One Dad's Life

The "Official" Easter 2012 Portrait!

And without further ado, here is our "official" Easter 2012 Portrait of the kids!

And, yes, every year I take pictures of our kids in front of the same floral arrangement at our church! 

This year, I've been doing a 52-week photo challenge with some people on flickr and either my skills are increasing, or at least I'm noticing my flaws, because now that it's done I'm seeing a lot of problems with this shot!

In any case, that is Rachel on the left at age 10 and Rebecca on the right at age 16 and driving! (PT Cruiser, stick shift!)

Wordless Thursday - Wait a Minute. Is That a Gingerbread House?

Yeah, I know. It's now WAY past Christmas, and our decorations are all down, but this gingerbread house remains.  We always keep these one-of-a-kind custom creations until spring. Then the raccoons and possums get them.  It would actually be edible, though, as we keep it under a custom made plexi-glass case to keep OUR critters away from the gingerbread house each year.  Click on the picture for a slightly larger version.

For all the regular readers of One Dad's Life, I appreciate your patience.  Don't worry. It's not going away. Too many demands on my time right now.  And, yeah, I thought it was still Wednesday. Oops.

And the Winner Is...

Boy does it feel good to win!  No matter how altruistic you are, you simply can't deny that rush of adrenaline that you get when you win a competition, contest, or even something good from the bottle cap on that soda!  I'm STILL disappointed that I didn't get one of those Dr. Pepper Camaros, though.

So, this past weekend, I won in a BIG way!

Our Christmas lights were up the longest in our neighborhood.  There was a close contest between us, and our next door neighbor, but they finally relented on Friday afternoon.  Ours came down on Saturday. It doesn't even really matter to me that they most likely were not aware of the contest.  I see that fact as being largely irrelevant.

Life is good.

In fact, some of my most exciting victories have come when the other contestants didn't even know they were contestants!   For example, my wife and I frequently find ourselves at the same location with two cars.  If we are going to the same next location, usually home, the race is on!  I don't think it really matters if she is informed about the race, or not.  If I have one of my daughters in the car, it can be even more exciting.  They can get worked into a fever pitch over the contest.  Well, at least my youngest daughter.  My oldest daughter now expresses her enthusiasm for my contests against people who aren't aware they are in competition with me with the following statement:

"That's nice, Dad." (returns to texting).

I hear that a lot, come to think about it. I don't let her apparent lack of enthusiasm dampen my spirits, though. I know she is doing back flips in her mind.  Contests that provide a similar thrill for me include the checkout line races.  This is where you try to determine which checkout line is the faster.  I can't play this game with my wife, though.  Despite her many talents, picking a line is not one of them. In fact, she is terrible at it.

It's still a big thrill when I make a mental note of who I would have been behind in all the other lines.  If I get through MY line first, I WIN!  Oh, the fun you can have.

Well, I've got to go. I'm in a heated contest with my daughter to see who can stay in their pajamas longer.  This is more challenging, as even if she is told to "get dressed" a hundred-billion times, she can still resist.

She's tough. Very tough.

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Epilogue: Before you get the idea that we are one of THOSE families that leaves their lights up until May, we are not! Our tradition is to take them down when our church celebrates Epiphany.  Generally, this falls AFTER the actual date of Epiphany (the 12th day of Christmas - when the Christian church celebrates the arrival of the magi - effectively the introduction of Jesus to the gentile world). However, this year, we celebrated this in church BEFORE the actual date of Epiphany.  Well, we couldn't take down decorations (inside or out) before that, so we agreed we'd take them down the next weekend.  We DID this on the interior decorations, but the outdoor ones were encased in ICE.  ICE.  Those little wires are brittle enough when they aren't frozen, so I waited until temps got above freezing.  I decided to keep the lights ON, during this time, which my oldest told me was "tacky."  Bleh to her.  She's doing back flips on the inside, I'm sure.

Semi-Wordless Wednesday - Going, Going, Gone.

I know that it is well after the Christmas season for most people, but we just got to the end of our indoor decorations yesterday. The outside decorations are still largely encased in ice and are staying right where they are until the thaw that is coming over the next couple of days.

When I realized the time was short for our decorations, I rushed around the house taking pictures.  I think our house pretty much looks like something you'd see in a magazine or movie during Christmas, thanks to my wife, and I wanted to capture that look for posterity.  Unfortunately, "rushed" is the key word and very few of the low-light pictures are acceptable for publication.  Here are a few I liked enough to share.

This Santa is one of perhaps two dozen in the house.  This particular one is on a vanity in our bedroom. That's right, even our bedroom is decorated like crazy! The gingerbread house in the background was made by my wife, daughters, and mom.  They make at least one every single year. Each is unique.  My wife, Dianne, designs the pattern and makes the walls, the kids decorate, my mom provides a workshop, helping hands, and many candies!  One year, they did a model of the Kirkwood train station.  We keep the gingerbread house all winter and then give it to the possums and raccoons in the yard.  Expect to see pictures of this later.

