Couple of nights ago, I can't remember how long, but not too long ago, Josh and I had one of our 'routine' conversations during bed time (picked the picture simply because it showed Josh sleeping). Josh has slowly degraded to needing a little more 'attention' at bed time. Before, our bed time ritual was pretty straight forward... bath, lotion, brush teeth/hair, read 1 or 2 books while drinking a bottle of milk, then put him to bed and walk out of the room. It has slowly morphed into something a bit more 'entertaining' for Josh.

Ritual now includes watching TV, preferrably Bull Riding - "that bull looks MEAN!" is Josh's favorite saying, while drinking the bottle. Then we go back to read a book or two. So he's finagled his way to get an extra 15-25 minutes of staying awake. Then, after reading books we have to lay with him in his bed for a little bit. I've managed to keep this to 5 minutes at the most then explaining I have to go 'help' Mom or something to get me out of the room. Well, this works for the majority of the time, but about 15% of the time, it takes a bit more 'massaging' before I can leave. And even less frequent, maybe 5% of the time, Josh will wake up/start balling/screaming for 'I want my Daddy' and when he does that most of the time he really got scared and needs to be cuddled with a bit (I say most of the time b/c sometimes he does it just to get me down there and he doesn't appear shaken up or anything - sneaky little bastage).

So the night that I'm referring to, after we did our little 'lay in bed' ritual I was going to leave and Josh was sitting 'up'. For some reason, he threw his head/body back expecting it to land on the pillow, but he miscalculated the distance. Instead of playfully landing on the bed/pillow, there was an enormous CRACK as his head hit the panelling/wall in his build in bunk beds. It is actually the wall that you 'can't' see in this picture but you get the idea. So as you parents of young children know, when an 'injury' like that happens and there is complete silence, you know it's bad. It is silent because Josh was in such shock and pain that he couldn't even breath, lol. He had tears streaming out, his mouth was wide open, but he was like a frozen statue...no sound. Then after he remembered that he wanted to cry, he took the one massive deep breath and let out a blood curtling scream.

"OK, looks like I'm gonna be down here a bit longer," I thought to myself. I immediately grabbed Josh and tried to comfort him, but he was having none of it. He had screaming to do...the kind of screaming that wakes up a neighborhood. Mom came rushing in, actually from the sound of his head hitting the wall and not the scream. Josh temporarily wanted to be held by Mommy, but then wanted to come back to me after she calmed him down. So he came back to me and uttered his famous words that always stop me in my tracks.

"Snuggle with me Daddy." So I told him I'd lay with him a few more minutes. Now as I said, the way he says "Want to snuggle Daddy" is 'bad' enough in the fact that I can never resist, but his actions are even worse - and sneaky at that. As we lay in bed, every time I wiggle just a bit, hinting that I might be getting up, Josh quickly puts a hand on me, snuggles up in a spoon position and 'smoothly' says "Snuggle Daddy", then goes back to laying down/playing with blankie/or whatever else he was doing. He does it in a matter as if he's the one doing me a favor by snuggling, lol. As I've said before, he's got Mom and Dad wrapped around his finger sometimes, and this is one of the times he knows it. (I can only imagine how bad it will be with Audrey)

So after 2-3 failed attempts at leaving the room, I finally tell Josh, "Josh, I have to leave and do some work. You try to go to sleep and I will come back in 5 minutes to check on you." Note that it is almost 9:45pm already, so I figured he'd finally just fall asleep and I went to work in my office. After about 30 minutes of working, I figured I better turn on the monitor to make sure he's sleeping and I was a bit shocked at what I heard. Josh was just sitting there in his bed, talking in his whisper voice (ask Val how much she likes that voice), "Daddy check on me in fiiiiiivvvvve minutes. Daddy coming back in fiiiiivvvve minutes" over and over again. I half wanted to let him keep going to see how long it would go but knowing Josh, I was afraid he'd keep at it well past midnight. So I went back in the room to tell him to go to sleep now. As I opened the door...

"Snuggle Daddy," Josh said in his 'comforting/consoling' tone as if I'd come back because I needed a little loving. I just shook my head and replied,

"2 minutes Josh, I'll snuggle for 2 minutes."

"Yep!" Josh was quick to reply, as if he knew it all along, and assumed the spoon position waiting for me to crawl into bed with him.

Today we took our annual trip to Northwoods Orchard. The orchard offers a wide variety of things for the kids to do - picking apples, petting kittens and bunnies, goats, chickens, etc. Katie, Elizabeth and Cassie Arendt joined us for the afternoon. Joshua and Elizabeth palled around as usual being the cute and funny two-year olds they are. Joshua was especially interested in the big tractors!

