billy dee! billy dee!

over the fourth of july, we drove to our hometown to see some friends who were making their semi-annual visit from germany. driving from southeast iowa to southwest illinois means driving across rural missouri for 4 hours. there are huge differences between rural iowa and rural missouri. the former is pretty farmland sparsely populated with salt-of-the-earth types. the latter is some broke-ass land where farming may occur, in between piles of trash that may or may not be burning at any given time, sparsely populated by scary people who might well beat the shit of me for my human rights campaign bumper sticker. rural iowans consistently seem like normal, educated people who happen to live and work on farms. rural missourians, on the other hand, tend to seem more like post-apocalyptic mutants who are just waiting for a chance to steal your shoes. all kinds of fascinating nuggets at the NCES homepage, like, despite having twice the population of iowa, missouri has less than half the number of libraries.

anyway. the point is, there's a billboard we'd never seen in iowa that stood proudly across the missouri landscape from hannibal to st louis.


i'm serious. i'm also not the only one who finds it funny enough to blog about it

so MonkeyBeef is pretty good about being stuck in the car for 5 hours, plus or minus a mcdonalds break and an "I HAVE TO GO POTTY RIGHT NOW IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE!" break. but at some point just out side st. louis proper, he apparently lost interest in practicing his rendition of "witch doctor," and "oo-ee-oo-ah-ah" turned into balls-to-the-wall screeching and tears. i reached into what we like to call "the STFU bag," (stocked with toys and books and junk food,) and tossed the boy his current favorite candy, a gummy krabby patty. screeching stops, plastic wrapper rattles, and then we hear him chirping "spongebob!" through a fat mouthful of chewy sugar.

PRM decided that we needed an animatronic billy dee williams in the back of the van. it would be screech-activated, dispense treats to the offending child, and then say "works every time." then pound a colt 45 and bang an animatronic drunk woman.

anyway. SpazMonkey is still on his amateur movie-maker kick. so most of the 200 pictures from last weekend look about like this:




in fact, i was able to wrest the camera from his sticky clutches only long enough to take this one, lone picture of a couple of opas and their grandsons: that's my dad, my 4 boys, and my dad's best friend from germany with his grandson, who is two weeks younger than MonkeyBeef. pictures of the omas, me sandwiched in between my knocked-up sister and knocked-up friend, and our husbands, will trickle in over email as everyone gets home and gets around to uploading their adult-taken photos.

more on MonkeyBeef's continuing language issues later; my friend's little boy has language issues of an entirely different nature than MB's - lots of words. in several languages. his mom is german. his dad is italian. they mostly speak english to each other. and they just moved from italy to switzerland, adding a new dialect of german, and the supremely weird romansh language, to his occasionally confused repertoire. he speaks really well, and keeps his languages separated much better than would be expected for a 2-1/2 year old. but it's still a fertile source of lulz (as is the case any time any toddler opens his or her mouth, really.) his english has a pronounced italian accent - the song "twinkle twinkle little star" comes out "TWINKLA TWINKLA LITTLA STAR!" he knows the german word for binoculars, "fernglass." when his opa asked him what the italian word was, he replied confidently, "fernglasso!" and he added some important words to his english vocabulary while hanging out with my kids, like "wheat thins" and "pew pew pew!"

anyway... good weekend. fireworks, barbecued pork steaks, swiss chocolate, italian wine, squirt guns, root beer floats and wings at fitz's in university city, a stroll through the new Citygarden, 4 lbs of pregasaurus-rex impulse buying at the st louis fudge factory... and billy dee.

works every time!