caution: elves at work

(our new walkie talkie spy pens, thanks to wend and karl)

we knew the holidays were started off right when our first night of hanukah (how cool is it that i get to celebrate hanukah now??) gifts included a family of tape measures as a gentle hint from the boy that either: a) he was tired of having to go out to my car or dig through my purse anytime he wanted the tape measure, or b) he was tired of all of our pictures being hung unevenly on the walls

in honor of our recent mexico trip, i got him an electric wall-e toothbrush, complete with berry blast toothpaste.
(it was the "blast" part of the toothpaste that made the boy's hair look like he'd been electrocuted)

it only got better as we travelled down to the new mexico to spent christmas with the rents and sibs. maybe we didn't think it was getting better when we ran out of gas... i'd rather not talk about it...

at the homestead, we made, and delivered, our traditional christmas cookies (does anybody else still do door-to-door christmas caroling?? oh wait - we do!) then, off to see the luminaries, which is an awesome new mexican feature. it was even more awesome when my dad was sure he knew where this great lighted neighborhood was, got us lost a couple of times, then we got stuck in the middle of this completely blocked-off neighborhood - jammed between hundreds...maybe thousands of other cars, including this unmarked white van doused in blue christmas lights...?

then, in pure indiana jones style, my dad totally hoped a median right in front of a cop to get us outta there. i'm sure the brother's reading this right now thinking "it was not even a median. it was a curb. and the cop was all the way up the street." to which my response as the author of this post is, "creative liberty."

and then home to put on our elves hats and make the nephews some toys! (okay fine, i didn't put on an elf hat. i just took the picture)

and in the morning, the expected response was achieved

the boy and i had a good idea what we were getting from each other. i KNEW (at least hoped i KNEW) that the boy was getting me ddr. for those of you not hip enough to know the lingo, that stands for dance dance revolution. for those of you still lost.... well, i can't help you. anyway, let's just say that now i can - and probably will - dance my life away on a 3ft square pad.

the boy KNEW (at least he thought he did) what i was getting him. so i think he was a little shocked when he opened up his brand new mortel and pestle (which is actually a very cool little item). it's not what he thought i was getting him though. he kept looking in the box, trying to seem excited with his gift, but hoping that a sign of something more would magically appear.

and it DID appear when we all marched into the dining room! the boy looked like he was two! and i thought gibson was excited when he saw his space train

so, we had popcorn for our christmas breakfast...and lunch... and dinner... and every day since (ps, thanks for the scarf grandma and grandpa! it completes the perfect charles dickens image of a street popcorn vendor)

and here's mr. milo - all tuckered out after such an exhausting christmas morning

look how long he is. seriously. where did he come from?? he's got to be at least the same size as three subway $5 footlongs

our babies

according to makemebabies.com, this is what our kid will look like

1. we can't tell if it's a boy or a girl

2. he/she certainly didn't get MY ears!

3. not to brag or anything, but we made the cutest baby i've seen so far on this website, although he/she does look totally smug and stuck up. crap. 

and then we decided that one of the guys the boy works with looks like the love child between quentin tarentino and jude law. we're waiting to hear back from said guy to see if he'll donate a baby picture for us to compare...

p.s. might i emphasize that our e-baby is WAY cuter than jude and quentin's, because as smug as he/she is, he/she doesn't look 50... or maybe i've just got mommy eyes for my own offspring.jpg 

our tripod trip

leg 1: cancun

our mexican fiesta started off in cancun, where the boy's company takes its employees every year for christmas...i know - rough...

we stayed at the iberostar paraiso del mar, which i think literally translates into "that big ship that all the humans lived on in the movie wall-e." check out this description - it says it all.

with all our salmon colored couches, pillow menus and personal butlers et al., what were we to even do with ourselves?? why, try out the pillows of course

and then, we discovered the secret ingredient to the whole resort.

so we left in search of something less made-of-babies.

