A sure sign that spring is slowly, slowly making its way - trampoline hair. Although on this first day of spring we woke up to snow! It is gone now and just gloomy and rainy, but the grass is growing greener and the tips of all the spring bulbs are peeking through. We are reading The Secret Garden together at night and it feels like the perfect time for it.
And here is a picture of C pretending to be blind. I am not going to pretend that I didn't laugh until I had to beg him for mercy to stop. You can see him smiling, but he is trying so hard not to. On Wednesday last week, he went to get his eyes checked, turns out he has a cataract in his left eye. We were all (especially him) a little anxious about what this would mean for his flying. So we said a few extra prayers about it. After he met with the specialist on Friday, he thought it would be extra funny to tease the girls about being blind/having eye surgery etc... He kept it up for about 35 minutes - all during dinner. Ashlee kept saying "Dad, stop it! Are you really blind?" "Dad, I mean it." "Dad, tell us the truth." I tried to point out to her that he had driven himself home from work, changed out of work clothes and been generally functioning around the house up until dinner time. But, I can really sympathize with her because he's just so relentless in pursuing the joke that you start to believe him. At various times during our marriage I have believed him to: lose feeling in his legs, suffer from heart palpitations, experience vision loss etc.... Somewhere around the 15/20 minute mark all reason goes out the window for me. He must be serious, I think, because I would have driven him over the edge by now if it was just a joke. The more we start to believe though, the harder it makes him work at the game. He is really twisted that way. You may be wondering why he is crawling on the floor. Well, he was pretending to be unable to find his plate to put some grapes on, so he was on the floor slapping/groping around to get all of the grapes. Right after this, we got out the water bottle- so that Ashlee would see him put his arms up in defense when we squirted him, but he kept it up. I think tears were what finally brought back his sight. And the specialist says that the cataract is so small right now that it's nothing to worry about.

Major Yeates

Congratulations to one of the newest Major selects! He should "pin on" sometime this year. New Air Force policy - Blues on Mondays - I've always preferred him in his "green pajamas", but the blues are growing on me.

Love

Why I love him. He had just gotten home from a short trip and as usual the girls swarmed him - Paigie got out a "book" to read and he spent 20 minutes on the floor with them ooohing and aaahhing over ...... the latest American Girl catalog. Paigie says hi!

Huh?

As part of C's military training, he attended SEER's school - survive, evade....something something. It's where they train you for the possibility of being captured, landing in hostile territory etc... He also attends a refresher course every once in a while. At one of those refreshers a few years ago, the instructor was speaking about tactics to use while being interrogated. He told those in attendance that if they had children, they had seen first hand how to be evasive during interrogation. Here is an example of what he was talking about taken from our dinner table last night.

Set the stage: during dinner conversation, we find that there was some behavior that needs to be corrected... Maggie was with her friend and yelled at the neighbor boys. I asked what happened:

Me: What did they say?

Ashlee: They started talking to us first.

Maggie: Yeah, they started it.

Me: What did they say?

Ashlee: We were jumping on the trampoline and looked over at them.

Me: What did they say?

Maggie: They started it, we were just minding our own business.

Me and Chris in unison: What did they say?

Maggie - they started talking to us.

Ashlee - yeah

Maggie - covers her face and says "We weren't doing anything."

Me: "What did they say? (starting to get a little alarmed, maybe they said something really awful....) Was it inappropriate?

Maggie: yes

Me: Well, you didn't say it, so you will not be in trouble. Now, please, what did they say?"

Whispered conversation between the two girls - Ashlee can't remember what they said, her head is "full of math and spelling."

Maggie: "They did give us Brody's ball back."

Hello.....WHAT DID THEY SAY???????

Six or seven attempts later, out it comes, they said.....drumroll please...."We know you want to kiss us." It hardly seemed worth the effort.

If you have kids, I'm sure that you have experienced one or two or three thousand conversations like this. Just tuck them away so that if you are ever captured, you will be able to avoid answering questions while being interrogated. You know...is your homework done? I'm so tired. Have you practiced piano...I haven't had a snack yet....

Maggie responded by calling them jerks and morons. Chris had some other ideas for how to respond: I would if it looked like you were even from planet earth, Maybe if your breath didn't smell like the bottom of your shoe, etc....the girls laughed and laughed and laughed. That's what dads are for.

The master of evasion and her sleeping sister.

David Letterman

On the East Coast, David Letterman's show doesn't come on until 11:35 and even though I love him, I rarely watch it anymore. One of his best segments has been "Great Moments in Presidential Speeches." SO FUNNY! Here is a link to his farewell tribute to the segment.


www.youtube.com/watch?v=AGSZmtNCjz0

Snow Day

Yesterday morning, Maggie got up at 5:00 am to shower before school. I may have given birth to her, and she may look just like her dad, but I am starting to wonder if she really is my daughter. I got up at 6:45 and checked our local public access channel - NO SCHOOL! She said that she had checked when she first woke up and there was no message - could it be that everyone was still SLEEPING? So, yay for us school was cancelled!

