Happy Halloween!

Double Digits, Baby!

Our baby is 10 years old. Wow. Just...wow. A decade knowing and loving Miss Emma Bloom. What a gift.

Sleepover shenanigans to mark the momentous occasion.

 

 

 

 

And fun times with Every Flavor Beans...

 

My Favorite Day

First of all, HAPPY MOTHER'S DAY to all the awesome moms I know, and all the ones I don't. Every mother in the world deserves a day of appreciation and pampering, which is probably why the powers-that-be went and made Mother's Day a national holiday and all. 

Since having kids, this is my favorite day of the year. Maybe because I'm a Christmas baby, or maybe absolutely because I'm a narcissist, I really like having a day all about me! And my family puts so much thought into making the day special, which really touches me.

I absolutely love seeing the excitement in my girls as they give me my presents. This year, Sophie woke me up with a Breakfast in Bed Bag, complete with tea and a granola bar.

She also decorated a special photo frame for me. She was very proud of herself, as she should be.

Emma gave me a wonderful gift basket with a picture frame she put together at school, three new nail polishes, and a lime orange foot rub that she made from scratch. (My DIY girl.)

 

Em also made me a card, with a picture of me (not bad, right?) and a beautiful note inside that made me cry. (It references another gift still to come. She knows how to build anticipation!)

And both girls wrote me something special...a letter from Sophie and a poem from Emma.

 

 

Chris would not be outdone, surprising me with a brand new desk. Our old one came with the house, and it's been held together by random staples and lots of prayer for quite awhile. I was totally blown away by the surprise.

Even better than the gift itself is that he worked all day long to put the thing together for me. As he labored away, I told my girls that flowers and candy might be the stuff of fairy tales, but having a guy dedicate an entire day toward building something just for you is true romance. Sophie said, "Mommy, it makes me so happy that Daddy did that for you. It makes me happy that he loves you."

Eight hours later, the masterpiece was complete. Ta da! My hero.

I am full of gratitude for this wonderful family of mine. I sure do dig them a lot, and I'm super glad they feel the same way about me. Long live Mother's Day!

The Mathews Family on NYE: A Photo/Video Essay

New Year's Eve 2013 in the Mathews household was all about the board games. And cocktails. And games. And tears. And games. And ridiculous local television coverage that made me embarrassed for Chicago. And GAMES!

New Year's Eve begins with a rousing game of Beat the Parents! Will they beat us? Time will tell. And yes, those are Mommy and Daddy drinks in the picture. We gotta level the playing field somehow, folks.

 

The kids win! BUT...the parents are into their third cocktail each, which means....THE PARENTS WIN TOO!!!!

Next board game...Labyrinth. Who will win, WHO WILL WIN?

And the victor is...Emma! Final verdict for Labyrinth: two thumbs up. In fact, we like it so much, we play it again.

Labyrinth Take 2: Sophie wins! Very proud smile with tears still drying on her face because 30 seconds earlier, she was convinced she had lost and crumpled into a sobbing mass of despair. Ah...the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, the emotional roller coaster of Olympians and six-year-olds everywhere.

Up next...Make 'N' Break.

Make 'N' Break: A Video Snippet.

We have a winner!!! Anyone notice I'm the only one that hasn't won a game yet? I blame the margaritas. Also...this is not normally how my husband looks. He doesn't usually come across this handsome. :)

All four of us made it til midnight, and all we got was this lousy awesome selfie. :)

Happy 2014 from the Mathews family! May your year be filled with wonder, laughter and love.

Slacker

I was so proud of myself because I got a Christmas blog up. SO PROUD. I worked on it until 2:30am, and when I finished I was like, "Yay Jen, you rock! You did it! Christmas 2013 will actually be semi-documented! You are so on top of things, GOOD FOR YOU!" I practically gave myself a gold star and put myself on the honor roll of life.

And then, on this New Year's Eve day, I decided to go down the old blog memory lane. I checked out how many posts I had written in 2012: 51. Wow...51. Not bad. And in 2013, I did a whopping 12. TWELVE.

I knew I'd been slacking, but good gravy, I had no idea how much.

So I guess that's one of my (thousands of) promises to myself for 2014...to write more and self-censure less. And honestly, why wait til 2014? No time like the present. So let's start rambling, shall we?

I'm excited for tonight. It's just the four of us. I remember pre-kids I'd feel this pressure about NYE, to do something awesome and fun and spectacular. And if I didn't get invited to a lot of parties, I felt like a loser. Now, it feels more like a relief because it's impossible to find a babysitter and it just means I have less people that I have to disappoint by telling them I can't make it. (Okay, honesty check: 90% of the time, that is true.10% of the time, I still feel like a loser.) The last few years, we've tried inviting people to hang out here with us, but no one was willing or available this year. So...tonight, we are four.

