Light and Momentary

Not Uncertain

Oh, you guys, I gave ANOTHER exam -- that's two of them inside a week -- that was much more difficult for my students than I expected. I think I've gotten better at writing sneaky multiple-choice questions in which the wrong answers sound plausible. Either that or I am a dreadful teacher and I should go work at Wendy's. Sigh. Today's exam was double-plus-stinkified by some avoidable hassles: the person in the office who copied the exams didn't notice that the copier wasn't working right, so that about 20% of the students had an unreadable page or two. I forgot until after they'd started that I'd included three questions with more than five answer choices, and needed to interrupt them (twice!) to tell them how to handle those questions. And despite the fact that I'd told them clearly to prepare for a particular short-answer question, it flummoxed a number of them and I expect to get blowback about it.

SO. Instead of telling you even more about the stuff that is filling my brain at the moment I am going to tell you about my funny oldest son. He's on the Scholastic Bowl team this year, where (to hear him tell it, at least -- keep your saltshaker at the ready) he takes no prisoners. They had a meet tonight and it reminded me of the story I meant to blog after their last meet. For every European history toss-up question, Alex would smack the buzzer and answer coolly, "Otto von Bismarck." He did this four times in a row, and four times in a row he was wrong. His teammates ribbed him about this, but he is pretty much immune to ribbing. As the last match was racing toward its heated conclusion, there was another European history toss-up. "Otto von Bismarck," he announced in his I-may-be-wrong-but-I'm-not-uncertain voice. "Correct!" said the judge. His teammates, and his mother, thought this was a riot.

Maybe I'll tell my students they should guess Otto von Bismarck next time.

Like a mama kitty

I am typing this on my iPod on the living room floor, crouched on my hands and knees. I am in a kitty house, with a couch cushion making one wall and the loveseat cushion the other. I have a toy muffin tin for kitty food and a little dish for water, and my last attempt to move met with emphatic disapproval from the builder of the kitty house. She is 3, and flexibility is not her strong suit. This is a game we play a lot lately, where I am the mama horsie or the mama bunny and I am supposed to be still in the living room floor. "Lie down," she sometimes insists. "Close you eyes. Like a mama [insert animal here]." My ankles are falling asleep.

My Chisel-Wielding Brother

Somehow at dinner we were talking about Oxford's New College, which is called new even though it was founded in the 14th century. "Oh!" I said, "you know the gargoyle on the office wall above the computer? It's from New College. The summer that Alex was 2, my parents and brother and sister came to the UK. I spent my birthday in Oxford and Uncle Rob gave me one of the New College gargoyles as a present."

I descended briefly into reverie, remembering how happy I had been to see my family. I loved living in the UK but it was lonely and no mistake. The train trip from Edinburgh flew by, even with Alex in my lap and his younger brother, in utero, kicking us both all the way. We went punting on a glorious summer day, and we saw an outdoor production of Midsummer Night's Dream in the New College Gardens. Toddler Alex did not appreciate Shakespeare, so I spent most of the second act away from the performers, near the chapel. I remember the bats were out in force, swooping down on their suppers, but they were up high enough in the purple twilight -- up by the gargoyles, which are the small round things where wall meets roof in this picture -- that they were fun to watch and not alarming. Afterward we ate real ice cream, Ben and Jerry's Phish Food. In 1999 the UK was an ice cream wasteland. Ben and Jerry's was available here and there but it cost more than $7 per pint. We had no money for extravagances, so it had been a long time since I'd had good ice cream. Yum, I can almost taste it now.

In this welter of happy memories it took me a minute to notice that my 12yo was making a strange face. "How," he asked, "did Uncle Rob get the gargoyle off the building?"

A replica, I hastened to tell him. It's a replica of a New College gargoyle.

Dat's MY Mama

My daughter is not shy, not shy at all, about finding one-on-one time with me. If she and I are doing something together and one of the boys approaches, she tells him fiercely, "Dat's MY mama." I say, "Sweetheart, I'm his mama too," but she is undeterred.

Tonight in the car my oldest was in the front seat, telling me about a complicated plotline, when his sister decided he'd had quite enough of my attention. "Dat's MY mama," she announced. "Stop talking!" she told him firmly. I sighed. I said to Alex, "Tell her who your mama is."