leg 2: sayulita

we flew from cancun into peurto vallarta where the plan was to go staight to yelapa (spoiler alert - leg 3 is yelapa). we instead decided to rent a car, buy a bag of oranges from some guy selling them in the middle of the highway (it was a hard choice between those and the giant reindeer antler pin cushions the lady next to him was selling), and drive up the coast to a lovely little town called sayulita.

we liked the town the second we drove in and saw a sign for the burrito revolution. step aside qdoba and chipotle. you've just been trumped by the world's best burritos.

while i would recommend visiting sayulita for sure, i would probably not recommend it during any sort of week long santa maria festival. you might be woken up at odd hours of the night to fireworks flying right past your window and think that your hotel room is under siege.

i would also recommend checking your time zone map before going. it turns out sayulita is part of the teensy little sliver of mexico in mountain standard time. when we drove from the airport to sayulita, we switched time zones and never even realized it until right before we were leaving to head back to peurto vallarta. good thing we got it straightened out though. it's always good to know what time it is

leg 3: yelapa

when you stay in an open-air pelapa in yelapa (shameless plug - casa aramara was AWESOME!! thanks, alex!), three things happen:

1. you for some reason always have the bananas in pajamas song stuck in your head, only replaced with the lyrics "pelapa in yelapa. do dee do do da dee."

2. you can't fall asleep any hour of the night because there's apparently a blind old senile rooster in the town that cock-a-doodle-doos his way all the way through the night

3. you get critters in your house.

we woke up one morning to find this crime scene

what animal comes in at night, eats a banana but leaves the peel, opens the fridge and takes one egg (ps, we had lots of good stuff in that fridge!) and then leaves his little grubby footprints all over the place?

i think it was a monkey. the boy thinks it was this monkey

other cool things about yelapa. they have multiple uses for soccer balls

people like our new friend tita live there


there's lots of bamboo shavings that come off the tree and make a decent paper substitute. since we had such a rockin pelapa, we decided on our last night there to throw a party for all of our new friends. and since we were feeling oober creative, we wrote our invites on these shavings

on our way back from delivering our invites, a bunch of the town kids came up to us and started telling us to drop those shavings right away. the little needles get on you and create a rash. luckily we had already distributed them all out...

people still showed up to our little party surprisingly, but everyone was at least an hour late. the more we thought about it, the more we realized that everything going on in this crazy place was about an hour late - people not showing up on time, things not being open on time...

then, on our very last night there, something clicked. after seeing half the town's clocks, we realized that the clock in our pelapa was an hour fast. we had spent the entire week an hour off. we were those old people who show up for dinner at 4pm and then go to bed at 10pm. all of our guests were right on time - we were the ones who were off!!

i guess our goal on the trip to "completely lose track of time" was accomplished

turkey lurkey day

sometimes thanksgiving brings mayflowers and other times it brings walkers. i can't really attest to how much people liked when it brought mayflowers, but i CAN say that we very much liked it when it brought walkers because the mom makes a dreamy stuffing and the brother made a killer yam/orange combination. i can just picture him in the kitchen thinking, "hmmm...yams are orange. and oranges are orange. and this crayon is orange." only i'm glad he left the crayon out. 

one time, i knew a girl who went on a color diet. she matched up days with colors and only ate certain colors on their designated days. i feel like i've shared this story before...no? 

anyway, bug didn't bring any food, but she brought herself, which is always more than enough entertainment for any holiday occasion. 

the boy made his first ever turkey and, are you ready for this, maxine - he even put onions in it! (this is a big deal because the boy is "sensitive to onions")

we ate a grandiouso feast on our new plates, a very generous house/wedding gift from the soon-to-be-parents-in-law (yes, the very same ones i got a speeding ticket with...i'm surprised they didn't instead get me a "how to drive slower" guide book)

look how lovely, but don't look too close or get too attached because that might seal our fate to host thanksgiving every year, in which case i might start threatening to make tofurkey for everyone. 

after dinner and a little i'm-full-of-turkey-and-stuffing-and-orange-yams-and-maybe-crayons walk around the block, the festivities continued with a celebration of gibson's fourth birthday! a present for the boy and the brother was conveniently planted amongst the others. as soon as gibson opened it, they snatched it away and started making ramps and obstacles for it. 

