1. Things Fit in a RAV-4

This morning we took the Mad Whip to “The Park without the Playground” (as opposed to “George Bush”, “George Bush with the Playground” and “Daddy’s Park” which are all totally different experiences). We were worried about the RAV-4 being smaller than the Explorer as we tried to cram in the customary 3 kids bikes, two scooters and a Wave Board. They all fit. They never fit like that in the Explorer.

2. Cheapest Mid-Life Crisis Vehicle Ever

No, not the RAV-4. The Wave . It was the T-Bot’s birthday present, but it is The Daddy who has become the Wave-Master. He likes to wiggle his way past us shouting in a mock California-Surf-Dude voice “THE WAVE!“. As he did this at the almost-deserted park this morning I yelled back “I don’t think you are quite at the stage where 19 year old girls are going to be throwing themselves at you!”.

We turned the corner and guess who was standing there, open-mouthed.

Yes.

A gaggle of 19 year old girls.

3. Un-co? Try Ice Skating!

I have been promising Baby Sister ice-skating for such a long time. This weekend we finally made it to the rink. After all, she is about to turn 6.

Baby Sister is one of the most uncoordinated people I know. She trips over her own feet, knocks over anything in her path and only has to turn the handlebars on her bike to fall off it.

A little harsh maybe But once at the rink she did what we like to call an “Aunty Natty“.

(Sorry, Aunty Natty, but I promise you it is a compliment!)

She listened to the instructions, got up on those skates, and in 30 minutes was skating like a pro.

4. Fish and Chips

Yesterday we were at the supermarket and The Daddy left us by the donuts to go get some fish for dinner.

He returned brandishing cod wrapped up in white paper.

“Look!” he said, “Cod! And look at the price! We are going to eat fish and chips tonight!!”

Next, he put potatoes in the cart.

And then he tossed a deep fat fryer in there. Not kidding.

And before I knew it, we were at the checkout and he was trying to Google a recipe on his iphone, to be sure we had not missed any ingredients:

“BBC Recipe Fish and Chips“, he murmured urgently into the phone.

“Ah, not again! ” he sighed, as Google brought up “fishing trips”.

We never did get all the ingredients, and had to improvise. But the fish and chips were yummy. Yummy, if not good for the waistline.

Also,  I had to burn scented candles for hours afterwards.

He is talking about frying home made donuts next.

I’m sure most Dads would do anything for their daughter, but how many of them would do this?

One Friday a few weeks back, inspired by that TV commercial where the businessman goes away, taking his daughter’s stuffed animal with him to photograph in different places  (I think - I can’t even remember the damn thing to be honest - and it is 12.30am - but I am assured this is the gist of it), Baby Sister begged her Daddy to take Butterfly on a photoshoot in Houston.

This is Butterfly.

To be more precise, this is Butterfly sitting on the table of a restaurant during The Daddy’s lunch hour.

I cropped The Daddy’s Boss out of the picture.

These are the extremes to which The Daddy will go for his daughter.

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Here is The Daddy in the restaurant holding Butterfly.

Yes, he does look a little embarrassed.

Even I would have looked a little embarrassed. And I look good in pink.

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Cut to Butterfly on the bridge The Daddy walks over to get from his carpark to work.

He carried Butterfly for 10 minutes along some very public sidewalks. Now that is true dedication for you. I can’t remember what that businessman in the commercial had, but I am pretty damn sure it was not a pink poodle.

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And now, some local interest shots for the folks back home. Butterfly on the bridge. See the lamp in the background?

Here’s that same lamp, on Tuesday (when school was cancelled and half the city stayed home, but The Daddy took his little car and aquaglided in to work):

Yeah, Houston floods. Just a little.

Wow, it’s been a long time.

So long that I had to read back in time to find out exactly which photos I had promised you. There has been a lot going on here, which I will be sure to blog about later. I know, always later…

In the meantime, I did promise you my 80’s hair. And I always keep my promises, although in this case I really really don’t want to. Had I partaken of the silly juice when I wrote that post? OK. Deep breath. Here goes:

Oops. Looks like my hair got a little flat on top. Maybe I forgot to backcomb it that morning.

