She had a birthday, shout hooray.

Will it surprise anyone that this post is late? Yeah, I didn't think so. On to the main event.

Yesterday, our wacky and wonderful toddler hit the big 2-0. Well, 2-point-0. Anyway, it was a big birthday milestone. Exceedingly exciting frivolity and mirth abounded. Since you never, ever, ever get to hear about Madeline on this blog, allow me to wax eloquent about why we love the little mischief maker.

1. We are so much more cultured since she has come into our lives. We know all the songs to Mary Poppins by heart. Jessie doubled his knowledge of primary songs. I have seen more episodes of Curious George than I ever did in college. Yes, I know my education was lacking.

2. We like being on a strict sleeping schedule. Madeline sure helps with the whole early to bed early to rise thing. And she keeps me alert by randomly screaming at various times throughout the night. If we ever have to sleep in a war zone, with our lives depending upon our keen senses, I will live and Jessie will die. This is comforting to know.

3. Madeline makes us appreciate gospel principles. Like temples. And prophets. We get to spend more time on lds.org looking at uplifting photos than ever before. And we get to appreciate the knowledge that there is a pseudo temple in our backyard everytime I open the back drapes. If you lived in front of a temple too, you would feel the joy.

4. We've doubled the number of shoes in our house. This has to be a good thing. And Jessie's share of the shoes went from about 5% TO 2.5%. Plus his aren't nearly as cute. Poor Jessie.

5. Madeline helps me make friends. I try to emulate her tactics to get to know people, but mostly they look at me funny if I admire their boots loudly in the grocery store.

6. We go to the park more often now. And trust me, I need it, as my ability on the monkey bars has sadly plummeted since second grade.

7. Madeline puts on shows for us. Always original and entertaining, and very much free. You have to bring your own popcorn, but it's not so bad once you get used to it.

8. She's just cute. I would upload proof, but blogspot hates me. Also I need to download pictures and I can't find my cord. Shocking, I know.

Anyway, we're just pleased as punch that she made it to her second birthday alive and happy and relatively well-adjusted. I think. Celebrations included kite-flying, McDonald's, cake, and a new high chair and pack and play for her baby doll that sent her into throes of ecstasy. (McDonald's and kite-flying were on Saturday. I know you thought we high-tailed it over there after church. Don't worry, we were too busy sitting around in our perfectly tailored Sunday clothes reading from the bible and listening to EFY music, like we do all day every Sunday.) Anyway. We do really love her and can't imagine what the heck we did before she came along. Happy birthday, Madeline, and may you stay two forever so that I don't have an emotional breakdown. Thank you.

Madeline is sleeping, so allow me to do Jessie's bragging for him.

Madeline is weird. For a many, many reasons. But sometimes she forgets it is day time and takes gigantic marathon naps. And then is really cranky when I wake her up. I almost never wake her up, but if I am afraid her nap is going to last six hours and I am going to be up all night with her, I will wake her up. Right now she has been asleep for three hours. I went in to see if she was stirring. I made some noises, snapped my fingers, and stared at her for a while. She just looked cute and slept. And I didn't have the heart to wake her up. I am actually a little afraid to. Because she will probably yell at me. Have you ever had that cranky, groggy, yucky feeling when you sleep too long? I'm pretty sure Madeline feels that way. So I am chicken. And instead of waking up my daughter, I am going to blog about Jessie.

The other day, I wrote a blog. I told Jessie about it. He said, "Did you blog about my iphone?". I told him I blogged about Madeline dying. He was kind of disappointed. "I think you should blog about my iphone." He's just a little excited. Or maybe a lot. His work bought him an iphone. Because they bought it and are paying for the ultra expensive plan, I let him keep it. Because I am nice like that. He brought it home two days ago. Now his favorite nighttime activity is playing Youtube videos on it for Madeline. (She thinks iphone is synonymous with Poppins.) He does this even if the laptop or television are bigger and closer. Yesterday we went to a wedding reception for my cousin. It was ridiculously easy to find the church. He had me look up directions on his iphone and we tracked ourselves with GPS the entire way. He now likes to spend his free time pretending to throw wads of paper into garbage cans at various locations. Fake locations. So that is Jessie's iphone. And Jessie. And the great thing is I never have to plan a date night again, because we'll just be bowling together on his iphone. And eating at virtual restaurants. And we won't even need a babysitter.

I think she has a death wish.

Madeline is kind of determined not to make it to her second birthday. She's had more near death experiences and trauma the past week than the past six months combined. It started when we went to Jessie's mission reunion. She was having a blast running around on the stage with all the other kids, and my biggest worry was that she would go exploring the church and find a hidden tunnel to the parking lot. Turns out I should have been more worried about her hidden aspirations to fly. She suddenly jumped off the stage and face planted onto the wooden floor. Jessie had seen the mischief in her eyes and ran to catch her, but arrived three seconds too late. But just in time, it turns out, to donate his best dress shirt as a rag for the torrent of blood gushing out her mouth. Now isn't that love? Anyway, after mopping up some of the carnage, we decided there was no chipped teeth, but she definitely bit her lip open in at least four places and bruised her upper gum quite badly. She was thoroughly traumatized, we all caused quite the scene, and it was a great night.

Madeline's lip is starting to not look like a scene from a horror film, but she has continued to be inexplicably clumsy. She randomly slid out of her booster seat at dinner, banged her head on the table, and sprawled onto the floor. She keeps running into tables, doors, and other hard objects. She banged her head on her crib while napping today, which she has never done before. She's reached new highs in tripping and falling. And I keep banging her with my elbow whenever I turn around suddenly. She jumps suddenly from stairs instead of walking down them normally. Did I mention she's also had a snot-nosed-hacking-cough-cold again through all this madness? Basically, I'm just counting our blessings that we haven't been to the ER yet, and counting the days until her birthday. At which point we'll hope the older and wiser thing kicks in pretty quickly. Heaven help us until then.