crew didn't need any toys. he just needed a cubby. 

i'm famous!

one time, i was driving my future in-laws to the airport and i got pulled over for speeding. not only did i get pulled over for speeding, but i was driving the boy's car, so i had no idea where the insurance card was and i nearly got a ticket for THAT too. 

after shyly dropping them off, i desperately needed gas (i'm starting to think that the boy "lets" me take his car when it's on zero gas so that i'll fill it up for him...we used to pull this prank on my dad all the time... oh the cyclical irony). 

so i pulled into a gas station and these two people walk up to me and start asking me questions about gas prices. they snapped a few pics and the guy handed me his card, which i shoved into my black-hole purse. they looked like they were twelve. i figured it was a school project or something.  

only, i was actually cleaning my purse out today (i know - this deserves a news report in and of itself) and found the guy's card - which led me to finding my 15 minutes of fame!!

my favorite part is how they were apparently a little bit confused about my gender in the picture caption..

you know it's a good day when you get home feeling like people around the nation are thinking "oh, chelsea walker? yeah he's got a bit of a lead foot, but you gotta give him credit for filling up someone else's car."

 

oh yeah i forgot...

...this picture

nuff said

ode to boy

i can't decide if i'm in an exceptionally sappy mood, or if i just found too many priceless pictures to not post them all, but either way, here's a photo sampling of the many reasons why i love the boy


you know it's a good day when you find a flight of bright green stairs leading to nowhere up against a parking lot wall



my brown eyed boys at the sand dunes




it's amazing how advanced your foosball skills become simply by making a monkey face

my favorite part about this was how the boy was in an airport by himself, stopped some complete stranger and asked said stranger to take this picture

remember how one time we had a long lay-over in london, so we converted some dollars into pounds and toured around a bit. before heading back to the airport, we still had 20-some pence left and were determined to squeeze the most out of our british money. so, after a long search, we decided to get hobnobs. which seemed appropriately british. and which turned out to be complete and utter crap. boo

on top of a spanish castle. the boy is pretty certain he was somehow involved with castles in a past life. probably a court jester

this is sometimes the look i get when i tell the boy that we're not going to have a dozen kids

bill the pirate makes his debut in new york city - with the disclaimer, "i'm not really a pc, i'm a mac. but i AM a pirate!" 

we decided a really good idea would be to install a doggie door. the boy took it one step further and decided an even better idea would be to install it right as his parents were directly upstairs taking a nap. he also decided that he needed a chainsaw to do the job right.

this leash demeans us both

this is what the ads say your child will look like when you use the kid leash (let's call it the kleash for simplicity) (p.s. i love the lack of logistics in this picture. the kid's at a full, apparently productive stride but the kleash is completely taut and the mom's not even moving... plus either everyone in the background is moving so fast in the opposite direction, they're blurry, or the kid and mom are somehow really booking it. maybe the mom's on rolley shoes and the kid is pulling her):

and his thoughts will be "goly gee, mom! you got me a stuffed animal?! wait, no - a backpack?!? wait, even better a kleash that keeps me within 2 inches of you at all times!!?! aw, you're the greatest."

but this is what your kid will really be like:

and his thoughts will be "fine, you're gonna treat me like an animal, i'm gonna make like a starfish in the middle of airport security. so there"

this is halloween

my grandma and grandpa are so cute. every year, they send little goodie boxes for some of the holidays. i have no idea how they decide which holidays to send stuff for, but this year brought us some fun halloween stuff. example: nose flutes. 

the boy picked his up right away. what a talented guy. can you tell what song he's playing? 

