What we're watching...

Part of our philosophy regarding music is basically that we refuse to listen to the Wiggles, the BackYardigans, Barney, Disney or anything remotely juvenille in the car. At home, fine, but when we can't get away from it, like in the car, adult music, please. Laurie Berkner made a brief appearance in the car when it was just me and E and not Howie. The boys had a CD by "They Might be Giants" that was made for kids, but technically they're an adult band, right?
Therefore, the kids have gotten a lot of exposure to the Beatles, Elvis, BNL, artists that are catchy, kid friendly, and bearable for those of us over the age of 7.
Enter YouTube. This site has enabled me to find anything that I want to expose the kids to. I can pull together references to music that they understand. Elvis singing "Burning Love" on the soundtrack of "Lilo and Stitch"? Found the real video clip. H making fun of Micheal Jackson? ( FYI in the fourth grade in 2008, comparing someone to the King of Pop is the ultimate putdown.) I found the whole video of "Thriller" and "Billie Jean", trying to prove that at one time MJ was the epitome of cool, a little cheesy, but still cool. Any Dan Zanes video E wants to watch is on YouTube.

Here are two of her favorites at the moment. The one of Mika we found because one of the contestents on American Idol sang part of the song, and I liked it, the other was on some MTV countdown the otherday. I suppose if I was twenty, I would know all about these artists, but I don't, I just know the songs are cool and E comes running whenever I put them on.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPUpxIBkcjM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SGTDRztaCCw

Basketball Pictures

H's last game. The picture is fuzzy because I used the zoom on my camera, which never works right.

M and couple of his teammates from the neighborhood. Notice H in the background. I am so proud.

The great end of the season celebration.....mmmmm...Cheez-its and Capri-Sun. What more could you want?

Would the real "Guitar Hero" please stand up?

So after weeks and weeks of waiting...( OK just three days, and we tracked the thing on the UPS website ), the real guitar made it to our house safe and sound. Someone please call me crazy. It has an AMPLIFIER. Of course, H being H, is completely convinced that he already knows how to play. Every 5 minutes he his calling me down to hear some awesome chord or riff that he magically figured out. Do you remember the scene in "Back to the Future" when Marty McFly is disappearing at the dance and is still trying to play "Johnny be Good"? Yeah, sounds kind of like that. I pray for his new teacher.


By the way, Happy Valentine's Day. Here they are waiting for the bus this morning. E is holding a Baby Beanie Baby she got. It's a pink sparkly unicorn named Frilly, which she insists on calling Emma. Go figure.

Old Kitchen/New Kitchen

Here is our revised kitchen remodel. The first picture was taken with our old camera, so it's blurry. The second 2 were taken after the new paint, hardware, and curtains. I think it's hard to tell it looks better because it's empty.

Little Susie Homemaker

No school today because of the -10 degree temperature and black ice on the road. E and I were bored and made a blueberry pie for Howie. When I was little we used to make "pinwheels" out of the leftover crust. Butter, sugar, cinnamon onto the rolled up crust, cut up and bake right along with the pie. (Really, really healthy.) So that's what I was going to do with her, but she was having so much fun just playing in it that I just let her go. She's still playing as I type this, and I just avert my eyes from the flour covered floor and rug. The apron my mom made for her at Christmas. I have a matching one, but she looks much cuter in hers.

As far as the other kitchen goes, we decided that we better have the furnace inspected before we go tearing the kitchen apart so that we weren't in for any suprises. Well SUPRISE!! We need a new furnace. Some nonsense about cracks in 2 of the 5 heat exchangers and carbon monoxide being dangerous and blah blah blah ;). I watched the guy basically do a colonoscopy on the furnace, and I saw the cracks through his little camera, so I am glad that we found out now rather than at an inspection. So needless to say gutting the kitchen is on indefinite hold.

