Every once in a while we ask Isabelle if she’d like to cut her hair. She usually replies, “no!”. Maybe that’s because Alan traumatized her by kidding around once saying, “how would you like daddy to cut your hair like mine, all short?”

That brings on tears and “but I’d miss my hair!”

Well a couple of weeks ago, we asked her if she’d like to cut her hair and she said yes. Her first real haircut, not done by herself. So, I jumped on that like bananas. Like the way bananas jump on gorillas. Like the way gorillas jump on monkeys. Wait…no, like the way monkeys jump on bananas. Yes, I actually thought that sequence out in my head and that’s exactly how it went before I figured it out. Or something like that. Isn’t there a saying that goes like that?

Ok back to what I was saying. Isabelle said yes so immediately we marched her into the bathroom and snip snip there went her hair.

And she loves it. And I love it (even though I can’t cut worth crap and it’s uneven). I love it because her hair is soooo easy to take care of now. No more troublesome knots and tangles.

And then she wanted a new name to go with her new haircut.

Since then she’s been thinking of new names for herself. Besides Dob, there’s been Sum. Then there was Little Mmmmmm and Big Mmmmmm for me and countless others. Then today it was Betsy. It’s fine with us just as long as it’s new names and not personalities that come with those names.

I’ve been playing around with my site lately. I went all mad scientist on it.

You may have noticed, I turned off comments a week ago. I decided to give it a try after running across a couple of blogs that didn’t have any comments. I thought: What an interesting idea. You don’t have to worry about spam then! But do you guys miss it? Is it totally anti-social? Have any comments on that?

Then I kept up mad scientisting my site: I changed my banner today and my twitter background picture. And now I have an idea about my “I Heart” section.

Have you noticed my “I Heart” section in my sidebar? I copied the idea from Secret Agent Josephine’s “Eye spy with my little eye”. Well anyhoo, my idea is that I’m going to start drawing the “I Heart” section to get my draw on. So, instead of grabbing a picture of what I’m loving I’ll draw it. I’m having drawing withdrawal I guess.

It’s been almost 6 months since I had this I MUST draw urge. Blame Secret Agent Josephine again. She’s started to draw daily and it got my yearning for it up and going again.

What else can I go mad scientist on?! Well, I think I’m done with my site for now so moving onto the real world and a GRAND EXPERIMENT.

And the title of this post is Mad Scientists because the GRAND EXPERIMENT involves Isabelle.

Ok that sounds so mysterious and exciting. But it’s not really. Do you remember what it was? It was us trying to grow things. Ooooohhhh!

It failed miserably last time and I’ve been wanting to try again so we bought a whole bunch of new seeds.

And this time we’re serious. We even bought planting gear!

That’s right. Gardening world, watch out, we’re well equipped here! We planted a seed, a single seed of corn, a week ago. (We learned this time and didn’t go all crazy planting a gazillion seeds.)

And lo and behold, it groweth. A plant thing sprouteth yesterday.

Ok so I’m not down with the gardening terminology. A plant grew. Is that what you say? A plant sprouted. A seed has…oh whatever.

We are mad scientists and mad scientists don’t need to talk properly. They can use crazy words. They’re mad! Bwa ha ha!!

And to prove our awesome powers, LOOK:

We have the power to mutate helium. This balloon has been up since Isabelle’s birthday back in September. It’s mutant helium. All cower at our mad sciencing. Bwa ha ha!

Ok, I obviously need to go to bed now. But seriously, Isabelle’s balloon…Craaaazzzzy!

(Last real picture “I Heart”) These dresses by faithworks4u make me happy. I think it’s the big buttons.

Yesterday we went for Nathan’s two month well check for the THIRD time. Heh? Ok let me back it up a bit.

Two and a half weeks ago was the first time. But we walked out without seeing the doctor. There was a mix up on us filling out paperwork and basically Nathan had no health insurance. NO HEALTH INSURANCE. Scary phrases were thrown around like: you only had 30 days to add him and if you’ve missed the open enrollment you might have to wait until next year and we might be sending you a bill for his past visits.