On the other hand, Elizabeth was keen on holding the kitties. After we got done holding the animals and riding the tractors, we went out to the Apple Orchard and picked ourselves some apples. Joshua liked the idea of pulling apples off the tree and Elizabeth taste-tested each one to make sure they were yummy.

Audrey and Cassie were happy as usual for the afternoon outing- they are one month apart. They both can sit up now - without assistance. Our baby girls are getting SO BIG!

The next outing will be the Pumpkin Patch - Stay tuned! To see pictures from the weekend, check out the Weekend with the Arendt Girls gallery. Enjoy!

Again, catching up a bit on 'journal' entries for Josh and Audrey, so sorry for the delay. About a month ago, Jess Gideon had her annual party at the farm. You can see the pictures in the Farm Picnics gallery. So the whole Aney clan packed up and headed out to Oronoco, with the intention that Josh and Dad would pitch a tent and sleep over night. The good thing about Oronoco is that it is only about 5-10 minutes from our house, so it was a perfect time to practice sleeping in a tent to see if Josh liked it and if he was 'ready' for it.

So why am I telling you about pitching a tent and why is the post titled 'The Other Hammer'? Well you know who the real hammer is ;) Couple of factors play into this. First is fact that Josh loves walking around with a hammer (my goal is to minimize the amount of time he actually has a real hammer in his hand) and 'fixing' things, so pitching a tent with a hammer was pretty sweet for Josh. Secondly, I let something slip out one day while mowing that has now turned Josh into a hammer wielding 'killer' :O That may be a bit far fetched, but maybe I should tell you where he gets the killer instinct.

When I was younger, maybe 6-7, I ended up being the brunt of one of my Mom's 'Cruel and Unusual Mental Punishments', also known as 'humor' to her ;) I don't know how many of my family members were involved in the setup but the premise went something like this. It was Thanksgiving, and my Mom and Sissy were pretending to not have a turkey and sent out a friend of Sissy's to go to all the stores to try and find a turkey to cook. Of course my Mom laid on the 'panic' real thick saying she didn't know how we were going to find one on Thanksgiving Day and didn't know how we were going to feed everyone. So a little time passes...probably half hour or so, and Sissy's friend returns to the house and low and behold she has a turkey! Crisis averted!

Now, I know to many people that know me, it doesn't suprise you at all that I have a 'killer instinct' given the dirty glares I can dish out and grudges I can hold ;) But in reality, I'm probably the biggest wimp you'll ever meet. Why am I confessing? The 'turkey' that was brought back to cook had one problem associated with it - size not being that problem. As I glanced out towards our kitchen expecting to see a Cub Foods bag or some other grocery store bag holding a frozen turkey, all I see is a flash of claws and feathers and what looked like a 100 pound turkey, as a 20+ pound real turkey came tearing around the corner. Of course I froze, but someone, I think Sissy or maybe Tim diverted the turkey's path and directed him into the bathroom adjacent to our dining room as it gobbled and did whatever else turkeys do while we 'figured out a game plan'.

One other footnote I should bring up. In my life up until this point, I've only killed one type of animal - pigeons. And I did this begrudgingly! lol I can still remember my Mom making me kill them with a pellet gun because they would build nests in our house awnings and poop/pee all over house, so she wanted them gone. I'd line up the pigeon in my sites, and right before pulling the trigger, I'd get all guilty about killing some 'baby pigeons' Mom. Pretty pathetic huh? Well, it gets worse. After I'd shoot them, I was too wimpy to pick up the dead pigeon, so I'd get Victoria, my younger sister to come pick it up after I had blown its brains out. To this day I have yet to touch a dead animal - and hope I never do!

So back to the sick joke my Mom was playing on me :) It was made known that we were going to have to kill this turkey so that we could cook it up for Thanksgiving. My family proceeded to tell the tall tales of how our Grandma used to cut/snap heads off of turkeys and they'd run around the yard headless - hence the saying 'Run around like a chicken with its head chopped off' I guess, except in this case it was a turkey that I only saw a glimpse of, sort of like Sasquatch sitings and it was in the next room over trotting around clawing up our bathroom floor. Telling these types of stories to a 6-7 year old, you can only imagine what was going through my head - I was also thinking, "Hey, at least I have a head, which is more than this turkey is going to be able to say".

