Hi.

Wow. Time for my semi-monthly repenting and to regale you with all the thrilling things the Warners have been up to. Because we are always involved in a multitude of exciting, monumental things. Of that you can be sure. We've all been accomplishing great things with our lives. Here's a quick rundown, to spare you a novel.

-We celebrated Father's Day. I love my dads and Jessie, but due to my laziness and lack of preparation, they do not get their own post. Or pictures. But let's face it, our moms are better looking anyway. But I love my dad, Jessie's dad, and Jessie for being brave enough to have children. Maybe I'll extol their virtues another time. Just know they are awesome. Really awesome. So awesome that if I tried to explain their awesomeness I'd have to kill you.

-Madeline discovered our smoke detectors. At ten o'clock at night. They freaked her out and made her want to sleep in our bed. But after a lot of heart to heart conversations, she is now excited to point out every smoke detector in our house. If you ask her about them, she will probably tell you something like this: "There is a smoke detector! Madeline is scared of smoke detectors. We put a sticker on the smoke detector so Madeline can be brave. They are good. They help us. It is smoky and then the smoke detector goes BEEP! BEEP! BEEP! And we put out the fire!" We are so proud and fire educated around here.

-Kimberly got cranky. Then she got a tooth. Now she's only half cranky. We're thinking maybe another tooth is coming. And she finally learned to take a bottle, and there was great rejoicing in the land. And she's starting to get mobile. Scooting, reaching, climbing. She has yet to regularly roll over, but we're thinking maybe that's just because she's a freak of nature. We love her anyway.

-We went to Lehi's Grand Parade. Not sure why we hadn't ever done this before, except that I thought Lehi Days were exclusively about rodeos and I was trying to avoid being sucked into the cowboy mania. But apparently there's a lot to Rodeo Days besides rodeos. Madeline loved the whole experience. She loved getting candy, seeing bands, "princesses", horses, motorcycles, and all other parade fanfare. Kimberly enjoyed sitting in a chair and chewing on candy. (Through the wrapper. I am not a complete failure as a mother.) Madeline even got to take a pony ride and gleefully eat the nastiest snow cone ever. Successful outing.

We probably did other stuff. I can't remember. Blame it on the heat. Just wanted to let you know we're all alive and kicking and stuff. And ready for more summer festivities. Let the fun times roll.

We are stylin', happening people who do stuff.

I cut Madeline's hair. You might think this was a bad idea. It certainly sounded foolhardy at the time, and I was probably on drugs when I made this decision. Except I don't like drugs, so maybe a sleep deprivation induced haze was responsible. (Kimberly continues to awaken at obscene hours. Or at least hours I consider obscene, which is anytime before 6:30. Sorry if that is your happy time of day. I mean no offense. Except to tell you you're a freak of nature. But anyway. This whole tangent is a post for another time. Or one I already wrote. I can't remember. Back to Madeline's hair.) So at first Madeline was really gung ho about the while hair cutting thing because she wanted to be like Rapunzel. Then she understandably freaked out upon meeting her hair stylist. Then she was promised milk and cookies for good behavior and got back into the mood and enjoyed yelling "Eugene!" at random intervals. Her hair is really short now because she would not stop moving. But once I got over the shock and the guilt (for not consulting Jessie about this insanity), I think it turned out pretty cute. And independent third party polling companies agree. That is a fancy way of saying my neighbors and family, most of which didn't know I did it myself, so I feel like that removes some bias. I would post a picture, but I just realized I haven't taken a picture yet, and since Madeline is in bed and there is no way in heck I awaken that child once we have achieved Nirvana, you will just have to trust me that it's adorable and eagerly await our next photo shoot. Kimberly did not get a haircut and probably won't until she's three because apparently I am overly attached to baby curls.

In other news, we took the family to Lagoon on Friday and had the adventure of our lives. Since you asked, I will give you my now infamous, numerically ordered list of things I learned from the experience. Because I know you love them. So much order and wisdom.

1. I love Dramamine. I did not realize how much until I got old and lame.
2. You cannot go to an amusement park and entertain your child and yourself. You must choose. No fence sitting.
3. Lagoon is now forcing you to buy their overpriced drinks by substituting "free" drinks for deposits on lockers and tubes. Just thought you should know so you can be enraged.
4. I hate handicap policies. I will not elaborate but trust me that I am not bashing on real handicapped people. Just the policies amusement parks have about them and people who manipulate and take advantage of those policies.
5. You can build snowmen out of piles of pollen. If you're into that sort of thing.
6. Babies like stuffed tigers and rice puffs. They do not like sunscreen.
7. Watching little kids pretend to drive cars and make friends with strangers is pretty adorable. Watching little kids almost puke is not adorable. But kind of funny. As long as they don't actually puke.
8. Walking around an amusement park all day gives you free license to eat cookies all day. I like that.

I think you now understand what a fantastic time it was. Fun all around. I would expand on our adventures more but Jessie just suggested we have two kids every year for the next ten years and I have to go have him tested for dementia. Too much sun at Lagoon, I guess.

Extra Terrestrial Visitors

(That title is somewhat misleading, I suppose. There are no aliens in this post. Unless you count my brother as an alien life form. Just warning you. In case you were psyched about it.)