He jumped in instantly: "That's MY mama." From the back there were three immediate echoes from his brothers: "That's MY mama!" "That's MY mama!"  "That's MY mama!" One of them added, "And it's MY couch too!" (she's been known to be territorial about the furniture); the rest of them quickly amended their shouts to include the couch as well. The din was impressive. Alex said to me, "If you keep laughing like that while you're driving, you're going to run into something."

"Okay," I said, "time to stop now." The cacophony ended quickly. In Stella's view this meant only that the last word was hers. "MY mama," she asserted. "Dat's MY mama."

Whenever the Duggars are mentioned in a blog post somewhere, the comments will include adults from large families talking about how little attention they received as children. This haunts me, even though five children << 19 children. I wonder often if my kids' needs are slipping through the cracks. I tell you what, though, I think if I were going to neglect my daughter I'd have to work at it.

Seven Quick Takes: Birthday Edition

1. Today is my daughter's third birthday. Can you believe it? Three years ago I was still feeling a little stunned: I had an actual daughter, and she had arrived before Christmas. On the afternoon of the 22nd I was scrubbing blind slats with a toothbrush, expecting to be pregnant until the 28th. Or, you know, the end of time. And then -- kaboom! -- at 1am I had a real live baby in my arms.

2. This morning I told her she could pick any kind of cake she wanted. "Would you like a chocolate cake? or a yellow cake? or maybe a carrot cake?" "Red," she answered. Red velvet cake it was. I used the Pioneer Woman's recipe, mostly, except I subbed in a half-cup of cocoa for a half-cup of flour (because what good is a teaspoon and a half of cocoa?) and I used less food coloring because (a) that's all I had and (b) I was a La Leche League Leader for ten years and I didn't want the ghost of Edwina Froelich to visit me tonight, intoning, "...as close to their natural state as possible." Stella couldn't quite get the candles blown out but she had four willing helpers who pitched in to get the job done.

3. Something I want to remember about my daughter at exactly three: she loves to sing. She sings to herself every day and she carries a tune pretty well. None of the boys have been especially interested in music and so it warms my cockles to hear her singing while she goes about her business.

4. Another little quirk of hers: she says "dinder" and "doughndits" for "dinner" and "doughnuts." Are there other words with the structure /dVnV.../? She's been saying "doughndits" for a while but I just noticed "dinder" tonight. I'm curious about whether it's a phonological rule for her or just a fluke.

5. Remember the sweater saga, where I made her a sweater with the yarn she loved and she declined to wear it? I decided I would knit the same sweater for the dolly I made her last year. She thought this was cool enough that she agreed to put on the sweater briefly. I was going to post the pattern for the dolly sweater, but I am out of minutes to write it up. (It's really easy. I can probably get it done tomorrow. I should do it soon before I forget it.) I was looking for a dolly sweater pattern and found a simple little doll-sized raglan on Ravelry -- selling for $10. Ten dollars? For a doll's sweater? Nope. You can have my pattern for free.

6. My parents sent a dollhouse especially for her birthday. I am so glad they did -- a December 23 birthday gets short shrift. She's too little to care, but I'm happy that she had something special to open tonight. And she could not have been more excited to play with it. Still smiling about that one.

7. She gave me two gifts today: she slept through the night in her own bed for the first time, and she went to sleep peacefully at a reasonable hour. There are many many things I love about my daughter, but she is unquestionably the worst sleeper of the five kids. And none of them would have won any sleep prizes. When the boy who used to be the worst sleeper was a toddler I would tell myself, "Of all the things a kid could be bad at, sleeping is a pretty good choice." I am less philosophical about it these days and OH it was lovely to have an uninterrupted night. I'm not going to count on two in a row, so I'll bid you good night.

Find more quick takes here.

Cosmume Party

We have a chest full of costumes accumulated over the past 15 years, and they are in heavy rotation around here. Stella calls them "cosmumes," which is so heart-meltingly cute that the boys and I have adopted it temporarily, and she likes to dress me up. I was sitting on the couch tonight with various capes and other accoutrements draped fetchingly around me, watching the two younger boys play a game. I am still a little vague on the rules of this game, but they seem to go something like this:

1. Make loud laser death ray noises while bedecked with at least three items from the cosmume chest.
2. Say "HaHA! I got you with dark energy!"
3. Shake your head skeptically at the inevitable riposte ("No you didn't either!")
4. Switch roles.

