The Quotable Abigail, Part VI

Bonus Item! Abigail’s Phrase Most Quoted by Mama: “Settle down, Daddy.”

On her grunting: “I’m sad grunting.”

On why she would grunt when she was sad: “No, I’m sad because I’m grunting.”

On what wearing Mama’s high heels puts her in mind of: “I need to watch ‘Single Ladies’.”

On what she wants from Santa: “I don’t want Santa to bring anything. Just shoes.”

On what she did at school: “I played and played and then Daddy picked me up.”

On the pink pony with wings: “That one’s daddy.”

On selecting her morning outfit: “You can do it by your own, Daddy. I know you can do it.”

On what Mama needs:  “You don’t need help, Mama. You’re perfect.”


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Down a Notch, by Way of Mouse

Things have been getting nuts around Christmas-time. Abigail is now old enough to appreciate how awesome things are this time of year. First she sees a few Christmas lights. The next night there are more. The next night we drive to a crazy person neighborhood where everyone decides to spend their annual vacation budget on Christmas lights. Then we go out to Del Mar, to take an open air hayride to see lights. Then we … er, Santa gets her a new bed.

Basically she’s constantly over stimulated, so we thought it was time to take things down a notch.

Naturally, we went to Disneyland.

This photo should illustrate two things. First, we’re at Disneyland. Obviously that’s the Disneyland tree. Second, true to our standard Disneyland tradition, we brought only cell phone cameras with us.

Maybe this one will make the location clearer. Now you can tell it’s the Disney tree.

In case you’re wondering about the angle, I took a lot of pictures like this because Abigail spent much of the day on my shoulders.

Not only my shoulders, but also Mama’s shoulders. The latter shoulders offer more options for expressing yourself through diabolic hairstyling.

Rides were ridden:

Smiles were crushed out.

And she fell asleep on the drive home. All in all, a pretty good result.

And I need to give special thanks to Megan and Andy, without whom we wouldn’t have gone to Disneyland at all.

I’ll end it with a shiny castle.

 

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Christmas at the Mall

Like a lot of people, we made a trip to the mall this weekend. We didn’t actually buy anything, at least not anything traditionally purchased at malls.

We did, however, go for a ride. I’ll let the following video speak for itself. The connoisseur will probably notice that it was shot entirely on a cell phone, but the rest of you probably won’t even notice. I think I’ve done an excellent job of illustrating the difference between the experiences on the inside and the outside.

In other news, I’ll be on a business trip until Wednesday, so this one will have to tide you over for at least most of this week.

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Santa’s Early Visit

Normally Santa only arrives on Christmas Eve. Well, probably a mix of Christmas Eve and very early Christmas morning, depending on the time zone, flight pattern, weather conditions in Northern Europe – that sort of thing. But for really big jobs, Santa often comes early. He doesn’t want to weight the reindeer down unnecessarily on the big day. They have a lot of work to do, after all. I mean, he went through four Dashers last Christmas alone.

Anyway, this year’s early Christmas presnet was Abigail’s. It came in the form of a brand new “big girl” bed, seen here:

Considering the fact that Santa delivered this, I feel that Jessica and I did a considerable amount of work putting this together. I can’t say exactly what we did, but I’ll just say it was considerable. Those are new bookshelves as well. In fact, one of the first things one needs to do with a new bed is empty the contents of those bookshelves and pile them on top of the aforementioned new bed.

Pillow embracing is optional.

To say the least, Abigail was pleased with this gift. There was clapping. I could tell you how happy she was, but I’ll let this picture sell it. This is an actual, “I’m happy” smile. It may be aided by the ample size of the pile of stuff lying next to her.

 

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One About Dad

As many of your know, I’m a big fan of my dad. That might not be too out of the ordinary for most people, but as it turns out, I have video proof of his greatness.

In earlier posts, I’ve discussed his story telling and how it influenced me over the years. As I was going through our old family videos, I found this gem, in which he narrates a scene of us walking through a regional park. None of us were aware of what he was doing, which makes a few of the clips even odder.

I made this video in the course of an hour or so, rather than four or five, which has been my standard. I had the advantage of having something pretty linear to work with, but it still feels a little raw to me. I think it works pretty well, regardless.

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Doctor Awesome

In the course of your life, or lives, if you’re a time lord, you will rarely come across anything that even approaches the awesomeness of the following clip:

 

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Christmas Music!

It’s Christmas music time!

As most of you know, Christmas music is awesome. I have a dissent filter on this point, so any complaining you have will automatically be rejected without notice.

I decided to kick off this Christmas season with a representative of the highest form of Christmas music – the feline based song. I also decided that Abigail should decide which song we should use. As a result we listened to a lot of cats singing Christmas songs.

There was a clear winner.

There are others that I will no doubt subject you to in the future, all awesome in their own way, but this was the only one that had Abigail laughing out loud. Myself as well, because it gets kind of weird toward the end, like any good Christmas song.

Please for to enjoy.

Update: Apparently they’ve got some weird YouTube permissions. It’s worth the click.

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Thanksgiving Schemes

As the image above clearly displays, the subject known as Abigail is a criminal mastermind disguising herself as a typical Thanksgiving-goer. As you can see in the photographic evidence below, it seems as though we have ourselves a typical American Thanksgiving feast.

Please note the pleasant expressions and the traditional decorations and table layout:

However, if we isolate the subject in question, we find a quite different sense of the events that were unfolding that night:

Clearly the girl had already concocted some sort of plan, even this early in the evening.

We also have it on good authority that she hangs out with shady characters. I’ll refer you to this photo as exhibit A:

I wouldn’t want to hazard a guess as to what that person in the foreground is doing, but I assure you that this photo was not edited in any way to make this appear to be a more incriminating situation than it truly was.

Despite the vast array of evidence we have against the suspect, we also find ourselves without a crime. Clearly she’s been up to something, but as of yet we’ve been unable to determine what.

In addition to the eating of her Thanksgiving dinner, we found that she played with a dog in a particularly cute fashion, as illustrated here:

And she also enjoyed a piece of cake. Rumor has it that she acquire the cake through intimidation and likely blackmail, but we haven’t found any evidence to back that up. We do have graphic photos of the cake eating crime scene. We caught her white-handed, folks:

If anyone has any information on the alleged troublemaker, please let us know right away.

Other than that, I hope you all had a good Thanksgiving.

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Not Thanksgiving Either

I was totally planning to upload the awesome Thanksgiving pictures I have of Abigail and some other people who are of significantly less importance. Then we went to the Home Depot today and she spotted a raised display area featuring discount Martha Stewart items. She declared that this was her “stage” and climbed up onto it.

This then happened:

Clearly, Thanksgiving would have to wait.

My favorite part is how well she matches her setting.

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Thanksgiving Pending

Yesterday was Thanksgiving, so naturally today I come to you prepared with several pictures of Halloween.

That’s the kind of schedule we’re on around here. And I’m tired. As I mentioned, yesterday was Thanksgiving, today we went to Target, which could have been worse than it was. We bought a Wonder Pets DVD. It was awesome.

Oh, and I wrote 3,700 words of a short story. Which is staggering.

What’s that? Pictures? Oh, yeah.

I hope to return soon with actual Thanksgiving information. And maybe some Disney photos.

Only time will tell.

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