down to"hell"...

the other night lucy requested a new song for bedtime..."go down to hell". of course, i initially laughed and said what? i tried and tried to figure out what in the world she was talking about or where she had heard it, but in the end settled on the more recognizable song..."i am a child of god" (ya know to get those bad words out of her mind). well, she kept asking for it the next few nights, and i finally got a chance to ask peder what in the world he thought she was talking about. it appears that on saturdays when i'm at work, peder drives hannah to her art class and goes up and down the freeway ramps and sings..."the grand old duke of york...he had 10,000 men...he marched them up the hill and then he marched them down again".  apparently lucy heard... "the grand old duke of york went down to "hell". if that's not selective hearing i do not know what is. so watch out people, next time you sing a song to your kid....enunciate.

...

Ellipses...i love them. I'm pretty sure that i use them way too often, and at completely the wrong times. I've never claimed to be a good writer. some of you "english major" people probably cringe at my grammar. sorry. oh well. i love them. once i wrote a post about some of my favorite words, well this is my favorite quotation mark...by far. i looked back, and there are 39 blog titles that have ellipses in them. 39! and as you all know, it's not like i blog a lot. 39 out of 109 titles is a pretty good average. my guess is that it's actually in 98% of my blogs...just like a favorite quotation mark should be.
it's perfect for almost any occasion(especially when you use it any way you want to). i feel that it is totally superior to the comma. Commas to me just give a split second of a pause, where ellipses give that real thoughtful, sassy pause. it adds feeling, and can even denote the rolling of my figurative eyes.... Plus if you are Japanese you can even double it at one time......!
So here's to you ellipses...you complete me.

snow is fun...

but only as long as you can't actually feel the snow.

The longer i live in the "Valley of the Sun", the colder i get. I mean, we are talking that when it gets below 69 degrees, i am freezing...time to bust out the extra blanket on my half of the bed. i was excited though to take the kids up to flagstaff with my parents and sister to play in the snow. we all know that opportunity doesn't arise every day around here.

this is right at the beginning when everyone was bundled and hadn't really felt any snow yet. awww the innocence...

we had a great time throwing snowballs at eachother ...

and seeing how much snow we could pick up...

and being really cute, all bundled up...she kinds looks like a chipmunk =)

this is when we hurried and took a group picture because we knew we only had moments left before the wall of cold hit and the icy tears began.

 

even after all the work of finding/dressing in layers and layers and layers of warmth, it is just never enough.

she may be smiling here, but she was crying just moments before...and after.  i decided that i love the warmth even more than before. seriously, trying to go out in the cold with little kids is way too much work.  and way too many clothes. and snow is only fun if you can't feel it.