We were so stressed. I actually cried at the receptionist’s desk. I think it was lack of sleep. Either that or I’m a big blubbering whale.

So, we went home and Alan called the union hall and they said oh we’ll just mail out the forms and you can mail it back and we’ll retroactive it to October. We were still stressing so the very next day, right after our homeschool meet up group (and yes I know I STILL haven’t talked about that), we drove over to the union hall to see if we could pick up the paperwork and fill it out right there.

Unfortunately for us, but fortunately for Isabelle, the office that accepted the paperwork was in a different location, Milpitas. Sucks because our stress was dragged out a few days but so fun for Isabelle because we decided to drive down there. Milpitas is where the Great Mall is. Acccck malls!! Run away and hide.

Actually, I did quite well in the beginning. Alan was surprised at my lack of hyperventilating. We went and bought some pants for Isabelle who has outgrown everything. And the funniest thing, she went all gaga over the mannequins. She kept wanting to touch them and asked why they were frozen.

Do I seriously not go shopping enough at real stores that Isabelle doesn’t know what a mannequin is?!

Well anyhoo, getting to the fortunately for Isabelle part…at the dreadful mall they had a bouncer house place. Bouncers everywhere. It’s sort of like a Chuck E. Cheese except there are bouncers.

They had the biggest freaking jumper I’ve ever seen. Looks like a whole bunch of fun huh? Well sure, if you’re a kid. But not if you’re me. They had signs around that said no adults in bouncers. And you had to wear socks, which I didn’t have. Can you imagine my torment? All that bouncing and sliding and I’m supposed to act like an adult and not join in? No fair.

And I couldn’t sneak in because I’m a goober. I thought, well I’m an adult AND I have no socks so it’s like double whammy if I break the rules. I’m a dork. So after hours of not jumping around and watching all the kids have fun we went home. Boo bouncer house place! Boo! BOO! BOO!!!

So, back to Nathan’s doctor appointment. We rescheduled it and on Wednesday we went in only to find that we were a day late. I got the date wrong. A whole day! So they rescheduled it again for yesterday and we finally got Nathan’s two month well check done.

And my big boy weighs a whopping 15 pounds and 1.8 ounces. That’s in the 95th percentile. You know, I really don’t notice how big he is until I see the pictures. And when I read the medicine listing that says 4-11 months as 12-17 pounds. Errm ok. Is he really that big?!?

I’m running out of room on my hard drive. Well, when I say running out, I mean about 4 gigs of space. Crazily, that’s how much hard drive space total of my first iMac.

But anyhoo, as I was saying, I’m running out of space. One of these days I’m going to have to start deleting files. Yikes!! I have to do some serious backing up. Right now I have everything backed up on a backup drive. But what I cherish the most are our pictures and having a single backup source isn’t enough. I have a few months of Isabelle’s pictures backed up on CDs. And then I have everything except 10 months backed up on Shutterfly. I need to have backups of the backups before I start removing stuff.

So, that brings me to this video. I found it when scouring my files looking for other stuff to delete besides my precious pictures. My sister and I made this about 8 years ago back when I didn’t have a real digital camera. We made it with my camcorder that could take snapshots. It was dark and we didn’t have flash but it was fun.

Worm’s day on Flickr

My sister made the birds out of clay or playdoh. I cannot even remember. I wish I had the original files because in the original small grainy video you can see the toothpick used to help the chicken stand. I photoshopped it out but missed a few frames. Now I only have the finished video files but I like the first video better because I am a big child. But if you read regularly, you know that already.

And if you don’t, here are some pictures demonstrating that fact. See, little kid riding:

Little kid and big kid riding:

The big round thing is like a tilted merry go round except you have nothing to hold onto. As other parents stood around watching their kids play on it, I jumped on.

At the bottom of the incline I kept falling off. But that’s totally fun too. The trick for me was to sit up so the gravity of my big butt wouldn’t pull me off.