The scanner cable hasn’t turned up yet but that’s probably because I haven’t had time to sort through the boxes and boxes of cables and find it. Luckily (why didn’t I think of this before?) I haven’t managed to lose my camera yet. And I see that I also promised pictures of us. At different times. Together. Well, won’t this be a trip down memory lane? And an interesting exercise for my last remaining non-family reader!

Hmm. My parents sent me a bunch of early scanned photos from their archives and dared me to put them online. This, believe it or not, is the best one they could dredge up. The others are CENSORED. This one really should be too. But, you know, they dared me.

And now, what about a wedding photo?

Those caterpillars crawling down the side of his face were all the rage in our circles at the time, for those not willing to go for the full-on goatee look. The Daddy did grow a goatee once but it scared me and I made him shave it off.

And those children? All grown up now.

Yes, it was a lo-o-o-o-ong time ago.

Many many years passed. Eight to be exact. And then we had a baby and traveled halfway around the world with him and here we are snapped pretending to be full of beans and not at all wishing we could just give the baby away to a random stranger and sleep for a thousand years.

Then the baby grew up a little. Here he is at 18 months. Oh, and us in the background, looking, again, faintly manic:

And now, three days before we set off on our great adventure. April 2005. Not sure what was wrong with the T-Bot.

And that, unbelievably, is where our photo story ends.

Want cute photos of my kids? Can oblige, 1000 times over.

Want photos of us together? Come visit! Take one!

I dare you.

(or: Obviously the Evil Mommy, Destroyer of Simple Pleasures like Playing With Fire, was Not Home)

(or: Please Don’t Call CPS, They were Sort of Supervised)

(or: It All Turned Out Fine In the End)

The Daddy: “I left them alone for about 20 seconds. And when I got back, there was a flaming marshmallow in the middle of the lounge.”

Oh, really?

This is how sad we are right now. We are sitting at our desks, facing each other, typing on our respective computers.

“More wine”, I say, “Your turn.”

“No”, says The Daddy, “I’m good.”

“What are you doing?” I ask, “obviously not loving me.”

“You may have similar genetic makeup,” says The Daddy, “but you are not Dido. I am watching Dido. ”

(Here we go again)

Me: “Yes, but Dido’s soulless”.

Him: “If by soulless you mean perfect.”

I have a lot to live up to. My husband is in love with Dido, and he would totally marry her if he wasn’t already married to me. What? Of course she would have him. All women want him. After all, he once saw Linda Evangelista  as he walked past a photo shoot and she totally gave him the eye.

Me: “Are you sure she wasn’t posing?”

Him: “No, she wanted me”.

So, Dido. he is watching her in concert right now. She has no faults.

Him: “Dido wouldn’t leave loading the dishwasher until 4pm … Also Dido wouldn’t be in a bad mood when I got home from work. She would waft up to me wearing something light and floaty and rub my feet while crooning a love song”.

Me: “Yes but Dido has no children. Children, as you know, are a distraction. ”

Him: “Well, she just hasn’t found the right man yet. She would have lots of children with me.”

I resist the urge to remind him that he used to call Dido dildo. (Am I allowed to say that on public internet?). Until one day he saw this concert. And in the intervening years, he has shown this concert to every male friend who has ever expressed reservations about Dido’s (ahem) music. And I swear that every single one has been converted.

Him: “Those shorts? Make your backside look huge. Dido would never wear those. Well, you did ask me”.

And they say romance is dead.

Back to Dido. She does have one failing. She gets her hair cut (probably at £300 a time, but I digress…).

And The Daddy doesn’t find short(er) hair attractive.

Me: “Dido doesn’t have long hair…”

Him: “She’s allowed not to. But only because she is Dido“.

(Sigh)

Last night The Daddy arrived home and I greeted him with “I had to make a sandwich. I was about to pass out”.

His reply: “Why do you do that to yourself, won’t you ever learn?”

I took offense at that but instead of reminding him in a reasonable and adult manner that I do not have a canteen at my house serving such delicacies as BBQ beef, stir fry chicken and sushi, washed down with copious amounts of Odwallas, I let loose with a tirade about how my web sites look like cr*p, the design is out of the 90s and whoever designed them should have been shot. Or something to that effect.

Ahem. It really doesn’t pay to annoy the Chief Technical Officer. I spent the rest of the evening wrestling with my own stylesheets and swearing copiously.