There nothing too special about this picture, other than this is what I was looking at as I ate dinner the other night.  I grabbed the camera and snapped the picture!  My dirty plate and wine glass was just in front of this.  The blue lights in the background are reflections of some of the outdoor lights in our china cabinet.  It's a real live poinsettia!

 

If there is anything we have more of than Santas, it is Nativity sets.  This is as it should be, since Christmas is ALL about the gift of God's son. Like the Santas, we don't even put them all up each year.  They are rotated from year to year.  This one, however, ALWAYS gets put up. It belonged to my grandparents and is a match to one my parents have...so it is like I grew up with it!  One of the wise men were broken at some point. I need to repair it, but I'm not exactly sure where it is, which upsets me.

I also didn't realize until last night how really poor this picture was, but I really wanted to post one of this Nativity set, and now it is taken down!  So, I did what I could with it, and here it is!  And yes, we have little lights and lighted garland EVERYWHERE in the house during Christmas.  It's a Christmas wonderland!

So, just a couple of pictures, but definitely representative of the beauty you'd find in our house at Christmas!

Wordless Wednesday - Bye, Bye, Santa!

Well, today is the official last day of Christmas, being Epiphany, so although ol' Saint Nick has turned into a secular character for most, I thought it would be appropriate to show him leaving town for the season!  By the way, in some cultures Christmas is celebrated today!

Taken at this year's "Gardenland Express" exhibit at the Missouri Botanical Garden.  My entire extended family goes to this every year, right after Christmas...usually the day after.

Here's the details: Nikon D60, Auto-mode, flash off.  (Camera selected f5.6, 1/30 s, ISO 500).  I tracked the motion of the train as I took the picture, which is how Santa is sharp and everything around him is progressively blurred. Click on the picture for a bigger view!

Oh, by the way, even though Christmas is over, I still reserve the right to post more about this Christmas.

Wordless Wednesday - Christmas Tree 2009

Boy, the "One Dad's Life" complaint department has been working overtime, fielding complaints of there not being enough updates here.  The problem is the "One Dad's Life" complaint department fields, seemingly, 72% of ALL of the complaints in the St. Louis area, and since the complaint department is really just me, I haven't had much time for blogging.

So, it's Christmas time (still) and I've totally missed out on all the great Christmas posts I could have written.  As a token, I give you our Christmas Tree, 2009 edition.  It looks a LOT like the 2008 edition, unless you look really close.

I was in my office wrapping a set of Wizard the Oz PEZ dispensers I was giving my wife, when I heard a sleigh bell, a meow, a small "thunk", and my dog jumping up on the couch to look out the window.  Then the noise was over in a flash!  Well, I grabbed my camera and ran upstairs, hoping to catch Santa in the act. 

Let me tell you, that guy is FAST.

The cookies were mostly eaten, the egg nog was empty (and the glass knocked over - from the cat, obviously), but nothing had spilled out since the glass had been DRAINED.  There was also a note to my youngest daughter, answering some questions she had for Santa, and two new Hogwarts Gryffindor scarves left for my daughters.

Missed him AGAIN!

Anyway, here's what the tree looked like!

Wordless Wednesday - Colorful Cookies!

Today's wordless (or as wordless as I usually get) post is from the same cookie baking tradition I discussed here and here.  The cookies in the first picture are actually called "Colorful Cookies."  I can't remember the name of the second cookies; we made them for the first time this year.  Our emphasis in 2009 was "pretty."  I think these fit!

Nikon D60, 18-55mm, f3.5-5.6 kit lens, SB-600 flash.

 

Christmas Traditions - Cookie Baking Day 2009

I almost hesitate to write this post, as not too much changes from year to year!  So, if you want to get the low-down on Cookie Baking Day, click here. In summary, the whole "Cookie Baking Day" starting the year my Grandpa Luecker died.  It started out as a way to give my grandma something to do during the Thanksgiving Holiday and she LOVED to bake.  Who knew it would turn into a huge tradition for us!?  Grandma died a number of years ago, when Rachel was a baby, but the rest of us are keeping with the tradition.

Every year, we load up our car with cookie dough, cooling racks, cookie trays, and other accessories and head to my parents' house the Saturday after thanksgiving for the big event. What's interesting each year is how everyone changes and shifts into different jobs.  Cookie baking day started when I was a kid, living at home.  Now MY kids are involved.  I remember how strange it was the first year we had Rebecca up in her high chair to bake the cookies.  She was 11 months old (Christmas baby!)  My mom made matching aprons for all of the participants in cookie baking day, and finally this year (due to all the grandchildren and the fact that they continue to GROW) she ran out of the original material for the aprons and had to make a new style of apron for the youngest.

