Topper

I think I failed to show our awesome tree. Becky and the girls made the topper, which is a dual representation of Yuletide wonder and guilt. Many of the ornaments were also created by small hands. You can really sense their anger.

Grease? I'll give you GREASE!

This is the face Lucy makes when nobody seems to care about previous posts that involve her.

These are two girls getting all boozed up for a day on the slopes.
This is story time. Nora is not normally involved, as she eats books.

You'll note that her front tooth has not fallen out, but merely turned a pleasant shade of grey. "Pleasant Shade of Grey"... is that one by the Mommas and the Papas?

GO-RI-LLA!

The Fruit of Sue's Loins

Last week, from Tuesday to Thanksgiving Thursday, Terry and Sue Thorne and their descendants descended on the Great Wolf Lodge, a hotel with a water park and an arcade and Magiquest and what-not.

You'll note that our children are the more attractive ones. A two year comparison can be made here.



Lucy, Samantha, and Zoe Ralston enjoyed free, late-night HBO episodes of My Little Pony.


This is a photo featuring Grandpa Terry's gut, his wife, and his immediate offspring.

Chrissy enjoyed screaming at the babies. She didn't scream anything coherent. Just horrid, guttural screams that seemed to last for hours.

I believe Lucy is contemplating the acquisition of Kim's wallet.

That look from the tall, bald one may not be mere goofiness. I may have been losing it a bit due to the fact that I was unable to participate in any of the water-oriented fun due to a relatively fresh pacemaker incision. Lucy is either embarrassed, or spreading snot up to her forehead.

Pachalla's Blade

This will be another conglomeration.

First: Cute baby.

Second: Cute girls snuggling while they slumber.

Third: Two girls doing dishes just like their mother does.

Fourth: The pacemaker. When I awoke early Tuesday to go to work, I felt an unusual amount of pacemaker activity. I continued to feel it at work whenever I sat down, so I put on one of the heart monitors and had a look at my rhythm (one of the perks of working on a telemetry unit). Indeed, my pacemaker was not behaving as usual, so I spoke with one of the cardiac nurses and one of the cardiologists and arranged to have mt pacer interrogated that afternoon.

Now, when I say "interrogated," I'm not necessarily talking about anything involving Dick Cheney or electrodes. Well actually, I guess it does involve electrodes, and I suppose there's really no way of knowing whether or not Cheney was involved.

So it turns out that my battery needed to be changed. When the battery is low, the pacemaker reverts to a power-saving mode in which it only fires in one chamber, and the minimum rate is 65. My lower rate had been set at 50. So, ironically, the power-saving mode was shocking me any time I stopped moving.

With some cajoling, I managed to get Dr. Sarat Pachalla to agree to switch out my pacemaker on Thursday. It's a good thing I know the man, because I seriously never saw the guy's face. I spoke to him briefly from under the surgical field, but then the drugs kicked in.

So here's number 2...

And here's number 3.

And here's some proof that our daughter is pretty much the most awesome.

The Magic of Descriptive Language

A quote from our oldest:

"Yesterday, I made a poop, and it was shaped like an 'L' and this long."

Amberthing

Octoberween

The spookiest and least diabetic-friendly holiday has passed over the Tolman household. Come to think of it, Halloween is a lot like Passover, but with fewer feasts, more costumes, and less Judaism.

Our youngest was an apple. Or a strawberry. Or a chili. I think it was probably an apple, since it had a worm on it, but she's shaped more like a chili, and she tastes more like provolone.

Lucy was an African version of Cruella DeVille. Has no one else heard of "101 Wildebeasts"?

Samantha pranced about as an adorable invertebrate.

Superdad. Delivering chilis to the hungry children of the world.
There was actually a version that involved red jocky shorts instead of running shorts, but we figured that if Dad's superness was making us uncomfortable, it would likely make the neighborhood children and their parents uncomfortable as well.

Rebecca Tolman, the unwashed lima bean.

It was a theme. All things from nature. An apple, a ladybug, a zebra, and a creepy doofus.

Poops, Moves, and Emotional Fats

There are pros and cons to having all girls. Potty training is one of the pros. Lucy, our 28-month-old, snaggle-tooth muffin with hair like Frasier season 1, just decided the other day that she wanted do her business in the toilet like her big sister. She's even pulled the little stool over to climb up there and drop a couple deuces that looked like infant Klingons. Two down. One to go.

Becky REALLY likes this show. I keep finding myself wanting to see how many crossbow darts could be shot into those whiny fat people before they finally shut their pie-holes. Seriously, all the Biggest Loser contestants do is cry. Wah wah wah, my whole life has been about tacos. Wah wah wah, I miss my mommy. Wah wah wah, I have a jelly bean embedded in one of my back folds.

And all that blubbery blubbering is rubbing off on MY wife. We need to get back into Heroes.

And Nora can crawl now.

Sicks and Giggles

Sam is learning how to read and write. We need to work on vowels and we need to work on looking at the word instead of making it up based on the picture. She made this crown all by herself the other day. I guess we also need to work on connotation.

