Tuesday, November 30, 2010

Thanksgiving, Untraditionally

Our family is really good at switching back and forth between the Romneys and Preslars for Thanksgiving.  This year was a Romney year, but since everyone came for Stomper's baptism, and because both of my brothers had big events going on in their in-laws' families, we decided to not have a big ole' turkey dinner at home that Mom and I would cook all day and everyone would gobble up in 10 minutes.  (Pun intended.) Since it would just be our little Preslar gang plus my parents, we decided to try out a restaurant for our feast.  I had a little trouble finding a satisfactory location - it seemed like it was hard to find a middle ground.  It was either a $10 buffet at JB's or a $50 buffet at La Caille.  (Believe me, I'd love to try La Callie, but I'm not paying $27.50 per kid for them to each eat an ounce and a half of food, which is their average intake at any given meal, Thanksgiving or not.)  I think our choice still ended up being pretty pricey, but it was sure fun.  We picked....an Italian place!  Buca Di Beppo, to be exact.  They did have a turkey and stuffing platter, which we enjoyed, but we also started out with garlic bread and calamari, which my children devoured.  Even Bundle got a few tentacles in her mouth and worked on them for at least 15 minutes before handing me the remains.


Then an awesome salad, turkey and stuffing and potatoes of course, plus a veggie pizza and a plate of salmon!  (My kids: won't eat spaghetti, will eat anything from the ocean.  Weird.)  My sister joined the table just in time for pumpkin cannoli.


After dinner we headed over to the Gateway for a showing of Tangled.  Happily, we were joined by the Mayfield Clan of Bountiful and much to my shock and surprise, I was able to see almost all of the movie despite the fact that I was accompanied by an 18-month old child:


Bundle was as good as could be expected, though of course I was slightly frazzled by the end of the show.  Bundle had, naturally, produced a messy diaper, eaten popcorn and choked on it and thus puked on her shirt, tried to gather as much popcorn as she could from the theater floor, and veiwed the aisles as her own personal stair-master.  But hey, I caught the movie, so I'm not going to complain, possibly unlike a few families seated around us.

Saturday, November 27, 2010

Brill Cream Forever


There is nothing quite like watching your kid perform something on stage.  To most people, some random 2nd grade play is pretty yawn-inspiring.  But when it's your kid up there, it's just amazing to watch them come out of their shell and be so brave, say their cute little lines and maybe even sing a line or two.  Stomper's teacher is so awesome.  She put together an absolutely darling little show about Olde Time Radio - a radio show from the 1920's, complete with reproductions of actual commercials from the past.  Besides doing a little boxing and announcing Bing Crosby, Stomper did an add that was for Brill Cream:



One fun thing was that I have been keeping in my basement for as long as we've had the house (and in fact since I was a sophomore in high school,) a cool old oval hat box containing a real beaver-fur top hat. I inherited the hat from my Grandma Romney, who inherited it from her father, Leonard Cahoon.  I have never really known what to do with this hat, but I have loved having it around.  With many promises of ultimate care, I let Stomper wear it for the play.  It was a little nerve-wracking, both for me and the teacher, to have the silky black hat in the hands of an eight year old, but he took super good care of it and it was fun to see it on Stomper.  Too bad I didn't have a matching tuxedo in his size hanging around.  Maybe next year!

Wednesday, November 17, 2010

Can't Believe I'm Going to Post This

Sunday afternoon.  Dinner at a friend's house with my family.  Chatting happily with the grownups in the kitchen. Kids playing around the house.  Stomper and his buddy come running in and start babbling excitedly about....something...a computer game....not too sure what they're talking about because they're so excited.  Finally Stomper settles down and starts drawing a picture of the game.  He shows it to me.  "Oh, a superhero!" I say.  "Is that a P on his shirt?  Is that 'P' man?...?  Oh, you say that's 'Pee' Man?" Huh.  Maybe we'd better go check out this computer game.

Well, somehow Stomper and his buddy found a game on the computer that really is called Pee Man.  A little superhero flies through a city, collecting beverages from maidens hanging out their apartment windows. With every drink there's a little bladder at the top of the screen that fills with yellow fluid. More fluid equals more, uh, :pee power," I'll call it. Meanwhile, a giant poo-monster is attacking and your job is to pee on him.  I can not believe this game.  Stomper thought it was the most amazingly wonderful game ever.  Troy and I checked it out at home and pretty quickly decided it was a no-go for our family.  Not so educational or appropriate in any way.  Of course, Troy and I decided this after playing it for a good 15 minutes, giggling the whole time.  But we're not letting the kids near it.  I couldn't bring myself to dispose of the drawings that Stomper did of the game - so funny.  So not appropriate.  So going to put them in his "hang on to until the wedding breakfast" file.  Ah, high quality learning materials at your very fingertips!  (You know, with all of the trouble Bitty's had with the whole potty thing, maybe I should let her play....)


Tuesday, November 16, 2010

Big Weekend, Big Stomper

Last weekend was the last of our major weekends for a while (not including Thanksgiving and Christmas, which should really count but I don't feel like counting them so I'm NOT). What with birthdays, Halloween, and other events, life has been busy.  And the weekend topped it off.  In a good way, of course.

Stomper turned eight last month which means that he was able to get baptized.  It was such a neat weekend!  Both of my brothers were able to be in town - Adam from Los Angeles and Peter from St. George. It was so nice of them to come.  Plus Troy's family was as supportive as ever.  Well, since everyone in my family was around, we decided to have our Thanksgiving dinner early, seeing as how on the actual Day O' Turkey my siblings won't be here.  We did that on Friday night.  I'm sorry to say that the dinner was so hectic and crazy that almost no pictures were taken.  But there was yummy food and great company and it was so wonderful having everyone together.  On Friday I was at my folks' house when Adam and his kids arrived.  I borrowed the two older kids and took them with me to pick up my own kids from school.  It was so fun to surprise my kids with their cousins - and very gratifying because both Stomper and Bitty freaked out, jumped up and down, and embraced their cousin feircly.  Cousins are awesome.  So yeah, dinner on Friday night was bedlam.  But hey, that's how it goes when you get everyone together and we decided that we'd rather have bedlam than not.  Okay, we did manage to sneak in a few shots of the cousin/triplets:



Stomper's baptism was on Saturday, and I'm so very grateful to the many folks who worked hard to put it together.  Believe me, there were many.  And it was a lovely service. My brother Adam spoke as well as Troy's brother Rick.  What nice talks they shared. And I was so proud of Stomper.  It's kind of hard, I imagine, to be a young kid and have many many people pay you lots and lots of attention plus you're expected to act in a quiet, grown-up kind of way.  He did great. 

Monday, November 08, 2010

Excited After All

As we approached Stomper's eighth birthday, I began to dread the coinciding start of cub scouts.  Man, our weeks are already feeling so busy and I just didn't want to add one more thing that someone has to be to and has to be doing stuff for which I have to make them do.  But guess what.  Stomper has LOVED his first two scout activities, can't wait to start earning badges, and looks adorable in his cub uniform.  I guess I'm excited after all.