Rebecca has now graduated to what will be her permanent adult apron.  At 13 years old, she has been a big help the last couple of years making icing for cookies, in addition to the normal decorating tasks.  This year, she even made cookie dough for us!

Rachel, at eight years old, also loves to cook. We've been surprised in the morning by fresh muffins from this kid!  She also loves to make cookies and all other manner of things, and is even adept at breaking eggs without getting shell fragments in the bowl.  This year, she took over some of the rolling tasks and cutting out the cookies and did an excellent job!

The last several years, Dianne and I have decided that while we LOVE making the cookies (and love eating them...too much) we really didn't care for the step where we divide them all up.  So, we let the kids fill up a couple of containers of cookies and then we donate the rest to our church's cookie walk.  Sometimes, we even buy back some of our own cookies!  Since so many of the cookies head to the cookie walk, this year we made the conscious decision to just make the more colorful and pretty cookies.  This unfortunately eliminates some favorites like chocolate chip, oatmeal cookies, and rocks, but the cookies we ended up with WERE beautiful.

I've intentionally concentrated on MY little family in this post, to try and keep it a reasonable length, but the total participants included my family, my mom, my sister and her son and daughter, and my brother-in-law.  Each family brings 3-4 batches of cookie dough and we work ALL DAY.  Each batch is a double or triple batch, too!  Here's this years photo of the participants.  Look at us all styling in our aprons!

This photo was taken AFTER the cookies were all baked, and we're still smiling!  After we ate a nice soup dinner, most of the people cleaned up the dishes and bowls and decorating supplies and packed them away for next year.  Dianne and I spent some quality time decorating dozens of little gingerbread boys and girls.  By the way, using a pastry bag is the ONLY way to do these things.  They are so easy to use!

So that's it for cookie baking day, 2009 style. Clearly, this is one of our big family Christmas traditions.  Hopefully all of our kids will keep this going when we are no longer here and OUR aprons are neatly folded on the table.

Halloween 2009

As any self-respecting parent blogger with children still at home will tell you - there is a unspoken law somewhere that I'm sure clearly states that all parent bloggers MUST post their darling children in each year's Halloween costumes.  I'm not about to break the law, so here's my post! Check it off my "to-do" list. 

As I'm certain that the only people interested in all of the pictures to come are either relatives, close friends, or possibly long-time "One Dad's Life" readers who are in no way creepy stalkers, despite disturbing statistics to the contrary, I'm going to get right to it and skip the rest of my normally clever prose!

Since Halloween was on a Saturday this year, I actually got to be around for the preparations instead of fighting traffic on the highway!  So, I sat on our front porch, enjoying the wonderful fall weather with the three pumpkins we purchased at Eckert's last week, cut the tops off, and scooped out all the seeds and other assorted pumpkin innards.  Then I turned over the pumpkins to the kids to carve their scary faces in...or if that was too hard to make more traditional pumpkins.

I joke.  They never intended to carve their own faces into the pumpkins!

First we have little Rachel, who at eight years old figures she can do pretty much anything by herself and how she wants!  I figured what kind of trouble could an eight year old get into with a sharp knife and a giant squash that weighs nearly as much as her?  So, naturally, I gave her the knife (or more accurately - wasn't about to try and disarm her) and let her go.  She sketched out her idea for a jack-o-lantern face on a piece of paper, then enthusiastically stabbed the fleshy gourd.  Remind me to hide the knives when I'm done typing this, won't you?

 

 

While Rachel was going crazy with sharp objects in the kitchen, Rebecca had successfully enslaved my wife, Dianne, and had forced the captured Dianne to work on her hair.  As a performing kind of family, dressing up in costumes is NOT a task to be taken lightly.  Hair and makeup had to be done!

BTW, sharp-eyed readers will note that the normally blond and short-haired Rachel now had long BROWN hair. That's right, Dianne died her hair AND wove long braids into the newly browned hair.  This all happened before Rebecca had captured Dianne and Rachel had gone on her knife-wielding, pumpkin carving spree.

Then the newly coiffed Rebecca had her turn carving up a pumpkin.  Check out that concentration!

I even got a chance to carve a pumpkin all by myself, due to the whole Saturday thing! Yeah me!  No one took pictures.

No doubt by now you are DYING to know what their costumes were, right?  Well, wonder no more, dear reader!  Here they are, posing in my sisters living room:

  

Rebecca, on left, is "Alice in Wonderland" and Rachel is "Laura Ingalls."  Authentic, no?  Dianne made the "Alice in Wonderland" costume, and my mom made the Laura Ingalls prairie dress for Rachel.  The bonnet was a souvenir Rachel bought on a trip my parents took both kids on last year - a trip to all the important "Little House on the Prairie" and "Laura Ingalls" sites.  Cool, huh?  There's no way we're going to get suckered into expensive and sub-par store-bought costumes, no matter how long it takes or whatever the cost! No, not us.