We are going to make our own pizzas and cocktails (virgins for the little roommates) and play board games and watch movies and let the kids stay up til midnight if they can...and try to stay up til midnight with them, if we can. (And by "we" I mean Chris. I am up past midnight every single evening of my life, but my dear husband stays up past 10:00pm approximately three times a year. Barely.) It may not be as cool as party hopping across the city, but ringing in the new year surrounded by the three people I adore most in this world ain't a bad way to pass the time. Besides, I've really never been cool anyway, even in my carefree single days. I've always preferred a quiet evening in to a frenetic evening out.

Chris is still sleeping right now, trying to rest away the last remnants of a cold that's had its claws in him for most of December. The girls are eating toast and discussing the merits of peracord bracelets and duct tape purses. (Is it duct tape or duck tape? Because I always thought duct, but they actually print duck on the tape we bought Emma, which has me so confused. As a spelling purist, these are the things that keep me up at night.)

We watched Miracle on 34th Street last night, and Emma remained unconvinced that the dude was the real Santa Claus, even after the movie ended. She said that getting someone a house and a Dad was something that "anyone" could do, and if he wanted to prove he was Santa Claus then he should have made the reindeer fly in court when the lawyer challenged him to, or done something truly magical like bring someone back from the dead. We discussed that just because Santa is magic, that doesn't mean he can do anything. That I have no doubt there have been children all across time who go to bed on Christmas Eve begging Santa to bring back someone they love and miss, but some things are out of Santa's power. Emma said, "I don't think it's out of his power. I just think he knows that it's something he shouldn't do, because if he made that one big change, then other changes would follow, changes that shouldn't happen, and it opens a door that can't be closed." I told her she just might be right about that. (Yes, my nine-year-old still believes in Santa. Fiercely. She believes in everything fiercely. Our own little Emma the Fierce.)

The girls have already moved on from talk of accessories. I just wandered into the family room and found them doing this:

I'm going to go join them in whatever new escapade they have now undoubtedly undertaken. More rambling in 2014! Happy New Year, everyone.

Here's Looking At You, SIX

Our baby turned six years old today.

To celebrate, we threw a crazy, chaotic, and loud (oh so loud) birthday party with 18 kids, 2 babies, and a handful of very brave adults. The house was overcrowded with bodies, voices, sounds...and love. Lots of love for our smart, spunky, inquisitive, sweet, mercurial, kindhearted, funny and fascinating Sophie Patrice.

Cookie Cake in My Little Pony colors.

The birthday girl, soaking up the attention.

So many presents! Very generous friends and family.

Miss Sophie and Miss Julie rock it out.

Our six-year-old!

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And a brief video that illustrates the ruling dichotomy of the day...calm (mostly girls, sitting and chatting) on one side, and chaos (mostly boys, annihilating my amazing sport of a husband) on the other. Totally. Awesome.

Movie trailers, bats, and all other kinds of awesome

We just returned from our annual Ohio vacation with the Dippel family, and as always, we had a blast. We played lots of board games, ate lots of food, and battled lots of bats. Yes, BATS.

In the early morning hours of one fine gaming evening, we endured three separate visits from the flapping little beasts. The kids miraculously slept through the entire thing. The adults each played a role in bat control...some more effectively than others. My Chris stormed right into the fray and caught the little buggers. Claire planted herself on the stairs and protected the children by flapping a pillow maniacally whenever a bat neared. Chris D. started screaming M. Night Shyamalan quotes and flying a toy helicopter into the bat cave living room. I ran for my life and took cover, hiding in the bathroom (bat attack #1), the laundry room (bat attack #2), and under the table (bat attack #3) before finally barricading myself in the bedroom when a bat that looked an awful lot like a helicopter flew a little too close for comfort. After Claire and my Chris chased the last bat downstairs and then actually followed it into the bowels of hell unfinished basement to verify the point of entry, "Mission: Bat Containment" was accomplished with a blanket and lots of duck tape.

I tell ya...we all felt like superheroes after that crazy encounter. (Shut up. Hiding is too a superpower.) So, we decided to make a movie trailer about it.

Luckily, we had movie-trailer-making whiz Charlotte Dippel on hand. An ipad camera prodigy at the tender age of 9 years old, she made two awesome and gloriously creepy trailers featuring the kids: The House of Seacrisy and The Haunted House of Indiana. Charlotte and Chris D. shared directing duties on the trailer that includes all of us, Super, Ohio. Take a gander below. (Watch them on full screen if you can - they are so much better that way.) Enjoy, and be sure to look for all three flicks not so soon in a theater near you!

The Nutcracker, Dueling Diva Style

Emma and Sophie present their version of The Nutcracker. Well, Emma tries...but Sophie keeps going rogue. "I've been performing here for seven years." Indeed you have, Emma Bloom. Indeed you have.

