My Food Chain Gang

Ok, going in, I knew it would be a terrible movie.  When Christmas With The Kranks came out in the movie theater, it was met with terrible reviews from critics, and its imdb.com rating is a measley 4.7 with over 7,000 votes.  So why did I want to watch it?  Two reasons - I wanted to watch a Christmas movie on Christmas Eve, and I had read Surviving Christmas -  one of the rare John Grisham books that isn’t legal fiction, “Surviving Christmas” months ago - I always like to see books come to life on the screen.  Well, ok, not always…  because Christmas With The Kranks was simply awful - even worse than I thought.

The story is about a couple of empty-nesters who decide to skip Christmas since their daughter will be out of town.  They plan to take a tropical cruise and go about getting fake tans and whatnot to prepare for their unconventional holiday celebration.  Not such a big deal, you’d think.  Except that the Krank’s live on a street that is famous for their Christmas decorations.  Every house is expected to put a Frosty the Snowman decoration on their roof every year, and so when the Kranks are preparing to leave town without doing so, the neighborhood is abuzz.  That’s it.

The novel was alright; it was a fun little story, and although it wasn’t one of the best books, I did get all the way through it.  But I can’t say the same about the movie.  We turned it off in the middle and I can’t say I missed the rest.  My main problem with it was the casting of Tim Allen as Luther Krank.  While reading the book, I kept picturing Luther as a crabby senior citizen, but Tim Allen made Luther more angry than crabby.  In the novel, John Grisham does a nice job setting scene of a small, close-knit community, but all that is lost in the movie, especially with Tim Allen involved.  I was shocked to read on imdb.com that John Grisham has casting approval rights for movies based on his novels.  Maybe that was established because of Christmas With The Kranks.  Well anyway, that’s enough time wasted on this movie.  From what I hear, it’s not the best example of a John Grisham book, but worth a try, I suppose, if you have lots of spare time and like to read.  On the other hand, I wouldn’t recommend the movie to anyone.

Our Christmas was wonderful, thanks for asking!  Our 8 9 year old and our 2 year old were awake first on Christmas morning, and they crept downstairs to see if Santa came.  He did, and surprisingly, they waited very patiently until Mom and Dad were ready to roll out of bed to open their presents.  Christmas Eve was a late night, and because we weren’t really being pestered, we stayed in bed until about 9:45 Christmas morning.  After that, it took A LOT of prodding to wake our middle daughter who is 4.  Believe it or not, even telling her to check if Santa came didn’t do the trick…  she was apparently tired!  Like I said, late night last night.

Finally she was awake and excited, so then the kids opened their gifts, and they were really happy with what Santa had picked out.  So happy, in fact, that they were really good during the day, and we had few fights amongst the natives - a rarity in our house.  Their favorite toys seem to be these large inflatable balls with handles that they sit on and bounce.  I guess Santa didn’t realize how annoying it would be to have 3 little girls bouncing all around the house

So what did I get?  My husband got me a game based upon our favorite tv show, The Office.  A good friend had gotten us another board game (with a dvd as a big part of the game) based upon the show, and so now we have both games - the complete set.  I love it.  I was looking forward to playing it all day, and it’s easy to see that the game is REALLY cool.  It’s different than your average trivia game; lots of added elements, making it a stand-out favorite board game.  But then again, we feel the show is a stand-out favorite.  My husband also got me a Snuggie - ever heard of them?  Snuggies are big blankets with sleeves, essentially.  That way you can do many a chore (or even fun things, like changing channels on the remote or blogging) while still being covered by a blanket.  We’re waiting for mine to arrive, and once they do, they will be an especially appreciated gift since our electric bill doubled between last month and this month - must be all those space heaters we were using to supplement our giant furnace because we thought our gas bill was too high.  Just wait til we get that bill in the mail this month… ugh.  At least it didn’t come on Christmas Eve like I was sure it would.

So what did I get for my wonderful hubby?  It’s lame I know, but months ago while I was still pregnant with our son, I found a picture frame that says “I get my good looks from my Daddy”.  I liked it immediately and bought it, and it’s ironic that at that time, I thought we were going to have a baby girl instead of a boy which would make more sense when it comes to the photo frame.  But then we found out we were indeed having a boy, and so I was able to give my husband the picture frame with a picture of our son inside.  A good gift, but I had wanted to get him something else.

I almost asked a friend to get something for him from me.  My husband usually wants-for-nothing, but this year, he did spy a few gadgets for his wish list.  Since he’s usually with me when we’re shopping at the stores that carry the items, I was going to ask a favor of someone to pick them up.  But alas, my plan was foiled when I told my husband (and the captain of our family finances) I need some money for Christmas shopping.  He basically vetoed the idea of me getting him anything, and I was under the impression it was mutual, that we were going to focus on the kids this year and not get each other anything.  But he sneakily got me some really good gifts, and I’m not going to let this happen again - I’ll be squirreling away some money here and there until I have enough to buy him a birthday present in June - HA!

Hope you and yours had a very Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas!