Sometimes I love Ashlee's little touches - she wanted a hat for her little snowman, but knew we didn't have one that size so she made him one out of snow, clever no?Things I love about snow days: pajamas until late morning/early afternoon, hot chocolate,games on the floor, and that feeling of cheating because we're really not supposed to all be home. Bonus: Chris was flying that night, so he was home until about 2:30. Things I don't really love: piles of wet snow gear, making and cleaning up three meals - (breakfast is bigger, lunch was for five), and the cabin fever that sets in around 5:00 pm.

Pajamas or leisure suit?

Last night for dinner I made bread and homemade chicken noodle soup. It reminded me of last year when I was sick. At first we weren't sure what it was , just that I felt awful. I would spend half my day lying on the floor with stomach pain. I had been to see the doctor twice about it - nothing. Finally one morning I woke up a little yellow and a lot in pain, so we went to the ER. The doctor there was pretty certain that I had one of the lettered Hepatitis strains. I was miserable and called my mom - she came out to take care of us. We didn't really need her to, and said so, but she came anyway. And it was wonderful. I would sleep for several hours each day and she cooked and played with Paige and took care of homework and laundry (even the whites - that's how sick I was). All while trying to work from our computer at the job she had just started. She made bread a few times and chicken noodle soup and it was just so nice to be babied. Sometimes that's a perk of living far away. If we had lived close and needed that kind of help - she would have come over to help, but she would have gone home to sleep at night and been busy with her own life. But, since she was here, we got two weeks of full time pampering. Turns out, it was just Epstein Barr and by the time she left I was feeling much much better. So, last night as the girls and I sat down to eat homemade bread and soup, I thought thankfully of my mom and how she is always there when I need her.

Happy Snow Day!

Freezing

It has been really cold here lately... not today, today it is a glorious 52... Maggie came in from outside and said "I feel like I went to Hawaii." But last Saturday was a different story: a pipe in the bathroom froze and burst. Luckily, Chris was home and turned the water off right away. We called maintenance and they said they would put us on a very long list of emergencies for the day. They showed up just as we were discussing where we were going to shower/eat/use the facilities. This was pretty inconvenient, but having maintenance people come to the house is always a little fun for Christopher. He gets to follow them around and talk to them about how things work. Here is a picture of the pipe - the plumber admonished us several times to let the faucet drip during cold weather and we promised we would. But, we didn't. So, on Wednesday morning the pipes were frozen again...Chris said to call because it is a quick fix, but I did NOT want to call and say that we had a frozen pipe, probably in the same location. So we turned the faucet on hot (where a little drip was dripping) and waited... I was so nervous that it would burst again before the ice melted - but we made it. The faucet has been dripping ever since. Here is one of Paige's favorite spots. She is probably yelling in this picture to have someone come and read to her. I can't decide what she likes more: reading books or pulling books off the shelves. I know what I like more and it's not picking up all of her and some of her sister's books several times a day. Today, I just left them and will leave them until bedtime, when I can enlist the help of her 2 older sisters.
Maggie took the picture below at my request - Paige is wearing hand-me-downs of Elizabeth's that Sharron sent at Christmas. (When I washed the dress that Ashlee is wearing this week, I cut the ties off - neither of my girls will ever leave them tied and there is a man at church that every time they come with a tie hanging down tries to tie it for them. Plus it looks like we're total slackers who don't know how to dress our kids) Just in case you read this Elizabeth, we got several compliments on your dress! Thank-You! Last thing: since Christopher has left the squadron for the wing, he has had more interesting desk duties. Yesterday and today, he is sitting on Court Marshall Duty and I can't wait for him to come home and tell me all about it. It was KILLING me last night that he couldn't talk about it. I want all the details, what the guy did, how they reached the verdict, did he make eye contact, is he sorry, were his parents there, who were the witnesses, did they get to examine any evidence...I want to know. And last weekend he got to play host to a couple of crews passing through from the Italian Air Force. As a thank-you, they gave him the following gifts. We were teasing the girls that the wine would be ok because after all it's just grape juice, Maggie was scandalized, Ashlee seemed to take us at our word. It's going to the neighbors. It's the statue I don't know what to do with. Maggie and I opened the box that it came in together and she turned a few shades pink and left the room because the guy has all his business hanging out.(that's a piece of paper towel). There is no way that Chris will let me throw him out...I figure if I leave him out for a week or two, he'll let me put him in the closet with the other stuff we don't know what to do with!

Oh, and I did let the girls stay home to watch the Inauguration - but it turns out that both of their classes watched it at school. I told Chris the other night that President Obama has already satisfied any expectation/hope that I had of his Presidency by issuing the order to close Guantanimo and stating unequivocally that the U.S. will not engage in torture - reason enough to have voted for him, in my humble opinion. Plus, the closing prayer - we would never have gotten anything like that with any of the other candidates. The girls and I have been saying it to each other ever since...