Spring Is In The...(Achoo)... Air

I love spring for so many reasons. First and foremost, being in Arizona, the weather is just about as amazing as it gets. This leads to what is called Spring Fever which hits Thatcher, AZ pretty hard. It is not uncommon during this period known as Spring Break for half the town to literally disappear. If you think I am joking, I got a call last Thursday during Spring Break from a Phoenix newspaper wanting a quote from us regarding recent cuts in healthcare spending in Arizona. I am not joking when I say that I panicked just a little bit because four of the five administrators were out of the office and the only one left was the HR director who would normally not comment on this. I share that just to emphasize how dead it was here last week. Unfortunately, one other side effect of Spring for me is severe hayfever. When hayfever hits for me, it feels like someone snuck into my bedroom during the night and stuck a small tube up my nose and then filled my head with that tire sealer stuff which then takes the entire next day to slowly drain out through my nostrils only to have the whole process repeated the next day. That was a pleasant visual wasn't it. Anyway, our family did not get to have a "vacation" this spring break, but we did do a few things.



First off, my kids discovered the park in Solomon. First of all, this little hamlet (I use this word because I can't think of any other way to describe it. Can You? I am open to suggestions. "Ghost Town Where People Still Live" seemed a little harsh so hamlet seemed my next best option.) outside of Safford can only be described as quaint. (I am putting my PR skills to work here pretty hard. I guarantee the next time you are looking up real estate listings and you see quaint hamlet and you are familiar with Solomon, you are going to run for the hills.) However, it has one of the best parks for kids at their school. They have one of the only proper merry-go-rounds in town and my kids love it. So they got to go on Wednesday and promptly begged to go back Thursday where I met up with them after work. I immediately got the job of pushing the merry-go-round as fast as I could get it to go. I looked back fondly on my days in primary school where we would play for hours on the merry-go-round. Then as the thing went faster and faster, I started to feel a bit queasy just watching them and remembered that I am 36, not 6 anymore and had to walk away. We followed our park experience with a trip to La Paloma. It was the first time we had been since they reopened and it was good. However, that 36 thing cropped again as I just can't eat unlimited Mexican food like I used to. Half way through the amount of food they brought me, the cheese and grease started to get to me and I just had to stop and walk away. Great beans and rice though. Kate was very impressed.











The next day, the family travelled to Mesa to go to Bounce U. What a place Bounce U is. Imagine a kid having a birthday party where his parents rent the bounce castle. Now times it by 10. Not just the bounce castles but the kids as well. That is Bounce U. No, it really is a fun place and it was Logan and Kate's first time to get to go. They bounced and slid and...bounced and...well you get the idea. They absolutely loved it. Even Kate, who we were worried about because of her size in comparison to the toys and the other kids did great and had a ball.





As always, it ended too early but then the family was off to the temple to visit the grounds and see the Joseph Smith movie. Everyone enjoyed it but our sweet Braden struggled at the end. He is so emotional and couldn't understand why people would be so mean. I still don't have an answer for him.

Anyway, an absolutely great day. The kind of day no father would ever miss, right? Wrong!! Dad couldn't be bothered to do that stuff, because it was the annual March Madness first weekend gathering at Buffalo Wild Wings. So while the rest of my family was making memories to last a lifetime, I was eating wings, yelling at large screen televisions as my bracket imploded worse than a supernova and trying desperately to master the Super Shot basketball game over in the corner. It was good times. It was good to see friends I haven't seen in a while and just hang out with fellow members of the male gender watching sports and eating unhealthily (real word?). As usual it ended all to quickly. Already I am looking forward to the third Friday in March next year.

Once we all returned home, Shannon and I felt the need to address a problem that had been building in our home. We were seeing a truly crippling case of halfassitis gripping our children. (If you say it all as one word it isn't cussing.) Maybe some of you have experienced this in your own homes. Your children are assigned tasks and they will set off to do them only to return a short time later telling you they are done with said task. You go and inspect and see that in reality they are either not really done or standards for a completed job have gone way down since we were kids. Anyway, it was getting out of hand so we had to take drastic measures. We took both kids' iPods and told them they were going to have to pick 10 songs and 10 songs only to have on their iPod. All the rest of the songs currently on their iPods were erased. Then each day, they could earn back two songs if they completed their chores to our standards. If they had to be called back once to complete something after they said they were done, they would earn no songs for that day. If they had to be called back again, they would lose a song for each time they had to repeat a task. I don't know how any of this would work for anyone else, but so far, we are having much better results with the cleaning of our kitchen and bathroom. I suppose we will ride this train as long as it runs.

Finally, I don't know how many people are familiar with the Conventional Wisdom thing they have in Newsweek every week (at least I think they still do), but if you aren't, you will get the gist here pretty quick. Just a quick synopsis of my opinions of certain random things. I always wanted to do this...so now I am.

American Idol - Down Anytime a show is spending this much time talking about the judges and the personal drama surrounding them, it may be time to call it quits.

