My mom sent Wanda these cute leggings for her birthday. I misread the label, seeing it as NINJA (3T). It may not be what was actually on the label but I think it fits.

It’s time to introduce a new game on the blog. I like to call it, “Guess What I Ordered – No Really – Guess.” The way it works is I order something in the mail and slowly reveal what I found inside the package and you get to guess what I ordered. You can only look at one picture at a time and no skipping to the end. If you can guess what I ordered before looking at the final picture, you win… your mind-reader’s license. This is a good one. Ready? Okay.

Picture number one:

If you guessed that I ordered something from Misikko, you’re RIGHT! But that’s not specific enough. Try again.

Picture number two:

If you guessed bubble wrap or a box full of pink and monkeys, you are incorrect.

Picture number three:

Mid-grade false flower in eggshell? Nope.

Picture number four:

Did you guess pink soap flowers in a recyclable recepticle with a pink bow? Incorrect!

Picture number five:

Gorilla with convenient velcro hands? So very wrong. Both you and the gorilla.

Picture number six:

Pink satin bag or pink satin bag full of emery boards with their own individual ball chains? Uh-uh.

Picture number seven:

Bargain brand hand sanitizer? Not a bit.

Picture number eight:

Purple satin clutch? This was a free gift.

Picture number nine:

White satin bag nesting inside the purple satin bag? We’re getting close.

Picture number ten:

TA-DA! If you guessed Hana Shine Shield Advanced Heat Styling Therapy, you’re a winner!

I’m excited to try it out. It comes as a recommendation from Abby, my hair guru, who has a blog that I lurk on and then spend hours trying to copy her hair… because I am creepy like that. If things don’t work out with me and Hana, there’s always the velcro monkey. What a haul!

I saw a woman in the line at the grocery store today who was a dead ringer for Dame Judy Dench. It made sense to me because Dame Judy seems to pop up in all kinds of places. But then I thought, “Why would an older woman with a British accent be required to play ‘woman buying avocadoes at Safeway’?” No, they could have gotten anybody for that role. Heck, I’ve played it before.

Judy Dench should be kept available for playing roles like: persnickety housekeeper, or snobby aristocrat, or hard-bitten head of British intelligence, or The Queen.

It’s time to break out the die cuts and vibrating-uvula-shaped punches because Wanda just had her first full-scale grocery store melt down and I’d like to capture this special moment properly.  [Read more at Parenting.com]

My parents and sister came to visit us for Christmas and it was so fun to have them here. It’s the first time we’ve ever had family up for the holiday and we wanted to make it special so we each chose a gift for each of our visitors. This year for the first time I asked the kids to use their own allowance money to pay for half of the gifts. It made the gifts more meaningful and it caused them to think more seriously about what to give.

Both kids got Auntie Meg jewelry because she is fashionable like that. Magoo got Papa a laser pointer and Grammy some chapstick.

After hours of looking, Laylee was browsing the little red boxed gift items on the end cap at Target when she came upon the Perfect Present for Grammy. She held the box up triumphantly.

Me: It’s a mini megaphone.
Laylee [grinning and nodding]: WITH siren!

I had to let her buy it, because who won’t remember the year that Grammy received a mini megaphone WITH siren for Christmas?

The gift was especially poignant considering Grammy suffered from migraines off and on for the first few days they were at our house. Yes, a siren will come in very handy for Grammy.

So I’ve been playing around with the Motorola Droid for a few weeks and I’m gonna share some thoughts on the experience soon. However, I’m first going to jump to the end and say that I LOVE the Droid.

I had all but decided to buy one when I found out that its hotter younger brother was coming to town April 29th so after much thought, consideration, reading rave reviews, plunking down $199, squealing, and stalking the UPS package online, I am pleased to announce that our new command center is safely home A DAY BEFORE RELEASE and charging happily on the windowsill. I’m not sure if you can see but he already has a Wanda fingerprint on his face. I’m sure he likes it. I hope he doesn’t catch her ear infection.

I’ll be sure to let you know if it lives up to all the hype when I surface from the technological honeymoon.

While we were on vacation in Utah my cell phone disappeared. “Oh,” you might think, “That’s a shame. Good thing it was just a cell phone.” The problem is it was not just a cell phone. That little black brick was our family’s Mobile Command Center. Since 2006 I’ve used it and its older brother before it to keep track of and control nearly every aspect of our family’s lives.

I’m currently using my sister’s old Razor and although it’s very cute and I’m really grateful to borrow it, it’s missing a few of the things that I’ve come to feel are necessary in a Mobile Family Command Center. Here is a partial list:

-Auto-sync calendaring connecting my phone calendar with my home calendar and Dan’s work, phone and home calendars

-A complete list of every contact I may ever need with their phone numbers and addresses included that auto-syncs over the air waves as soon as I update it

-Documents and spreadsheets of just about any piece of information I could want

-Full-text scriptures

-Internet access

-All kinds of applications that do all kinds of things I don’t really need but have learned to depend on.

