Can't Help But Laugh

I can't help but crack up every time I hear Asa's new ringtone. Mackenzie used some text-to-speech converter on the internet and then recorded it and downloaded it onto her phone as a bit of a joke. But she loved it and has kept it as her ringtone.

Now when someone calls, her phone says "Hi, this is Asa. I cannot come to the phone right now because I have lost it somewhere and I am dancing and singing in my room."

Why does it make us all laugh so hard? Because it's absolutely true!

Overheard: Sure Proof That I Have a Tween and a Teen

Teenage Boy wants me to purchase ultra-cool Halloween costume that includes mask with recirculating fake blood that drips down the front, a voicebox that turns his voice into a ghoulish creepy voice, and a gory fake axe. This exceeds my budget so he pulls the following out of his arsenal:

"Mooooommmmmm, it's probably the LAST time I'll EVER go trick or treating. Since I'm GROWING UP and all."

Sniffle. Sniffle. He knows how to play on my last little nostalgic mommy nerve, doesn't he?? The last time he goes trick or treating? How can that be? Of course I can't refuse him the costume of his dreams. Of course not.

And this was overheard from the backseat of the car while driving Tweenage Girl to dance class.

Back story: It's "Spirit Week" at her dance studio. Which means every day is something different, like Pajama Day, and Crazy Sock Day. Kind of like Spirit Week in Middle School, except without all of the anxiety of whether or not other people will actually wear their pajamas or whether you'll be the only one and the bullies will beat you up and call you a freaky nerd for actually believing in spirit week. Or whether you won't wear your pajamas, but then all of the popular people will, and so you'll be an idiot for not wearing them. Thus the only safe option is to wear normal clothes but bring your pajamas in a paper bag just in case you should put them on.

But I digress. Spirit week at the dance studio is fun because all of the girls who go there are super-enthusiastic types who just love this stuff. Thus my Tween was calling on the way to class, talking to another girl who was also on her cell phone, about to leave for class. Asa's side of the conversation went thusly:

"Okay, I'll tell you what I'm wearing. But you've got to PROMISE me that you won't steal my style, okay? No, I won't tell you unless you promise. Uh, I'm sure. 'Cuz mine is really cool and I don't want to wear the same thing. Okay, you won't steal it? Okay. I'm wearing one long stripey sock and one short sock that's green with little scotty dogs on it...." (lengthy description of every minute detail of clothing ommitted for brevity).

Yep. I'm the mom to a Teen and a Tween. Entering entirely new universe now. I hope I have a road map, or a star map, or something to guide me...

Time Machine Pranks and Other Random Conversations

One of my favorite times with the kids is when we get to walk someplace together and just talk. No distractions, just hearing what's on their minds. When they were little, it was about puddles or frogs or their new umbrella, very concrete stuff. As they get older, it gets more abstract: plans for the future, questions about bigger topics, musings on life and the universe.

One day on a walk with Mackenzie, we started discussing what sorts of pranks we would play if we had a time machine. Here was our top few:

1) Arrive on the summit of Mt. Everest slightly before Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay. Have already planted a flag and be lounging around eating a sandwich. Casually say "Oh hey guys, what are you doing up here?"

2) Hide on the moon just before Neil Armstrong steps out. Just as he's reciting the whole "One small step for man" speech, jump out wearing a green alien costume.

3) Build a hotel at the site where Columbus will land. Serve him a margarita with a fancy umbrella

4) Become the seer that tells Julius Caesar "Beware the Ides of March". Then we could get stuck in a time paradox where we would have to continually go back in time in order for that to occur in order for history to be correct in order for us to be born in order to travel back in time...

5) Alternately, show up and tell Julius Caesar "Beware St. Patrick's Day"

Yes, this is what we spend our time doing...

Happy National Waffle Day

This week on August 24th, Mackenzie informed me it was National Waffle Day and therefore he absolutely HAD to eat large piles of waffles. Of course, this kid would use any excuse to eat large piles of waffles, but this was a good one. In the U.S., National Waffle Day is the anniversary of the first U.S. patent for a waffle iron. Cornelius Swarthout of Troy, New York received his patent for a "device to bake waffles" in 1869. 

Mackenzie can, and has in fact easily put away four waffles at a sitting. I make a huge recipe up at one time, modifying my basic Betty Crocker recipe by substituting coconut flour, almond meal, flax meal, and hemp seeds for about half of the flour. Then I bake waffles for an hour or two, and put whatever he doesn't eat into the freezer in gallon freezer bags. That way at least he's got a several day supply of frozen waffles for whenever he needs some. They're far healthier and more cost-efficient than the Eggo-style waffles, but they're just as easy once they're made up and frozen.

