Thanks for Being a Nerd with Me

Chloe and her friend Keelin found some old 3-D glasses stuffed in one of our junk drawers and decided to pop the lens' out and wear them around for the entire day. Everywhere they went they wore their "nerd" glasses. I carted them around the whole day as if I was running a school for visually impaired children--these girls were very serious about declaring the entire day a nerdy one. We got a lot of goofy looks around town but these girls were undeterred.

After Keelin went home, we found this note she left for Chloe:

Just like a nerd, very polite.

BOY Did He Miss Out

Connor and Chloe like to go to Home Depot once a month for the Kids Building Workshop they put on so they can build whatever project-of-the-month they've got for the kids to make.  Like clockwork, the first Saturday of every month Chloe dons her little orange apron, forces Connor into wearing his, and then she reminds me it's hammer time.

But this month Connor opted not to go since all the projects lately have been decidedly way too girly.  Last month, because of Valentine's Day, he had to make--horror of horrors--a heart-shaped shelf.  So this time he decided not surrender his man card anymore by refusing to let his little sister talk him into going.

So Chloe and I headed to the Home Depot, minus Connor.  We decided to go and pick up her cousins since there was more room in the car without a stinky brother brave enough to come and swing a hammer with us.  We arrived to discover that this month's project was the mother of testosterone driven projects:

NASCARS!

Chloe with her cousins Madi and Janelle

somewhere amidst the toxins of the fertilizer isle, 

assembling their Nascars.

BOY did Connor miss out!

Connor was bummed when we got home.  He said next time he won't miss the workshop since things are looking up.  What I didn't tell him was that I already asked what next month's project would be...

... it's Easter Baskets!!!!

Shhhhhh! Don't tell him though.  I'm waiting to see the look on his face when he shows up and realizes he has to glue and nail together another stupid girl project.  [fade to evil laughing.]

Borrowed Brothers

As far as sibling struggles are concerned, Connor won the brother lottery.  His older brother Mitchell is very mellow and mild mannered. Lucky Connor. It means that he has the great fortune to escape the traditional hazing that usually befalls the youngest male who lives in a home that harbors at least one older brother under the same roof.

Unfortunately Connor doesn't seem to see it that way.  Instead, he has decided that in-home hazing is a right of passage, an inalienable right, a truth that he holds to be self-evident, that as a younger brother he should endure a traditional sibling smack-down every now and then. Connor took matters into his own hands and decided to outsource the job by borrowing some big brothers.

Borrowed Brother #1 is Nick.

Nick is Mitchell's good friend who stands about 6 foot 6 inches high with the physique of a linebacker whose favorite past time is to watch WWF on cable TV and then come to our house and try out the moves on his eager sidekick "ConDog". (For those of you with a largely estrogen based home WWF stands for World Wrestling Federation-or so I'm told.)  Connor has been "flea flicked", "bad slammed", "splash pressed", and "chokeslammed" all over the house by Nick. All while Connor sports an enormous grin from ear to ear--though admittedly his eyebrows are simultaneously raised in strange contortions that can only be described as having the consistency of two parts foreboding and one part fun.

Borrowed Brother #2 is his cousin Tanner.  Tanner is almost as tall as Nick but still scrawny enough that he couldn't really pull off a flea-flick on The ConDog.  Tanner's fiendish forte is that he is good at being a smooooth talker.  So while Nick fulfills Connor's perplexing need for physical torture, Tanner plays the role of beguiling brother. It just so happens that Tanner is also a younger brother himself who knows all to well the perils of letting an older brother convince you to throw caution to the wind and do something absolutely stupid. So to help Connor learn how to avoid this sort of painful pitfall Tanner considers it his duty to temp him into dangerous situations, thereby teaching him NOT to ever, ever, ever, trust an older brother's pernicious plots. Tanner is what we call a self-appointed mentor of mayhem.

Last week Tanner's latest scheme was to convince Connor to let him stuff him into a trash can. Later that night Connor was laughing as he told us all about his odiferous adventures as Houdini of the heap.
"It only took me 10 minutes to escape!" he boasted with a self-satisfied grin.

Seriously, what is wrong with this kid? 

Then recently Connor wrote the following letter to one of Mitchell's friends who used to live nearby and was yet another "borrowed brother" who helped fill Connor's self-imposed pain quota.  When I read the letter things got more confusingly clear.

Apparently the exhilaration of getting stuffed in a trash can AND having the pleasure of getting "choke slammed" are all interactions considered by Connor to be brotherly bonding moments--but getting his head accidentally whacked into a couch's arm rest (I believe that sorta move would technically be called "The Facebuster") is apparently where Connor draws the line...

...at least the kid has one.

I was beginning to think the boy was crazy.

Secret Message Received

We've been having problems with our internet lately.  Actually, truth be told, we've been having problems with our internet ALL THE TIME. Just chalk it up to one of the drawbacks to living out in the hinterlands. Sketchy Internet.

NOT SO says our resident computer geek.  That'd be Mitchell, he's the kid in our house wearing the "I Void Warranties" t-shirt. Mitchell claims it's our crappy router that's causing all the problems and has been begging us for almost a year to buy a pricy newfangled one.

Whatever it is, the one thing we're absolutely positively sure of, is the fact that when the internet does go down at the Skillman house, we act like the Apocalypse was here.  No one here, myself including, seems to be able to breath without the internet.

So when it does go down, which is a daily and most wretched occurrence, we call in our personal Geek Squad...Mitchell. The kid can fix anything. Make anything too.  His first computer was made from thrown away computer parts that he duct taped inside a cardboard box.  The thing ran faster and smoother than my macbook. Boy Wonder.

And of course just a few minutes ago...FLATLINE.  No internet.  So when I asked him to fix the internet issues just a moment ago, he did exactly that.  Soon, he hollered upstairs

"It's fixed, only you have to change the router your using, not our "Skillman"one!"

So, I pop back online and this is what I see:

Well, if the "Skillman" one isn't working I guess that leaves me only one other option.  Wonder who in the world could have scrounged up a used router from a stash of discarded computer parts, duct taped it back together, hooked it up and named it "We Need A New Router". Hmmmm.

Secret message received! I guess that's what you get when you ask for free help!