Everyone knows that Thumper will do almost anything for a cookie, right?

This includes scaling the kitchen counters to get to a box of Candy Cane Joe-Joe’s that his dad put up above our kitchen cabinets.

He’s got minty fresh breath and chocolate crumbs in his teeth, and has no idea why we have to hide the cookies from him.

Speaking of getting married…. guess who got engaged????????

It’s official!!!!  Auntie and JW are going to get married!  Ane and I have already come up with a new blog name for JW, once he is officially part of the the family.

We have known JW a very long time.  The kids took to him right away.  Here he is in January 2011, with Tad climbing on him, as we were eating lunch at the zoo.

I think this was the first time that JW had really spent any time with the kids.  They liked him, but I think he might have been a bit overwhelmed by them.  And this was when Rerun was the baby, and Thumper wasn’t even born or thought of yet!

Here are Auntie and JW at Zoolights in December 2011.

And here they are when Rerun turned three.

The kids have always liked him.  I think they grew on him.

Welcome to the family, JW – officially, anyway!  You’ve been around for so long the kids think you’re their uncle already!

The news that broke yesterday about the death of Monty Python member Terry Jones, who had been suffering from dementia, was very sad, but it also reminded me very strongly of the first year of the Webmaster’s and my marriage.

About the time that the Webmaster and I started dating, DVDs were just becoming mainstream.  I realize how old this makes us sound.  The Webmaster was in process of collecting the DVDs of Monty Python’s Flying Circus as they were being released.  Now, even though I could quote the movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail forwards and backwards (one of the many things that I’m sure proved irresistably attractive to the Webmaster), I hadn’t watched much of the TV show.  Having the DVDs on hand changed all that.  No longer were we watching VHS taped copies off of PBS.  Now we could just pop in a disc and go to our favorite episode or sketch.

I worked a swing shift doing data entry during our dating and early married life (a job I kept until Ane was born, actually), so I would often get home late.  We had a meal schedule written and would go shopping on Sunday afternoons, so we knew what we would be having for dinner and who would be making it.  The Webmaster got very good at making Hamburger Helper, and I came home many evenings to a hot dinner and Monty Python on TV in our apartment.

Now, we haven’t let the boys watch much of anything Python related, but Ane has seen Holy Grail and we really should have her watch the old shows, now that she’s old enough to appreciate them.  And who knows, maybe someday a future boyfriend will find that irresistably attractive, too.  (When she’s 30.)

Rest in peace, Terry Jones – and thank you for the laughs.

I don’t remember this level of crazy surrounding finals until I was in college, but it is the end of the semester.  Ane has been very stressed out over her finals this week, and seems to be getting everything done by the seat of her pants at the last minute.

Her finals actually start tonight.  Her physics teacher offered the class the chance to bring in a parent and take your exam early.  You can discuss the questions, but you can’t get actual help from the parent who comes.  The idea is that simply talking over the question will jog the memory and allow the student to remember what they have learned.

Due to the timing involved, the Webmaster got drafted into being the parent on hand.  I mean, I could have done it, but that would have meant bringing the boys with us.  Yeah, that would have gone over well.

Ane’s lack of organization this last semester was bad, and now she’s paying for it with all of this last-minute stuff.

This is almost as bad as Tad finishing his homework (which he conveniently neglected to tell me about) at the bus stop.  Yeah, that one is on me.  His executive functioning skills still stink.