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.