The results are in!

Thanks for submitting your comments on the blogiversary post. They made me laugh (not necessarily at my own funniness, just the oddity of the situations) and remember the good ol' days when we were in Poland and when Anna was young...er.

So without further ado, and from a numerical process generated on random.org, the contest winner is Lara! Congratulations, Lara! Lend me your address and I'll mail you your delightful prize.

And now onto other posts, namely our magical, white Christmas!

4 days left!

Thanks for your comments on the blogiversary post, everyone. It's been fun to reminisce. But keep them coming. You only have 4 days left!

And also, MERRY CHRISTMAS, everyone!

Happy Blogiversary!

I realized a few days ago that our blog has now been in existence for exactly one year. And that merits something a little extra special, don't you think?

So in honor of The Life and Times, and in the vainest way possible, I'd like to announce a little contest — prize and all.

The rules: Submit a comment with your favorite post(s) from the past year, telling me why it/they were so memorable (ha), and I will pick a winner at random. The contest will end two weeks from today at 12:00 a.m. on Monday, December 29th.

The reward: A delightfully unique prize sent via regular mail.

This is a chance for all of you public fans to cash in on your hard work and for all of you phantom readers (I like to call you "blalkers" (blog stalkers, get it?)) out there to make yourselves known . . . and also cash in on your hard work. See? Everybody wins. My ego gets fed and everyone else gets a chance at an exciting, and perhaps random, prize. (You'll put up with my obnoxiousness for a chance to get a prize, right? That's what I thought.)

To get you thinking, here is a short list of a few of my favorite blog moments:
1. Our Polish Christmas, where I went into intricate detail about each traditional dish served at a Polish Christmas meal and where Trevor told our friend's grandmother that he, likewise, wished for a "man child" to enter her home in the coming year.
2. The one where Anna stole an egg from the fridge without me knowing and I found her rubbing it on her cheek.
3. The one about toothpaste that produced more comments than any other post.
4. Our Ukranian Adventure, a minute-by-minute account of one of the many times we had to flee the country.
5. And the only post Trevor has written, about his crazy trip to Ukraine and how he got beat up on the way home from the store.

And that's just to name a few. There are SO many more! So get crackin'.

Retribution

This is what I get for leaving Steph alone with Anna for 20 minutes . . . and for breaking Steph's necklace and dumping out her perfume when I was three.

Presenting . . . the demon child.




It's just not right.

We just bought the first DVD ever made.

Most of you know that Trevor likes movies and good deals as much as he enjoys breathing, so he's been taking the two- and three-dollar movie sale at Big Lots by storm. I recently joined him on one outing and we came away with a copy of Little Women. (I picked this one, obviously, as Little Women is a classic novel and a fairly good film, if my memory serves me correctly, and Trevor's illiterate. Just kidding. This is a joke he often uses on himself, and this is my way of guilting him into actually reading our blog.)

Anyway, we opened up the DVD case to find a little card tucked in with the disc. Here's what we read:

Care Tips and Disc Removal

To remove disc from its case, press the "push here" button on hub located at the center of disc. Using your other hand, gently remove disc by its outer edge. Never remove disc by prying its outer edge.

The tips continue, but you get the idea. It was so strange that it made me laugh to see these instructions included with the DVD, almost like I was Christopher Reeve seeing the penny in Somewhere in Time, and it transported me back (instead of forward, like in the movie) to 1994.

If that doesn't make you laugh, a shot of the DVD menu will. Get a load of this:


What is this, 1905?

Anyway, we had a good chuckle over the sheer novelty of it all. I watched the movie and then proceeded to tell Trevor, nearly verbatim, about that Friends episode where Rachel reads Joey's copy of The Shining and he reads her copy of Little Women. Another classic. Can't you just hear Joey now?

Joey: Beth is really, really sick. Jo's there, but I don't think there's anything she can do.
Rachel: Joey?
Joey: Yeah?
Rachel: You want to put the book in the freezer?

So view both for a good laugh AND a good cry. And go to Big Lots. You won't be sorry.

Things commonly heard coming from this little girl:

(I know she's fuzzy, but she's cute.)

1. "Sorry, honey." "Oh, excuse me, honey." (I guess that just shows you how much I call her honey, but it's super cute coming from a 2 year old. The more frequently she assumes the role of Old Lady Anna, the better.)
2. "Washcloff"
3. "Lesterday"
4. "Please I want some more broccoli please, Mom, please." (This is what she says after she has already said "Get me some more broccoli" and I tell her to ask nicely. I don't know how we got the angel child that LOVES broccoli, but she really does. She could eat a cupful every day.)
5. "Me does it." (Translation: "I do it." I love to see how she's learning conjugation and tenses and all of that fun vocabulary development, but this one is just WAY off.)
6. "That feels tickle."
7. To be sung: "A sunbeep, a sunbeep, Jesus wants me for a sunbeep."
8. "Louder 'Rosies.'" Anna loves to sing songs with us, and she most often requests "Ring Around the Rosies" and does so by ordering us to sing it louder. Every time. Also, at her urging, we ALWAYS sing these five songs — in order — before bedtime: "Ring Around the Rosies," "You are My Sunshine," "I am a Child of God" (which she calls "Of God" = cute), "Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star" and the ABCs. Sometimes "My Bonny Lies Over the Ocean" gets thrown into the mix as well. She's such a creature of habit. Or she's 2. Either one.
9. So this one isn't something we hear often since we only heard it once (how's that?), but it was too good to not post. Trevor was reading to Anna and they came across a picture of a cow. Trevor pointed to the udder and asked, "What's this?" Anna said, "A pig's body." Not too bad, if you ask me.

This picture is seriously making me laugh out loud.