While the furnace guy was at house, I had to leave for 15 minutes to go get E from school. When I came back, as I drove over the little hill leading to our house, I spotted a Sherrif's Deputy Vehicle in my driveway. In probably 5 milliseconds time thoughts ran through my head like " The furnace guy has a deputy that's a friend",
" The furnace guy found illegal drugs in my house from before we moved there." ,
" It's illegal to have cracked heat exchangers and he called the cops". I couldn't possibly make my brain rationalize what the heck a cop was doing in my empty house. So after the 5 milliseconds, I pulled up to the curb and greeted the nice lady cop. ( Can I say lady cop? Is that like stewardess or actress anymore? ) Anyhow, she wanted to know if I knew a Howard Brown. Instant panic. Yes I know a Howard Brown. Is he dead? Injured? In trouble for the illegal drugs the furnace guy found? None of the above. She wanted to know if he owned a red Dodge Shadow with front end damage parked on a street called Shady Creek. Um, no. Now I myself know 3 other Jen Browns, so I figured that they had the wrong Howard Brown. So she emphasized that she was looking for a Howard W. Brown II. Not so many of those around, just my husband, as far as I know. But we have never owned a Dodge Shadow. ( Those of you that know Howie know he would rather ride a bike to work than own a Dodge.) My brain is still working overtime as I'm talking to this cop. We did own a red Acura Integra that was hit by a drunk driver early last year. It was parked in front of our house and totaled. We got a salvage title and sold it to a guy who works at the local Honda dealership. He was going to use it for parts. So the cop called over on her little walkie-talkie on her shoulder to see if it was an Integra. Which it was. With the plate "6ntwins", which were our old plates from a Toyota Supra he had that he slapped on the Integra and forgot to take off when he sold it. So this guy had pushed it out in front of his house to make room in his driveway for a party. Some neighbor complained that it was just sitting there, and they ran the plates, which came back to us. This is tax money at work, let me tell you. Scaring the crap out of me because of a damaged car parked in the street. I got ahold of the guy at the dealership, who was very apologetic and promised he would move the car. Otherwise it was our responsibility to take care of it in 24 hours. Moral of the story, if you sell a car, make sure you take your plates with you. Otherwise you might end up on the next episode of "Cops".

What we're up to....

Not much. I think we are in a Post-Holiday, Post-Move funk. Howie took a week of vacation last week, so we bummed a couple of days, took a trip to Ann Arbor, and at the advice of my Realtor painted the OLD kitchen..( you know, in the house that has been for sale for 10 months). Really not what I wanted to be doing while he was home, and certainly not what HE wanted to do while he was home, so he didn't, my mom and I did. Wednesday I stripped wall paper all afternoon, then God bless my mom, she got the paint for me and we painted until the wee hours of the morning, which for me is like 9:30 PM. It looks much better, but I opened the proverbial can of worms, ( I think that's the right metaphor?) New paint made the old cabinets look older, we couldn't re-surface the cabinets or put updated hardware on without messing with the hinges, which were falling off and probably couldn't be put back on. The floor looked worse, the molding looked worse, so the next logical step is to tear it all out and have someone put in new, right? Well anyway, that's what we are doing, hoping it will entice someone to buy the house, since everything we have done to date obviously hasn't worked. I will post before and after pics if I get a chance.
Otherwise, the boys are finishing up basketball, and we are in the middle of swimming lessons. We are seriously thinking about guitar lessons for H once basketball is over. Neither Howie or I are terribly musically inclined, ( although I was in the band.. he just played football.) So I think that if he shows some interest in anything that makes him more well rounded, bring it on... I'm not thinking that basketball is his thing, anyhow. Their last game they lost 64-0.

E and I have been working on sewing clothes for her Bitty Baby. I hope some day she loves and cherishes these because right now, she says she doesn't like them as she rips them off. Her baby's name is Jacob, after the little boy down the street. ( Her fish is named Emma, after Jacob's sister). Maybe I should be making little boy clothes, or at least gender neutral. Silly Me

Explanation

For whatever reason the pictures below aren't posting to this site correctly and I can't get words to show up in the same post, so I am writing here. I didn't have batteries in my camera forever, and was forced to get some today because of H's birthday party, so I can finally post Christmas pictures too. #1 is E's Christmas program in which she refused to sing. #2 is our tree. I had no intention of getting a new tree this year, but somebody Howie works with moved, and could no longer use this one. We did a tree swap, and I thought the results were great. #3 is E after a difficult morning of opening Christmas presents. She is sitting here with her favorite, the My Little Pony Surf Shop. ( Didn't you all know that Ponies surf and snorkle? One of the Ponies has flippers and a snorkle, for gosh sake.) Something must be universal about combing their manes and tails, because she spends hours with these ponies doing just that. The other big hit this year was the aformentioned Guitar Hero. (I hear the song "Schools Out for the Summer" in my sleep). The last two pictures are of H's party tonight, he had a couple of boys stay over night after family left, so they are mostly pics of those boys and some of their little brothers, but also of my cousin Danielle, who is back living here from sunny Florida, despite the -7 degree weather. She's a trooper !