Pete jumped on the couch and snuggled in close. He said to Joe, "You forgot that touching Mom makes you invincible!"

How's that for a superpower?

Silly me

Three years ago I made Joe a little knitted turtle. (It's the first picture in this post.) Tonight Stella was walking around with it and I said, "Do you know what? I knitted that turtle!" She said, "No, this a turtle."

I tried again. "Yeah, I know. I made that turtle with my knitting needles. Did you know that?" She was adamant. "This not knitting. This a turtle."

"Joe," I said, "tell your sister where that turtle came from." He was happy to oblige. "Mama made that turtle," he explained, "with her knitting needles and yarn."

Stella walked into the next room, where this little sweater was sitting on the couch. (It still fits, but the sleeves are three-quarter length now.) She brought it back into the dining room. "This," she said (waving the sweater and speaking slowly, for the benefit of the slowcoaches she was addressing), "is knitting. This [brandishing the turtle] is a turtle."

She may be wrong, but she's not uncertain.

Addictive

Back in the summer Bearing-Erin wrote a post about parameters for kids using the internet. I thought at the time that its ideas were good for younger kids, but I also wondered how it might need to be modified for kids a little bigger than hers. I'm still thinking about it.

--Oh, the problem with posting in haste late at night is that you (I) sometimes make bad judgments about bigger kids and privacy. Middle paragraphs redacted. Nutshell version: long-term effects on kids who learn to love computer time are uncertain and a little worrisome.--

This is a bit of the background behind yesterday's crotchety post. I can't help but wonder: if we teach kids that the iPad comes out every time they must wait for something, how do they learn what to do when the iPad isn't available? Doesn't that approach disregard the addictive potential of devices like iPads and iPhones? In four years my oldest will be a freshman in college, with no one to say, "You can't play on the computer until you've finished [whatever needs finishing]." And then what?

Voice on the Phone

"This is the Gladlyville fire department calling."

Our 9yo was biking home from a friend's house this evening. He saw the turning pickup truck too late; he couldn't get stopped. He slammed hard into the back of the truck, hard enough to warp the wheel and flex the fork.

He had sped away from home with no helmet. Bareheaded, he slammed into that pickup truck.

He's fine. Thanks be, thanks be -- he's fine. He has a sore thumb. I know what to do for a sore thumb.

A neighbor saw the collision and called 911. They sent two police cars, two fire trucks and an ambulance. [Edited: two police cars, two fire dept. ambulances. It was a little confusing when he first came home.] My husband took the call. I knew something was wrong. "I'll be right there," he told them. "Joe's fine," he said to me when he hung up the phone, "but he was clipped by a pickup truck."

I held out my arms to Joe when he walked in the door and he stepped into them, brushing away tears. Thank God for guardian angels.

Conversation

[We drive by a garage sale featuring a giant triceratops.]

That is indescribably awesome.

    You are categorically forbidden to bring that thing home.

But it is made of awesome.

    You are categorically forbidden to bring that thing home.

I would keep it in my room. [NB: The room in question is about 50 square feet. Tiny tiny tiny.]

    You are categorically forbidden to bring that thing home.

I could hang it from the ceiling.

    You are categorically forbidden to bring that thing home.

I could get rid of my bed.

    You are categorically forbidden to bring that thing home.

I could put my bed in diagonally so I had room for it.

    You are categorically forbidden to bring that thing home.

This must mean that you hate America.

    Can I blog this conversation?

If I can have the triceratops.

    When you stoop to bribery, you lose the right to determine what I write about you on my blog.

Okay, you can blog this.

    Thanks.

But why do you hate America?

Lemonade Renegades

This last week it was just Pete and Stella and me. Pete asked me every day, sometimes umpty-eleven times a day, if I'd help him make a lemonade stand. Later, I said. Wait until Joe gets back home. I can't stay with you at a lemonade stand because Stella takes too much chasing. There's not enough traffic at our house and around the corner there's too much traffic for you to be alone. Later.

Thirty minutes later: "Mama, when can I make a lemonade stand?"

I emailed my pal Jenny who lives around the corner and asked if her kids, lemonade stand veterans, could help us out. Sure, she said. How about Friday?

On Friday they lugged their stuff out to the corner and started setting up. The lady from the house at the corner came zooming out. You kids get off my lawn, she said. The last time you were here you left a big mess.

It wasn't us, the kids asserted. It was Michael, from down the block. We don't leave a mess.

