I really should have done this a long time ago.  Julie and I have both written some funny things down in multiple places that the kids have said, but I need to find those lists and get them all consolidated in one place, here on this blog.   So this will serve as my collection place for funny sayings and I’ll just add to this post as new funny things are said.  So here are a few starter kid quotes.  If any of you have any funny things the kids have said to you, please add it here in a comment and I’ll merge it in with these sayings.

Eden, December 2008 – Logan was getting a little mouthy with Julie one day.  Eden ran up and said “You need to respect Mom, Logan.”  Except it sounded more like “You need to wespet Mom, Logan.”  He walked off and Eden looks up at Julie and says “Seriously, Mom, he needs to wespet you.”

Logan, November 2008 – Logan was having a talk with Grammy and Gramps who were visiting from Texas. Grammy said something Logan didn’t believe.  Grammy told him “Ask your dad”, to which Logan replied “OK I will – wait – he lies a LOT!” Hmm – he thinks he’s figured me out.  I don’t really LIE.  I just like to have fun with the answers.  I subscribe to the “Calvin’s Dad School of Question Answering”.  You can find some awesome examples here and here.

Soren, November 2008 – We were playing Scattergories and the letter was P.  One item was Summer Activity.  As we’re all working on our list, he suddenly says “ahh man, I wish the letter was S.  Then for Summer Activity I could put Sacrificing Chickens.”  We were rolling and could barely finish.  When we finally finished and were reading our lists, when it came to Summer Activity, he proudly said “PERSECUTING chickens!” Don’t ask me. I have NO IDEA where he pulled that from.

Logan, October 2008 – Just sitting at the bar eating breakfast and matter of factly said “Hey Mom…I want you to change my birthday, OK?”

Eden, January 2008 – Upon seeing Julie in some pants she’d not been able to wear while pregnant with the twins.  “Wow!  New pants, Mom!”

Peyton, November 2004 – While we sat in an IHOP in Anaheim having breakfast waiting for Disneyland to open.  Our waiter was speaking to us in his thick Mexican accent.  Peyton, stared at him intently while he was talking to us, then suddenly said “Uhh, we speak English!”

Soren, more than once, random bathrooms, usually in a restaurant, when someone in a stall is having a “rough” time. “Dad, what’s that noise?  Is that a monster, dad?  Dad, I think there’s a monster in here.  Ooh, dad, what’s that smell?  It’s making my tummy sick dad.”

On Monday evening we went to the park across the street.  There’s a pathway that encircles the park that is somewhere between 1/4 and 1/3 mile.  There’s a marker we’ve seen before that says the distance but it was getting dark so we couldn’t find it.  Anyway, when we got there, Logan said he wanted to “wun fo a minute and exohcise”.   So he took off – and didn’t stop until 6 laps later!  Actually that’s not totally true.  He stopped long enough each time he passed to ask if he could go again.  Julie wanted him to stop after 3 laps – she thought he was going to pass out or something – but I wanted to see how long he could go.  He finally said he was ready to go after 6 laps but he didn’t even look that tired.  I think he could have gone more.  He looked so funny too — totally reminded me of Dash on The Incredibles with his little legs just a blur and his little hands clenched in these tight fists.  Actually his only complaint afterwards was that his hands hurt from making fists for that long.  HAHA!  He actually was pretty fast too.  I don’t know for sure how long, but it was definitely less than 20 minutes.  Peyton tried to run with him about halfway through but couldn’t for very long.  And Soren did 11 trips on his bike in that time.  A 4 year old running 1.5 – 2 miles in less than 20 minutes seems like it’s pretty good to me.    I wondered if this had something to do with watching the Olympics but I don’t think he had really seen much of the track events by then since everything we watched was mostly swimming, gymnastics, and volleyball.  But somehow, he got the running bug.  I said to Julie after, that we need to take him to the park every night and just let him run.

I’ve been had! I just got off the phone with Peyton and I’m busted. Well, actually the tooth fairy is busted. Peyt told me he knows I’m the tooth fairy. See, he lost a tooth yesterday and didn’t say anything. He said he wanted to test the tooth fairy. So he secretly put the tooth under his pillow and sadly there was no money there this morning. So now he knows. I figure if a kid can come up with a plan like that and say nothing about a lost tooth, which most kids are so excited about, then he deserves to know the truth anyway. I wonder what sort of plan he has for Christmas?

And by the way, perhaps the best part of the story is HOW he lost the tooth. When I told him I didn’t know he even had a loose tooth, he replied:

“Oh, I didn’t. Well, it was a LITTLE bit loose. But Soren kicked it out.”

Great.

After months of going back and forth over who I’m going to vote for in the presidential election this fall, I think I’ve finally made up my mind. I’m voting for Peyton. Who cares if he’s TECHNICALLY not old enough? Who cares if he hasn’t even finished 2nd grade? He has a GREAT platform that I’d like to share with everyone. Apparently this was a writing assignment where they practiced brainstorming ideas and then turning those ideas into a paper. So I’ve posted the rough draft and final versions below. I was just going to post the final version, but his rough draft has some pretty classic tidbits in it. So here they are:

Rough Draft

Final Version

So that does it for me. Any president who would make a store called Get Coins and ensure that ALL robbers are caught has got to be good. Heck, at least as good as any of the current choices. So forget that whole “35 years old” rule!

Vote Peyt in ’08!

Julie and I decided to be brave and take all 6 kids to Costco on Saturday. They have those nice big carts, so I put both twins car seats on the back of one cart. Julie had another cart with Logan and Eden in it and we headed in the store. Soren has this “thing” where everytime you get to the very back of a Costco, he has to pee. Of course he can never tell us on the way in, it has to be at the back. Well he didn’t fail us this time, either, so I took my cart with Peyton and Soren back to the front of the store to use the bathroom.