Here's both of the little darlings together along with a matching doll for Rachel:

Each year, we head to my sisters neighborhood, which just goes crazy for Halloween, to do our trick-or-treating. It also gives us a chance to show off our Halloween themed food (forgot to take pictures! Here's a link to some of  last year's food) and gives the kids a chance to trick-or-treat with their cousins. This year, however, Rebecca ran off to her friend's house for a party with her classmates and didn't actually trick-or-treat with us.  Wah!

We even brought our freshly carved jack-o-lanterns to my sisters and added them to the collection on the porch. Here's what they all looked like:

        

From left to right are Rebecca's, Rachel's, and finally mine.  I stole my pumpkin's eyes from a book. My daughter's are ALL original!

While Rachel was out trick or treating with one of her friends from school and her cousins, she ALSO ran into ANOTHER friend from school!  Here they are in all their over-the-top glory.

It was totally Rachel's idea to bring a basket to put her candy in instead of using a plastic pumpkin.  Apparently, the plastic pumpkin just wasn't the right way to collect candy for a Laura Ingalls costume! Details make all the difference, people, details.

And now, as a special treat for all my dedicated readers, I shall present MY Halloween costume.  However, since I'm the one that normally takes the pictures on our family outings, there really wasn't any way to get a shot of me...plus I didn't actually HAVE a costume.  So, instead, we go now to my alternate reality in the peaceful little town of "Rosebud."  In all the important ways, "Rosebud", in Nintendo's "Animal Crossing: City Folk", is exactly the same as my so-called "real" life...right down to being surrounded by talking animals! (insert your own joke here).

So there I am in my pumpkin head and patched shirt, standing next to the fountain I donated to the town 'cause I'm rich.  And, yeah, I'm rich like that in real life, too. The parallels are just astounding!

My daughter's put up the "Hey, Dad!" flag while I was in China as a surprise for me.  Wasn't that sweet?

And that's it! Halloween 2009.  I hope you enjoyed this little journey in self-indulgence, because basically that's what having a blog is all about, so just deal with it people.  Creepy stalkers included.

Happy Mother's Day!

Happy Mother's Day to all of the regular moms that read "One Dad's Life!" and even the occasional mom reader.  I'm not trying to exclude anyone, but if you are a REGULAR mom reader - like you check in at least a couple of times a week - there are certain benefits, including a heavy discount on your reading fees.  Awesome, right?  Consider becoming a regular reader if you aren't already!  Despite my thoughts that if I wrote a blog called "One Dad's Life", that naturally dads would just congregate here, it turns out that probably 90% of the readers are MOMS. 

So, I'm not very good at that whole marketing thing, because had I done some focus groups and such, there might need to be articles on "What Shoes are In this Year?" or "What Is My Husband Thinking?" and "What Can I do with All of This Zucchini?" based on my actual readership.  I probably lost a lot of guy readers, looking back, when I wrote about my car catching on fire and I just kept driving.  I don't know much about cars.  Of course, I could be wrong on how to appeal to my demographic, as I clearly don't understand marketing.

I also know that some of my readers are from other countries, and may not know exactly what Mother's Day is, as it is not celebrated all over the world.   In the United States, Mother's Day is the day that all our mothers were born on! So, Happy Birthday moms!  I've never exactly understood how this works out, but apparently, all the female babies born this Sunday (May 10th, 2009) will be the mothers, eventually.   If you weren't born on Mother's Day, the actual date changing just a bit every year because it always falls on Sunday, then either you won't be a mother or you will have to fill out some special paperwork to allow it to happen.  I think there is also a fee.

To me, this is one of those little mysteries of life, how all the moms could be born on this one single day each year and....oh, wait just a minute, my on-staff consultants apparently DESPERATELY want to have a word with me.  I don't know why it can't wait, but they won't stop bothering me. 

Perhaps something is on fire.  I should talk to them. Hold please.

Well, ok, heh.  The strangest thing.  Apparently, I may have somehow got a few facts scrambled somewhere along the line.  I'm not sure exactly how this happened, but I blame my education for failing me. I do.

It would seem that it is not actually the day of the year when all the eventual mothers will be born.  I'm not sure about the paperwork and stuff, yet.  In a way, thought, this makes more sense because I always thought that it was strange that Hallmark had so many BIRTHDAY cards for mom AND Mother's Day cards.  I thought they were just trying to double charge us...sucker born every minute and all.

Well, this is embarrassing. 

Anyway, Happy Mother's Day to all the moms out there from the staff here at "One Dad's Life"...even if it isn't also your birthday!  Thanks for reading "One Dad's Life" and making this so much fun!