If those don't sound appealing, here's a great listing of over 100 waffle recipes, including bacon cheddar waffles, blue corn waffles, and Belgian coconut waffles. Sounds like I might need to try some of these out and get creative!

After I watched my once-sturdy, now-skinny almost 14 year old (2 days and counting!) devour platefuls of waffles, I logged onto Facebook to find that friend Laura posted this adorable photo of our two kiddos at about age three. As you can see, Mackenzie's pastime of food obsession has a long history. But man, isn't this the cutest picture ever? It's hard to believe they're both teenagers now.

I'll have to end this food-based post with a funny quote from Mackenzie. We were in the store the other day and he asked me to buy him two corn dogs. After handing him the corn dogs, I turned back to the cashier to pay for them. 30 seconds later I turned back to Mackenzie to see his hands completely empty. "Where did you put the corn dogs?" I asked, thinking he had set them down on the counter.

"Well," he replied "I was holding them in my hand. Then I heard this suctioning noise, and when I looked down there was a corndog-shaped hole in the universe where they'd been a moment before."

"Ah," I said, "was that suctioning noise perhaps you inhaling two corndogs?"

"That's within the realms of possibility" he admitted.

Life with a teenage boy. Never a dull moment, and never enough money for food!

Time Machine Pranks and Hijinks

While Mackenzie and I were on the road this weekend, we had a long discussion about the best pranks to pull if you had a time machine. Here were our top three:


3. Dress as a Native American and when Lewis and Clark come to your village, helpfully show them a large full-scale modern topographic map of America, conveniently printed on Tyvek that they can take with them.


2. Be sitting at the top of Mt. Everest munching on a PB&J when Sir Edmund Hilary and Tenzing Norgay arrive. Bonus points for having planted the flag of some tiny country like Liechtenstein  prominently on the summit ahead of time.


3. After Neil Armstrong utters his famous "One small step for man..." speech, jump out from a crater wearing a green bug-eyed alien suit.

Proud Geek Mom

This week as I was coming home from working, Mackenzie came bounding out of the house to greet me with a big smile. I knew something momentous had happened that he was just busting to tell me about and sure enough he came out with it just as I climbed out of the car...

"Mom, they fired up the Large Hadron Collider today! And it didn't even create an earth-swallowing black hole!"

Yeah, that's my boy :)

The quote I like best from the live coverage of the collider was this one:

11.28am: Hilarious. A Cern physicist has just been talking about creating black holes. He worked out that to make a black hole, you need to compress 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 protons into the space of a billionth of a millionth of a millimetre. That number of protons would make up three times the population of Geneva. Apparently.

This from Brian Cox on Twitter:

"If anyone else says "black hole" today I'm going to come round and chin em".

Although there's lots of great sci-geek info tucked into the commentary, like this:

"What would the effect on living tissue (other than the assumed cold) of these high-energy beams be?"

A good question.

In the mid-70s, a Russian physicist called Anatoli Bugorski was checking a faulty accelerator when the proton beam came on and hit his head. He says he saw a bright flash "brighter than a thousand suns".

His face swelled up and skin started falling off. He lost some hearing but otherwise his brain remained in quite decent shape. He could still function, but got tired quickly. It was a crazy accident to have happened.

And this:

11.37am: i: manipulating the Higgs field isn't going to happen any time soon. You'd need to heat your part of the universe above 10,000,000,000,000,000 degrees to influence it. Which isn't really on. A bit dangerous too. If you change the Higgs field, you'll alter the size of atoms (though not their mass very much), and destablise normal matter. That's not a good thing to do. 

Or perhaps this:

9.48am:  I refer you to the priceless exchange between Robert Wilson, former director of Fermilab, and Senator John Pastore, during a Congressional hearing over the value of building a new particle accelerator. Pastore is sure there must be something about the machine that can be steered towards a defence app:

Pastore: Is there anything connected with the hopes of this accelerator that in any way involves the security of this country?

Robert Wilson: No sir, I don't belive so.

Pastore: Nothing at all?

Wilson: Nothing at all.

Pastore: It has no value in that respect?

Wilson: It has only to do with the respect with which we regard one another, the dignity of men, our love of culture. It has to do with, are we good painters, good sculptors, great poets? I mean, all the things we really venerate and honor in our country and are patriotic about. It has nothing to do directly with defending our country except perhaps to make it worth defending. 

