Car Conversation

So I am driving in the car with the kids today, and Ben is talking up a storm (as usual).  Then there's a brief, uncommon pause, and:

Benjamin : I smell a poopy diaper!
Daddy : Penelope, do you have a poop?
Penelope : No.
Benjamin : I can smell it!
Daddy : Penelope, are you sure?  Do you have a poopy diaper?
Penelope : No!  No poopy! I don't have poopy diaper!

There's a pause, while I sample the air in the car.

Daddy : Ben, I don't smell anything.  Are you sure its poop?  Are you smelling something else maybe?  Did someone pass gas?
Benjamin : Well....

... and then I can hear Ben making an odd noise.. it sounds like he's hyperventilating, and I am not sure what's wrong. I glance back for a second to see that he's really breathing weird.. out through his mouth, in through his nose, really rapidly.

Daddy : Ben, are you ok?
Benjamin : Yeah.  Its not poopy.  Its my stinky breath.
Daddy : Oh. Ok.  Good. (Good?)
Benjamin : Yeah... sometimes when I play Wii it makes my breath stinky.

Video games get blamed for a lot of things, but I think this is a first.

The Lego Maniac Has a Birthday Party

Ben is a Lego maniac.. just like that Zack kid from the 80's commercials, only without the neon signs in his room.  He and Mommy went to the Lego store at the mall on the day it opened (Daddy was insanely jealous of that outing).

In the past year or so, he's collected several small Lego kits.  At first, he would just follow the instructions and build stuff, but after a while he started, as he puts it, "Building his imagination".  The early explorations into his imagination produced random works of art that required everyone else to use a significant amount of their own imagination to "see" them.  Sort of like the drawings you get when they first get their hands on crayons.  But then on the 4th of July, he made the coolest little car!

And since then, he's been building all sorts of interesting things.  A lot of them are still random, but he's also made some other pretty cool vehicles, and more recently, robots.  So we decided it was only natural to throw him a Lego-themed birthday party this year, starting with some Lego-themed invitations. I had way too much fun playing around with the "Lego Digital Designer" software for that project:

We had planned a bunch of different Lego games, and we did a couple of them ("Guess how many Legos?" and "Lego Toss!") but mostly the kids all just played with Legos, cars and other stuff, ran around, and had fun.  We took a brief journey to the frozen tundra of the backyard for a pinata, which was a huge hit (pun intended) for all the kids. Then we warmed back up inside with some cupcakes, and plenty more running around.