Is the whole world ill right now? Holy cow pox. At least one member of our family has been dripping something from somewhere since July.

This one kind of goes on. But you're here, so this is probably the sort of schlock you're looking for.

Go. To. SLEEP.

PLEASE

Disjointed Post

Ok. A few things.

We have three very cute girls.


One of them doesn't mind having her hands and feet superglued to the walls.



Lucy assumed Dad was looking and launched herself off the top bunk toward him. Luckily, she didn't sustain a head injury because the impact was absorbed by her front teeth. One of her incisors did bleed and move back a smidge. The dentist said over the phone that it might heal on its own if we leave it alone. We're hoping so, because we hadn't bothered to put Lucy on our dental plan.




Speaking of dental plans, we've been married 5 years as of yesterday. I really really like that Becky. She's very nice and pretty.

Lucyisms

Lucy is not as linguistically gifted as her older sister. Sam was talking in very complete, understandable sentences by this age. However, Lucy is getting much better about putting words together and has developed a functional, individual vocabulary, some of which is as follows:

Mommy = MOMMEEE!!!

Daddy = DADDEEEE!!!

Sam = Drai-jrai (no idea)

Nora = Baby

Bottle = Bahbo

Nose = Bop bop

Horse = Gidyup, or Eeehaw

Food = Eat

Dora = Dada

Ear = Eeeyoo

Insect = Dubby

Any color = Puhpoh (Purple)

Any fruit = Appoh

So, when discussing an orange: "Lucy, what's this?" "Appoh" "No, it's an orange. Can you say 'orange'?" "Puhpoh."

Waaboo dwee no no daymo Drai-jrai hahpoo fai = If you don't take that toy away from Sam and give it to me, I'm going to burn the couch.

Join Our Cause

Protect Insurance Companies PSA from Will Ferrell

We Shaved the Baby

See what happened was we went to feed baby goats again and then we stopped at the new playground before we left. There in the playground was this lady, who claimed to be from Chihuahua. Mexico but really she was probably a gypsy. I guess there isn't really a reason that a gypsy couldn't be from Chihuahua, Mexico.

So there was this Mexican Gypsy and she had this daughter who was about 3 years old and this little girl had more hair than any five normal adults combined. It was super thick down past her little tushy. In a jealous tone, I told the gypsy lady that her daughter had lots of hair.

She replied, in a very mysterious gypsy-like, Mexican accent, "Yes she does. When our girls are between 6-10 months old, we shave their heads, then it grows in thick. And here, take these magic turnips."

Actually, she didn't offer us any of her magic turnips, but we did ponder on her words. We figured that Nora is pretty much bald anyway and if it helps her hair grow, she might look like a girl a little sooner than Sam did.

So yeah, we shaved the baby.

Becky made some surprisingly stylish dresses for the older girls using her own shirts.

Sam was not prompted to use Magnum.

I think Sam kinda looks like a little Nephite here.

Less Successful

A few examples of some activities that turned out less than triumphant.

We're trying to get Lucy off the bottle. When we just took it away, she refused to drink to the point where she got really constipated, so we relented. If you look close you can see a lovely bottle rash around her lips. I got her to use this twirly straw the other day, but that only lasted about an hour. Maybe I should just start an IV to keep her hydrated.


This was supposed to be a meatloaf.



This was supposed to be a picture of something other than Sam's finger.


This was a very pleasant activity for our middle daughter, until she stood up and walked around on the carpet with her toes curled under.

This was supposed to be a thawing chicken, but those scheming naked babies are always running around and pooping in any body of water they can find.

A Bit O' Lucy

Thanks for noticing.



Intimidating the sewing machine.

Mid-August

A few events took place this week that will undoubtedly bore the general public, but nonetheless have the Tolman household in a mind of progress.
Samantha received her first haircut from a professional haircutting person. This individual took quite a bit longer to complete the task than would generally be considered acceptable, but Sam is very pleased with the results.

We turned off the TV and seem to have established a bedtime routine including, but not limited to, three books, two songs, butter churning, and a flog. They've actually been asleep prior to 9:00, if you can tie that in square knot!

These have started turning red. I just hope George Clooney doesn't show up to thwart them.

Homework

My first online assignment in "Nursing Research" was to introduce myself. I claimed to have cuter kids than anyone else and included a link to our blog, so I figured I should put up some current proof.

This is our eldest, Samantha. Sam enjoys princesses, rainbows, swimming, and World War I reenactments. As the only one of her siblings that speaks in complete sentences, she's become the designated messenger to the neighbors in the event of badger or racoon attack.

This is Lucy, our ornry second child. She enjoys Dora the Explorer, staying up late, and occasionally drawing blood with her teeth. Lucy hopes to one day have her name in the horticulture section of the Guiness Book of World Records.

Nora is our docile third and final. She is bald like her father, sweet-tempered like her mother, and has the powerful grip of her truck-driving granduncle Clair. We believe she has good, but realistically conservative plans for her eventual mobility.