Sam vs. the Camera

(narrated by Sam herself)

heh heh heh. picture.

It's okay. Look!

Kitchen! That one's in my kitchen.

Pictures. Mommy & Mommy.

I wanna see the uderr mommy.

That one's making cake...brownies...cake.

I wanna see daddy-one. Can I play games now?

Cystic Fibrosis Cure

Our friends (Matt & Charla Schriever) have a little boy with CF and they are having a walk for the cure in May.

If you're interested in donating, go to this site: http://www.cff.org/great_strides/CharlaSchriever5094

Even if you can't donate right now, go to the site and watch the montage that Charla did about little Connor. It's very sweet and opened my eyes to the difficulties of CF.

Chomp-chomp-chomp? Yes yes yes.

Lucy has two teeth, though she still doesn't seem inclined to use them on anything but our fingers. She was fairly ill for a week or so, and the doctor prescribed an antibiotic. For all you parents out there, you should be aware that Omniceph can make your child's feces turn brick red, which can be very alarming. I didn't include a picture.

This is a picture form a few weeks ago when Sam was out hunting elk.

Lessons

Jon is no longer going to be nursing in the exciting world of the Emergency Department. He'll be maintaining life and spending more time with fewer patients on the medical telemetry floor. The transition is somewhat bitter-sweet. We'll miss the stories that the ER afforded, but we'll also not miss many of those same stories. Here's a brief list of the things we've learned from working in the ER:

1. Drinking and driving is bad. It breaks your bones into little pieces and damages your organs until you die. Same goes for drinking and falling, drinking and fighting, and drinking and dating.

2. If your teeth hurt, don't go to the emergency room. ER doctors are not dentists. They can't fix your teeth. Also...brush.

3. Defibrillating shocks can cause aspirated stomach contents to spew five feet into the air. There's more than one reason they say "clear".

4. If you have a growth under your skin, do not try to cut it out with a pocketknife at home. Use a table saw.

5. And finally, cockroaches cannot crawl backwards. So, if they enter a space that's too small for them to turn around, like a human's ear canal, they get stuck and have to be removed in pieces.

Here's a cute baby doing kung fu.

It's a long'un, folks.

Happy Yuletide and a very merry transition to writing 08 on your checks. The Tolman family Christmas was a bit spread out this year since we managed to swing over to Colorado for a grand Tolman family gathering.

We began the ritualistic giving of gifts in Missouri, where the girls were given obnoxiously matching pajamas. Sam actually went to bed when she was told that Santa Claus would be coming to drop off presents.

Sam had been persistently asking for a "Dora bike" ever since she started getting the idea that some mysterious being would be bringing her things. Since Dora doesn't care enough about her fans to make her merchandise affordable, we elected to take a hand-me-down tricycle from her older cousin Cooper and smother it with Dora decals and attach a $5 Dora backback to the front. Sam was excited when we brought it out, but when we asked her what she got she said "A bike...with stickers...and a backback." Oh,well. Get used to it, kid.

New book. Beautiful wife.

After festivities at home, we packed up the car and made a 10-hour overnight journey to Denver where we were able to spend two blessed weeks mooching off Wendell and Deanna Tolman and frolicking about Emily Tolman and the Rachel (Tolman) Terry and Allison (Tolman) Benefield familys.

Sam got a banana and Emily and I were very pleased.

"Then the angel appeared and granted three wishes to the wiseman's camel. 'First, I want a flying machine' said the mischeivious camel."

New book. Beautiful grandmother.

Hyrum Benefield, who is 6 months younger but several pounds heavier than Samantha, spent most of his vacation asking his mother where his Cars were or requesting cheese. The two did manage to bond a bit during "Wonder Pets."

"Holds the world record for the longest bowel movement-over two feet, without a break."

-Becky Tolman

This really is quite relaxing. You can come over and try it.


My father has long been our family's premier jello slurper. He only managed to down the top layer. There's a new king in town. Bow down.

Grumpa the troll.