and of course, me - the natural flutist and amazing musician i am - couldn't even make a freakin noise out of the thing. maybe my nose isn't built right for nose fluting. here's me playing the same song*

and, of course, what's halloween without getting excited for the trick or treaters? we were so (overly) excited for the hundreds of kids we were surely going to get. we prepared by buying at least twenty thousand bags of candy and dressing the dogs up

the first doorbell ring was like music to my ears. three cute little kids to start putting a dent in our mt. kilamanjaro sized stack of candy. then it happened...the costumed dogs darted (they love a) being outside and b) kids) they seriously mauled those poor kids - one of the kids ran off crying without even getting candy! what a devastating way to start off our trick or treating. so, the baby gate went up to barricade the dogs from whatever other disasters they were planning. about 8 kids later, the trick or treating was done. that was it - 8 kids. twenty thousand bags of candy and 8 kids. now we don't have pantry space because we have created our life food supply out of reeses peanut butter cups. 

luckily, we had a halloween party the next night and successfully got rid of 1/4 of one bag of candy. go us. 

our costume party was muppet-themed...we didn't really expect other people to dress up like muppets (and not many did), but the boy is obsessed with this: 

and has had dreams of us dressing up like the mahna mahna guys probably since the day he met me. so, we did. 

and this is how great the world of blogging is - i found my charming little headpiece on some stranger's blog in minnesota (no...i don't know if he has an accent). he had a picture of his wife wearing it last year - she made it! so, i emailed him and asked if i could "rent" it for this year. 2 days later, i had a mahna mahna cow costume! i love life. and people in minnesota. and people who can make their own halloween costumes and then share them with others. 

to top it all off, meghan came as her look-alike

* why, it's john jacob jingle heimer schmidt, of course!

bathroom stalls and family fits

what a happy looking family


(except let's be honest, that girl on the left looks like she's missing a torso and that can't be pleasant)

...but wait - what's that separating this charming family?

a divorce decree! oh no! what are we going to do about it?

all i have to say is, it's a really good thing this is posted on the back of the bathroom stall in the family-style (world's crappiest) steakhouse, Traildust. i imagine a lot of people's life problems are solved in that setting.

the only other thing i have to say has to do with how hugging your attorney and wanting a divorce decree might be directly correlated, but expanding on that hardly feels appropriate for my g-rated blog.

moments... it's all about moments

(isn't this an awesome picture? it looks like crew is gibson's little guardian angel and he's holding on by actually biting gib's shoulder. p.s. i've accepted the fact that i will probably look like this everyday when i have my own kids... unslept and unshowered... hope you don't mind, bill!)

some of my favorite instances this past week...

1. seeing this at the denver airport. sometimes i wonder if maybe i'm just vegetarian so i can see what kind of weird questions people might ask me. and then it reminded me about this time when i went on a date with this guy and he was so floored that i was vegetarian. he didn't know what to do with me. so he took me to 7-11 for dinner... because "there's plenty of vegetarian food there"... right...

2. helping out at this community college music event where bach's musical offering was being dissected for an hour. of course i, and all of the other summoned musicians, assumed (maybe because we practiced about 40 minutes worth of music) that most of the event would highlight sections of the piece using...get this... actual musicians and instruments... instead, we were cut off after about 3 minutes and replaced with this ENTIRE video. i'm pretty sure this is some creepy fantasy the composer/guy who put this together has. i mean, who wouldn't want a choir of japanese anime babes singing bach to you with electronic voices? needless to say, it was a very informational event

3. watching my darling nephews for a couple of days, which included listening to the indiana jones theme song at least two dozen times over the course of one hour and posing a lot for my aspiring photographer nephew, gibson who LOVED taking pictures on his auntie's cell phone... and then going through the 500 plus pictures he took and getting a kick out of the perspective of a 3 year old and what they view as "kodak moments"

caught in the act, crew! ... don't worry mom, we washed the sippy cup really well after that...

i'm not at all sure how gibson caught this - it's like four completely different pictures in one. way to get experimental, buddy!

of course, what kid doesn't want twenty pictures of his cool sandals? maybe gibson's destiny is in consumer advertising...

and, of course, my personal favorite. 

4. after keeping teddy and milo cooped up in the house for the entire morning and into the afternoon, we decided to treat them with a trip to the park. where teddy immediately b-lined it into the river and milo a) stole some poor little kid's capri sun right out of his hand, and b) rolled around for a good 5 minutes in the remains of a dead mouse. so then it was back to the house for baths and more cooping up. 

i love my life