HI HI HI DID YOU MISS ME PROBABLY NOT ARE YOU SUPER SICK AND TIRED OF HEARING ABOUT HOW BUSY I AM IF SO SORRY YO AMY HIT THE CAPS LOCK KEY PLEASE *deep breath* My new job (which I guess isn't THAT new anymore, but since I'm still in that learning-curve stage where getting asked a direct question during a meeting results in momentary panic of I PROBABLY DON'T KNOW THE ANSWER TO THIS QUESTION OH SHIT EVERYBODY IS LOOKING AT ME I CAN'T THINK OF ANY WORDS PASS PASS PASS!, I think it still qualifies as new-ish) continues to be very cool and also very time consuming. We all work from home most of the time, but there's also some travel, and we get together as a team as often as we can, spending long days in various hotel lobby restaurants or wherever we can score free wifi, strategerizing and planning to plan and mapping out campaign sequences on whiteboards and then taking photos of the whiteboards so we can all go home and spend the next couple days trying to read each other's chickenscratch handwriting. This week a couple people I actually hadn't met yet joined us,... Read more →

Ike, generally the most independent of all my small independent people, struggles with a touch of separation anxiety. It started over the summer, and quite suddenly. If Jason left for work without giving Ike a hug and a kiss goodbye, Ike would freak out, panic, wail, and run to the front window to plaster his tear-streaked face against the glass in hopes that Daddy would see him and come back inside. Worked every time, and eventually Jason made sure he always left time for a proper goodbye. Then Ike started policing everybody else's goodbyes, demanding that Jason give Noah and hug and a kiss, then Ezra, then me. Then he added a double high five to the end, one smack for each hand. Then any time anybody left the house, for work or camp or school, he'd assign an order and supervise the entire pre-exit process. He demands that everyone both give and recieve hugannakissannahighfive to and from everyone else, no exceptions. "YOU'RE MISSING YOUR HUGANNAKISSANNAHIGHFIVE," he'll shriek, the second he senses someone moving towards the front door. "COME BACK FOR YOUR HUGANNAKISSANNAHIGHFIVE!" Trying to convince him that you already gave someone their hugannakissannahighfive is pointless. He will not believe... Read more →

I totally bought Ezra the wrong Transformer for his birthday. He wanted Prowl, the Autobot, Battle Masters edition; for some reason this translated in my brain to Strafe, the Technobot, Construct-Bots edition. I still have no idea what at least seven or eight of those words mean. Lesson learned, though: Strafe is blue, while Prowl is yellow. But not like, Bumblebee yellow. Also, Battle Masters don't actually transform into anything, which, okay, I give up, these toys are stupid. Luckily, my mom has this birthday thing down and knows to just send them money rather than attempt to decode whatever Extreme Robot Ninja Lizard With Super Clutch Fisting Action Power the boys are rambling on about. So we ordered the correct (NON-TRANSFORMING) Transformer (WTF) and it arrived and is apparently so flipping awesome a fight broke out over it before I'd even gotten it out of the package. (Which to be fair, probably took me 20 minutes, because the toy was literally roped to the box in about 15 different places and then the box was coated in about three layers of packing tape just for good measure. HELLO ADULT AND YOUR CLUMSY MEATHANDS. I AM HERE TO MAKE YOU... Read more →

This post is sponsored by OneDay and the OneDay Instant Movie Maker App. (Almost) every time I upload and share one of my boys' birthday montages, I get comments and emails asking how I make them. And I generally respond with a hybrid of truth and a lie: 1) I use iMovie currently, although Noah's earliest videos were made with Windows Movie Maker, so basically: I use whatever what program that done came free with my computing lapbox. 2) It's easy! Okay, so maybe "It's easy!" isn't a complete lie, but definitely oversimplifies the time commitment involved. Here's how the production cycle usually goes down: 7 DAYS BEFORE BDAY: La la la la la 6 DAYS BEFORE BDAY: Hmm, I should probably start getting all the video clips togeth-la la la la la 5 DAYS BEFORE BDAY: *hears song on radio, cries in car, declares it PERFECT* 4 DAYS BEFORE BDAY: *goes online, reads perfect song's actual lyrics, discovers it's actually about butts* 3 DAYS BEFORE BDAY: *spends entire day waiting for 146 different video clips from three different recording devices to import into iMovie* 2 DAYS BEFORE BDAY: Thumbnail processing? WHAT IS THUMBNAIL PROCESSING AND WHY DOES IT REQUIRE... Read more →

For his birthday, Ezra asked for exactly four things: 1) A chocolate cake with chocolate icing. 2) A Lord Business LEGO set. 3) A very specific Transformer that oh God I hope I bought the correct one THEY ALL LOOK ALIKE. and 4) A party dress for Bloon. So we took a recent scouting trip to a Big Box Toy Store — the POINT of which was to figure out exactly which Transformer he was talking about, which I completely blanked on while scrolling through Amazon because THEY ALL LOOK ALIKE and there are fourteen million variations of the same robot and now I'm utterly amazed at my parents' ability to always get me the exact pose of Strawberry Shortcake I had my heart set on. "The Strawberry Shortcake with the watering can! The GREEN watering can. And not the BENDING DOWN one. The STANDING UP one." While we were there, I figured Ezra might want to have a say in Bloon's party dress selection as well, so after some disoriented wandering around in search of the doll aisle, I asked an employee where we might find doll clothes. "Like for [DOLL BRAND I'VE NEVER HEARD OF]?" he asked. "Um,... Read more →

So what is going on with me? Why do I keep disappearing? Where do I even go? What happened to my seemingly infinitely endless capacity to talk about myself? I don't know. Work is pretty busy. Okay, really busy. And life is pleasantly monotonous. I'm switching closets over to fall/winter and am unprepared to deal with the actual number of closets that involves now. I took Ezra to the dentist last week and then spent the rest of the day nursing a thrashy head-butt bruise with an ice pack while starting at the ceiling like a shellshocked zombie. ("Does he have any SENSORY ISSUES?" the hygienist asked me, as Ezra proceeded to flip the fuck out for 20 agonizing minutes straight. "No," I said, while attempting to gently hog-tie him to the chair with my own limbs. "Except for THIS ONE RIGHT HERE, apparently.") We saw Gone Girl over the weekend but arrived late and had to sit in the front row and my neck is still killing me, plus Jason has a cold with the number-one side effect of breathing so loudly at night he wakes me up and I get to spend hours lying awake, trying to ignore... Read more →

Well hello there, blog full o' tumbleweeds. How's it hanging? So I went away for a few days there to a conference in Santa Barbara, California. A non-blogging, non-just-an-excuse-to-squee-and-party conference, where I actually spent every minute of my time either in conference sessions or in a semi-circle with coworkers while we worked and planned and over-strategerized our marketing funnels. At night there was good food and even better wine, but still like, Business Wine. (You know, where every delicious sip must be weighed against the ever-increasing odds of Saying Something Dumb or Regrettable in front of work people.) Overall, it was pretty uneventful. I didn't show up at the wrong airport or lose my luggage or cause any sort of international incident. I didn't get much sleep or free time, and the entire trip sort of faded into a hazy, four-day quest for either decent coffee or a place to charge my phone. *** On the flight out, the middle seat in my row was empty. A pregnant mom with a baby in her lap asked the woman with the aisle seat if she'd possibly consider switching to HER aisle seat just one row up, so she could put her... Read more →