Christmas Eve

Finally in bed! after a busy day of horse drawn carriage rides and playing in the snow.

Light of my life

Or at least one of them. Emma is going to be in the Lights program at school, which is their gifted and talented system. We knew she was getting tested, and she came home today said she missed by two points so wouldn't be in it. She was a little disappointed, and then this evening the teacher called and said she had used the wrong scale for her thinking she was older than 8.

Hearsay from Emma says that disection of a sand shark (!) is part of things, but that may just be for the older kids, we're not sure yet. Anyway, go Emma!

Eliza sings the ABC's

I don't know why I've only posted Eliza videos. Perhaps because the older kids ham it up too much. Enjoy. BTW, she's barely 2!!!!!

We've decided child videos on the internet probably aren't a good idea, so it you would like to see this cute email, let me know and I'll email it to you.

One more thing

One standard is never good enough for anyone. Turns out RSS is the name of one kind of "feed." Apparently Blogger doesn't use RSS, it uses Atom. I don't know what the difference is. I don't think it matters. I was shocked after reading my last post to actually look at this blog and see that there was no link to our feed! It now on the side in my links and at the very bottom of the page too.

Let me know what you think of the new layout, too.

Update: Just looked at this under Internet Explorer and the sidebar is all messed up, pushed down to the bottom. I'll take a look at fixing it later. You should be using firefox anyway.

Confusion

Wow, one might think I was on drugs reading my last post. How embarrassing :). Let me try to clarify. RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication. It's basically a way for you to subscribe to a list of headlines from some website. Usually a column someone writes or a blog or a comic strip.

There are many different RSS readers out there. I recommended RSS Reader merely because it was the first Windows based tool that looked like Akregator (the Linux based tool I use). Basically, you look for the RSS feed icon, copy the link it goes to and put it in your reader. Then it will check the feed every so often and show you what new items have been posted.

Some of my favorite feeds are 101cookbooks (recipes I'll never make), the dilbert blog (he's annoyingly atheistic, but very humorous otherwise), lots of right-wing blogs (like hughhewitt.com and soundpolitics.com). Oh and each category on craigslist.org has its own RSS feed. I can't believe the number of dogs and cats that roll through the Free list (well, I guess I can considering our track record).

Hopefully I cleared at least something up. Oh, and maybe the last post will make a little more sense, though probably not. Here's a picture Emma made so you don't have go away empty handed.

Blogs, RSS, etc

I started to write this post to inform my family who might read this of what RSS is so they could set up an RSS reader and be able to see when I added more amazing new info. But then I started to worry about their free time.

I fired up KDE's Akregator several months ago to see what all the hype was about. I liked keeping up with http://planetkde.org and preferred it to my email digest of new stuff at slashdot. Soon, I started looking for other blogs I might care to read and found reddit.com, digg.com, oy! Sara made me stop sending her links. Now I've gotten into the blogosphere, instapundit, hugh hewitt, corruption chronicles, and more.

Not good for my daily internet overhead. But I can quit any time :). Anyhoo, http://www.rssreader.com/ seems to look a lot like Akregator (though if you're really brave, download Kubuntu and try out a real operating system).

Get me a shotgun for my birthday

I think I'm going to need it for this cutie. Oh, and I guess Google has started a beta of online web albums. I tried it out with some pictures of Abe and I at Disneyland. Check it out here. We'll probably add more later when we get around to it.

Blueberry Muffin Fever by Emma Matelich

Sose loves her parents. Sose loves blueberry muffins. Her parents let her eat blueberry muffins all of the time. She has blueberry muffin crumbs on pork chops, salmon, tunafish sandwiches, hotdogs, and last but not least, ice cream.

Sose had a twin sister named Dove. Dove is a good sis. She doesn’t pull Sose’s braids.

Sose started feeling funny. She went to the bathroom. She went to the mirror and screamed! Her eyes were blueberries. Plus her hair was blue and white. Her mom saw her and fainted. Could someone help them?

Sose grabbed Dove and ran as fast as she could. Sose and Dove ran to Gram and Gramps house. Gram took them to nurse Emma Matelich. Nurse Emma Matelich had never seen this kind of fever ever. She took them to the children’s center. A doctor came and greeted them and then he took them into a room. After they got in the room, he pulled one of Sose’s hairs.

“Ouch!” she said.

“Did that hurt?” asked the doctor.

“No, but I thought it would, “she said.

