When in Rome...

I laughed a lot with the kids this week!  Unfortunately, my memory is terrible, so I only remember a few of the things that the kids did that triggered my laughter.
The first one has to do with William.  Apparently during the past school year he was fascinated watching several of his friends playing the Pokemon card game with each other during recess.  So, he finally saved up some of his allowance and bought himself his own deck, which means, of course, that I had to buy myself a deck as well.  We played quite a few rounds this weekend, and I must admit that I am very impressed with how well William took repeated defeat!  Of course, he was pretty gracious in victory as well, but we won't talk about that...
Anyway, William is getting really good at reading as well!  Though he still hasn't mastered all of the nuances of English (who has?!)  So, several times he'd be reading something from one of his Pokemon cards to me and I would have to stop him and have him show me the word he had just read, because I couldn't quite make it out.  Anyway, one of my favorites was when he was telling me that he was attacking me with his "pissy bolt".  Buddy, it took a while to recover from that one!  :)  And it was even funny the second, third, fourth... etc. time as well!  (Even though I tried to explain the fact that the p was silent in the syllable 'psy', he continued to bring out his 'pissy' pokemon, and have them use their 'pissy' energy to attack me with their 'pissy' attacks.
Another funny thing happened when we went out to the park on Friday morning.  The kids got bored pretty quickly and wanted to come back in.  I wanted them to stay out for a good stint since that meant that they would go down better come bedtime.  So, I busted out the secret weapon that Mom had suggested, three paintbrushes and a small bucket of water.  Buddy, you should have seen their little faces light up when they realized that I was giving them permission to put graffiti on the wooden playground!  After they got going on that, they were very contentedly happy... at least until William thought it would be fun to dump the water down the slide, and then they found out that I would only allow them one bucket of water per week.
This week I also introduced the kids to some more important culture-type things.  That is to say, we watched Earnest Scared Stupid, Earnest Goes to Jail, and Earnest Goes to Camp together (in that order).  They loved those movies!  Though I must admit that I had enjoyed them much more when I was younger than I did this time around.  But I did get a big kick out of watching the kids watch the movies!  They were literally rolling in the aisles!  So I thought that I'd see how much they enjoyed some movies that I still enjoy.  We watched The Gamers (which they loved) and then The Gamers: Dorkness Rising (which they loved even more).  They were particularly fond of the many ways the Bard died, over and over again, in Dorkness Rising.  Of course, Dorkness Rising has some stuff I don't really want the kids to be exposed to, such as some foul language, and the very horny bard.  But we talked about how in some movies they use words that are bad and we shouldn't use, and I didn't hear them use any of the said words after watching the movie so hopefully that worked out.  And when they looked at me with puzzled expressions on their faces when the bard would lead giggling damsels off to some back room, I explained that he wanted to kiss them even though they weren't married, and they seemed to accept that without question.
For some reason I sang the first verse of "you are my sunshine" to Carly this weekend when she was cuddled in my lap.  She really liked me singing that song to her!  So much so that she came up to me three times after that throughout the weekend and asked me to sing it to her while rocking her in my arms.  I almost cried.
I did cry a little this morning in the car when we were getting ready to head out to church.  Michael asked me: "Daddy, when are you coming back to Mommy's house?"  I was a bit surprised, because I was pretty sure we had explained that we would not be getting back together again to the kids.  So I replied: "Probably never Michael."  When I turned around to start backing out of the parking space I noticed that tears were streaming down his face.  I quickly parked the car and had him unbuckle and crawl into my lap.  I rocked him as he sobbed into my chest for a few minutes.  I could feel his little heart breaking!  I cried with him and told him that I was so sorry, and that Jenny and I both still loved him and William and Carly very, very much, and that I really wished we could have worked things out so that I could come back.  Surprisingly this episode seemed to affect me more than it did him.  After a few minutes he gave me a hug, then crawled back to his seat and started acting like Michael again: smiling and making jokes.  I guess he just needed a good cry.  I was very happy to see that he was able to be so happy again so quickly after crying, even though I'm sure the hurt is far from over.  I haven't been able to get over it that quickly, that's for sure!
Well, sorry to end on kind of a low note this week.  But there it is.

Where did the Easter Bunny come from?