I tried to stay calm and listen to the stories, but a sick feeling started brewing in my stomach when everyone was saying they didn't want to have to be the one to kill it. I felt like everyone was looking at me to step up and say I was Rambo or something, but remember, I'm pro life advocate for animals ;) So my Mom came up with the idea that all the kids would draw straws to see who had to kill it. Note, my Dad was still working or something, I just remember he wasn't there and my Mom was using her wheelchair/arthritis as an 'excuse' to get out of the drawing ;) So it was down to the kids. Straws were made... to make the long, straw drawing ceremony short, you all know who ended up with the short straw!

I was really sick to my stomach now and probably turning pretty pale to boot. Someone 'bagged' up the turkey in the big burlap bag and took it out to the garage where the 'execution' was to take place. I can't remember who did it because by this point I was turning pretty numb with nausea setting in. I thought back to all the pigeons I had to kill and how hard it was and I asked if the pellet gun would kill the turkey. They informed me that I had to use a different gun...probably told me a .22 or something. So, now I was scared of having to shoot a big gun as well.

Here's where the 'killer instinct' of mine kicked in ;) I had a new plan, and to this day, I can't believe I thought this was going to be 'better' lol. I told my Mom and everyone that I wouldn't shoot the turkey only offering a 'because I don't want to' as an excuse. But instead, if they give me a bat, I would go out to the garage and kill it. I'm laughing right now as I type this thinking of what my Mom must have thought of me. Now any other Mom probably would have stopped the joke right there and more importantly, stopped me from going into the garage to bludgeon a turkey to death or at least ask why I thought that was going to be better. But no! This was 'humor' remember. She told me we didn't have any bats, but we had some golf clubs and asked if I'd use that instead. Sure, a driver should suffice I thought and she told someone to go get me a club.

So I start marching towards the door and out to the garage like an executioner walking to the guillotine, thinking of how I'm going to kill this turkey. Like I said now, I don't know how I could have ever thought this was going to be better/easier than shooting it, but somehow in my mind it was - probably because I didn't think there was going to be a lot of blood. Boy would I have been wrong. That's right 'would have been', thankfully, my family came bursting out the door in laughter stopping me from performing an act that would have scared me for life probably - not that I'm scarred now or anything ;) All along we had a turkey cooked, this was just my Mom's way of getting a little holiday entertainment on the schedule. It is pretty hilarious when I think about it, I probably laughed about it at the time as well, and unfortunately, this is one of the milder forms of 'humor' that I was used as the primary prop in.

What does this story have to do with 'The Other Hammer'? Mowing the other day, Josh on my back in a backpack, we spotted a mouse by the side of the house. We've had a few get into our garage and they are driving me nuts. Anyway, I think I hit it/stunned it with the weed wacker when I was trimming by the house, so it was kind of motionless as I ran to the garage to 'figure out what to do'. That sick/anxious feeling was creeping into my stomach again fearing I may have to kill the mouse, lol. Ann was outside at the time and I told her to get me the 'Kitty Catcher' (long story, but basically just one of those extension rods with squeeze grip that closes a 'vice' on the other end). I ran back and tried picking up the mouse by the body but of course it wiggled out of that, but I did get luck an got a hold of its tail in the vice grip.

I went back to the garage, Josh on my back screaming "We got the mouse, we got the mouse Mommy!" I was thinking, "Yeah we got the mouse but now what?" Anyway, I figured if I could change shit diapers, I could kill a little mouse, I just had to keep thoughts of its Mommy out of my mind and figure out how I was going to do it. I needed something that would do the job quick! "Ann, get me the hammer!" I figured that was the best method :) Ann gave me a look of shock..."You are going to kill it with a hammer?!" Then reality set in, knowing my 'limits' as to what I can pull off ;) "You're right, maybe I'll just let it go". So I started back towards the field with the intention of 'throwing' the mouse via the Kitty Catcher into the field 'thinking' it would just leave. I'm sure it wouldn't have, but I never got that far. That poor mouse's tail broke off on the way back and it got away.

So the point to all these stories...Josh now gets his hammer (play one) daily and goes on 'Mouse Hunts'..."Got my hammer! Yep! Gonna take care of mouse!" It makes me laugh every time and like my Mom before me, I have this strange sense of curiosity to see what would actually happen if Josh did come across a mouse during one of his hunts. lol Come to think of it, it is pretty comical and a good form of 'humor', maybe my Mom was on to something :).

PS - The mouse is now gone via glue traps, so no death blows by Dad or Josh were necessary and I've succeeded in sheltering Josh a bit longer from inflicting/seeing death onto animals for the time being. Hammer wielding or not, that kid's a chip off the old block - he couldn't hurt a fly!

