Christmas Lights! Wow!

This past weekend we hung up our Christmas lights (and by "we" I mean "Onil and Amy"). When Onil was in NYC last week he went to the Phil-Am store in Queens and found an inexpensive parol, so he got one for us. We have a larger, more expensive parol that we hang inside, but we figured that for $15 we could hang this one outside. Here are our pictures:

As usual, the Littlest Lord of All contributed NOTHING to the procedure other than to sit on the stepladder and play her guitar for the cars passing by. Hmmm... I seem to remember this happening before....
















Here she is, pretending like she's actually working:




This is a good shot of the parol, by the way:




I was upstairs folding laundry while this was going on, and I came out and saw the Little Lord playing guitar for the passing cars, so I shook my booty like she was a rock star or something. Amy eventually joined in. Please ignore my glasses and lack of make-up. I usually try to look better than this. NOTE: Torrk, if you take any of these pictures and do rude stuff to them I will totally kill you.








At one poin during my dance a car pulled over to laugh and watch. Good times!




And here's what our house looks like, all lit up! Yay!!!





The one with Amy is all fuzzy because we suck at taking night pictures but you get the idea.

Tanksgibben 2007

We had our Thanksgiving day here, just the six of us (four humans, a cat and a hamster) and we had loads of fun! We had a turkey dinner (of course), made funny hats, had a MST3k Turkey Day Marathon, and went out to a crappy movie (Beowulf, and we wore our funny hats to the movie theater). Awesome! Here are some pictures.



Here's our turkey! I love that they misspelled my last name here. Frankly, I like the way they spelled it more than the real spelling. We got a local free-range turkey from Meadow Run Farms in Lititz. It was very tasty -- I think that even thought it was more than twice the price of a store-bought turkey we'll continue to get one every year.







Here are some pictures of Onil, Anna and Amy making the hats. Anna made mine for me (and she made it too big so I had to adjust it). I was a boy pilgrim, Amy was a girl pilgrim, Onil was an Indian and Anna was the turkey. They also made shirts.





















Time for the food!















Hope you all had a great Thanksgiving! Happy Holidays from all of us!

Gaby's 5th Birthday!

Hey, I thought I'd share some pictures from Gaby's birthday party last weekend. These pictures probably aren't your typical birthday shots -- they're mostly just pictures of us doing dumb stuff or stuff that cracked us up.

Since, for some unknown reason, Gaby lacks the natural instinct to fear clowns that all humans should possess, they had a clown at her birthday party. While all clowns are nightmarish, this one wasn't as bad as some.



At least this clown was a woman, which isn't nearly as scary as a dude dressed up as a clown. Plus, she had a hot emo clown assistant! Anna and I were cracking up because we were sure Amy was totally digging the emo clown assistant. And we were right! She was like, Wow, he's really cute! Check him out, he's by the door in the back:



Here, the clown (whose name was Giggles) was showing the kids some magic thing where she pretended to look for a rabbit and while she looked away she slid something along the bottom of the frame and a rabbit came out. I am not kidding when I say that these kids totally lost their shit when the rabbit came out. They were screaming and jumping up and down and pointing like the Beatles just walked in or something. Here are a couple of pictures of Giggles, the rabbit, and the kids going apeshit over the whole act:





Here you can see the kids crowding around Giggles and practically knocking her over:


Another thing that cracked us up was how giant my kids were, especially Anna. She's like 5'9" or something, and in a room full of tiny Filipino people she really stood out.





Giggles broke out the face paint and made all the kids look like whores, including my kids and Onil. I already had make-up on -- what do I need a flower on my cheek for?







Game time! Man, it was rough. I don't have pictures of it all, but you'll see the end result. First, they played pin the nose on the clown. Gaby didn't win and she was completely annoyed by that. Michael had to give her a lecture. Then Rachel sent all of the kids from the room and hid a toy, and the first kid to find that got a prize. Gaby didn't win that either and started to cry. So to cheer her up they broke out the musical chairs. That's when everything really fell apart. Gaby continued her massive losing streak and was eliminated in the first round. She lost it. Total temper tantrum!



Can I just say that there is nothing funnier than a little kid crying while wearing face paint? Hilarious! So they played the first round again and some other kid got out. I had a feeling they would keep playing the first round until Gaby won. The game continued, and all hell was breaking loose right there in the living room because every little kid who was eliminated was crying her head off. One kid totally beat the crap out of her mother. I'm not kidding -- punches and kicks and everything. Man! Those little girls were cutthroat! At the end of the game every single kid was crying, even the girl who won because she hurt herself winning. It was completely insane and totally awesome. Onil was in a picture-taking frenzy!



So that was the fun end to the party. Every party should end with a group of little girls crying their heads off.

To round out the post, here are some random pictures. See you at Gaby's sixth birthday!











Gaby's giving us the finger!