I was waiting outside the door for the boys to get done when an older gentleman walked up and, upon seeing the twins, came over and oohed and aahed over them. Then he said, “we have a set of twin grandkids back east born a couple years ago.” That was cool, but then he started telling me his daughter’s whole history of trying to get pregnant, not being able to, having IVF with 8 eggs and a couple of failed attempts and then finally 2 eggs took so she had the twins, then a third egg took and so now she has 3 kids. Quite a story but more than I really wanted to know. He asked if ours were natural or a fertility treatment result and I said, “oh they’re natural, no fertility treatments needed by us for sure”. Well, finally he went into the bathroom. Soren and Peyton then came out so I told them to watch the babies while I went. There were 3 urinals and the older man I was talking to a minute earlier was at the middle one, so I pulled in at one next to him and started doing my business.

Urinal conversations are always weird.

“Yeah”, he said, “if those earlier eggs had taken, my daughter would have had 6 kids under 8 years old. Can you imagine that? ha ha ha…”.

“Umm, actually I can imagine that” I replied. “That’s what we have”

His eyes got big and he started a “whoa” when the air was punctuated by a drawled exclamation from the other end of the bathroom in a toilet stall. “WOW! 6 under 8! I’m impressed.”

It was about all I could do to not laugh. Who jumps in to a conversation with people they can’t even see and don’t know, while seated on a toilet??? Apparently, the unseen cowboy in the toilet stall had no qualms about doing it.

So me and my 2 new friends, one unseen, the other just met, had a little conversation there in the bathroom about how crazy life with 6 kids under 8 is. After I washed my hands, I left. I never did see my toilet stall friend. I wonder how he’s doing?

On Saturday we went to our old neighborhood in West Jordan for a birthday party for Christian. Before the party, though, we stopped at Jordan Landing to do some shopping. As we navigated the parking lot, Soren’s sharp eye spotted the green-clad girls and leaders outside the doors of the store selling their wonderful pre-packaged morsels of bliss and shouted “Hey, there’s Girl Sprout Cookies!” Actually, I think that’s a great name. I like it better than the original.

Soren is a budding photographer.  He is always stealing our camera, wandering off, and taking pictures with it.  Thank goodness for digital cameras!!!  Otherwise he’d be in big trouble for wasting tons of film.  Every time we download pictures there are always at least 20 – 30 that we’ve never seen before.  Lots of them are actually pretty good.  He likes to experiment and the last round was a self-portrait session I guess.  He’s obviously having lots of fun.  So I thought I’d share the results with you all…

The other day, I was standing in our family room enjoying the great view out the windows when I noticed that one of the higher windows, ten feet up, had a huge hole and big crack in the bottom corner of the window:

I called the boys over and I’m sure you can guess what happened. Straight out of the old Family Circus cartoons. “Not Me” did it.

Well unfortunately “Not Me” doesn’t have a very large bank account and he’s rather elusive anyway, so now “Me” gets to pay for it. Ouch. Julie and I both have a gut feeling that it was Logan. He has a little anger issue and likes to throw things when he gets mad. Julie says sometimes he reminds her of his Uncle Jeff when he was growing up. So we’re working on that with him. My guess is he got mad at something and just randomly threw whatever he was holding. He probably had no idea where it even went and didn’t see it break the window, because he really is sincere when he says it was “Not Me”. But maybe we’re wrong too and it really was “Not Me”. If anyone sees him anywhere, please let him know I’m looking for him. Thanks.

The other day Soren was out of control and had to go to his room to cool down. After a few minutes I heard him screaming and thought he was mad at me again. I went to check on him, walked in his room, and he was standing with his back to his bed screaming hysterically and pointing to the wall right by his bedroom door where there was a Praying Mantis. He thought it was some kind of monster or something and I hugged him and his whole body was shaking. Poor little guy. So then I told him what it was and called up the other boys and they had some fun with him (the Mantis, not Soren) before carrying him outside and letting him go in the front yard. Here’s some fun pictures though.

Well, Mom, it’s now closer to happening than ever before. I’m talking about the danger my mom has been worried about ever since we built our house a couple years back. See, Julie and I each had some things that we really wanted in our home. One thing I really wanted was a nice big open family room with a loft above it. Well, it’s kind of been a running joke that sooner or later our boys would figure out that they could actually jump off the balcony. Last Christmas we got a trampoline and when my parents heard about it they were nervous right away that we’d set it up in the family room, thus further enticing the boys to jump. We joked about having little head dents in the ceiling. Well, mom, no worries, they haven’t actually jumped yet.

HOWEVER…Peyton and Soren were in trouble the other day and were sitting on the couch in the family room getting a good talking-to from me. As we were talking something prompted Soren to say, “well, yeah dad, Peyton climbed up over the railing today” and he pointed up toward the loft and looked at Peyton with a look of pure admiration that only a younger brother could have for an older. This stopped me in mid-sentence.

The wall and railing in question

“What?”, I asked.

“Peyton climbed up the wall and over the railing, Dad”, said Soren.

“All the way up and over?”

“uh-huh” they both said, giggling.

My eyes got wide. It was one of those parenting moments when you know you’re supposed to be mad, but the whole situation sure makes it tough. I turned to Julie, who was doing dishes in the kitchen, with a stern look on my face.

“WOW!”, she said, eyes wide.

The boys broke out in laughter as they saw how impressed their mom was with Peyton’s feat. There went my ability to stay stern-faced.

Afterwards of course, I did lecture them on the danger of doing that, but for the first time I realized that just maybe, my mom was right about the possibilities of that balcony.