Sunday Update

Iris ripped a super loud fart during the pastor's pretty long prayer in church yesterday.  She was sitting on my lap and everyone had their eyes closed around me.  There is just no way any of those people are going to believe that man-sized blast came out of that little girl.

Torsdag is the new Tisdag

Hi all, a new post after a long hiatus!  I'm with the kids on Thursdays instead of Tuesdays now.

For today's activity, I tried the unthinkable...solo dad trip to IKEA.  Agreed, an unassisted trip to IKEA with three children under 5 does sound like a forgotten episode of Fear Factor or a triple-dog-dare challenge accepted, but we needed some new BESTA cabinets to envelop our big new normal-American-sized flat screen TV.  Yes, in a burst of post-thanksgiving consumerism, we finally upgraded from the boxy 13-inch (the little guy actually generated quite a bit of interest when I posted it for free on Craigs).  With my new, normal-American-sized TV, I have to sacrifice feeling morally superior to the rest of you, but I gain the ability to read the football game score from the couch.

Välkommen, Earthling consumers

Spirits were high as we aimed the car at the burbs, zooming in the opposite direction as rush-hour traffic.  Soon we arrived at IKEA, and the kids loved it.  Everywhere are little display roomlets with cabinets to look in and beds to jump on.  It's like all the things that would be unacceptable in a regular person's home are perfectly fine at IKEA.  The kids dragged out the wrapped Christmas presents from under the tree in the corner of one "living room".  Janie pitched a fit when I told her to stop reading the Swedish staging prop books she found on a bedroom bookshelf so we could get to the toy department already.   The three of them systematically laid in and bounced on every bed in the entire kids department and played with every toy.  The nice thing was that there was really no one around.  At 10am on a Thursday morning the store was pretty empty, the employees were nice, and we didn't seem to be annoying anyone.

Kids pretended to have a birthday party, singing Happy Birthday to Iris.  Um,  hello?  Isn't that someone else's birthday, too?

Sam in rolling bedroom coffin

That nice lady seems thrilled by whatever Janey is trying to tell her

We did have to take a detour from the kids department for long enough to write down the code for the BESTA bookshelf we came for in the first place.  I'm always interested in the names of IKEA products.  They often seem like fake Swedish cognates for english nouns, like a shelf will be named SHAALF or something. We encountered one actual product, a protective rubber floor mat for your home office named KOLON.  This evocative name conjured up a set of mental images of digestive trouble so horrifying it necessitates plastic floor protection.  A little unsettled, I shooed the kids on to the cafeteria.

The cafeteria, too, was nice, cheap, and set up to be easy for kids. Without really thinking, I ordered the kids french toast sticks and chocolate milk, loading them up with enough sugar to last the month.  We ate at these little kid tables surrounded by warpy circus mirrors and a tv playing cartoons.  I was waiting for one of their little heads to explode into a cloud of cotton candy, but it never happened.  We peed in the spacious family restroom and headed to the dreaded "self-service" catacombs to gather our bookshelf.

insert evil clown music and ticking time bomb sound here

The final stage of the IKEA experience is the maze-like self-serve section where the products displayed in the rooms are stored in elusive locations with puzzling names like "Aisle Eleventy-six, bin Foursteen".  If you're not careful, you can lose your sense of direction and never be heard from again.  Amplifying the off-kilter feeling are the carts provided for retrieval of your goods.  Unlike normal shopping carts, these ride on wheels that swivel to travel in any direction.  Pushing one feels like pushing a regular shopping cart across the oiled deck of a Swedish whaling vessel in high winds.  Of course, once we did find and load our shelves, Sam insisted on  pushing the cart by himself with no help ("take your hands off, DAD!").  We nearly leveled several displays on our way to checkout, where a friendly midwestern woman awaited as our cashier.  Adding to the ghastly surreality of the house-of-horrors self-serve experience was the sight of her left forearm, entirely covered in a photo-realistic tattoo of torn flesh peeled back to reveal muscle, gristle, and bone (no pic, sorry).  We fishtailed that crazy rudderless cart to our car, in a hurry to get back to the real world.

On the way home, the kids fell asleep to the sounds of their favorite car-song, the Black Eyed Peas' "Imma Be".  I actually remembered to mute 3 of the 4 (not bad, Dad) instances of the word "shit" in the song, which the kids are convinced is entitled "Elmo B."   The kids slept for about an hour in the car, which was long enough for me to make a phone call and do a little reading.  The rest of the day was fun, if uneventful, except for the reading of the ABC book by Dr. Suess, which contains this disturbingly unsafe-for-children image, ostensibly related to the Letter R:

Um, wow, that's quite a "horn"on that rhino, Dr. Suess.

