dinner table discussions

One night last week, I announced that I wanted to go around the table and tell each girl why I thought they were so special. So I turned to Bri, then to Mia, then to Elise, and finally to Hadley and shared with each of them. It went over well and the girls seemed to listen intently to my praise.

But then Bri announced that she too wanted to tell each of us why we are special. Here's what we heard:

"Mia, you booduful cause...cause....cause... you gwew up China. {insert garble, garble}. And you adopted. You born Mommy's heart I born in Mommy tummy. Mommy, you booduful cause...cause...cause... you fix dings. Had-lay, you booduful cause...cause...you dance.

Daddy, you so booduful cause...cause...{garble garble}...watch football."

About Foxes...

Untitled from Elise Deeble on Vimeo.

Final Score

Team Deeble, after a last minute surge by Team Meltdown and some rancorous debate among the home team, was able to hold on to close out the game.

Team Deeble: 3
Meltdown: 1

Game Analysis:

1st Quarter: a strong showing out of the gate. The deebledaughters slept til 7:30 (Dude!), our dear friend "Miss Sharon" came over and watched our two youngest so that Elise and I could spend some 2 on 1 time with Mia. Incredibly special time. Then, I took Brianna shopping - we went to the library, the grocery store, and she helped me pick out some new boots.

2nd Quarter: also a strong quarter of play but with a major setback at the end. A small mutiny occurred on the way to NAP time that caused TeamDeeble 3 penalties, a personal foul, and a stiff fine for inappropriate conduct.

3rd Quarter: starting out extremely strong. All 3 have been asleep for 2 hours. After their waking, we attempted to bake cookies for our neighbors. This was a disaster and required a quick audible by Elise (our QB). Coloring books and crayons kept us in the game.

4th Quarter: some bickering among the star QB and the back-up QB (dan) got the 4th quarter off to a rocky start, resulting in Dan coming in and pulling off some late heroics to finish off Team Meltdown.


All in all, a fairly solid effort by the good guys and, it seems, the win has lifted the spirits in the locker room as well. After his post-game interviews, Dan was seen heading to the showers. He and Elise crossed paths in the tunnel where he reportedly gave her a slap on the butt and said, "good game."

Karaoke Night at Butde and Pappa's

unforgettable from Elise Deeble on Vimeo.

a new approach

monday is my day off.
therefore, it's my most important day.
it is also my most exhausting.

i find that - to keep up with my girls - I have to be proactive, otherwise I will get pummelled and left for dead. so this morning I woke up with a new gameplan: I was going to approach the day as many football coaches approach a game....by quarters.

It dawned on me that a whole day from start to finish of taking girls to the potty, washing bibs, preparing meals, roughhousing, getting them in carseats, out of carseats, wiping noses, reading books, cleaning up, then uncleaning up what i had just cleaned up, etc...was just to much to get my arms around (i know, i know...i'm talking about just a day, when my blessed wife has to think in terms of years).

So I broke the day up into quarters.

1st Quarter: wake up through breakfast.
2nd Quarter: post-breakfast through 2:00PM nap time
3rd Quarter: post-nap through dinner
4th Quarter: bath, books, bedtime

My goal, you see, was to win more quarters than I lost and...to own the 4th quarter. I've kept a small scorecard. Here's how we did:

TeamDeeble: 4
Meltdown: 0

Oh yeah. We killed today. We decorated a Christmas tree, I raked/mowed leaves, Mia and I ran errands and had a lunch date, girls were hugging, they were sharing, there were new songs written, no one bit anyone,...I mean, it was a really good day and I'm sticking with my new strategy.

Elise is a bit worried, though, that I'm taking the football analogy a bit far. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that, after dinner, I shouted "It's the 4th Quarter baby!" and then made everyone raise 4 fingers in the air as we hit the showers - err, bathtub.

oh. so this is joy.

Before leaving for our 4-day trip to Colorado for Thanksgiving, I asked my friends to pray for two specific things: (1) Safety and (2) Sanity.

And God answered one of those prayers.

The picture below really says it all as Elise and our two oldest were ready to throw in the towel by day 4. This is not to say that there weren't great moments (such as Papa and Hadley sharing the Karaoke machine - post pending) nor that Butde and Papa didn't bend over backwards to make our time as relaxing as possible. It's just that the girls got sick. All of them. Fevers and snot galore.

One moment rises above the rest in my head, however, and it happened to be within the first hour of our 12-hour drive home. Our mini-van's dvd went on the fritz and we couldn't get it to work at all for the first 6 hours of our trip. So I just remember driving down the mountain with Hadley screaming, Mia sneezing, Brianna crying, Elise wacking on the DVD player - all the while a Veggie Tale's CD blared through all 8 speakers: "I've got JOY JOY JOY JOY down in my heart. Where? Down in my heart. Where? Down in my heart. I've got JOY JOY JOY JOY down in my heart - where?...."


If only we had brought the dogs.

P.S. We later got the dvd player to work after the girls fixed it. No kidding. It still required Elise to whack it every 5-10 minutes in order to make it work which prompted me to say "score one for the team" each time.

thanksgiving 2009