We hope this Christmas Blogcard finds you and yours happy, safe, and healthy.  We want to thank all of you who thought of our family this year and sent us the wonderful Christmas cards.  I was going to send out Christmas e-cards with pictures of the kids this year, but somehow time got away from me (somehow?  I have 4 kids!) and wouldn’t you know it - it’s already Christmas and we never even got our family Christmas picture taken!  So I gathered the kids, put them in front of the Christmas tree, and viola!  Our family’s 2008 version of Christmas cards, and this is the fastest way to make sure we sent our Christmas wishes before the holiday is over.
As for our family, 2008 was busy but great.  The kids are doing wonderfully!  Taylor just turned 9 and really likes 3rd grade.  She loves to read and is a very talented artist.  Sammie is 4 and in preschool.  She is learning to write her name and loves Barbies.  Disney is 2 and still very sweet.  She loves to play with baby dolls and play-doh.  Baby Christopher has learned to jump in his bouncy seat, and he loves to use his hands, especially to grab his toes.
God Bless everyone and we wish you and your family a truly happy holiday season, as well as the rest of the year, of course!  We are so lucky to have such wonderful friends and family!  Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!
Love,
Chris, Lisa, Taylor, Sammie, Disney, and Christopher

I shouldn’t have liked it.  It’s an 82 minute comedy farce co-starring Reese Witherspoon - what’s to like?  But I actually enjoyed the movie 4 Christmases more than I thought.

So why did I see if I thought I’d hate it?  For one, it was the only thing playing at the matinee price and for two, I had a sort of curiosity about the acting abilities of two country music super-stars:  Dwight Yoakam and Tim McGraw.  Actually, having seen Dwight Yoakam in Sling Blade, I’m well aware of his acting skills.  It was such a great performance in Sling Blade that I thought it was Oscar-worthy.  He’s not given much to work with in this movie however, and his role as one of those Leap of Faith-type preachers is not very well developed.  I don’t think it’s any fault of Yoakam, though, but more a testament to the lazy script.

Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon star as a freewheeling couple who don’t see the need to marry since they’re already happy, and they don’t want kids.  The first scenes of the movie really emphasize how perfect this couple’s lives are, and it’s almost sickeningly sweet how well they get along.  Enter their extended families, and they become miserable people.  It begins when their flight to Fiji is cancelled on Christmas and they are featured on the news.  The couple (their names were not memorable) is now busted in their annual lie about travelling to some exotic location for charity work.  They fib about this every year to their families so they can avoid seeing all 4 families (each set of parents is divorcd) for Christmas.  So now that they can’t go to Fiji, they have to visit 4 sets of crazy relatives on one day and yada, yada, anticipated baby jokes and predictable chaos ensues, you get the picture.

For some reason, a lot of Hollywood stars agreed to be in this movie.  And just as I expected, Vince Vaughn was the same in this movie as the characters he always plays.  He can be funny, but he’s not very versatile.  I was surprised that Reese Witherspoon did not get under my skin because for some reason, she annoys the heck out of me, and it’s distracting when watching her in movies.  As far as the country music super-stars are concerned, I consider this movie a waste of Dwight Yoakam’s acting talent, and Tim McGraw was barely in the movie at all.  I read somewhere that he beefed up for the role, and he was hard to recognize, although I don’t really know why he bothered gaining all the weight for a part that hardly has him on camera and with barely any lines.  Other big name actors making cameos were Mary Steenburgen, Jon Voight, Robert Duvall, and Sissy Spacek - maybe it’s just me, but even though she’s almost 60, I still look at her and see Carrie the fire-starting teen from the famous Stephen King horror movie of the ’70’s.

Overall, there was only one scene where I couldn’t even watch because of its ludicrousness, so instead I turned to my husband and whispered, “This is unbelievably dumb”.  Other than that, I was entertained, and mostly because it was a holiday movie, it was fun to sit, watch, and eat popcorn.  I wonder how Christmas With The Kranks will compare.  I’ve heard that one is just awful, yet I want to see it since I read the John Grisham novel upon which it was based.

“Windy City White House” is more of a reference to our visit to the Windy City rather than a blog post about the recent election - it’s over and done with, and although I won’t talk much about the outcome, I am happy to not have to hear about it on the news anymore.  While in Illinois, my mother-in-law kept talking about what huge news it is that Obama was elected and how his pick for Chief-of-Staff, Rahm Emanuel is a fellow Chicagoan - making it a ‘Windy City White House’.