The Nightmare Before Christmas

I'm in my parent's basement, which is actually Angela Leone's old basement, and I have a tickle on my right foot, so I look at it and see a little piece of what looks like...um...you know how when you are writing on paper with a pencil and you mess up so you erase the whole first paragraph and then you have all these little pieces of dirty eraser, well it looked like a little eraser shard so I went to sweep it off my foot and it doesn't sweep, so I pick it up with my finger and I realize it's attached to me, which is gross, so I pull it and pull it and it gets bigger and bigger and then I realize it's a worm and I can feel it unwinding inside my big toe as I'm pulling it out. And also it has this weird winding thing that is wrapping around the worm and looks like the left-over fat from a roast or something, all wound up and sucking on the worm. So then I start seeing these shards all over my foot and I keep pulling them out one after the next and the worms get nastier and nastier and it starts hurting because, well...because I'm pulling a fat old worm out of the pores on my foot. So I finally get the last one so I stopped to go up and tell mom that I had just pulled worms from my foot. So now I'm upstairs and mom and dad are in their room and I tell mom I have just pulled worms with roast fat out of my foot. She looks at dad and gives him that, oh dear look and then turns back to me and says, "It's happening." I was like, um, what is happening? I'm dying? I'm getting old? I'm going crazy? What? She says, "when I was younger I started pulling worms out of my foot too and now I pull them out of my bones and it's just part of life dear." And they start going on with their day like it's all fine and dandy that my life is now doomed to worm-feet. After some thought I decided I should at least go pick up the worms off the carpet downstairs so they don't infest someone else and when I get downstairs to do it, mom had already picked them up and put them in a tupperware container for me, what a sweetheart.
So that's it. I think they decided it was a parasite that maybe could be taken care of but we didn't do anything about it in my dream. Maybe tonight I'll be able to go through radiation or something.
Merry Christmas to all,
Becky

Coolin' out, coolin' out...

The Kansas City metropolitan area came through this week's ice storms relatively unscathed. The temperature never dropped to a sufficiently cold level to freeze the rain that fell onto the streets, though we did manage to get a crystaline sheen over our lawns and trees.





One of our next door neighbor's trees split down the middle and fell mostly into the street.

The really cool part is that a front end loader came by in the morning and moved a large portion of the branches into OUR yard. Maybe we can get Sam to take up whittling.

Still fits, Mom.

'Tis the Season to be Hoary

Merry Christmas and Happy Winter Solstice and Cheery Kwanza and Plentiful Chanoonacka or whatever it is.
The yuletide season seems to have struck Independence Missouri in a fury. One day you're sitting around enjoying autumn and then all of a sudden you're lying frozen in a ditch with your fingers turning black and none of your shopping done.

As you can tell, Lucy's rash is beginning to subside. Santa brought her an early treat of expensive, steroid creme and about 40,000 bibs which help protect her waddle from exessive moisture.

After we threw Sam up on the roof to secure the Christmas lights, she didn't want to come down, so I had to go up to retreive her.





As the cold sets in, we find ourselves seeking out indoor activities such as the play area at the Independence Mall. They have lots of things to play and climb on and for a bit of spare change, a child can experience his or her dream of driving a forklift.

We discovered a new method for setting up an artificial tree. We didn't install the branches on the backside. This lets us position the tree closer to the wall, saving space in our tiny living room, and it keeps us from having to put lights on the back where no one can see them. Make sure you anchor the tree to the wall with some duct tape, though, or it's libel to tip forward and crush your baby.

Fun on the Bed

When Becky and I got married, my parents bought us a bed. They got us a luxurious, pillow-top king-size bed which has ruined every other sleeping surface's chance of fulfilling our resting needs.

Over the last 3+ years, many wonderful things have happened on that mattress. The following videos illustrate two of them.

No longer pending, but dark

Grandma Sue was kind enough to purchase a couple water-proof cameras to document all the frivolity that took place in the Great Wolf Lodge water park. Unfortunately, such cameras are designed for use on bright, sunny beaches where flashes are unnecessary. The indoor water park was not bright, and the camera yielded few distinguishable images. Alas.

Ella and Baylee submerged in both their pseudo-angst and the lazy river.

Cooper, the future locker-room towel-snapper.

It took a skilled photographer to capture an image of Cassie Ralston without her finger up her nose.

Marc Varone is truly a good-looking man. It's not hard to imagine this scene in a beer commercial.


There was another picture that flaunted Becky's marvelous anatomy a little more, but I was vetoed.