Also, at lunch time, for the first time in my life, I somehow managed to burn a pot of hard boiled eggs.  Trust me, at one point that pot was full of water.

Fun Rating: 8.5 out of 10 Kids really had a lot of fun, and it was pretty stress-free because the store was so empty.  I'm a little embarrassed about my chocolate-cakeish breakfast selections for the kids, and it did get pretty trippy there at the end.  Isn't that always the IKEA experience, though?

Nature Museum

Tuesday was a rainy day so went to our neighborhood library to get a museum pass. Chicago allows residents to check out free passes to any of the main museums, but the super popular ones are often checked out. The plan for today was to head to the library and just check out the best available pass, allowing fate to dictate the specifics of our Tuesday outing. As it turned out, most of the passes were in, so fate wasn't being very specific.  We (I) chose to go to the Peggy Notebaert Nature museum, where they have a bunch of nice stuff, including a butterfly habitat.

 Before we left, the kids selected some books to check out. Iris made a scene in the library by inexplicably falling off the reading chair and landing on her face.  I mean, she just wiped out hard, and for no apparent reason.  Did she cry?  Yes.

The ride to the museum was informative, kind of like a tour with our own little docent, Sam.   "Daddy, when i cry, my eyes get very wet"... "Grapes have juice inside. When you smush them you can feel it on your fingers"..."Ants kill people when they get mad, but sometimes they are nice"..."Conductors think that freight trains are people, but they are not people".  It was a very informative experience, and to top it off we got free parking right by the museum, which was under attack by some sort of organic steel sex alien.

yikes!

We employed the Bystander Effect and just tried to find the entrance without getting too involved.

The butterlies were pretty, mostly, at least the fluttery ones.  There was this one kind that was way too big, still with its fat caterpillar body but with bat wings.  It was slow and buzzy, and I did not want it to land on my shoulder, i wanted to hit it with a tennis racquet.  There were also lots taxidermized wolves, deer, birds, porcupines, and raccoons that caught the kids' attention.  I avoided the whole "dead" discussion, telling them that these were "statues". "Look, honey, a statue of a bald eagle!"

one of the pretty ones

awwww

Back at home, after naps, the kids started getting a little bonkers, so we (I) made some play-doh. For you make-at-home play-doh-ers, I made two batches, one with the cream of tartar and one without.  It turns out the same either way, and is much cheaper without the c.o.t. addtion.  I can only assume that it's in the recipe to give an acidic taste to the doh so kids won't want to eat it.  That's the least of my worries.  I'd pay a pretty penny for some additive that would discourage kids from sticking their chins in it and shaping it into large balls to throw around the house.

Fun Rating:  9 out of 10.  I like to get out in the city, and things just kind of worked out well today.  

Christians and Casserole

Despite our occasional misogyny, homophobia, and hypocrisy, we Christians at times make very positive contributions to society.  If you're making a T-chart of pros and cons for my religion, I'd add "making casseroles" to the Pros column alongside "Mother Theresa" and "Martin Luther King".  Indeed, Christians are in top form when there's a new baby around, whipping up casseroles of every imaginable description for the new family.

It must be noted that our family stands in great debt to the folks at our church, who evidently organized families to deliver us two to three home cooked meals a week for over a month right after the twins were born.  It was apparently an amazing act of graciousness and community that really helped us pull through.  I wouldn't know, as I have no memories of any kind for a period of about two months after the girls' birth.

One of the families who brought us food during that hard stretch recently had an adorable baby of their own!  Our activity this Tuesday was to make and bring a meal to this family, at least attempting to repay some of their kindness to us, and hopefully not bringing them any runny nose viruses.  

Some readers may not realize that there are entire Christian cookbooks made to serve the demand for freezable post-partum meals.  Below is one such resource from our shelf.

The three branches of Christian government: School, Legislature, and Windmill

It offers several examples of fine Christian food, ranging from the elaborate...

What on Earth is going on in bullet point 5??

to the bizarre:

I think "luncheon meat" is a polite way to refer to non-email SPAM

While these options were promising, I do not usually have the time to cook with actual recipes.  Instead, I rely on a dangerous combination of memory and improvisation.  I get mixed results: carving the walnuts off the outside of a Christmas cheese log, melting the cheesy core to make a sauce for noodles was a great bet; approximating Ramen with Thai rice noodles boiled in water seasoned with Old Bay and Lawry's salt was a bad one.
For today's activity I think I manged ok, making a big pot of chili on Monday night after the kids went to bed.

With the chili made, the kids and I used Tuesday morning to focus on making congratulations cards and dessert, which was this layered brownie mix in a jar thing.