PPS - This post got 'lost' in telling stories about bludgeoning, but the camping practice was a disaster :) We lasted about 1.5 hours in the tent and then Josh started demanding that we wanted to go home. I told him we had to wait until we get up in the morning which of course prompted him to ask me every 30 seconds - "Time to wake up yet?" It was fun though and Josh is eager to try again, I just don't know when that will be.

Well, as many 'personal bloggers' have done before I, I must apologize for falling behind on my blog posts. This will be the first of a few 'retro-posts' (all posted today) where I cover things that have happened in the Aney household lately (almost spanning over a month). I feel so pathetic, every day I say to myself, "Take 20 minutes and write out a blog". But then I start cranking on work and the day slips by and once again, no blog post materialized in front of me :(. That coupled with the fact that Lost Season 2 came out, Ann and I can't wait to get to bed to watch an episode or four. We are pretty pathetic. Anyway, enough rambling on. I chose the picture for this post, because this post if about me disciplining Josh and in that picture he shows the type of face/looks I have to deal with when trying to discipline him.

Speaking of pathetic, I had my first 'pathetic disciplining experience' a month ago (8/11/06). Ann obviously does a lot of the disciplining in our house as she's with the kids for much larger stretches of time than me. But I have inherited the role of 'The Hammer'. I come in to 'reinforce' points or to 'scare' Josh a bit more to make sure he understood Ann's discipline. Well, when I got home from work the other day, Ann informed me that Josh was being very bad that day and was actually down in bed being punished. She told me to go get him out of bed and to talk to him about three things.

Before I tell you what the three are, I want to side track you a bit and get another visual in your head. Any of you remember Clyde from Every Which Way But Loose? You know, the orangutan? Well, it was the only movie/orangutan that I could think of and I'm not sure if Clyde does it in the movie or not. I'm actually not even sure how I got this visual in my head but I know it is an orangutan and I'm not sure if I saw it in this movie or if it was on Letterman at some point during Stupid Animal Tricks. Anyway, you know how they have these 'comedy' scenes where someone is talking to an orangutan and the orangutan is 'ignoring' the speaker, then something happens and the orangutan snaps to attention and swings his face around, about 1 centimeter away from the speaker as if in full attention, only to lose interest and fade back into whatever orangutans daydream about. Then the process repeats itself bringing laughs from the crowd as the orangutan keeps feigning interest in what the speaker is saying simply by invading the speaker's personal space while obtaining 'optimal' eye contact. I hope I've explained/described this well enough because it will enhance my story below, but if I've failed miserably, it will not totally diminish the story :) And the other piece of information Josh will eventually use 'against me' was the fact that I have jokenly talked about the fact that I want a 'new house' to Josh, he of course asks, "Our house is old?" I didn't go in the 'Badger Ridge War' dialog that many of you have seen (you can request it if you haven't), but I went on to explain that indeed I did want a new house.

So what three things does a two year old get punished for?

1. Taking toys from neighborhood kids after Mom has told him not to
2. Turning/touching the burner knobs on the stove after Mom has told him not to
3. Just not 'listening' in general to anything Mom was trying to tell him that day

So that was my agenda given to me by Ann to go down and 'reinforce' to Josh. Before I start explaining my utter failure, to my defense, in the majority of cases I must say that I have inherited my Mom's disciplining 'gift'. Just as she could put the fear of God in me when I was misbehaving, I feel I'm pretty good at it as well with Josh as I usually can reduce him to a guilty, cowering heap on the ground, too repentant to move or look up with a simple whistle and glare - at least until I ask him what he has to say, then he stands up and exclaims/stutters in the utmost sincerity as if the fate of the world depends on it "Sorry Daddy for XXX" :) (wonder how long that will last) It's so cute/funny watching him try to 'spit' out his apology that I almost look for things to discipline him on...shame on me. But what I learned this day is that any dialog beyond that, a simple whistle and glare, Josh definately has the upper hand - practice will change everything though ;).

