Lunchtime Conversation

Lisa and Abby were telling a variety of knock-knock jokes at lunch, and it climaxed with this one:

Abby: Knock-knock!
Lisa: Who's there?
Abby: Mouse!
Lisa: Mouse who?
Abby: Mouse in your butt!
Lisa (sternly): No!
Abby: I mean buns.

THE END

Christmas Break Fun

Right now it's halftime of the Jacksonville-Pittsburgh NFL wildcard game. For the first time ever, I just saw one of my former students at Notre Dame sack the Steeler's quarterback and intercept a pass. I had him in Math 107 during the spring of 2003.

Anyway, we made it through the Christmas marathon, including a trip to Chicago that got extended due to bad weather. For New Year's Eve we hung out with friends that also have lots of little girls, and Annika and Abby got to see the ball drop. The next day we had lots of tired family members, and later in the day the whole family was sleeping except for me, including all three cats and our friends' dog that we were looking after. It was right during the end of the Michigan-Florida game, which was nice for me. In the past few days we've been trying to get the our sleeping schedules back on track for school.

During break we've also gone bowling and done some sledding. The park behind our house actually has some kid-sized decent hills, although when the snow is packed down and the sleds go far there are lots of obstacles to run into, like cement walls, bike racks, and trees. Annika actually went over the largest sledding ramp that some kids had built into the hill that I've ever seen. Fortunately, she wasn't going too fast - she mostly went up the ramp and then dropped off the end - a good two foot drop. She wasn't very happy with the result.

In other news, Jake's head is filling out his helmet real nicely, so that in three weeks they're actually going to rescan his head, and he might be done - after only 12 weeks, a pretty minimal amount of time for this sort of thing. We'll see how it actually turns out.

School starts for Lisa and the girls on Monday, and work essentially starts for me, too.

Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaats' all for now.

Hockey

Annika went to her first hockey game the on Friday night - the Grand Rapids Griffins at Van Andel Arena. We got free tickets through a school reading program, and she got the full experience:

• She finished her popcorn before the game started
• The visiting team, the Hamilton Bulldogs, got their first penalty in 7 seconds, their second in other 10, and we scored right away - sound the foghorn!
• We scored again just after three minutes were up
• Amid a ton of penalties on both teams, Hamilton took the lead 3-2 before the first period was done
• They had a ridiculous game featuring kids and leaf blowers at the first intermission
• We got a second popcorn at the first intermission, and she would have finished it in no time if she didn't deliberately save it for the end of the second period
• During the third period she was featured on the big video screen
  
• With three minutes to go Hamilton got a penalty and we scored to tie it, much to Annika's delight - she gets into these things quite emotionally
• No one scored in overtime, so it went to a shootout
• Hamilton scored one of the flukiest shootout goals I've ever seen, on a puck that was blocked high into the air and then bounced screwy off the ice behind the goalie and went in
• We scored to tie the shootout on a controversial goal that might have been kicked in (if we missed the game was over)
• On the last pair of shootout attempts, they missed, we scored, and the celebration began
• The opposing coach stormed onto the ice, yelled at the referee, and even picked up a puck like he was going to throw it. The opposing goalie berated the ref from the bench.
• After a long and aborted wait for an elevator, we found a bathroom that we could both go in, since Annika had consumed a lot of water during the game.
• She fell asleep in the van on the way home

Whew! It was fun...

The Latest Pictures

The other day Jake was taking a nap. Then Lisa goes upstairs and finds the door to his room open, like this:

How is this so? Well, the culprit didn't flee the scene of the crime:


Abby spent some time baking with Lisa, wearing her apron from Grandma:


I took a picture of myself with Jake, during his "helmet-off hour":

My classes are done, finals are this coming week, while Lisa and the girls have two weeks to go. We'll see many of you soon!

3-Year-Old Alarm Clock

Everyone but Abby was sleeping this morning when she walked into our room and began talking about something. I don't know what it was, though, since I immediately noticed that it was 7:45, and clearly no alarm had gone off like it should have at 6:45. So: pee-clothes-frozen lunch-granola bar-coat-kisses, and I was gone. No showering or shaving, no real combing of the hair, no brushing of the teeth. Also, we had our first real snow of the year, so our street was an ice rink, and the drive to Big Rapids wasn't great, but it wasn't a disaster, either. Regardless, I was almost 20 minutes late for my first class.

On the way up, I tried to call the math department office so they could let my students know before they could employ some sort of made-up "10-minute rule" and left. However, I only got about 2 seconds of call time before my cell phone died. After thinking through the quickest way to redial, I managed to power it up one more time, and tried to say "It'sMikeDekkerI'mgoingtobelatehelp!" before it died again. It was like some movie where I was in danger and had a small window of time to alert the authorities. Apparently, they heard enough in the office or managed to figure it out, because someone spoke with my students. They didn't mind, and thought my Christmas All-Stars were cool.

In the end, the sky turned blue, all was well, and we had a nice evening with friends up in Cedar Springs with pizza, beer, ice cream, foosball, cards, and general chaos: 8 adults (ages 32,32,32,31,31,31,31,31), 10 kids (ages 6,6,5,5,3,3,2,2,1,8mo), and one yellow lab.

Piano Prodigy?

A Mish-Mash

OK, it's been forever. I wanted to do justice to the blog and put up good pictures of stuff, but there's been too much going on to spend the time on it. So, anyway, here's a rundown of stuff from the past four weeks:

I pretty much missed Halloween since I had to work late, but the girls had a great time, even though it was a little damp. They went as crayons, wearing felt costumes that Lisa did a great job making for them. She even made one for Jake, although he only wore it briefly.

Abby and Annika both started dance lessons at a new dance studio, located in the old Seymour Christian School. I spent parts of 8 school years working there, so returning was quite nostalgic.

Annika also started piano lessons with a woman from our church. She's enjoying them and doing pretty well.

We raked lots of leaves. One Monday morning there were 16 city of Grand Rapids yard waste bags in front of our house. We're doing pretty well getting settled, too.

The girls and I, over the course of 6 sessions or so, watched all of Star Wars. They're probably too young for it, really (Abby, at least), but they still enjoyed it. I'm sort of proud that they know names like Obi-Wan Kenobi. They can't ever seem to remember C-3PO, though.

We continue to watch Dancing with the Stars (see a previous post on my blog - link at right), and while some justice was served last week when Jane Seymour got the boot, somehow Marie Osmond continues to survive. It matters to us.

Jake is officially helmet-headed now, to deal with his somewhat misshapen head. We're a couple weeks into what will be at least a 3-month process, and we've pretty much gotten used to it - he has too. You can't kiss those baby cheeks as well anymore, but Jake is still Jake.

Who knows how much I forgot just now, but we'll call that good.