Janie adds some finishing touches

The kids learned the word "funnel"

The brownie mix turned out pretty good.  We only had to dump it out and start over once when Sam got carried away adding flour.

It was nice for the kids to meet the new baby when we brought the package over.  They played a little with the older sister while I bored the visiting grandparents with my views on school reform.  Before long we left the family to rest and  I took the kids to a nearby park, then home.  Unsurprisingly,  a 30-minute drive home listening to an NPR expert on Afghan-Pakistani relations put all three to sleep.

Feel free to post a comment: It's lunchtime and you're by yourself with three sleeping kids in carseats, parked in front of your house.  What do you do?

Fun Rating: 8 out of 10 The kids liked dumping brownie ingredients into the jar and making cards.  They had a good time meeting the baby, and crying at the park was minimal.  Miraculously, all three transfered from the car and kept sleeping, allowing Daddie to draft his blog entry and tidy the house!  

Fat Tuesday Food Necklace

these foods have holes

Sunday night I went to the grocery store in search of threadable circle-shaped foods. The plan was to celebrate Fat Tuesday and kick off Daddie Gras by stringing dental floss through the snacks.  We would modify traditional Mardi Gras celebrations by eating the "beads" ourselves rather than throwing them out of 2nd story windows to topless revelers below.  The latter are hard to come by on our street in winter, anyway.
I put the food in bowls.  To thread the necklaces, I attached a piece of kabob skewer to one end of a line of dental floss, with the other end anchored to a cardboard disk to keep the snacks from sliding off the end.


The kids were acting like disinterested teenagers, giving a lazy, half-hearted attempt at necklace making.  They preferred to ignore me and focus on sorting the snack piles for fistfuls of Froot Loops and Gummi Savers.  Sam finally ran off, amusing himself with something quiet while the girls and I finished their necklaces.



I realized that what had kept Sam so quiet while I finished the girls' neclaces was the fact that he had found a little sewing kit and was unwinding spools of thread all over the house.

it was a lot of thread and it was wrapped around everything.

Before long, I was changing a poopy diaper, when I heard a crash and wailing.  As I went to deal with the crying twin I hear another crash from the other room: Sam had knocked over the humidifier.  As I helped Sam clean up the spilled water, I heard...silence.  A quick check found the twins on our bed, sharing a tube of Neutrogena hand cream.  Let's just say they probably won't get chapped cheeks any time soon.  Just then, the plumber showed up to demand my full attention and let me know that he would have to knock out the plaster in the kids' room.  Excellent!  In order to keep the dust down, I started hanging plastic from the ceiling, all while the kids were scattered throughout the neighborhood, doing goodness knows what.    I was officially rattled, getting my ass kicked, and it went on like that, pretty much all day.

Finally I gave up and fled with the kids to McDonalds.  We had Happy Meals and hung out at the Playland for a while.  The kids there were nice, and evidently pretty good at sharing:  Iris went into the play structure  empty handed and came out chewing on a Chicken McNugget.  Thanks, someone!

Thank you, McDonalds, for having strap-in restraint chairs for toddlers

Fun Rating: 3 out of 10.  You win some, you lose some :)  

Chinatown Snack Expedition

Kids were loaded safely in their seats. One of the twins was crying because her sister had been awarded the coveted third-row car seat known as "SammySeat".  Sammy had just gone to the bathroom twice at the lumber company and was complaining that he needed to go again. I knew their moods would be changing soon.  It was snack time, and we were headed on an outing to Chinatown in search of new and interesting treats.

Chinatown Produce is a grocery that stocks all kinds of wonderful and amazing food items, including an an aisle of snacks packed with super-cute anime-ish packaging and completely mysterious contents, at least to us.  The kids and I were each allowed to choose one snack, any snack.  Upon returning home, we would have a taste test to see which snack was yummiest.  I was eager to discover some delicious new imported snacks, hopefully even something as magical as the legendary Tamarindo flavor of Jarritos soda.

For an activity with basically no rules, the kids sure didn't waste any time selecting fully inappropriate snacks.  Jane and Iris both chose strips of candy that ended up being bubble gum, one in fruit flavors and one in Hello Kitty flavors.  Gum is no good because they swallow or choke on it before they can properly enjoy it.  Also, if I remember my childhood warnings correctly , this can lead to a gum tree growing of their stomachs (or is it, "you'll go blind!", i forget).  Noting the eerie similarity in the girls' choices, I added "snack choosing" to "car seat preference" and "biting" on my mental list of twin traits that are possibly genetic and will require further study.