-Email

-Cool personal ringtones for all my family members and friends

-A slide-out qwerty keyboard for text messaging

-Navigation

-Digital UNO

Don’t forget the fact that I feel kind of violated that someone is walking around with pictures and video of my kids I don’t have backups for, all of my recipes, emails and a lot of personal information.

When we realized it was really gone, like gone gone, like obvious-someone-had-pocketed-it gone, Dan sent out a command to do a remote wipe of all my data from the phone. We got a message back saying the wipe was successful when someone turned the phone on at about 4:30am the morning after it disappeared so that gives me comfort.

Now I’ve got my Razor and a paper calendar that I’m madly filling in with all my info from outlook and I feel so old-school. Remember this? At that point I had just begun my dive into techno-mom-dom. I’m really quite dependent now and I’m actively seeking a new phone.

The PR people from Verizon asked me a while ago if I wanted to try out a few of their smart phones and possibly review them. Now that I’m actually considering which phone to buy I think that’s a great idea so for the next several weeks I’ll be trying out some cool new devices and if I find anything worth telling, I’ll let you know.

My breached Command Center was an HTC Touch Pro from Verizon running Windows Mobile. In our area we get much better reception with Verizon than our friends who have other providers. The customer service has always been decent and most of our family members use Verizon so calls to them are free.

I have to say I was not uber impressed with the customer service we got when I lost my phone. For one thing, they could not perform a remote data wipe or track the phone’s GPS. For another, the guy at the call center told me that if the phone were turned in, they had no system in place for finding me and returning it based on the phone’s serial number. Through further investigation I found out that this was false. A kid named Dean in the West Valley store told me that they always do their best to get returned phones back to their rightful owners.

They were also unable to reactivate my service to my new/used phone until the following day because we had already deactivated, reactivated and deactivated the stolen phone that day and there is a hard-coded limit on the number of times you can do that. Apparently no supervisor has the power to override this so I was phoneless on vacation for a full day. I know, WAAAH, right? Still, it seemed strange to me and no one could give a good explanation as to why the policy was in place.

Still, we’re fairly loyal to Verizon and to phones that can play nice with Outlook. So, I’m on the hunt. Any suggestions?

Although we are far from “junior,” my sister and I made a run through the gauntlet of the Juniors department at Kohl’s recently. We were looking for shirts and sweaters and started in the Misses department but found that Vera Wang discriminates against women who have butts and whose breasts do not resemble those of an emaciated teenage boy. We found Vera Wangs, granny sweaters and everything in between but nothing was just right so we headed to the weird department.

In general, my size precludes me from shopping there at all but every once in a while I find an XL with my name on it. Pants are completely out of the question. Not only am I unable to fit my rear into any of the pants in juniors, NO ONE is able to fit their rear into any of the pants in juniors, not their whole rear anyway.

All of the clothes in Juniors seem to be made for a person with a 4 foot long torso, a 3 inch tall butt, and legs with the circumference of spaghetti sticks. The person must also be averse to consuming anything but unsweetened lemon juice. The current designs are mostly made up of faux vintage 80s rock star attire and pink and black items with skulls and crossbones on them. I am not a pirate, an 80s rock star, a misshapen freak of nature, or a 65 lb anorexic runway model interested in displaying plumber bum. So the pickins were slim.

We did however each find a normalish sweater we liked if we were willing to tolerate the brand names “Say What?!” and “It’s Our Time.” It struck me that each of these brands could also work in a senior citizens’ department, as in, “Say what, Sonny?! I can’t hear a word that’s coming out of your mouth.” Or perhaps a slogan for Depends, as in, “It’s our time. Why let embarrassing leaks stop us from doing the activities that are important to us?”

When Dan read the back of the packaging on the Transformer we bought Magoo for Christmas (WHO DOES THAT?!) he asked me why we chose the stoner Transformer. Perhaps because “we” were shopping very quickly on Black Friday morning and “we” never read the fine print on Transformer packages and “we” didn’t know there was a perpetually wasted children’s toy for sale at Target.

You better not cry and all that nonsense because Santa’s kicking the cruelty up a notch this year. I opened my mailbox earlier this week and what to my wondering eyes should appear but the Franklin Covey Holiday Gift Guide – 2009 edition.

I was intrigued. The cover stated that Franklin Covey had an array of gifts for both the nice among us AND the naughty. I thought they just sold planners and stuff made out of leather. Well, Boy Howdy was I wrong.

The first few pages do show planner after planner in various sizes and varieties. BUT, when you get to page 7, you find the truth. Can you handle the truth kids?

That’s right. If you don’t behave yourself this year, you may end up with a $50 red pen in your stocking and there won’t be anything you can do about it. It’s Franklin Covey’s answer to coal for Christmas of ’09. Stick that in your smoking device, light it and inhale.