Shhh. The king is resting

King Calvin was at our house yesterday. He was tired and needed a rest after ruling over the family. Actually Joseph saw some things in the toy box and decided to embellish him. Then he says, "Look at him!" It was so cleaver that the camera had to come out.Closeup of the scepter and ring.
Then Calvin's cousin came by for a visit. Gigi latched on to him and was raising him up like a set of weights. She loves babies.
The Barnhart's and Kellan with each of Joseph's hands on the newest grand kid's heads.
Gigi had enough of her brother sitting on her and just moved away, creating a void that Calvin slipped into.
Lorelei and Kellan

A card for Great Gramma G

Joseph is a very kind, considerate and thoughtful eight year old boy. His Great Gramma G was sick and in the hospital and he wanted to make and send her a card so that she would feel better. He called his Gramma Larsen and asked her what Gramma G's favorite color was. Judy said that it was RED. So he went to work and spent a couple of hours thinking, designing, laying out, drawing, cutting and coloring this card. We brought her home from the hospital and it was waiting for her. Sniff, sniff. Thanks Joseph. Gramma G loved your card.

Yo Gabba Gabba

Okay, there may be some of you that already know about this group. Well, I probably had my first and last experience with them. Kirstin came home from the hospital with baby Kellan Friday afternoon. We agreed to take the twins Saturday afternoon and keep them overnight and take them to church the next morning. Kirstin had already bought tickets for Yo Gabba Gabba knowing that we would love to take the Dudes to the concert. So after supper we headed to the Target Center. Since this was the second show, they were not ready to let us in and we had to wait almost 30 minutes with rambunctious kids, running around the Giant Timberwolf on the floor.

We all got our Party Glasses because there was "A Party In Your Tummy". There was some time before the show started so I took the boys down to center court right to the stage where all the action was going to happen.

Before we got there, we all picked out our favorite color character. Mine was Muno - he's the red cyclops.

Logan decided he wanted to be the blue guy - Toodee. He change from the green guy.

Liam from the start, and there was not any deviation, wanted to be Brobee, the one in the sporty yellow robot suit.

Here is the whole cast.

We can't forget to include DJ Lance, the handsome dude in Orange.

After 25 minutes, it was time for half time, a.k.a. intermission and also for merchandise sales. The intermission lasted 30 minutes, five minutes longer than the first half. Then they had the second 25 minutes of the show. I was going to upload the intermission sign but forgot. They also had a really goofy rock band. The boys got balloons that fell from the ceiling and decided to have a balloon fight. See for yourself below.

Now that Liam was armed with a balloon weapon and the fact that we were sitting in the first row with a railing in front of us and a walk way below, he bonked everyone that walked in front on the head with the balloon. My hero! He was protecting us.

12

12 means that we now have twelve grand kids. Baby Squishy, as he has been know for months and is still nameless, came into the world at 9:16AM on Mar 9. He was 21 1/4 inches long and 9 lb 5.2 oz. He is one of the biggest. I can't remember the biggest so any Larsen kids out there correct me if one of yours was bigger. And his blood type is B+. He is a cute bundle of joy. No, he does not sport a Mohawk hair-do. That is just the way the nurse decided to do it after his first bath. Both mom and baby are doing just great.
He resembles Liam a bit in this picture. But there is enough of both sides of the family in Baby Squishy that both can claim victory.
Can't wait for him to be home. I only got to hold him a few minutes.

Formerly known as the Pleasure Palace

LuAnn named this room "The Pleasure Palace". I don't know what she was thinking. It was just a place to recover from the day. When all four of our kids were at home and we only had a three bedroom home, I built a bedroom in the basement for Judy and me, because we didn't think any of the kids would want to be in a very dark (the darker, the better for me), and very cold room in the winter (I didn't mind how cold it was because we had a heated waterbed). And it stayed cool in the summer. As the kids moved out of the house, we converted two of the bedrooms upstairs into a computer room and Gramma Room. And then I built a queen captain's bed complete with two armories and night stands and we moved back upstairs. That left an unused and out dated room in the basement. In November 2008 I started ripping out the old room, all the built-in bookcases and cabinets and preparing it for a new purpose. I chopped up the waterbed and threw it away. Well, it took a year (I was pretty slow at it) to fix it up and paint it. Then in the cold garage I started cutting the large pieces of wood but did all the assembly and finishing in the much warmer basement. And below you see the results. A very nice horizontal Murphy bed. This frees up most of the room to relax in and play Wii. So now this is "The Wii Room", which doubles as a guest bedroom, provided the guests like a very dark and cold room. Now all we need is new bedding for it. This is not for small kids that are being potty trained, because they might confuse the Wii with wee-wee, and I am not in the mood to clean up any new kind of liquids from the new rug. There you have it. The next project for that room is to make two floor-to-ceiling book cases so I can finally get all the books out of the shed, but this will come after making some frames for Judy's family portrait wall project. Be aware that we purposely made this bed a full sized bed (also known as a double) because we just didn't want too many guests staying tooooo long (we might make some exceptions for out of staters who are just visiting).

A New Barnhart is on the Block

Introducing Calvin John Barnhart. He made his grand entrance at 10:02PM on Jan 30, 2010. He was 22 inches long and 8 pounds and 15 ounces. Isn't he adorable? While Calvin was being born, Joseph, Lorelei and Gretchen had a sleep-over at our house and went to church with us. For the most part they were good kids and were cooperative, although, Gigi had a couple moments. She can be stubborn.
He just wanted to sleep and all we did was hold him, pass him around to everyone in the room and make bright lights flash in his face. Sorry.

All the older brother and sisters going gaga over Calvin.

Each of Calvin's siblings had their turn holding and kissing him.

Calvin's and Lorelei's hands.
Nope. They're not Joe's. Now you guessed it. They belong to Calvin.

The whole happy Barnhart family.

Doppelgänger week

Since a lot of friends on FaceBook are participating in the Doppelgänger week (celebrity look-a-like), I thought I would see who I look like. Not too successful. Most of the current photos I have of me say I resemble people of the opposite gender - like Charlize Theron, Natalie Wood, Amanda Peet, Lisa Kudrow, Kate Boseworth, Renee Russo, Goldie Hawn, and the list goes on. Now do any of them have mustaches and spikie hair? Some of the others at Heritage.com said I looked like were John Travolta (74%), Barry Gibb, Tab Hunter, Thomas Edison and the rest I have never heard of. It was too funny. So I tried one of my eight year old photos and got these results: Leonardo DiCaprio, Jodie Sweetin, Drew Barrymore. So in other words I don't look like anybody! There is only one of me.