Fablehaven and The Hunger Games - UP Best literary finds this decade. (I am aware of just how old the decade is. Why do you think I am so confident making this statement?) Both are "teen" fiction, but extremely well written and truly gripping. In fact, reading "teen" fiction actually gives you a little more confidence in the language, sex and violence content. I read the sequel to The Hunger Games in less than 30 hours and was so disappointed when it was over, I read it again on the spot.

Tiger Woods - Down What else needs to be said? Except maybe MORON!

Media Covering Tiger Woods - WAY DOWN! What else needs to be said? Exactly, so stop talking about it.

US Healthcare - Down Unless you support the recent Healthcare bill that passed in which case I would add, Pharmaceutical Drugs For Symptoms Of Delusion - UP

(Although I have to agree with my extremely liberal co-worker who was actually in Washington D.C. last week during all the protests. She was walking amongst the protestors trying to keep her mouth shut when she saw something that she just couldn't let pass. A woman on a scooter with a sign that said, "Keep government out of my healthcare." My co-worker stopped her and asked, "Who paid for your scooter?" Her reply, "Medicare." I don't think the woman got the irony.)

The 1 cent sales tax proposition in Arizona - UP Without it, Arizona just might have to ship children living within 100 miles of it borders to neighboring states for education. For those on the Southern border, hope that Mexican education is up to par. Although history regarding the Alamo might be different there.

EAC President Mark Bryce - Down I'd be willing to bet he has had better weeks.

New Gila Valley Arizona Temple - UP Reports from Rhett Dodge who has been working on the glass inside and out says it is absolutely beautiful inside.

2010 NCAA Tournament - UP/DOWN I absolutely loved all of the thrilling games with several upsets. My bracket absolutely hated all of the thrilling games with several upsets.

Last Season Of Lost - UP The best show on TV is just getting better with this week's episode about Richard being one of the best episodes of the entire series. Although, I have to agree with columnist Bill Simmons who pointed out a real negative about Lost. If you are into it and you are talking about it around people who aren't, you sound like a complete idiot. I mean you sound like a 4th grader talking about Smoke Monsters, polar bears on tropical islands, flashbacks, flash forwards and flash sideways. It really is good and not as...I mean it isn't as crazy as it sounds...Kind of. Please don't think I'm crazy, or worse yet, something akin to a Trekkie. I'm really not! REALLY! It is just so good...Ahh screw it. Best show on TV and if you aren't watching it, it is just your loss. (How many times has saying that made us feel better?)

Verbal Shorts

As is the case with most of my posts, I have a hard time keeping them short. Here is hoping you don't age like Kate did in this picture while reading.

I Never Explain Anything

The opening line of this short is my absolute favorite line from the movie and stage musical "Mary Poppins". I have started using it with my family on many an occasion. Abby will ask for a song to get downloaded to her iPod and I will say no. She will ask why not. (in your mental picture of Abby asking for said song, add an intense whining as if the inability to have this song will result in her being caught on a conveyor belt moving slowly toward a rock crushing roller thing with no way to get off the belt because you are being attacked by a very large Thuggee thug. Once you have this in your mind, you will get the correct mental picture of what it sounds like to have Abby press you for a new song for her iPod. Also, if you didn't get the reference about the conveyor belt, you are down five points on your 80's movie icons trivia challenge.) As she continues to push for why she can't have said song, I now no longer have to explain why. I just reply, "I Never Explain Anything!" It doesn't make the whining stop, but I get a bit of joy as the words sink in to Abby and she stops short for just a moment before launching again. That moment is awesome. It however does not work so well when I am asked by my lovely wife to do something while she is away from the house and I neglect to get it done. She will ask why I didn't and I will respond, "I never explain anything?" She will let me know that is fine, but there are plenty of other things I never have to do again either. So my use of my new favorite phrase is a work in progress. (In fairness to my family, some (one) of my examples are a combination of several events combined into a fictional account so as to give readers a sense of reality. For instance, many of the instances I would have used the phrase with my wife occured in my brain without actually taking place in real life. I may not be the smartest guy, but I am not suicidal nor overly crazy about sleeping on the couch. But know that I have thought about using the phrase many times.)



Anyway, all of this has very little to do with what I am actually supposed to write about which is our family's trip to Tempe, AZ on Feb. 11 to see the Broadway touring production of "Mary Poppins". This was our kids' first opportunity to see a play like this and so they went with excitement, but also a lot of questions, like, "Why do we have to wear nice clothes?"



Shannon and I grew excited as we neared our Alma Mater of higher education and were proudly pointing out things that carried no interest whatsoever for our children. It took me back to our family's vacation to Colorado when I was about 11 or 12. My parents had lived there for a while and so we spent a week seeing things that held great memories for them, but reminded me of...I don't know...every other apartment complex I had ever seen, or the 20 other industrial parks that we could have visited in Phoenix without the 10 hour drive in the back of a truck with a camper shell on it. Did this stop me?...Heck no! I continued to point things out to an uninterested audience with amazing vigor. However, once we got to Gammage Auditorium, they were pretty excited.