Pop Dancing

A new dancing video! Happy Friday, and enjoy.

One Viewing Note: the video fades out right about the time Emma starts hitting herself on the head, and then fades back in just before Chris and I begin begging for gently encouraging the grand finale. In between were an additional FIVE MINUTES of dancing that I left on the cutting room floor. Allow me to sum up what you missed: stomping, mugging, bizarre hand movements, beating of one's own body, giggling, desperate copying of one's older sister, and excessive posing.

Okay, you may commence viewing now.

Indigo Girls...You Complete Me (And My Daughters?)

For those of you who skip the ramblings on this blog and go straight for the cute stuff, I'll reveal up front that there is a video of the girls singing at the end of this post. Now you can just scroll down and click, if you so choose, instead of wading through my long-winded love letter to the Indigo Girls.

I have been an Indigo Girls fan for almost 20 years. Our one-sided love affair began when I was a freshman in college. (Good lord, has it seriously been NINETEEN YEARS since I first went off to college?!? I feel sweaty even thinking about it. Or maybe I'm just having a hot flash. But I digress.) My roommate, Rebecca, brought this weird contraption called a CD player. Now, CD players weren't all that new back in 1992 - I'm not that old. But I grew up in a super-awesome-but-financially-strapped-family, so CD players were certainly new to me. (In fact, going from a town of 500 people to a campus with over 30,000 students, many things were new to me at college...but that's a post for another day.)

Rebecca taught me many things during our four month stint as roommates, before I drove her across campus to another dorm for fear she'd commit murder if she lived with me another day. (No worries...we ended up great friends. Life is strange, no?) Here's just a brief list of some of the life lessons I learned while sharing space with Reba:

1. The power of a good hug.
2. The joy of executing the perfect prank.
3. The exhilarating release of throwing rotten fruit and watching it explode into a zillion pieces.
4. When you hear a vacuum running and Whitney Houston's "I Will Always Love You" playing on repeat, it means you will not be sleeping in your own bed for awhile.
5. Not everyone is a TV person.
6. You can love someone and still want to strangle them.

But the best thing Rebecca brought into my life was the Indigo Girls. I still remember the very first time she played me "Ghost" off of Rites of Passage. No other song, before or since, has ever reached into my heart and squeezed. I lost myself in the haunting music and lyrics. It was almost as if I was in a trance. I know it sounds dramatic, but I knew at that moment I'd found something special that would stay with me for the rest of my life. And I was right.

Simply put, I fell head over heels in love that day. And over the last two decades, my love has only grown stronger. To say that the Indigo Girls is my favorite music group is a bit of an understatement. I own almost everything they've ever produced - including several rare discs that were only released overseas. I've seen them in concert at least 20 times. (At this point, I"ve seriously lost count.) "Power of Two" was my wedding song. If and when I ever get up the nerve to get that first tattoo I've been fantasizing about for years, it will be a quote from one of their songs. And on one perfect day in 2004, I even pulled a few strings at my PR job (which is a nice way of saying that I begged lots and lots of people) and was able to actually meet my idols. I spoke to them, shook their hands, and then watched them perform in front of me, close enough to touch, in a tiny radio studio with only ten people present. A framed picture of us from that day hangs in my bedroom, and a glance at it is still enough to bring tears to my eyes.

 I brought my friend Bonnie with me, basically so I had someone to hold my hand and keep me from passing out, and then she almost edges me out of the picture! Amy and I are like, "Sorry to intrude Bon and Emily, but can we be in this photo too?"

People throw around the word "genius" way too often, I know. But truly - as musicians, lyricists, poets, singers, and performers - Emily Saliers and Amy Ray are GENIUSES in their field.

So...uh...yeah. I love them. And I've loved introducing them to my daughters. The girls don't dig a lot of their music. It's hard to fight the power of what's on the radio, like Kesha (I refuse to spell her name with a dollar sign - I REFUSE) and Lady Gaga, particularly with my seven-year-old. But a few songs have stuck. Hands down, their favorite is "Galileo." We sing it as a lullaby almost every night, and my three-year-old is especially enamored with the song. I've tried for months to get video of them singing it together, but as is the case with kids, the minute they sense you really want them to do something, they won't do it. So, despite Grade A begging/bribing/manipulating on my part, they have steadfastly refused to do the performing monkey thing for the camera.

But the other night we had guests over, and suddenly the girls decided to show off. I actually got a video of them singing "Galileo." They skipped a verse and spaced on a few words, but they nailed most of the song.

I cannot adequately emphasize in writing how much joy this video brings me, so I'm not even going to try. Just...enjoy.

Pull my string and watch me go

We made our annual trek to Ohio with the Dippel family and had a glorious week, as usual.