He said to one of his helpers, “Take this to the office.” He took it to the office and came back and said to the doctor, “That hair is blueberry muffin!” When he went out of the room, Sose ran out of the room and to her friend’s house. She got her friend’s mom, who drove her to a different country. Sose went to the store in Japan. The storekeeper saw her and told her she saw a girl that looked like her. Sose asked how she got cured. She learned this lesson: You have to have a little of everything, not a lot of one kind of food. And she ate mustard pills. When Sose woke up, she was the same as she used to be. And she was home.

For breakfast, she had waffles and salmon. She put salmon on her waffles. It tasted good. She wondered if there was such thing as salmon fever. What do you think?

April Flowers

I wish I could take credit for these, but they were planted by the previous owners. I really love this first one, its a huge plant growing over the edge of the wall next to our driveway with all these hundreds of purple flowers.



 

Open mouthed wonder

This is Sara, by the way. I can never rememeber how to sign in. Abe and the others were watching a Monsters, Inc story on the computer. They kind of lose themselves. PLus, we have all been sick. When I was at Disneyland with Emma, she had an ear infection, Eliza has strep, Abe has a the puky flu, and I have a horrid head cold. Can someone say SUMMER, PLEASE!!!! 

Instant sleep

Eliza was up a little late and was pretty grumpy. After a while she just tossed herself on the ottoman, kicked her legs a couple times and fell fast asleep.'

Here's a joke from Abe:
Knock Knock
Who's there?
Go Go
Go Go Who?
Go and go and goes and goes and goes and goes and goes and doesn't come back and... (something about texas and getting a knife and lots more goes, I lost track).

And Emma's favorite knock knock joke is:
Knock Knock
Who's there?
Ben and Don
Ben and Don who?
Ben there and Don that. 

Pretty princess

Eliza is one baby who loves dressing up. While this princess outfit was great, nothing beats finding a pair of Emma's underwear and pulling them over whatever she's wearing. Oh help us when she is old enough to find Sara's makeup (or Emma's in too few years, EEK!). 

Emma's first soccer game

Emma's first soccer game was a lot of fun, they may not have won, but Emma did really well. She played goalie for one period and had great hands, then she scored a goal the next period. Emma and Abe's friends Ian and Zachary were watching for a little while and Abe and Zack had a good time.

GOOOOO SOCCER ANGELS!!!!!
 

Fun with paints

Well, she's no Picaso, but Eliza sure gets in to her work! To save space, I edited out the part where she stuck the paint in her mouth, I'll make one with that later. So far, I'm liking Vimeo.com, I think I'll put some more vids up there later.

Update: new pedophilophobia policy. No videos of kids online. Email me if you want to see them

This was one happy piglet for about a second, then she needed the costume off like now and when she disgustly threw it aside after peeling it off, she pulled her diaper off for good measure. Take that, diaper that botherith me! BE gone with you! 

The picture speaks volumes

Eliza eats a little and then if there is any left and it is in a semi liquid form, she ALWAYS puts it in her hair. Only with the right hand and then puts one or two fingers, depending on the mood, up a nostril. 

How blessed am I?

Here are recent photos of my 3 cuties. I can't believe how lucky I am too have such a great family. Emma's starting a short swimming class tomorrow, she can't wait to get back in the water. Abe's doing a preschool soccer league, had his first practice/game yesterday. Truly hilarious, too bad I forgot my digital camera. As you can see Eliza is still a doll. She has enough hair for some pigtails. She actually kept them in for about half an hour.

Stop the insanity

Of course I'm not clever or motivated enough to make the previous posts, they're from Sara. Well, to avoid confusing our huge fanbase, I've made a separate account for Sara so when she posts things it will say its from her. Aren't you relieved?

And while I know you're dying to know what IHOM stands for, I'm afraid you'll have to keep guessing.

THE AMAZING RACE

Okay, some of you dont watch as much TV as others. Make sure to tune in when we are on the Amazing Race. We have sent in our application and video. This is one of the photos we sent. It's sooo wonderful and witty, we know we'll be chosen. You wish we were joking. Emily is ready to send out postcards to the city of Moscow. This is bringin out a whole new side of us, esp my reserved, oh so quiet and smart, sister. Yeah right. 

Blinky

This picture looks like a mistake. However-she love to be weird and blink for a really long time. She finds herself quite humerous like her mother. I mean, how her mother finds herself...the actual fact is being debated. I am cute and clever for sure. 2 b 2 cute 4 ever is difficult, but attainable.