Kid Blogging

It was Ollie's birthday yesterday - the big 4...oh? Just 4. So we hightailed it all the way up to his house in the northern burbs to celebrate, eat cake and play with his presents. A fine time was had by all, although Eryn had a mini fit about being denied bossy-ing rights in Hungry Hungry Hippo. There was some disagreement about where you could pilfer your balls from (we're pretty lenient with the hungry hungry hippo rules at our house - the real rule is hungry hungry hippo doesn't mean much in real life and that you're supposed to just learn to have fun and not be pushy...it hasn't really sunk in yet).


The kids liked Twister in particular. Here's Eryn and my niece and nephew living it up. For quite a while, Eryn was pretty sure you were supposed to put the dial on whatever color/body part she was currently using. Twister dyslexia.


Of coure, Artie might have preferred she stuck to that set of rules, as he's clearly on the wrong end of a squishing in this picture.


Ceri didn't want to play Twister, he just wanted to play with his balls.


My niece and I focused on making sure Buzz Lightyear could get home (and eating strawberries...lots and lots of strawberries. And grapes...almost as good as strawberries).


That red dress Eryn has on is her Christmas dress, and she's very proud of it. Here are a few more pictures. In this one, she's happy about the red dress, and the prospect of an upcoming 48 degree day in Minnesota in December.


This is just to show off the whole dress and the fact that we have much of our Christmas shopping already done.


Later on, after the birthday, we went to a coworker's holiday party and ran into a bunch of my other coworkers, and Dan'l, CookieQueen and Conner (who know the coworker from CookieQueen's college days when she drank with him and invited me up to Morris to drink with them. He used to wear a shirt that said "Put a little KUMM in your ear" at that time - he worked for the Morris college radio station). The party started at 7:00 (we got there about 7:30), and by 9:00 or so, Eryn was absolutely having a meltdown about some spinning game with two plastic pieces that you jump over. Being an only kid doesn't prepare you well for people stomping on your game and criticizing your ability to play. In her defense, she was playing by herself quietly until the dozen other kids floating around realized she had something fun...it went downhill very fast after that. But her game was better than the host's kid's made up game...Squidball. He was making some coworker's wife play Squidball with him on the stairs. Sounds dirty, but it involves a football and throwing it up and down the stairs. When she dropped the ball, she lost 10 points. When the kid dropped the ball, she still lost 10 points. Everything the coworker's wife did cost her 10 points. We told Pooteewheet she was probably down 10 points just for asking what the hell Squidball was.

Here are some videos of the birthday party action, though I don't guarantee they'll be available immediately. YouTube plays it like that. By the way, if you haven't noticed, you can stream directly from your webcam to YouTube now. That is NOT why I bought a webcam, but if I was doing my own podcast, I'd consider that very cool. Twister:


My niece with a Curious George top - she picked up the idea almost immediately: