Mr. Awesome and the Queen of the Castle

Since the girls and Max had nicknames, I thought it was high time that Megan and I got our own nicknames as well. I asked Ali what she thought our names should be since she was "Super Ali", Kaitlyn was "Princess Kaitlyn" and Max was "Mr. Max." Ali responded that Megan should be "Queen of the Castle." I lobbied for "Mr. Awesome" for me, but somehow it didn't seem to catch; plain old "Dad" just seems to have become too ingrained.

As far as Megan's name goes though, you can see why she's the queen, and how lucky I am to be associated with her excellency:


Earlier this week, Ali worked on building some houses with blocks. She insisted that we take pictures of her creation from every angle so that her design wouldn't be lost once we cleaned up the blocks. Rather than show you the 12 pictures of her building, I thought you'd enjoy this one shot:

Speaking of Ali, she's been working on measurements at school, and apparently it's transferring to home because I've found at least two full sheets of her paper completed with the following three columns: one column naming an object (i.e. "ball" or "cup" or "book"), one with the length of the object in inches, and a third column with the length of the object in centimeters. I'm pretty sure she's not going to stop until she's measured everything in the house.

She also likes getting really close to the camera when I'm trying to take a picture of Max doing something interesting.

Max is not only improving his getting-things-into-his-mouth skills, but he's also becoming more adept at multi-tasking. For example, we've already known that he's able to cry and sleep at the same time, but this week he was shoving a foam snowflake into his mouth while simultaneously playing with another toy; he used his belly to hold the snowflake in place at the perfect height to be able to suck on it and still keep both hands free for shaking and throwing the toy from his high chair.

Yep. He's pretty talented.

Kaitlyn is just a doll. The other day Megan asked Kaitlyn what "love" was. Kaitlyn walked over to Megan, gently wrapped her arms around Megan's neck and said quietly, "This, is love." If she's able to replicate the cuteness of that when she's older, she's going to have amazing powers of persuasion in getting to use the car and the credit card. Should I be worried?

Kaitlyn is also able to leap off of stools into the kitchen with a single bound all the while wearing a new dress that she insisted on keeping even though Megan had it in the "take-back-to-the-store" pile.

And, speaking of videos...

This week in my Integrated Marketing Communications class, we had to make an advertising plan for a product we were assigned to. (Our group was assigned to Levi's.) We were supposed to present very rough sketches of what our ad campaigns might look like. However, I saw a great opportunity for shameless band promotion, and couldn't pass up the opportunity. Using the song I just wrote (and played on) as the background track, we created the following commercial:

I thought that was cool enough to share.

Ali and Kaitlyn are also working on memorizing the Primary scripture of the month, complete with sign language signs to help them remember. At bedtime tonight Kaitlyn was doing it so well, but then refused to be filmed in action--probably because her hair wasn't done anymore. In any case, Ali did a great job with it, and here's a video of her doing it (complete with Kaitlyn trying to escape bedtime at the end):