Me: Sam, if you eat all of your dinner we can play some video games tonight.

Evan: Me too?

Me: Yep.

[A few minutes go by and the kids are eating furiously]

Sam: I’m really trying to eat all my dinner because I want to play the video game tonight.

Evan: Me too.

[A few more minutes go by]

Sam: I’m really trying to eat all my dinner so I can play the Stars Wars video game.

[Quite a few more minutes go by… ok, it was another 40 minutes later]

Sam: I’m still trying to finish my dinner so I can play the video game.

Me: Ok, but you need to hurry up because it’s also a bath night.

Nearly an hour later I pull the plug because Sam hadn’t finished. Now why do I consider this a win? Because I had an hour of Sam trying to eat instead of whining about the dinner and finishing after 3 bites. Can you guess what I’m going to say again tomorrow night?

And Evan? Well he gave up after about 20 minutes and went to go play. He’s going to be a tougher nut to crack as he gets older.

Thank you Shirley and John, for taking the boys to ‘Chipwrecked’, so I didn’t have too!

So we finished up dinner and discussed what we wanted to watch. Evan had a left over choice of one ‘Star Wars – The Clone Wars’ that he didn’t get to use, so he choose first. After that Sam wanted to watch Alvin and the Chipmunks. Netflix didn’t have it, so we picked out a Toy Story 3 – something for everyone. Seemed like the perfect evening.

This is how it really went. Five minutes into the Star Wars show, I fell asleep. Sam and Evan asked to watch another one and I rolled over and hit play on the next episode. That one lasted twenty more minutes, so that’s when Sam said it was his turned. We searched Netflix, only to find that none of the Alvin and the Chipmunk movies were available. So Sam and I have a brief discussion on why we weren’t going to rent the movie from iTunes and that no, we weren’t going to Cub to see if Red Box had it either. That’s when we decided on Toy Story 3. Ten minutes into the move I’m asleep again. Fifiteen minutes into the movie Sam and Evan are arguing over who has more room on the bed. Twenty minutes into the movie Sam runs to his room to get his Woody doll and proceeds to play it in my ear at full volume. Twenty one minutes into the movie and Woody is no longer allowed to watch the movie with us.

Around 7:30pm, I realize I had fallen back asleep and the boys are no longer with me.  It’s at this appropriate point that Holly decides to come down stairs and check on things. Ooops.

Needless to say, movie nights are no longer an option on Thursdays.  My bad.

Note: This post didn’t go through as scheduled.

Here’s to hoping that 2012 only goes up from here.

After all the work Holly put into getting them dressed I think the boys spent about as much time outside as it took to get ready.

Test post from Flickr straight to WordPress.

So for the past couple of days she’s commented about the size of cabinets, placement of cabinets, moving outlets, etc.  Now I agreed that we wanted to do this too, so as she asked for feedback on what I thought I would give some of my own ideas.  Well vindication occurred this afternoon.  As we were discussing ideas and options she turned around and said, ‘What if we had two cabinets on each side of the washer and dryer?’  Why is that comment so important?  Because ‘someone’ had absolutely thought it was terrible when the other brought it up before.

Seems I’m not so far off my rocker after all.