But back to our family - it’s my blog, after all.  We scheduled an early Christmas with our family in Illinois this past weekend (the early Christmas theme is something that seems popular with tangents.org bloggers), and overall, it was great.  There are a few reasons we decided to do things this way - 1) We’re sick of the hustle and bustle of opening our presents from Santa and then rushing off to Illinois on Christmas Day  - add to that having the flu during this trip twice and UGH.  Best to travel before flu season.  2) My daughter was off school Friday for parent/teacher conferences 3) We wanted to beat the rush and other travelers.  Overall, it was a really great decision, although the trip was last minute, and so we did forget a few of the presents which we’ll now have to send.  We left Ohio on Friday morning and after a bit of traffic-sitting (of course), we got to my grandparents house about 40 minutes past schedule.  But no matter, they’re fully aware of the traffic problems plaguing their area.  We were treated to a delicious lunch of my grandma’s sloppy joes (love ‘em), and the girls got to open presents.  My grandpa gets tired really quickly, and so we didn’t stay too long there, and then it was on to our hotel.  My husband uses hotwire.com and got us a suite at the Sheraton for $49 - a nice price for the area.  When we pulled up to our hotel, we were pleased to see it was the same hotel where we spent our wedding night - that was a nice surprise.  My mom and my sister brought her two boys over for some swimming, and we all had a blast even though their indoor pool was chilly.  Luckily, I had thought to turn up our room’s thermostat so when we got back to the room we didn’t freeze, although it was quite crowded trying to get 10 hungry people changed out of bathing suits and trying to order pizza at the same time.  It was a suite, but it was probably the smallest suite I have ever seen, and we had 6 little kids and 4 adults in there.  My mother and sister wisely decided that they couldn’t wait for the time it would take to get pizza, and they got something to eat on the way home.  That was a good idea because my mom had to get up early the next day and didn’t want to be out too late.  They know their area well enough to realize that pizza delivery on a Friday night would take over an hour - and they were right.  My poor kids were starving and I had to raid my diaper bag.  I found a little bag of oyster crackers and two small bags of peanuts, so I divied everything up 3 ways (Survivor-style) and it quieted them a little until the pizza came.  Overall, the kids were kind of spastic all day, especially my oldest for some reason…  My husband blames the tension of the Chicagoland area, but then again, he hates it as much as I do.  We love seeing family, just wish we could visit them somewhere else!

Saturday morning we were up bright and early to meet my mother-in-law for breakfast at Uptown Cafe in Arlington Heights - the place has the best eggs benedict in the nation.  And I know this because way back when, before we had all these kids, my husband and I used to travel constantly, and one of the things we would look for was good hollandaise sauce.  We never found any that came close to Uptown Cafe’s.  And the owners remember us - we used to go there a lot when we lived in the area; I was pregnant with my first daughter.  They are surprised every time they see us because we usually have a new baby or two.  After breakfast, we went back to my mother-in-law’s house, and I felt badly for dropping in on my husband’s sister and her family without any notice.  This is one of the details that was overlooked in the last minute planning.  But it was ok; I didn’t have my gifts for their 3 kids, so I’ll have to send them.  But our kids had lots of fun playing together, and it’s important to me that my kids know their extended family, especially since a lot of hatchets have been buried over the years on this side of the family.

Next, it was time to see our good friend, the author of the sublife blog on tangents.org.  It was great to see him, especially on his own turf, but he’s right in his blog - there really wasn’t much time for chatting.  The kids wouldn’t have allowed us to just sit and talk peacefully, and we wanted to take them somewhere fun, so we went to an overflowing Chuck E. Cheese.  After waiting in line to park, I realized that I hadn’t seen our camera since I took a picture of the kids on the luggage rack at the hotel that morning.  Sound familiar?  Yes, I have terrible luck with digital cameras.  And worse, this one was not mine - I had borrowed it from Jamiahsh for the trip, so I was sick about losing it.  Luckily for me, it turned up when we got home though - YAY!  I was especially upset because I knew that I had put it in my diaper bag - I really thought someone had taken it.  Pessimistic of me, you’d think, except that we did have our tokens stolen from our table at Chuck E. Cheese with my husband less than 5 feet away.  Takes all kinds to steal game tokens from little kids, doesn’t it….  at least they didn’t also steal my digital camera.  We got lunch at a Vienna Beef hot dog place in Arlington Heights called Jimmy’s - highly recommended you get real Chicago-style beef sandwiches and ‘dogs if you’re in the area - YUM!

The ride home was uneventful - the kids slept most of the way, thank goodness.  We did manage to stop and get me my crave case of White Castles, and so our car reeked of steamed onions - thank goodness we weren’t pulled over or we may have gotten a ticket for disturbing the peace.  Maybe I wouldn’t have stopped if I’d known what White Castles would do to a 2-year-old’s diaper.  I tried to deliver some to my friend Carol who graciously pet sits for us, but for some reason, she neglected to pick them up.  My husband says that not everyone likes White Castles.  We picked up the slyders (as White Castles are known) in Dolton, Illinois; not the best area, but it just off the expressway so we made it unscathed.  Ironically, something made me talk about Dolton just before the stop; I was telling my husband how it’s gotten to be a really bad area and that I knew a family that had left there in the ’80’s because it was getting so bad, so imagine it now.  Then we saw a sign that said “Dolton Bowl” right across the street from the White Castle, and we laughed at the irony.  But overall, a nice trip, especially considering the area where we had to take it.  One positive thing I will say about the area is that they have excellent food.

Three quarters of my kids on the luggage cart: