You're gonna miss this! (We will see when I am fifty)

Ya know that song "You're gonna miss this". I think it's by Trace Adkins. Today it played at a avery ironic time. Let me explain.

Mollie and Lukas were in the tub, because as you all know, children tend to get dirty after doing... anything. Mollie has this thing now where she gets in the tub and immediately announces she has to go potty. Now Mollie isn't potty trained, well not fully. She has made it to the potty a few times when she tells us that she needs to go, but nothing serious enough that I trust her without a diaper.

So today she does her thing, she gets in the tub and yells "I NEED GO POTTY" so I pull her out and sit her on the potty, and she actually goes, pee. I congratulate her as every daddy should for a child this age. Later congratulations just don't work. When I congratulate Nikki on going to the potty she just looks at me like I'm nuts.

Anyway so I put her back in the tub, and she yells out again "I NEED GO POTTY". So I pull her out again and sit her on the potty. She goes AGAIN! Alright maybe she just didn't get everything out. I congratulate her again, and then she says "I NEED GO POTTY". Not one to dispute, since she is 2 for 2 now, I put her back on and go back to doing the dishes.  Then I hear it.

"Daddy I go Poo Poo" She had in fact gone poo poo, but got so excited after she drop the first log, she stood up to come tell me, ran into the hall, and pooped three more little logs on her way to see me.
"You're gonna miss this." There is absolutely nothing in that song about poop. And where does it land? In the same spot where I spilled bleach the other day (Please see the post about Laundry).  Well, I guess a little more bleach isn't going to hurt now.

BTW Mollie, when your kid does the same thing to you, I am going to personally play and sing that song to you.

Why do I write the blog.

For money of course. Actually I have a personal reason for it. I used to be real good at writing in my journal, like every day, in multiple languages. And then it stopped. Mainly because I came home from my mission and spent more time with my wife and school and work that I didn't have any time to journal. Well now is my chance to actually remember some stuff that my kids did.

We had another blog that I started, that my wife then managed, and then we both stopped posting on it. Mainly because we made it private, and really the only readership we had was like us, and my mom (hi mom thanks for reading this one too). The truth is until we had kids there really wasn't that much stuff to blog about. The posts would be like this:

"Today I went to work at Discovercard, and it sucked, and then I came home."

Not exactly a bestseller or something we want to remember. I think everyone who worked at Discovercard has certain parts of their past where they have mentally checked out and have absolutely no memory of it. It's how we coped.

Now that we have kids our lives have become much more interesting because kids make us do crap that we never would have done as DINKS (Double Income No KidS). Like accosting strangers at a playground hoping that eventually a friendship will spark up between their child and ours and then we can set up a play date and actually have a few minutes to think (or blog... about our kids) while our child is at the new person's house.

Seriously have you ever thought about the stuff that we do now that we have kids that we would never even dream about before. The things we touch and handle?

My sister when she was younger said that when she got married one of the deals she would have to have with her future husband was that he would be in charge of cleaning up all vomit. That's quite a pre-nup. Does this include her vomit as well, or is it just from the kids.

My first experience with vomit comes from Kara, but I won't go into that story. Let's talk about the kids. Nikki was little, like 6 months or so, and she was sick, and had been sick for the previous night. Here's where all the details are starting to get fuzzy so I am just going to add in things where there's blanks. Just to avoid confusion I am going to put ( ) around all the things that I can't remember and have judiciously guessed.

Nikki had been sick for (months) and she had a real hard time sleeping the night before. I was getting ready to go to work when Kara asked me to hold her (so she could go and re-arrange the furniture in the apartment). I'm holding Nikki and she starts to heave, heave HEAVE all over my nice work pants and shirt. I'm holding Nikki now at arm's length and it is still projecting onto my face. How did she fit all that in her stomach.

What do I do, I laugh.

I then hand her off to Kara and I run to change clothes and jump in the shower. 20 minutes later, I am ready to leave for work which starts in 10 minutes. Kara asks me to please change Nikki's diaper before I leave. I put Nikki on the carpet, remove her diaper, and just as before, am covered with green colored stuff, this time from the other end, and just as projectile. A phone call to work to inform them of my predicament, and I am off to shower, again.

Ya see, I didn't write that down the first time around, when it happened. True I don't think the internet existed in it's present form then, but I can't go back and remember that choice experience.

Well, now I can. Cuz I just wrote it down, completely wrong.

The point is, my kids do funny and crazy stuff everyday and I know that growing up there were albums and video tape of every stupid thing that I did. You know how I remember? Because I can see it. All the stuff that wasn't documented, I don't remember, and neither do my parents. So this blogging thing is like the shoebox full of photographs, and the baby book, and all those early video tapes that won't play on anything else but the camera it was made for, but the camera is broken so we have to find a place to transfer it to DVD.

This is for my kids (and me for when I am old and senile and can't recognize who the strangers are that are changing my diaper).

Laundry

Before this whole grad school thing, I had very little to do with the laundry, besides wearing it. I occasionally would put a load in the wash, and this was usually when we were all out of underwear. Anything else and I could usually find a suitable alternative, or just wear the item dirty. Not underwear though. For some strange reason, people find that corn chip smell offensive. Go figure.

Here, we don't have a washer/dryer in our apartment (it would take up half the apartment). Instead we have washing facilities, or in other words, a laundromat. Now I had used these types of facilities before when I was in the MTC, but I remember them being much nicer, like the fact that they actually worked.
Here they work, kind of. You just have to avoid the big ones. So as I have been trying to establish some type of routine other than put the kids in front of the TV and pray they are entertained until Mollie's nap, I needed to designate some laundry day(s). The first time though was quite a large undertaking, because it had been over a week since laundry had been done, and in our family, if you even touch it once, it's dirty and needs to be laundered. This is slightly different from when I was single when you didn't wash the towel until it started to emit an odor (notice how I said Towel, yep I only had one). Now I have over a dozen, in various states of disrepair (I would say repair, but that would be a lie). The oldest is a towel I got as a senior in High School that has my name, year and wrestling weight embroidered on it. I was saving it initially to put in a memory box and altar with all the stuff from high school that made me amazing (3rd place medals, participation awards, etc) but it was soon sacrificed on the altar of poor college students.

Back to laundry. Kara learned something when we were younger and that is don't start doing something in a relationship unless you plan on doing it the entire relationship. She would pay the bills, cook dinner (most of the time) do the laundry, and other things. I would take out the trash, iron everything that needed to be ironing (which was mostly my shirts anyway), yardcare, etc. You get the idea. In this stage of our life Kara has subconsciously decided that I will do the laundry, and her method is such that she spends her time doing things like homework, school and something called clinic, while the laundry piles up. I would ignore the laundry, but it eventually gets in the way of my TV watching, literally. I can't see around the laundry to watch La La Loopsy (that's the most stimulating show I get to watch these days). So out of desperation, I do laundry.

By the time I am desperate enough to do the laundry, it has piled up to the point of needing several machines. There are also bigger machines that you can use that cost just a little bit more, it they work. This time it didn't. The problem here is that I had already loaded all the laundry, all the detergent, and all the bleach into the washer.

Crap!

I found three other smaller washers and carefully ran the now semi-moist laundry to the new washers, all the time trying to avoid getting bleach on my clothes. It worked.

Another time I was trying to bring all the laundry down at once (an amazing, yet impossible feat) and I dropped the bleach. This wouldn't have been a problem if it hadn't have opened..... on the carpet. Don't worry though, I cleaned it up real nice. And to fix the problem I used an assortment of sharpie markers to re-color the carpet. This is where my Art degree has come in handy. Look you can't even tell the difference.

Dog Vs Cliff (hiking the Y in Provo)

We went hiking today as a family. We had this grand idea to get out and be active as a family. Let me define active. This means doing something more strenuous than walking to the playground that is 20 feet away from our front door. So even if we somehow manage to walk down to the creamery for some ice cream, we feel justified in the 300+ calorie snack because we walked off -50 calories walking there.

So we decided to be real ambitious and hike the Y today. The Y is about a mile up a mountain with switchbacks and stuff. Since it was memorial day there were a lot of people with the exact same idea. I'm just glad that we decided to start at 8:30 am instead of noon (which is when we finished). We didn't do any research, we just did it. No idea of elevation, how strenuous it was or anything. By the time we hit the first switch back we knew we were screwed. You would think we were finished a marathon with how much the family was wheezing. At this point Lukas turned to Kara and said "I'm tired, will you carry me?" Luckily Kara had the ergo baby carrier and he could just jump in the back. I was already outfitted with the Kelty pack with Mollie, all the water, the snacks, my camera, and anything that Nikki had brought with her and didn't want to carry. So I'm good, no need of a break, water, or anything.

We sweat our way to the top (and when I say the top, I mean the bottom of the Y, it was a shorter trip) spend a few moments up there enjoying the view, and start down. Now here is where the title of this story comes in to play.

For those of you who know my kids, specifically my eldest, you know that they (she) is horribly afraid of animals, especially animals that are alive. Like seriously Nikki won't go into a room if there is a fly buzzing around. Ridiculous I know. Lukas has a legitimate fear of ants, because when he was little he sat on an ant farm and they all crawled out and covered his entire body and bit him and stuff. Not a fun day at the Klc household then.

Anyway, Nikki is scared of dogs, so as we are going down, a lady is walking up with a small little terrier type dog, and Nikki flips out and runs, not down the hill, but towards the cliff, and is trying to go over it to get away from the dog. I grab her before her panic can doom her and hold her tight while she is screaming about this stupid little dog the size of a football. I was so mad and scared at the same time. We had to stop and talk right then and there. The crazy thing is Nikki didn't even realize that she was running towards a cliff, she just knew that there was a dog there and wanted to get as far away as possible.

We had a good long talk about Nikki's problem and about how she needs to handle these situations.
Sorry this post isn't very funny, but as far as advice goes, before you go anywhere outside with a little girl or boy who is afraid of animals, come up with a plan for when you do run across something that breaths, and go over it with the child so that they don't panic at the sight of the first thing with four legs.

On a side note, I think we saw Kyle Whittingham hiking the trail too.

This was us right before the hike. Notice how I am carrying almost everything on my back.

 Here is Kara with Lukas on her back. Lukas is eating an apple sauce to keep up his strength.

At the bottom serif of the Y.

Mollie was given exactly three feet of moving room or else she would have plummeted to the bottom of the mountain.

Here's my boy Lukas being all adventurous.

Had to hike up to get Nikki. She is really adventurous at this point. Five minutes before when she was tired of hiking she was berating me for what a lousy idea it was to hike up to the Y.
As we were heading down the mountain she asked when we could do it again.

Had to have a picture of me and Lukas on the Y.

The view from the Top.

I actually really had a good time and I feel real good about my time. I wore my GPS watch and averaged 26 miles per hour. Of course I forgot to turn it off when we got back in the car and drove to the Riverwoods shopping center for some burgers and a Dole Pineapple float, but I still feel good about myself.

Airplanes are the worst way to travel.

Well maybe not really. True they do get you there super fast in comparison to driving, riding, or walking, but it is Very uncomfortable. Seriously, I'm writing this right now on my wife's iPad, on an airplane and I am very uncomfortable. I'm even in economy plus (which I think is just a dumb excuse to charge more money for a seat). It's like here is a seat that is still cramped and will give you a charley horse in your legs, but not as much as the poor seats. There is a definite hierarchy to the plane. the closer you are to the front the more important you are. I mean look who is at the front of the plane? The captain. Whats in the back? The bathroom... And usually me. Today is an exception, somehow I got the third row, just behind first class, but not back by the toilets. Thats one of the reasons why I can actually write this today, because I have a little more room than my allotted six inches of comfort. And really first class doesn't look that much nicer. It never looks like it does in the movies, all quiet with la Z boyz for chairs, sipping champagne that is complimentary. Seriously when did all the complementary stuff go away?

I'm on a three hour flight right now at dinner time and all I got was a little glass of juice that was full of ice. The juice content was probably the equivalent of a playskool tea cup. I was asked if i wanted to purchase nuts. Seriously? I mean not to mock the airlines nuts, but I'm going to anyway, they are hard enough to choke down as it is but now they want me to pay three bucks for them? And forget a meal. Meals are like thirteen bucks and they are like an adult lunchable.

Since today I am dangerously close to first class (and let me tell you I am not dressed like a first class passenger) I was trying to put my bag in up in one of those overhead storage things that don't have enough room for everyone's bags, and I mistakenly started putting mine in a first class bin. Oh my goodness the stewardess was on me faster than a senior citizen at RC Willey on hotdog day. She said "That's FIRST CLASS! Your bag goes over there" and she gestures halfway down the plane to the one open slot that might possibly fit my bag. As I look back she quickly shuts the door to the first class bin to prevent me from stowing my bag there.

She kind of reminded me of that Effie trinket from the hunger games yelling out "That is Mahogany". Sorry ma'am I'm just a tribute forced to sit in an uncomfortable chair for three hours with no food, three dollar nuts and a cup full of ice. Oh by the way, I paid to do this. You're welcome.

Now I fly a lot (like every week) and there are some good airlines, and some not so good airlines, as far as the way they treat you. The good ones usually have animals on the tail, a color in their name, are foreign, or are named Delta. The bad ones have the name that tries to make you feel patriotic for flying with them, like you're doing the country a favor by flying on them. They are almost always delayed (every time on one particular airline, and I am "united" in my opinion on this). And these guys are the ones with the lunchables.

The best airline I have ever flown on is Austrian airlines. Oh my goodness, you know what they served us for dinner? A mignon that was fileted. No kidding. Plus I got like 18 drinks, and not one of the stewardesses (or stewards) had a mullet. So next time you have to take a little jaunt over to Denver (no one ever has to fly there) or DC or where ever, fly Austrian. Plus your kids get a free rubber duck!

This job is harder than I thought!

Ok so here's the deal, I kind of dropped off the radar completely for like... a month. Not willingly, simply due to my new set up in life. So we moved to Provo, that much you already know, but since then everything is pretty much a blur. For the first week or so of grad school I was computerless because Kara used my laptop at school and I was left with the iPad, which btw sucks to write anything on. I can type so much better using a REAL keyboard than using one of those virtual QWERTY things.

So here I am, I have my laptop again, Kara has a brand new Macbook Pro (better than mine, just a little jealous, but she's gonna make more money than me, so I guess it's fair) and I finally get to blog again.
So here is how my typical day goes.

Scenario A: Wake up and go jogging either at 5:30 or 6:30 depending on the day with my new neighbor Jimmy from California who is moving to Texas for an internship (soon to be replaced by another neighbor). Arrive home in time to make kids breakfast, see Kara out the door, and then pack all the kids in the car to take Nikki to school. Arrive home, turn on ONE show while the dishes and house are cleaned by me and I take a shower and get dressed. Children are completely and utterly entertained. Bathe and dress children. Dressing the children includes doing their hair so that people do not mistake them for poor orphaned children.
Next we run errands, which include the DI, the motorcycle parts store, the Library, faxing stuff (who needs stuff faxed to them in today's world?) etc. Arrive home for some play time outside. Sometimes errands are replaced by a bike-ride. Meet Kara for Lunch at either A: the creamery, B: the Wilkinson Center, or C: Subway on the lawn outside her classroom.
Return home and put Mollie down for a Nap around 12:00 pm.
Lukas watches a show while I fold the laundry, clean my room, or finish up dishes.
At this time I also get some freelance graphic design stuff done, or prepare for the class that I teach that night.
Kara comes home after picking up Nikki. Mollie wakes up, we all go outside to frolic in the grass with our newfound BFFs from our neighborhood at Student Housing.
We then come together as a family and eat a nutritious, well thought out meal with no preservatives or additives, completely organic and humanely treated food.
I then go into our bedroom where I teach my class remotely from my laptop while Kara gets all the kids in bed with teeth brushed and stories read.