I have an inordinate amount of time to blog. This is mostly due to the fact that my little brother is visiting us. School got out for the summer and he hightailed it down here for a while, because let's face it: this is the party house. And I did what any self-respecting sister would do. I put him in charge of entertaining my kids for the next three days and went to take a nap. Okay, not really. But he is keeping Madeline entertained, which is extremely awesome. He wanted to be sure I mentioned his visit on the blog. Because this makes him famous and important. You may know him from his stint as our resident Jimmer expert. Having him around is good for us, because it forces us to make up stuff to do instead of sitting around getting fat and losing brain cells. The kid was even game for exercising with me this morning and pushed the double stroller the whole way. Impressive. Next I'm going to put him on cleaning the basement.

Another awesome advantage of having my brother here is that our house is now fully Pokemon equipped. He brought his Pokemon video games and figurines and is teaching Madeline all of their names. So now I am going to have to steal some Pokemon cards from the neighborhood children when they're not looking so Madeline will have some to destroy. (Because I refuse to actually spend any money on such drivel.) I hear they're all the rage right now, which is kind of strange to me, because I thought they were all the rage ten years ago when my other brothers were obsessed with them. And then I was kind of hoping they had been obliterated from existence. But apparently they "came back". I don't understand the appeal. Apparently I am not a cool parent. Hopefully they'll be out again by the time Madeline is old enough to swap cards on the playground. So I can instead tolerate some other incredibly useless trend. I'm looking forward to it.

We continue to be awesome and organized.

The last few days we have been organizing. Remember I said I was getting organized? Well, as you can see from the date of that post, we went right out and got on that. Because we're so awesome. But finally we decided we can no longer ignore the mess that is the pile of shoes by our door and the pile of boxes in our basement. Or rather, Jessie promised me pretty furniture if we took care of it. I am easily bribed. So we bought one of these:

Madeline was really disappointed upon opening the box to find out the bed wasn't in there too. False advertising! We're going to sue. But Jessie had a lot of fun putting it together. He started out by complaining that he didn't have a drill to put the screws in really quickly. And I was like dude, what is that in your hand? And he informed me it was a cheap drill with no power and he needed a real manly man drill. And this sounded suspiciously to me like a conversation we had at Christmas. And this is what followed:

Me: Didn't my mom buy you a drill for Christmas? A power drill?
Jessie: No.
Me: Are you sure? I remember you getting a power tool for Christmas.
Jessie: I think it was a saw.
Me: I'm pretty sure I told her you wanted a drill.
Jessie: I think it was a saw. Probably...maybe I'll look.

He came back upstairs with a power drill. A really nice one.

Jessie: I totally forgot I had this! It's like Christmas again!

Then he read the directions and found out you can't use a power drill or it might crack the wood. So he used his extremely awesome non-power screwdriver. I laughed a lot.

Then we bought a bunch of bookshelves from Ikea to organize all the junk in our basement. I still don't really know what all is down there, but there are now a lot of pretty shelves to put it on. Those were pretty fun to put together too. And this time, Jessie did a lot of laughing at me. Because let's just say that driving nails was not my focus at college. And I'm really awesome at it. You want to hire me. I know you do. Anyway. Now we have to go through things and clean. You might even get before and after pictures if you're lucky. If that doesn't violate the basic tenants of this blog. I'll probably decide on that critical ethical point based on whether I am motivated enough to take the after pictures. You've been warned.

A camping we will go

Jessie had the brilliant idea yesterday to have a campout in our backyard. After we took down the tent this morning he said, "we didn't get any pictures! For your blog! Because I know you're gong to blog about this." So now I feel sort of obligated. But you will have to imagine the sweet visual evidence of our adventure. I know you can do it. We set up our tent and made s'mores on our camping burner, then watched a movie in our tent on the laptop. Super creative and awesome, I know. It also served as a sort of dry run for camping with two kids, checking our camping gear, and getting Madeline psyched up for future adventures. Here are the awesome things we learned from our practice:

1. Madeline should never stay up past nine. We knew that anyway, but I guess we forgot. And we're both college graduates. Go figure.
2. Our couch cushions and a bedding set are way more comfortable than an air matress and sleeping bags. Unfortunately, they would fill our whole car. So next time we'll have to rough it.
3. Madeline doesn't like the dark. She does like Jessie. More than me. I'm currently nursing my bruised ego and wondering why I spend all that time feeding, cleaning, and entertaining her when Jessie gets top billing. Something about dads and daughters. Or that's what Jessie claims.
4. There is a reason the girls sleep in separate bedrooms. So that when one wakes up screaming at 5:20 they don't both wake up for the day. I'll let you guess which one did the screaming.
5. Jessie treats tent directions like other men treat driving directions. But now he knows how to do it for when we go camping for real.
6. S'mores are really yummy. This is only significant because I only started eating them five years ago when some college friends insisted I try one after a lifetime of insisting I didn't like them. I only ever ate the chocolate. But when I had one, it was a green eggs and ham moment. And now I love them. Thanks, Amanda and Jordan. My life is forever changed.
7. It takes serious brain power to set up a pack and play. Even if you've done it before. Even if there are idiot proof directions right on it.
8. Tent bags are not designed to actually fit the tent they accompany.

Overall, a good and worthy family outing. If you enjoy sleep deprivation, junk food, windy nights, and stepping all over each other. Which we do.