Back To School With the Lazari

Well, the summer’s now over and fall has officially fell. Except here in Tucson where it’s always summer. It was a great summer of fun days, family trips and new babies for us Lazari, but now it’s back to business and back to school…or in our case, off to school for the first time for Logan.

Logan is going 3 days a week to a wonderful Jewish pre school where he’s learning about Shabbat, saying the prayers and how to guilt anyone into anything. The kids play all the time, eat snacks, read books, do projects, sing songs, nap and exchange boogers all day long. Typical pre-school curriculum. Every morning Logan gets up and is excited about going. And every day he cries when we drop him off. And every day he’s fine after 5 minutes. I don’t get it? I’m the one paying 5 grand a year so he can play with cars and blocks and toys all day! I’m the one that should be crying every morning, not him.

Attached are some photos from his first days of school, our Fall so far and a few images of our new son Sawyer. Here’s hoping your back to school went well, your fall is falling into place and, for the Jews, that your high holy days are both sweet and savory.

ENJOY THE PIX!

Logan and his new lunchbox. He loves this thing! It could be filled with angry bees and he wouldn’t care. He clutched this thing tight to his chest like the President holding launch codes. He walked into his classroom like a Brinks armed security guard and wouldn’t let his lunchbox out of his sight all day. I don’t think he realized that there was actually food inside until the teachers opened it for him at noon! Then he really loved the lunchbox because it was filled with delicious snacks…and not bees!

Story time at school. Logan already knows all his letters (upper AND lower case baby!) and kept interrupting the teacher as she tried to teach the other kids their letters. He eventually got so annoying they had to knock him unconscious with a judo chop because he wouldn’t stop. That last part isn’t true, but he does know all his letters. Now if he could only learn not to poop in his pants we’d be all set. P is for Potty! (FYI – in case you were wondering, that is not a real Tiger in the picture as live jungle cats in the classroom would not be safe for toddlers.)

School’s lets out at 12:30 and it’s finally time to unwind! This is when Logan forgets the every day stress of life like “I fell on the playground”, “my crayon broke”, “I spilled my juice” or “Why are there no more Cheerios?” After school is a time to grab some shades, poop in your pants and just chillax (which the kids today tell me means chill out and relax combined.)

Taking a bath after a long and very dirty day of school. If I could fill the bathtub with a combination of bleach, lye and Windex I would just to get that pre-school funk off of him. Pre-school is great but it’s like a giant bouillabaisse of kids’ coughing, drooling, spitting, pooping, painting, peeing, snacking, spilling and tushy picking. Every day when Logan gets home he’s covered in shmutz like Pig Pen from the Peanuts comic strip. He’s stained from head to toe and carrying several viruses, but he has the best time ever. He even has the flu now to prove it!

Logan playing “superhero” after the bath. He loves to wear this towel like a cape and run and jump around naked for awhile posing and pretending to fly. I get it. It’s a cool game. I do it too after I shower. If you notice, I covered up his “hoo-ha” with some CGI expert PhotoShopping so Logan wouldn’t get mad at me for putting his shmeckle online for the world to see and so I wouldn’t be arrested for child pornography. The last thing I need is Chris Hansen and Dateline NBC walking into my office again. It’s just embarrassing.

Bathed, fed and ready for bed. Here is Logan and his new baby brother Sawyer posin’ in their PJ’s ready for sleep time. No funny caption here but I do think it’s amusing how we describe this time in our house as “putting them to sleep” or “putting the kids down.” It always sounds like euthanasia or that we’re planning to take them behind the shed like Old Yeller and put them out of their misery. I never noticed how creepy it sounds until now but that’s what we say in the Lazarus household. And if there’s anyone in the house that needs to be “put down” it’s me. I need the rest.

