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.