I opened the door to his room, and immediately Josh jumped to attention, telling me "I want to listen now!". As I took the gate off his bed, I told him not to move and to stay in his bed. I sat down next to him and told him I wanted to talk about a couple things, "Yep, mmm-hmm" was his response. I started off pretty well as I started talking to him about taking toys from other people. As we were wrapping that up, Josh was starting to 'lose' interest in the conversation. As I started to talk about the most important one in my eyes - not playing with the stove - I 'demanded' that he looked at me when I was talking to him. Here's were you can insert your visual of the orangutan. Josh immediately swung his head back around to look at me and got about a millimeter from my nose. I can only imagine what it looked like, but I was battling a huge internal 'war' to not start laughing and was trying to compose myself before speaking. Josh looked away again, and my giggles subsided but I again demanded that he looked at me when I talked and again he swung around face to face. This time he noticed that I was having a hard time not laughing and he started to 'play along' with it as well as he 'faked' himself trying not to laugh. So as we both sat there in silence starring at each other trying not to laugh. This brought back flashbacks of the old days where myself, Victoria, Tim and Kelly would be playing 'Make Me Laugh' to pass the time and this move was pulled out only in the most deperate situations when you needed the person to laugh. The staredown while 'fighting' the giggles always reduced me to laughter. I'm smiling now envisioning Kelly doing it, she was always the best at that move - and always shamelessly used it instead of trying other creative measures :P Anyway, as you can guess, I bursted into laughter and Joshua followed suit. I knew I had to compose myself quickly if I had any prayer of this being a successful discipling event. But just as Clyde did in Any Which Way But Loose, Josh continued to do his staredown/giggle routine bringing us both to hysterics. To add insult to injury, Ann was upstairs listening to my meltdowns on the monitor, shaking her head 'knowningly' that I had fallen victim to Josh's shenanigans.

I finally composed myself enough so I could start talking again and had a conversation similiar to this (I only wish you could hear/see Josh's dialog in person as it adds so much more).

"So Josh, you cannot touch the stove, you have to listen to Mommy when she tells you things."

"I want to listen now"

"That's good. You know what happens when you play with the stove? You will burn your hand off!" Might be exaggerating a bit here, but hey I was trying to recover from my laugh attacks before.

"Burn hand off and die?" Thanks to Josh's "and die" ending to anything with a hint of turmoil, he trumped my warning about his hand falling off.

"No you will not die, but if you play with the stove you will burn your hand and you'll get a baaad owie."

Then thanks to Sissy introducing Josh to 'ice', Josh proudly says, as if he's figured out a solution that I've never heard of while at the same time once again trumping me, "Put ice on it!" Note, every time Josh gets an owie, he immediately starts calling for ice, then once the ice touches his owie, he proclaims, "I'm all better now". My God, you'd think he was working on being a soccer player or something given how 'easily' he gets injured and even more impressive, how fast/miraculously he gets healed.

All right, it was becoming clear why I was never on my high school debate team. I decided to shift the argument away from bodily injuries and focus on 'material damages'. "Josh, if you play with the stove, you could start a big fire".

"Big fire...roast marshmellows?"

"No," I said 'angrily', as this two year old kept coming up with ways to 'difuse' my 'threats', "you will not roast marshmellows. You will burn down the whole house and all our stuff and all your toys will be gone!" All right, I got him here. He will not know how to respond to this...

"Get new house Daddy, Josh's house old!" Josh now has a smile on his face as if he's just succeeded in balancing the National Debt. I wonder to myself if he knows he is 'beating' me in this debate we are having.

"No, we can't get a new house right now Josh, I don't have any money."

"Go to work and make more money's"

That was the last straw. I was sick of getting my a@# handed to me by a two year old in a discipline debate, so I busted out the old bread and butter...

"Josh, you do not touch the stove ever, because I said so!"

"Only Mommies and Daddies touch stove, yep um hmm," Josh said as if he knew all along but was just 'coaxing' me through this debate to get to this point. That sneaky little bastage ;)

So after our 'successful' Man to Man talk, Josh and I walked up stairs only to see Ann chuckling to herself as I 'slipped' back into The Hammer mode and demanded Josh apologize to Mom. I think I saw them exchange winks as they kissed, but I'll never know for sure ;)

This past weekend we visited the brand new Grand Lodge indoor water park kiddy-corner from the Mall of America. What a cool place - for both adults and kids (all sizes). Audrey loved playing in the wee tots' playground while Joshua opted for going down the big water rides. The great part about this place is that nearly all the rides are kiddy-friendly. However, we did have to walk up 10 flights of stairs for the family rafting ride - well worth the journey though - even with a toddler at the hip.

The rooms at the Grand Lodge were really cool as well - we had a deluxe king room and it had a pair of bunk beds to boot. Josh must have climbed the ladder on those darn bunk beds about 50 times.

We also visited UnderWater World at the Mall of America. That was really neat - much neater than we thought it would be. The fish exhibits were amazing - particularly the sharks! Even Audrey was in awe of the BIG toothy fishy's. Oh, on that toothy note, Audrey's second tooth came in on our trip - so CUTE. But oh, are they sharp little buggers!

To see the pictures from the weekend, check out the Our Busy Weekend gallery. Enjoy!