Overheard

From little sister to big brother: "You don't need to give me advice. I don't recall asking for a childhood mentor!"

Gummi Bear Cage Fighting

Mackenzie's been on a roll lately with making videos. Largely he has concentrated on how-to videos for some of the more complicated stuff in the game "Blockland", but we were on a hike Sunday with a friend of his and the two of them started dreaming up ideas for funny videos. They came up with Gummi Bear cage fighting as the theme, and on the way home from the hike I stopped off at the store and bought them some supplies in the form of large amounts of molded and shaped high-fructose corn syrup.

They got to work making sets and then on Monday Mackenzie filmed the stop-action sequences. Here it is in all its gummy glory, look for a sequel soon!:

Mackenzie Humor for the Day

Mackenzie tells about a million jokes a day that he just comes up with on the fly, and every now and then I remember to write some down. Here's a couple from today that had me chuckling:

What do you call a buffalo when he's being annoying?
> Jerky

What kind of priests make the best cooks?
> Friars

More Life With the Pun-Meister

Over the lunch table today, Mackenzie is commenting on Asa's tendency to only eat the middles of her grilled cheese sandwiches:

"Oh great, my sister is the Anti-Crust!"

Checking the P-Mail

With temperatures over 100 degrees here lately, we've been taking our dog to the dog park late at night when it's actually almost cool enough for her to run around (as I biked home from work at 7:45 on Monday, the thermometer read a toasty 97 degrees!). Mackenzie keeps up a running dog impersonation as Callie runs around sniffing "Yep, I'm just checking my pee-mail. 328 messages! Some of these are from two months ago. I'm getting behind on my pee-mail, must check the inbox more often." The kid cracks me up, it's like living with a full-time comedian (when it's not like living with the bouncing ball of hormonal emotions, that is).

Genetic Hoo-Haw

First of all, a pic of my great big gargantuan huge-looking kids. Gosh, does the summer weather make them sprout up like my dandelions?? I have to chuckle because someone commented the other day on how much the kids looked alike and Mackenzie (individuating himself as required in the Big Brother Code, section 1.3.c.) replied that they looked nothing alike. Ummmmm, yeah. Take a look at this photo, big bro.

Secondly, some totally cute stuff from the kids lately. The first is related to this growing-huge phenomenon. One day he just started doing it, Mackenzie in his now-much-deeper voice began to answer the phone like this... "Mmnnnnnyellow". This is EXACTLY how my dad has always said "hello" when answering the phone. But I don't think Mackenzie has ever heard that since I'm always the one to call my dad. It's just plain eerie, but at the same time it never fails to bring a smile to my face. Talk about a chip off the ol' grand-block. It sure makes you wonder exactly how many things are genetic. I mean, phone answering??? On a not-so fun note, both of the kids tend to get a painful knot in the muscle that lies just under the left shoulder blade.... Exactly where I have a killer knot that flares up from time to time and even travels up my neck until I can't turn my head to the left. So Mackenzie quips "Great, I inherited the family knot!"


My Asa funny for the week comes from her first swim meet of the season, where she won her freestyle and backstroke heats. Afterwards, she remarked langorously "I love breathing to the side in freestyle. That way I can just watch all the other swimmers slipping away behind me." LOL! Maybe that swimming thing is just a wee bit inherited also...

Measuring Up

Today Asa told me that if Mary Poppins measured me with her tape measure, it would say "practically perfect in every way".

High praise indeed from a daughter who only five minutes before had been giving me the evil eye about emptying the dishwasher, LOL.

And On The Subject of Caravaggio

Here's a funny kid quote...

I had the book of Caravaggio's paintings open on the dining room table as I was reading his biography and Asa started flipping through them, which led to long discussions of what most of the pictures were about. The longest by far was on his painting of the "Penitent Magdalen" because Asa wanted to know why this woman was so sad, what her story was, etc. I tried to explain as best I could what the painting was trying to represent about Mary Magdalen, but I had never discussed the term "prostitute" with my nine year old before, so that took a little deft explaining.

After which, she came out with:

"Well then, when she wants to become a mother she'll be able to really easily, because she'll have practiced a lot."

That one definitely had me almost ROTFLOL!

Funny Christmas Quote

This morning:


Asa: It's only 7 days to Christmas! A week to Christmas!

Mackenzie: No it's eight

Asa: No look, it's the 18th and Christmas is the 25th, that's only seven

Mackenzie: But Christmas Eve goes so slowly, it counts as two days.