SATURDAY!!!!! No school for Logan today! Instead of waking us up early for school, on weekends he wakes us up early so he can get into our bed and watch his TV shows. He likes “Meet the Press” and “Tucson Business Week” but usually settles for “The Backyardigans” and “The Wonder Pets.” We usually let him snuggle up next to us in bed and watch his shows for the next 6-8 hours so Em and I can get some much needed sleep. Give him a large box of cereal to eat all day and maybe some iced tea to sip on and he’s good. Other than the occasional “I’m hungry”, “My diaper is leaking” or “My eyes hurt from watching so much TV” he’s usually pretty quiet. I love Saturdays!

This is Sawyer at about 6 weeks. He’s either sleeping, concentrating really hard or very worried about something. Regardless what he’s doing here he is most definitely also pooping. He does that all day and night long.

Sawyer just relaxing in the warm cocoon of Daddy’s unnecessarily hairy legs. This is one of 3 pictures we have of Sawyer (out of 236) where his eyes are open. They are beautiful, deep blue eyes but you wouldn’t know it because he sleeps like a coma victim and when he’s not sleeping he’s screaming and his eyes are closed then too. Cute kid for a baby, huh?

Logan wants to be just like me I guess. Poor, poor kid. Here he is walking in daddy’s shoes, or my flip flops in this case. If he really wants to be like me though he’d want to watch football and not Dora the Explorer, he’d want to drink beer instead of strawberry milk, he’d listen to rap music instead of Raffi and he’d want to sleep late and not keep waking up at 6am every day!

This is when pre-school goes old-school. I love this picture! Logan rocking his B-Boys shirt while his little friend Cammeron sports the Run-DMC onesie. By the time these kids will be old enough to enjoy these bands it’ll be considered “oldies” music. The Beastie Boys will be the Beastie Senior Citizens and Run-DMC will be WalkWithACane-DMC. (Get it? They won’t be able to RUN any more?) Okay, that was bad. Not bad meaning bad, but bad meaning good!!!

More from the Laztastic 4 soon. Until next time!!!

All our love,
Adam, Emily, Logan & Sawyer

Lazarus Summer Vacation 2008

Friends and family,

What a fun summer for the Laz clan! A weekend getaway to Chicago, a family reunion in Hawaii, a trip to NY for a wedding, barbecues, the beach and, oh yeah, a new baby! It has been quite the summer and we wanted to share some pix with you now that the summer is “officially” over. The photos, as usual, are mostly of Logan because Emily never wants to be on film (I think she’s in the mafia!), I’m just plain ugly and Sawyer’s only been around a few weeks. Logan’s the ham anyway! So enjoy these photos of the Lazarus Summer Vacation 2008 – and what a summer it was!

Here are the photos:

Logan and his daddy horsing around in the NY summer sun! (Note: two seconds after this photo was taken Logan violently elbowed me in the groin so hard that I thought I would never smile again.)

Lazarus family, early summer 2008. Before baby #2…back when sleep meant 7 hours in a row every night, showers were daily and smiles were natural and not forced. Or as I like to call them, the good ol’ days of summer!

Logan, the art-IST, painting with his nana. He got more paint on his arms than on the paper and looked like a smurf when he was done, but what fun it was. I think Picasso got started the same way…by standing on a chair in his diaper throwing paint all over himself and the canvas. This was the start of Logan’s “Blue Period.”

Ahoy paloy! This is one of my favorite pictures ever of Logan! I love it. Taken on our friends’ (the Philbins) boat in Chicago, Logan looks like a model in a J. Crew ad - complete with polo hat, madras shorts and topsider shoes. After this photo was taken Logan checked his stock portfolio, played tennis with Muffy Vandersnoot, met an old Yale friend for brunch and went to a chic gallery opening in Cape Cod. Very cosmopolitan!

Photo two taken from the deck of the Philbins’ boat on the Chicago River – right after Logan’s croquet match with a Senator and a wine tasting with his Nantucket cronies. Nothing funny about the photo really but I do wish I wasn’t wearing a shirt that said “Kill All the Golfers” when I run a golf business and then decide to forward that photo to hundreds of people.

