Found Her!

WHEW!!! Where do I begin? January has been a whirlwind of activity. So much so that by mid-month I called 'uncle' and flew the coup for 2+ weeks and sailed down to the Panama Canal. More about that in a future post.

But before I go unpack the 120lbs of dirty laundry, let me leave you with this exciting tidbit of news;





Beck does that same exact half-scowl, concentrating look. Genetics is a wondrous thing.

Take Five

So what would you do for $5? Check out this total time-waster website and see what you can get people to do for a fiver.

Birthday Boy!

Beck had his first real big boy birthday bash on Friday. And where better to let a pack of 5 and 6 year old boys loose on a sugar high than the local arcade!

Pizza, ice cream, diabetes-inducing birthday cake and a warehouse full of obnoxiously loud video games and a kid size habitrail (READ: NO CLEAN UP AT MY HOUSE)= AWESOME.

And I have the pictures to prove it.

Beck at the Wheel of Wow. Trust me, that is the look of pure WOW.

SUGAR!!!! I mean, cake, There is cake under there, right?

How do I caption this picture? Where do I start? The one-legged boy? Beck hugging/attacking his friend? Joe instinctively protecting the family jewels?

In the end, everyone went home sticky, tired and happy. And Beck had his best birthday party ever! (READ: MY HOUSE WAS UNSCATHED)

I'm On Fire!

Here it is January and I'm just getting around to posting about Christmas. I'm really falling behind in my bloggy duties.

Santa's been here and he's a slob.

Before the rip fest!

Ready, set....

RIP!

Worst. gift. ever.
This piece of crap is supposed to play games. I spent most of Christmas trying to download games onto it. At wit's end, I finally emailed the company. This is their response:

As stated in our manual, features are subject to change without notice,
games is no longer a feature with our players. There are many other
great things you can do with this player. Thank you for your purchase.

Best Regards,

Joey
Visual Land Team
Support Representative

Dear Joey - I hope your crouch is infested by the fleas of a thousand camels. And by the way, the only great thing I can do with your shitty non-game playing game thing is to throw it in the dump!

Santa got a little ghetto with the "stockings"

The family checking out their loot.

Yes, that's my grandmother. How could you tell?

Benji LOVED this gift. Shame it wasn't his.

That's great, Daddy, but can we play with it now?

Our version of a rope tow

Weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee

Keeping with tradition, we spent another fabulous New Year's Eve at Casa de LaBev.

After midnight and 8 out of 10 kids were still going strong!

Rockin' the PJs and party hats!

So there you have it, 2010 lazily wrapped up in a picture-laden post. It's what you've come to expect from me, no?

And I have to admit, things will probably not get any better. I have been commissioned to write a book and that will probably be taking up my time and brainpower.

I'm really excited about the project. I originally wrote the proposal for this book in 2006. The publisher loved it and gave me the green light to start researching and writing. Shortly thereafter I began writing a new project, called a dossier.

(I just spent the last 45 minutes looking for the picture of our dossier, but no luck. But trust me, it was HUGE! Hundreds of pages. Don't believe me, ask Bev, who had to notarize almost every page. It devoured most of my 2007. Of course when I finally finished it, Beck came home and our lives didn't slow down a bit.)

So the book was put on the back burner. Hell, let's be honest, it wasn't even on the stove top. It was probably in the back of the fridge, next to something green and moldy and wrapped in plastic wrap.

Flash forward to November 2010 and out of the blue I get a letter from the publisher asking me to get my ass in gear to consider starting the book. This time, the timing is perfect.

So now I've been writing summaries, filing out paperwork and collecting historical documents, which has been very interesting and hopefully I'll share some along the way.

So that's where I've disappeared to. I'm very excited but also have a mountain of work in front of me.

But I will make an effort to keep up my little bloggy.