Okay, I should probably jump right in to explaining the title for this post.  At church on Sunday Carly was sitting in my lap.  Then, during the Sacrament, she started singing Little Bunny Foo Foo, with the hand motions and everything.  She was pretty quiet, but I decided that it would be a good teaching moment, so I leaned down and whispered in her ear that during the Sacrament we're supposed to think about Jesus Christ.  She got still and thought about that for a second, then she turned around and whispered back: "Daddy, Little Bunny Foo Foo helps me think about Jesus."
William was remarkably well behaved this past weekend!  Just to give you an idea, usually William needs multiple reminders before he will grudgingly do something.  Well, while at his Nana's last week, he got hooked on MineCraft, and he really wanted to buy a copy of it for my computer.  As it turns out, a desktop copy of MineCraft costs about $27, and he only had around $10 saved up from his allowance, while Michael had around $15 saved up.  Well, now William has $24 saved up and Michael is lagging behind with just $21.  Why?  Because William tried very hard to remember to clean his spot on the table without being asked, being good for bedtime, and being good in the mornings and just in general.  If you know William, you know that this means that he must really, REALLY, like MineCraft!
Returning to the topic of Church.  William outgrew the church shirt, that we got him about 8 months ago, about one month ago.  Michael, on the other hand, is just getting to where the hand-me-down church shirt he got from William is getting to be a little snug, after something like two years.  So, in celebration of this fact we are getting them both new shirts and ties!  :D  When I had them pick out their own ties they were totally stoked!  Of course, Michael tried to get a Christmas tie, but he settled for a less exciting tie after we talked about it a bit.
As for me, I'm doing pretty well.  My dissertation work is progressing slowly but steadily.  I'm a little disappointed about how little participation I'm getting this summer.  I emailed over 110 universities asking for their participation, and so far only about six have responded, and they all responded saying that they couldn't help.  :P  Well, at least I am able to run it here at UT and again at UNM.  Hopefully I'll get enough data that I won't have to rerun the darn thing a third time in the Fall.  I've also gotten down to 211 lbs!  :D  That's the lowest I've been in probably a decade!  I've been eating more fresh fruits and vegetables, but I've also been eating a LOT of (homemade) bread, as well as a goodly amount of chili and rice.
Speaking of which, the kids were not to keen on my idea of black olive pizza and general tso's asparagus and mushrooms on rice, but they ate it pretty well anyway.  We also did baked beans, and William, as is his custom, started pretending to gag as soon as he saw that we were eating something new.  Michael and Carly, on the other hand, both scarfed down their baked beans and then had seconds!  When William saw that he grudgingly tried them, then he cleaned his entire plate, though he did remember to whine about it every once in a while.  :)
Last thing, for those fantasy readers out there.  Have any of you heard of Terry Pratchet's Discworld books?  If so, shame on you for not telling me about them!  They are awesome!  Mort and The Night Watch are two of my new favorite books, and The Color of Magic is pretty darn good too.  Even though I did have some difficulty understanding a little of the Spanish (it didn't help that good ol' Terry was frequently making up words).  (Not to worry, they were originally written in English, I just bought them in Spanish for kicks.)  But seriously, these books are very good reads!  They are also hilarious!  I can't remember how long its been since I've laughed out loud while reading a book, or even watching a movie, but I was bursting out in laughter at least several times while reading each of these books!  I highly recommend them!  I'm looking forward to saving up some of my own allowance so that I can buy some more!  Even if that means that I have to clean off my spot on the table and be good for bedtime.  ;)

More travel

This past week Jenny took the kids to visit with her family and I went to Fort Lauderdale Florida to attend another conference.  So obviously I don't have anything to report on the kids and Jenny, other than the fact that I was assured that they got there safely.  As for my trip, I had a great time!  I actually didn't do anything other than conference stuff.  Mostly because I had just done the tourist thing in Hawaii.  But the conference was really great!  The project director I work for had asked me to come along as a last minute thing because the presentation for our project had received an award and been bumped up to a plenary talk!  (There were only two plenary talks at the conference.)  So this was another of those all-expenses paid trips.  And this time they put me up in a Sheraton.  But the Sheraton looked like a dump compared to the school where the conference was held!  I heard varying figures, but the general consensus was that tuition for this K-12 school is between $20,000 and $40,000 a year! The place looked like a really, really nice college campus!  Even the playground for the younger kids had astroturf!  They had awards for more different types of sports than I've ever even participated in during my entire life!  And not just that, but everyone was very friendly!  They had a bunch of student volunteers with uniforms made specifically for this conference all over the place just helping us poor old folks not get lost.  And you know what else?!  This one K-12 school has over ten foreign language teachers!  :O  But the best part was the food!  They provided breakfast and lunch each day, and the food was prepared by the school's personal gourmet chef!  I didn't even know what I was eating half the time, but it was goooooooood!!  So, back to the conference itself.  Our talk was the first talk of the second full day of the conference.  We presented it in a room that looked like a $15 per ticket movie theater room.  The screen was, well, huge!  And there were at least a hundred people in the theater seating.  So, as you might imagine, the two of us were a little nervous to say the least.  But the presentation went really well!  There were even collective gasps of amazement and we were actually interrupted with cheering and applause at one point!  (Not to mention that they gave each of a check for $166.66 as part of the award we had won.)  Okay, enough self-aggrandizement.  I also really enjoyed the talks I was able to go to.  The presentations at this conference were a lot different from the ones at the conference we presented at in Hawaii, and it was really interesting to see their different point of view!  Well, okay, maybe a little more self-aggrandizement.  Normally at these conferences I make a couple new friends and make contacts with a couple of important people.  Doing this usually takes some effort on my part to overcome my natural inclination for shyness.  Well, after our presentation I actually had people coming up to me and wanting to introduce themselves, give me their business cards, asking me for my 'expert' opinion, and inviting me to join them at their table for the banquet!  (Boy did I have them fooled!)  Okay, I'm really done this time.  Time to reign my ego back in and get back to real life.  <sigh>