The stuff we did that was more important than the other stuff we didn't do.

Hey, I am a blogging slacker again. Surprise. In my defense we have been really busy doing real stuff. Instead of the fake stuff we usually do. Jessie's been hard at work at his new job, and Madeline and I have been hard at work pretending to be hard at work. And then we went to a wedding. My cousin got married on Friday so Madeline and I trekked to Logan for the festivities, and Jessie came up later to also be cool. It was actually the first temple wedding I have attended (minus one or two sealings of previously married people), so that was a good experience. And Madeline got to touch the temple, which made her day, because there is nothing we love more than temples. (Seriously, yesterday we just sat and looked through pictures of temples on lds.org and Madeline had a blast. I'd click to the next one and she's pointing and jumping- look Mom! A temple! Woah! And another temple! And the next one is a temple too! And she was still shocked when the next one was...a temple! We looked at about 60 temples before she got tired of it.)

So a good time was had by all at the temple, and the wedding breakfast, and the reception. Which I am obligated to blog about, because my Aunt Wendy was a little nervous hanging out with me. She kept saying, "You're going to blog about this, aren't you? I just know this is going to be in your blog." So here I am, Aunt Wendy, blogging about you. And that emabarrassing thing you did. And that other thing. No, but seriously, my Aunt Wendy is a cool person, so maybe we'll devote an entire blog to her one day.

Jessie came up for the reception, and we didn't want to drive back late, so we stayed overnight with my grandma. But first we got pulled over by the Smithfield police. Which Jessie was really excited about- so much so that he had to turn around and drive through Smithfield again because he thought it would be cool if they pulled us over again. I wish I was kidding about that. (Well, we actually turned around because I had to go back to Richmond and give my grandmother her car keys, but he really was excited at the prospect of getting pulled over twice.) You can all rest easy though, because it was just a fix-it ticket, so no fines were levied and no resisting arrest ensued. Jessie basically relies on fix-it tickets to tell us when to change our tailights. He's maybe gotten quite a few, but if I told you how many he might get angry.

So anyway, sweet partying times at the Warner house. We also had a baby shower and some old friends for dinner, and home teaching and playing horsie, so it was a pretty jam packed weekend. Good times.

A little basketball and an embarrassing moment.

So, I guess I'm a bit late, but I need to achknowledge that March Madness has been amazingly fulfilling this year. My bracket has taken some serious blows, but since that's because a lot of lower seeded teams have been awesome. I always love an underdog. Of all the upsets, obviously Kansas was my favorite. But I'm pretty stoked about Cornell too, since I called their victories.

Anyway. Since every post this week has pretty much been basketball, let's insert a story about Cami and Jessie and their silliness and embarrassing moments. This weekend was our stake conference, and my brothers offered to watch Madeline so we could go to the sdult session Saturday night. (Okay. I coerced them. With bribes of basketball on a big screen television.) So we got all ready to go and headed off to our meeting- a touch late, naturally, because of the Kansas game. So we were hustling, trying to make it on time, and we kind of ran into the chapel. And I'm thinking that it's a little weird there's not a flood of late people coming in with us, because Mormon standard time would dictate we would be in good company. We got about fifteen feet into the chapel when I realized the chapel was entirely full of men. And the stake president was speaking. So I froze and dragged Jessie back out into the hall. Turns out we thought the meeting was at six when it was really at seven, and we had just crashed the last few minutes of priesthood leadership. Awkward. And caused an awesome distraction in those last few serious minutes of the meeting- you know, when the stake president is bearing his testimony and the spirit is strong and hte only way it could get better is if two univited people come waltzing through the chapel, followed by a hasty retreat. Sometimes we are awesome.

In which I use insurance and easy in the same sentence.

I hate to interfere with the beauty of March Madness and post about anything else. But I had to report one of the craziest experiences of my life. due to Jessie's new job, we need to cancel a bunch of old insurance policies. And I've been dreading it because I hate dealing with insurance. I've ranted about it more than a few times, I think. I figured it would be painful and require a bunch of annoying paperwork. But while I was on the website for my health insurance, looking up the customer service number, I saw a link for Live Help. And I figured maybe that would save me a little time, because all I wanted to know is what letters I had to send and when I could officially cancel. So I started chatting with this insurance agent, and in less than five minutes, my insurance was cancelled. No paperwork, no sitting on hold, no hassle whatsoever. And I sat and watched television while I did it. And I didn't have to call someone, which we all know makes me kind of hyperventilate (despite working two years as a professional telephone operator.) So so so so easy. I was kind of in shock. But I liked it.

(Okay. I couldn't let the whole post pass without stating that I am loving March Madness. When I'm not dying of stress and suspense. The Florida/BYU game nearly killed me. About twenty times. Jimmer Fredette was this close to being lynched. But I'm loving it. Best month ever.)

Welcome to March Madness!

It's that time of year again. If you don't know what time of year that is...shame on you. We must not be real life friends. So, to enlighten you, it's time for the best sports season of the year. March Madness kicks off tomorrow, and my goal is to indoctrinate Madeline so she will love basketball and let me watch all the games instead of Curious George or Mary Poppins. I finalized my bracket tonight, and I'm pretty satisfied with the results. At least, I'm fairly certain my entire final four won't be toast three rounds in, which is pretty much what happened last year. There's a lot of pride and glory on the line in our annual Lundstrom family pool, and I'm hoping to redeem myself. I haven't performed well since my sophomore year of college. But that's the beauty of March Madness- there's always next year. So if you need me, I'll be spending some quality sports bonding time with my daughter.