However, The Daddy is probably a saint or something, because (although he still won’t fix my sites) he didn’t bear a grudge. Generally he doesn’t bear a grudge, and that is probably why I can forgive the fact that he never buys me flowers.

That’s right, never in the last 16 years together has he bought me flowers.

But that is about to change!

Well, technically it is not, but next week on my birthday I will be getting flowers, thanks to The Daddy, even if I do have to choose them myself. And all because one time The Daddy took the idea of recycling to a whole new level to procure me flowers. I wrote about it here. I won. How could I not?

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I thought long and hard about publicizing this, because I really didn’t want to expose The Daddy to ridicule. And myself, by association. But it is  … kind of funny. Before writing this post I asked The Daddy if he would mind his dumpster diving skills were revealed to an even greater audience. He just shrugged, and said he didn’t see a problem.

If you know The Daddy you will probably understand.

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If you don’t you will probably misunderstand, but that’s fine too

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And now, time to go choose my flowers! With big thanks to The Daddy!

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Oh, and … ahem … The Daddy? Could you please fix my stylesheets now?

“Mommy, when you met Daddy you danced together.

And you wore a pretty lady dress.

And you kissed to be married. 

Then you told Daddy you had a baby inside your tummy and he was so excited! 

And you told him my baby name would be T-Bot. 

And he liked it! 

And he was very happy…. ”

(Ten years of my pre-baby life, as summarized by the T-Bot. That’s it, no more Disney Princess books for you, boy!)

First, a disclaimer. I do not have a trick for winning the Green Card Lottery. If I did, of course I would share it (for a price…). What I can do is detail the process. 

I left you here, with our little family unit all psyched up to try and get ourselves into the US. 

But what The Daddy had failed to tell me, as he was speeding through the night on the Metropolitan Line, was that the closing date  was midnight.

That very night.

And so, as he arrived, dinner was forgotten. It was probably best forgotten anyway, I am a terrible cook.

The adrenalin was flowing. We searched through our available photos. We found some acceptable shots of us, but they had foliage in the background. No recent decent shot of the T-Bot. Luckily he was not yet asleep so we threw him up against a white wall and took a hundred poses, just to be safe. He wasn’t blurry in about three of them. We tried to throw each other up against a wall but the resulting pictures were horrible, like zombies.

Then while I put T-Bot to bed, The Daddy got busy with Photoshop. 

It was approaching 11pm when we finally had our online forms completed, photos at the ready, and we were ready to Pass Go. At this moment, the US government servers, who were probably very tired and under an unprecedented onslaught from all the last-minute-hopefuls, gave up on us.

(cue frenetic music)

It took us until 11.52 to submit three simple forms, but - like a Hollywood movie where the heroes prevail 2 seconds before the bomb is to go off - we did it. 

And by the next morning, we had forgotten about it. Because, after all, we had never won before. 

(Look out for Part Three, coming soon. I apologise for feeding this in dribs and drabs, but it is still summer vacation time and I am feeling it here…)

We are at the pool, and the T-Bot (who two weeks ago refused to even put his mouth in the water, let alone his whole face, or his whole body) is showing The Daddy how he can dive for squid weights. With help. 

The Daddy throws the weights to the bottom, and the T-Bot dives down, down, down. Scoops up the weights and then sits on the bottom of the pool. Puts an arm up and waits patiently. 

Look!” says The Daddy, his eyes sparkling with pride and excitement, “He’s underwater!”

“Yes,” I call pointedly. “He’s underwater!!!!!!”

“Wow!!!” says The Daddy, all emotional (His son is becoming a man), “Underwater! Underwater!”

“Um, The Daddy!” I yell, he’s UNDERWATER!!!!! 

“Oh! SH–” 

Clearly their technique needs a little refinement. On both sides. 

I am coming out of the closet as a Dolly Parton fan. Well sort of.

I only know a few of her greatest hits and the Nine to Five movie, but I manage to sing along each time anyway. Though not line dance. I have never line danced, even back in college in the early 90s when it was in fashion.

Yes it was.

At least where I was living it was. 

So there I am bopping along with The Wictor to Jolene, and crooning “I’m begging of you please don’t take my man” when The Daddy butts in: 

“You know, that’s not really your style. You would be more like how much are you offering?”

And you know, he is right, I would. But only because I am curious.

I promise Jolene, no matter how much you offer, it would never be nearly enough.