Honestly, the above sentence just took me fifteen minutes to write. Camp is over, school hasn't started yet, and I've been stuck at home with both girls for most of August. After weeks of constant conflict resolution between my warring darlings, my brain has officially stopped working. I've become like one of those dolls you buy in the store that says certain things every time you pull a string in its back. I automatically shout "NO!" and "Stop it!" and "Have you lost your MIND?" when nudged, and otherwise my brain is in sleep mode.

Because I don't have a spare five hours to compose an eloquent paragraph about our vacation, I'm just gonna leave it at this: We had fun. Check out the videos below if you want a laugh. Our poor children, born into theatrical families...and poor us, too. Please, save a little of your sympathy for us?

Fevers and Tea Time

The girls' beloved Grandma Kitty came to visit for a few days, and they were over the moon to see her. Poor Pat. She had no idea what she was walking into when she stepped off that plane at Midway. What she thought was going to be a relaxing, fun-filled weekend of Chicago summer awesomeness quickly turned into an unbearably hot weekend of kid duty. I was sick with a sinus infection for most of her visit, sweating in bed with fever and looking like an extra from Night of the Living Dead. So a lot of the plans we had in place went on hold - either because of my illness or the extremeness of the weather. It was beautifully sunny her entire visit, but so hot that even Pat - who lives in Sarasota, FL - was starting to melt. Our a/c unit couldn't really keep up, so it was hovering around 85 degrees in our apartment most of the time. And because Chris was dealing with the girls all alone, Pat ended up picking up a lot of slack in the child rearing area too. I must say though, she was a complete sport through it all and we were all so sad to see her leave.

Here are a few photos from her trip, including tea time at American Girl Place with the girls, their dolls, and their new "pets" Sugar the dog and Ginger the cat. And the video...well, let's just say that when most parents leave their children with grandma for a few hours, they come home to an art project or some other such thing. We come home to a song-and-dance routine. And I wouldn't have it any other way. (Plus, it's hilarious how Pat quickly loses control of her back-up singers as the girls forge their own paths and pay no attention to direction. Welcome to our world, G. Kitty.)

 

 I know, this pic is totally random from the rest...but OH MY GOD. The most perfect capture of Sophie's current penchant for pouting I have ever seen. World, let me introduce you to the other side of my daughter, Miss Sophie Cranky-pants.

Tee Hee Hee

Greatest sound in the world...

Better than Cable

Our girls love to make up song and dance routines. We love to laugh our asses off watching them.

p.s. When Emma watched the playback on our computer, she studied the monitor intently for about 15 seconds before declaring, "Man, I look good."

Jokes, Jokes, Jokes

In the short video below, Sophie and Em each take a stab at making us laugh.

A little background:
You may recall from a recent post that Sophie's joke-telling skills need some honing. So my Dad taught her the classic knock knock joke about the banana and the orange. She loves it, but as you can see, she sometimes has a bit of trouble remembering the order.

A few hours before this video was taken, a discussion about marriage proposals ended with Chris and I sharing the story of our somewhat long and winding way to the alter. I believe that's where Emma's joke comes from. (They say the truth hurts, but sometimes the truth is just straight-up funny.)

Silly Safari

One of the many many many reasons I love Hoyne Street Playgroup, where Sophie now attends two days a week just as Emma did before her? The awesome creativity of the teachers. Click here to watch the silent movie that Jake (onscreen) and Ben (cameraman) made today with the kids. Keep your eyes open for a couple quick glimpses of Sophie!

Sophie tells some "jokes"

I wish I could just climb right into her brain and settle in. What a ride that would be...

Emma and Sophie Greet Their Public

My girls decided they wanted to make a video talking about themselves. I think, somewhat inadvertently, the video captures both of their personalities quite well. Mine too, probably. If you have a couple minutes to kill and want a giggle or two...here you go.

A mermaid, a princess, a fairy, a middle-aged white guy with no rhythm, and a full bladder

If this video clip were a joke, I guess the first line would go something like this: "A mermaid, a princess and a fairy take over the dance floor." I'm not sure about the punchline, though...it's either Emma running into the wall, Chris's body spasms or Em's bladder. You decide.

E.T. seems harmless, but can we really trust him?

A few weeks ago, I showed the girls E.T. for the first time. Emma loved it as I'd hoped she would, but surprisingly, Sophie enjoyed it too. In fact, Sophie has since developed a weird love/fear fascination with the film. She adores the movie and has every plot point memorized after countless viewings. Yet she still seems to believe that the film has the potential to morph at any time from a feel-good flick about a friendly alien into some horror tale about the extraterrestrial from hell. Hence, she goes through a specific three-step process whenever requesting to see it: 1. Talk about it. A LOT. 2. Beg to watch it. 3. Proceed to hide from it.

Here's a glimpse...