My Little Family

October 22, 2008 by Ryan 


Photo by SqueakyMarmot

It’s after midnight.

I’m up because both Kimberly and Jeremy have colds.

I’m sitting in my bed with Kimberly sleeping next to me, so cute, so peaceful…other than her occasional cough.

Next to her is Beth, with Jeremy sleeping on her chest. I’m jealous. I love when they sleep on your chest. He just giggled in his sleep! That’s good, poor little guy caught Kimberly’s cold. He really loves his mama!

Beth is asleep…I think. I think I might be keeping her up with my typing. She’s so good with the kids.

It’s so sad but sometimes it’s so sweet taking care of the sick babies. Every now and then they snuggle into you, or do something off the charts cute and I exchange looks of “Ahhhhh” with little half-frowns with Beth.

You might think that I’d be thinking, “This sucks!” Instead, it makes me think of how much I love being Daddy!

Nightmare Before Christmas…Tree!

October 13, 2008 by Ryan 


Our Nightmare Tree

You know, I think this Christmas thing
is not as tricky as it seems!
But why should they have all the fun?
It should belong to anyone!
Not anyone, in fact, but me!
Why, I could make a Christmas tree!
And there’s not a reason I can find,
I couldn’t have a Christmastime!
I bet I could improve it, too!
And that’s exactly what I’ll do!

-Jack Skellington
“The Nightmare Before Christmas”

Halloween Trees are all the rage these days. My wife sees them in tons of the countless Mama/Crafts/Design blogs that she subscries to. Trendy or not, I think it’s cool and we had fun making it which is what really counts! We found the branches outside my work, brought them home, spray painted them black and did this!

Halloween has always been a holiday. Nothing beats the excitement of those nights trick-or-treating! Running from door to door trying to get as much candy as you can stuff into your pillow case (Yes, experienced Trick-Or-Treaters know that you don’t use the wimpy Jack-O-Lantern buckets, you use the pillow case because it hold like 10x as much!) I remember how fun it was to run around with all my friends, the McCraes and the Sundbergs, way back and then Robbie & Andy when I was older but still old enough to get away with trick-or-treating.

Back in the day, my house had quite the reputation! My dad was working for M&M/Mars and come Halloween he laid out two huge tables filled with boxes of full-size Snickers, Twix, Milky Ways, etc. and we’d invite everyone to come in and grab a few. We would have kids that would switch masks and come back over and over. We’d have people that would drive just to come to our house! It was funny the year my dad switched companies and we were relegated to handing out the “normal” Halloween candies. I remember over hearing a few kids say, “They must have moved!?”

Somewhere between then and a few years back Halloween lost it’s excitement for me. Then I married a Halloween fanatic! Add to that kids coming into the ages that it becomes really fun and Halloween is back to being a really exciting time. We’ve been watching a ton of The Nightmare Before Christmas especially because of the new anniversay edition. We put the digital copy it comes with on our little Archos video player for Kim and bought her some headphones for car trips, but she loves it so much, she’ll watch it on her own some days. If you ever get to talk to her about it she calls it Halloween, Halloween.