Logan getting ready for the Tour De Chicago. It was his first time ever on a bike and my first time riding one in years. After 1 mile I was out of breath and thought I was going to pass away, my pant leg got all dirty from “bike chain grease” and Logan almost threw up four times from the bouncing. But man did we have a blast riding through the parks, zoo and paths of Chicago! My kind of town!

Logan and Daddy on the 50th go-round of the helicopter ride at a theme park in Long Island. Suggested maximum weight of the old squeaky ride? 150 pounds. What does daddy weigh? A lot more than that. But look at the smile on Logan’s face? The shrieks and groans from the strained, failing motor weren’t loud enough to drown out his squeals of delight! Weeeeeeeeee!

This is what happens to Logan when he doesn’t finish his broccoli. Barbaric perhaps, but the boy needs his roughage. Besides, a little corporal punishment never hurt anyone.

Big guy and little guy. Guess who’s who? (Give up? I’m the big guy.) Yes, as a dad you wear funny looking shirts if it makes your kid happy. He called me “big guy” all day and that was worth the humiliation of the people staring at me at the mall. Come to think of it, maybe they weren’t staring at me because of the shirt but because I wasn’t wearing any pants! Ohhhhhhhh!

Logan “Small Blind” Lazarus perfecting his poker skills at an underground $1,000 buy-in no-limit toddler game in the back of a Tucson speakeasy. He won the under 3 years old division and now has a spot at the World Series of Poker this fall. Check him out at PokerBabies.net

Mommy and Gilligan, I mean Logan, in the pool aboard the ship “Pride of America” in Hawaii. Followed by Logan and I building a sand castle in Maui. I know what you’re thinking, but no, that’s not a beached manatee…that’s me!

Logan figuring out the life jacket during the ship’s drill. Logan still wanted to wear his hours after the drill was over and refused to take it off. Either he’s a really cautious kid, he loves bright orange or he just likes the way smelly reflective vinyl makes him feel inside? Whatever his reasoning it was cute as hell.

White night on board the Hawaiian cruise. Everyone wears white. Good idea right? WRONG! It was also pasta with marinara night at the restaurant we went to and when you’re sitting next to a messy 2 year old who wipes his hands and face on daddy, it sucks. It should’ve been called “white with red sauce stains all over” night. That would have been more accurate.

Luau night in Kauai! We all got dressed up in our finest island clothes and watched half-naked women shake their hips while half-naked dudes spun sticks on fire just inches from their relatively exposed genitalia. All while eating a pig. Logan thought it was the greatest thing he’s ever seen…and he’s seen The Wiggles live!

Our island boy! Man, Logan LOVED Hawaii. (Who wouldn’t?) He said aloha to anyone that would listen, loved the beach and the sun and didn’t even mind the 9 hour flight there! What a trooper. He sat through tours and long car rides and lengthy meals and never complained once. He never whined. He complains so little that sometimes we’re convinced he’s not really Jewish.

Logan and his mommy. Nothing funny here, just a good photo of two of my favorite people ever (not including Brett Favre and the guy who invented air-conditioning.)

And the last (and greatest) highlight of Summer 2008? Welcoming another beautiful baby boy - Sawyer! He cries a lot, doesn’t sleep at all and is making mommy and daddy crazy. But Logan loves him more than we could ever have imagined (for now) and that makes this past summer the best one ever.

Want more Logan? Click here for a bonus video and watch Logan and I playing guitar together singing the original song “1,2,3” written by Logan himself! CLICK ON THE FOLLOWING LINK to see and hear this unreleased hit in the making: http://s67.photobucket.com/albums/h315/yaz98/?action=view&current=MVI_2652.flv

We hope your summer was a ton of fun too! Stay tuned for more family updates from the Lazari clan including bath time hijinks, first day of school follies, fun with friends and photos of Logan wearing white after Labor Day. Love you all and have a great start to the fall!

The Lazari