Once inside, we had to wait for the inner doors to open for quite a while and the excitement turned to boredom pretty quickly. But eventually we got in and sat down to enjoy the show. That is until the gentleman with the seat next to mine showed up with thirty seconds to spare before the curtain opened with not one, but two bags of potato chips...AAAAAAUUUUUGGHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! We were in a balcony and had we not been six rows up, it would have been a bit of a struggle to fight off the urge to just try and toss him over the edge. If that wasn't bad enough, as...not a little bit before...as the curtain is going up, he suddenly remembers that he needs to call someone on his cell phone and wish them happy birthday. Not the quick, "happy birthday, I gotta go." kind, but the, "I was thinking of you. Happy birthday, I love you. Blah Blah Blah." kind. Take that and then add to it that the people directly behind us decided that bringing a 1 year old to a three hour musical is a really good idea, and suddenly those people throughout history who are guilty of genocide started to sound somewhat reasonable to me. I mean, if the kids at Voldemort's orphanage had these kind of manners, suddenly the whole Harry Potter series takes on a different feel for me.



Anyway, despite those items (which my kids didn't even notice anyway) the play was so awesome that we were sucked into it and forgot about all the other things that were going on around us (with the exception of the armrest WWF match I was having with potato chip guy throughout the play. I always just give up on that when I go to the movies or a play and end up sitting uncomfortably to one side the whole show. Not this time I said, and I didn't give an inch the whole night.) Logan even loved it and Abby seemed transfixed through the whole production. It went a little long for the two boys, but amazingly, we didn't lose either one to sleep. Overall a definite success for a Rapier family outing.



One last item. It was funny during intermission (well it was actually funny in hindsight, not actually during intermission) both boys had to go to the bathroom. Gammage severly needs to update their restrooms. Braden had to poop (of course) and so we couldn't use the urinals. There are no lights over the stalls and so it was literally the experience of pooping in a cave. He was slightly frightened. I felt really bad for the guy in the next stall, because anytime anyone shifted in any of the three stalls, his stall door would fly open and he would have to frantically try to get it shut in the midst of his business. Again, laughed about it afterward, tried not to cuss during.

Nightmare On 1st Street

Abby has been of the opinion that she is into scary things. Movies, books, tv shows...you name it. So we had a conversation several weeks back over dinner regarding movies and their plots that were scary. I was enjoying it, as were the kids, while Shannon was sitting there just praying that anything up to and including a smoke monster coming through our front window would happen to cause a change in the subject. (For those unclear on a smoke monster, you clearly have not been watching this season of Lost. Too bad for you, suckers!) She had recently seen three of the four Indiana Jones movies, (Any guesses on which one we won't let her watch?) and so she thought she knew what scary was. One movie that came up during the conversation was Gremlins. She thought that sounded pretty cool. So fast forward to about a week and a half ago when she and I went to Blockbuster and found it on the shelf. She demanded that we rent it. So we did. If you haven't seen Gremlins, it is a bizarre little movie with just enough of a horror element to have freaked me out pretty good when I was her age, but not enough to tramatize me. Shannon wasn't allowed to watch it. Anyway, that night we put it on after the boys went to bed. Shannon and I were sitting there thinking how badly this movie had aged when the part where the gremlins get created and start wreaking havoc arrived. After about 10 minutes of that, we turned it off because she needed to go to bed. So we look over and she is completely freaked out. We asked if she was ok and she really wouldn't answer. So I asked if she wanted to actually watch the rest of the movie later to which she replied, "Um...I don't think so." It was kind of funny to watch her but we couldn't laugh because we didn't want to embarress her. So we used the opportunity to explain the difference between thrilling movies and horror movies and how she should probably avoid the latter. I think she was in total agreement with us at that moment. Let's hope it sticks.

Braden's Birthday and Baptism

Our son Braden has hit that magic age of 8. Don't worry, despite the temptation to go into a long drawn out discourse on how old I feel, I won't. For his birthday, he wanted to do something with his friends that was near and dear to his heart. That means playing the Wii. So Braden had a Wii party. Take a moment and think back to when you were 8 and what you would have thought if someone had invited you to a Wii (Wee) party. I just chuckled when I thought of that. Anyway, below you can see the cupcakes he took to his class with Miis on them and then his birthday cake at the party. Congrats to Shannon on a job well done with the cake. We borrowed a Wii from the Lees and the boys had a blast. A very successful party under the belt for Shannon. Many congrats dear.





Due to Stake Baptisms having become the norm, Braden then had to wait a week for his baptism. On this most special day, how did we let him celebrate? We had him pick up dog crud all morning. We believe in the school of hard knocks at the Rapier house. No, Braden's baptism wasn't until 2:00 p.m. and so the whole family spent the morning in our backyard doing clean up work. Braden's job was to take care of the fact that he and Abby had not been very effective in their poop scooping duties over the last couple of months. It was a pretty big job and despite some early major unhappiness, he did a good job getting the outhouse aspect of our backyard taken care of.





Later that day, he got himself completely ready in his church clothes without being asked. We went to the church and got him all ready. His friend Jacob Bauman was also being baptized that day. It went very smoothly and there was a special spirit about the meeting. Congratulations to Braden on his decision and on being just a wonderful young man we are proud to have as a member of our family.