Sam chose a package of curry flavored ramen,  which was problematic in that ramen is clearly a lunch food and not really a snack.  Do you think he was dissuaded by this line of logic?  Like Daddy Comedian Louis CK, I knew better than to fight him about this particular issue in public.  Sam also insisted that he had "sharp teeth" and wanted to "crunch the noodles" rather than boiling them.  Be serious.
I chose some iced cookies in cartoony animal shapes and at the last minute, impulse-bought a strip of wafery things in a red package.

Leaving the market, we took advantage of the pretty day by visiting nearby Ping Tom Park, which is a little harder to find than the platform for the Hogwarts Express.  There's a nice little playground there and it's strangely scenic. In addition to the playground, they have one of these:

and one of these:

And it's right on the river.  Almost immediately we came upon the remains of what must have been an amazing party:

You might want to click this one to zoom in a little

Back at home, Sam and I sampled our new snacks while the girls napped.  Turns out the world of snack food is a small one.  The gum we bought tasted just like any other gum, and the animal cookies weren't too different than any other bland iced cookies.  I was comforted to find that not even in Japan do they have the manufacturing technology to cheaply produce a cookie in a recognizable animal form:

is that a llama?  a mule?  a pinata of a llama?

Sammy made good on his threat/promise to crunch his ramen raw.  He finished a good third of the noodle brick in this fashion:

The surprise of the bunch were these things:

note the shards of uncooked ramen shrapnel

I wasn't sure if they'd be sweet or savory, but it turns out they were cute little mini Pringles!  They are delicious, and would go great with a cold bottle of Jarritos Tamarindo.

Fun Rating:   8 out of 10.  It was fun to get a change of scenery, and it was nice to play outside a little.  The kids snack choices didn't necessarily work out perfectly, but the mini-Pringles were a hit.

Boxtopia: Special election day edition

The following speech excerpts are available courtesy of the Daddie for House Mayor 2011 Campaign:

Children of the Hunefeld family, we gather here, poised at a crossroads with an opportunity to create a new boxmopolitan society housed in a gleaming boxtropolis such as eyes have never seen.  If you choose me, Daddie, to be mayor of your boxy city, I will lead us to create a new reality, right here in this living room.  Envision a city of the purest cardboard, where everyone sleeps all night all the time, where noses are always dry, where there is no hysterical crying because of incidental bumping, and no one pitches a fit because they have the wrong spoon.  Also, not because their sibling has the preferred, identical spoon.   In this new world, everyone will be content with the toy in their hand and will not be tempted by the toy in their sibling's hand or neighbor's house.  Yes!  We can usher in an era of lactose tolerance, of listening the first time, and of putting our own mittens on, even getting the thumb part right!

skeptical voter

We can build this new world today... out of boxes! Yes, the same boxes that have been accumulating in the back porch, never quite making it to the recycle bin.  Then there's that awesome cardboard tube that came in the Giant Bubble Wrap.  That thing should be fun for something.  Hey, we can even blow the dust off of those mysterious dirty boxes in the basement, trusting that any animal remains we may encounter do not carry disease!

Friends, if we can dream it, with teamwork we can build it together.  To that point, some might say, "I can dream a house with pockets right on the front like a pair of slacks!"  Well, that kind of dream is a sign of madness, and we can't really build a house like that anyway.  But just about anything else we can dream, we can probably build something pretty close anyway.

Why is that box on his head?

We must be strong, for the work will not be easy.  There will be crying, that is certain.  Clumsiness will lead to bonking and yelling.  Things will tip over in an enfuriating fashion, no matter how much tape we use.  If we persevere, however, our destiny is a Fun Rating of no less than 8!  Daddie can use a utility knife to help you add windows and doors, and tape and hot glue to stick things together.  You, the future citizens of Boxlandia will join hands in the streets of Boxtropolis, using all available art supplies to decorate the outsides of the buildings, of yourselves and of each other.

So, consider carefully for whom you will vote this day!  I ask you, who was it that neglected to recycle those boxes for months on end?  And who is "hip" enough to put your three-year-old brother in charge while looking for supplies?  And who do you trust the most?  Well, that last one is probably Mommy, so just focus on the first two rhetorical questions and vote... for... Daddie!  Let us realize our Boxtopian vision together! Before nap time!  Stop hitting her with that!

Sam named these buildings "Akericio" (rear) and "Abaydo Wayo" (front)

cars go down the tube, across the table and in that building

Lady Iris Macbeth

Fun Rating: 8 out of 10
It was a lot of fun playing with the boxes and making buildings, but they were kind of fragile for us brutes.  Even with plastic on the floor, I was a little concerned that we might make a mess with the paints.  With a small house, Mommy did specify that we think about where the stuff we make on Tuesdays can be stored, which in this case is easy since it's all recyclable.

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