So that's how I would like it to go, here's scenario B

Scenario B: 6:30 alarm goes off and I realize that my watch is still set on whatever time zone I was in over the weekend and I am either late or early for jogging. Either Snooze or turn off. Either way, I don't go running. When I do go running, it takes me almost the entire run for my ankle to loosen up enough for me to run like I don't have a stick up my butt, all the while trying to act cool for all the college kids out running (seriously who runs without a shirt at 7:15 ahem 6:30 in the morning?).

Come home exhausted and feel like I just had a heart attack, tell the wife I feel great, never better, totally still got it, all the while knowing that it's just a LIE.

Wife tells me she has to leave early to meet with her professor. Think back to when I did that in Grad school and avoid contentious argument. Kids have nothing to eat for breakfast except stuff I don't know how to make.

Oatmeal is a little runny and kind of tastes like hotdogs. Kids don't eat anything that I cook and eventually have a breakfast of fruit snacks, milk and a piece of bread if we're lucky.  Nikki's school starts in five minutes, we run to get everyone in the car. Lukas needs to go potty. I leave Nikki and Mollie in the car and run Lukas back in (up the stairs, we live on the second floor) while he goes thoughts keep going through my head of DCFS driving by and seeing two children alone in a car. I am a horrible parent. Lukas is done, we run back down. Nikki then informs me that she still has to do her homework from yesterday, or that I have to sign off on it or something. To avoid confrontation I just sign it without checking. Break the sound barrier on the way to school. Drop Nikki off, head home to the mess that is now our 750 square foot apartment.

Decide to try and clean up. Put on Jake and the Neverland Pirates, Timmy Time, or Yo Gabba Gabba (everyone loves DJ Lance). Plan on just playing one, all three are played. Decide to try and get some exercise in because I am doing a Triathlon in July. Load all the kids up in the bike trailer, get on my sexy bike shorts. Hauling Myself and my bike, plus bike trailer, two kids, water, treats, and extra clothes and diapers just in case of an accident. I can go 7 miles before I am completely spent. Come home feeling like I had yet another heart attack.

Kids play at the playground.

Place is still a mess. I go into the bathroom and cry a little.

Kara calls. Is she coming home? No. She got done with class early so she wants us to meet her early for lunch. This we can do. Fuel for me, and a distraction for the kids for an hour. We meet at the Wilkinson center. Mollie loves to run. I don't love Mollie to run. Lukas likes to walk behind me. I don't like Lukas to walk behind me.

Kids see Mom. They are giddy and happy, but at least their hair is combed... Today. We eat. Kara is excited to see kids too. I am happy to just sit. Kids get a donut for dessert. Why did I get them something sticky? On the way back to the car Mollie needs some privacy. She hides in a corner for about five minutes, then comes out with what Kara and I call "Duck Butt".  For those parents out there who have potty trained you know exactly what just transpired. For those un-initiated, just wait.

Mollie wants to run everywhere. Lukas wants to take his time. Eventually Lukas is on my shoulders and Mollie is carried in one arm. Parents who have been there before look at me and smile. Freshman (because only the Freshman at BYU are single) look at me in horror, whisper behind my back, and snap pictures.

Mollie is mad when I take the donut away that she dropped in the dirt (literally the dirt). We arrive home. Mollie, Lukas and I are sticky. Mollie gets her hands washed and is down for a nap. Lukas, gets to watch another show.

Still haven't showered.

Finally get around to doing the dishes, showering, and cleaning the house.

Kara gets home. House is clean. I am clean and dressed (have been for five minutes) and Mollie is just barely stirring.

Nikki plays with friends, I prep my class for that night. Eat dinner, play outside.

Life is Good.