were invited to. And I had to get them there by 1:00 just after stopping by the pharmacy for some meds for mom. I was a little late.
My two younger daughters had a party at 2:00 that they were invited to. Lucky for me I was a little earlier for that one. I dropped the two girls off and headed home by way of McDonald’s.
This is the part of the show where things get a little interesting. I had about four weeks of work to do today. My wife had a few hours of sleep to catch up and some preparing to do for a party she was going to tonight. My son was supposed to have slept during this time so both my wife and I could get done what we needed to get done (and no, we didn’t “do” that).
AJ decided to sleep earlier in the afternoon so the plans we had were shot straight to heck. But neither my wife nor I ever talked about what we were really planning on doing. To that end she decided to put AJ in the bedroom with me while I worked so she could go sleep on the couch. Except I did know she was sleeping on the couch. So I kicked AJ out of our room. Sandi called me out loudly and I knew it was time to leave.
I grabbed AJ and we headed out the door. I didn’t know where we were going to go but I knew Sandi needed sleep so I left. We ended up hitting up Big 5 and playing with boy toys for a little while. Then we left to go get the two younger girls whose party ended at 5:00.
Luckily we got home in time for the three youngest kids to say goodbye and goodnight to mom. She left a few minutes after we got home (looking hotter than ever I might add 
).
It was just a few moments of quiet then it was time to head out to get the older girls from their party. It was about 7:20 when we left San Jose and one of the girls mentioned she was hungry. After a quick vote we decided that it was time to hit up Claim Jumper.
The events that unfolded at dinner tonight are totally for another post at another time. In fact, this is a great place to end this days recap since it only gets worse from here.
I will say that I had an awesome day with my kids today. It was busier than crud, but still awesome. Plus they got to get out of the house and see some friends. And I got to spend some boy time with my son.
Yep, everything today was awesome.
Last night after dinner I treated my family to some ice cream. I do this from time to time just to let the kids know that I still love them and want to spoil them.
As is usually the case I was done with my ice cream first and began washing dishes. As I washed the dishes I listened to my children and their discussions and laughter over bowls of ice cream.
I am still amazed at their ability to have a fully inclusive conversation amongst themselves even though their ages range from two and a half to 12. As they ate and talked they began to finish up and I began to take their bowls from them.
I turned around for a moment to see how they were doing (since I am not facing them when washing dishes) and noticed that Sarah had her face in her bowl and was licking the edges clean. Hmm, I don’t remember teaching any of my kids that this was acceptable table manners. So I asked her to stop doing that and promptly took her bowl from her.
A few minutes after this I heard one of the best comments I have ever heard from my children:
Bekah: “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could cut off your chin?”
Me: “Uh, no. Why would you want to cut your chin off?”
Bekah: “So you could fit your face inside of your bowl to lick the ice cream out.”
Me: “????????”
That’s right ladies and gentlemen, you heard it here first. My daughter wants to be able to cut her chin off so she can get a few milimeters farther into her bowl to lick the remnants of ice cream out of it.
Yeah, I know. I couldn’t believe it either.