They started packing up anyway, until their dad came out and asked them why. He said, "You're not on her lawn. The sidewalk is not her property. You kids can stay here with your lemonade stand."

Shortly afterward -- brace yourselves -- the cops showed up. They stepped out of the squad car and sauntered over to the lemonade stand. Pete (this part breaks my heart) started to cry: he thought the cops had come to arrest them all and take them away. Jenny's boy Jack, who is Pete's friend even though they are almost five years apart, tried to comfort him.

Mercifully, Jenny's husband was still there. The cops said, "We've had a complaint that these kids have been leaving styrofoam cups all over the place." Inadvertently, the neighbor had given the kids some ammunition. "Styrofoam!" they exclaimed. "We NEVER use styrofoam cups. We haven't used styrofoam cups in FOUR YEARS of lemonade stands."

They waved their recyclable plastic cups around. They offered the cops a free sample. The cops declined, pleasantly, and grumbled briefly about having been called out to deal with a perfectly legal lemonade stand run by polite responsible kids.

Pete stopped crying. Jenny's kids told him he could keep all the proceeds. He came home with the money clenched in his little fist, feeling proud and  a little bit braver. We had a chat about the limits of police power, and the reality that 6-year-old boys don't generally have to worry about being arrested and taken away.

I am still thinking, DANG! Who calls the cops on a lemonade stand?

Seven Quick Takes: Cute Toddler Edition

1. Last night the boys and Elwood were walking downtown to see a movie and Stella thought we should tag along. She was disappointed when they got ahead of us, until I asked if she'd like to go for ice cream. "Ox weem!" she exclaimed. "I wuff ox weem."


2. I could eat her up with a spoon sometimes.


3. On the way home we played Scary Dinosaur. She would growl and shout "Somp! Somp!" while stamping her little feet in their flowered sandals. This was my cue to wave my hands and shriek "Oh no! It's a terrible dinosaur." I would run down the bike trail ahead of her until she stopped growling and said "Eek!" "Eek" means it's time to switch places so she can be the scare-ee.


4. Sometimes she wakes in the night crying and tells me she's sad about a scary monster. I wonder where that comes from? I'm not sure where she's been seeing scary monsters.


5. She is like a lot of toddlers in her eagerness to assert possession. She'll routinely let us know that something is hers. Instead of saying "mine!" she shouts "mine's!" It makes sense, if you're hearing "yours" and "hers" and "ours," to give "mines" a whirl. It makes me smile, though, to hear that improvised double possessive -- like it's not just hers, it's reallyreallyreally hers.


6. A few days ago I was reading some old posts and came across this one where I wrote about Joe. He's my explorer, I said, and described his spontaneous visit to the neighbors at just-barely-three. Stella has an explorer streak herself. Yesterday I sent the two of them outside together, thinking they'd play ball in the yard for a few minutes. When I sent Alex out to relieve Joe, they were nowhere in sight. She had led him down to the school playground, half a mile away. I am having a little adrenaline surge remembering it. (The three of us had a talk about the capital-I Importance of telling mama before you leave the block. I love it that our kids feel comfortable navigating the neighborhood on foot, but yikes.)


7. I took Stella with me to campus today because I thought she'd be happier that way, playing at the house where she stayed on Fridays during the school year instead of staying home with a fairly new babysitter. She had forgotten, though, that it takes an hour to get to Theresa's house. About two-thirds of the way there she asked to nurse. "Siddamidda," she said emphatically. "Siddamidda?" I echoed, baffled. "Yes!" she answered, pleased that I'd understood so quickly. "Sid-a-mid-a," I repeated slowly, and then the light dawned: sit in the middle. "Darling," I said, "who will drive the car if I sit in the middle?"
   
   She was indignant. "Come on, Mom," I could see her thinking, "why are you bothering me with details? Make it so!" That's one of my favorite things about toddlers, that certainty that mom can make the magic happen. Having a teenager at the same time makes it clear that it's an evanescent certainty. I'll enjoy it while it lasts.

More quick takes here.

Voices

I took my oldest son to the doctor last month for his Scout physical. He's 5'9" now, three inches taller than me. The growth that keeps taking me by surprise is invisible, though: his larynx is bigger than mine.

Your larynx sits right on top of your trachea. Its primary purpose is to protect your airway, but as a lovely bonus God designed the system so we can also use it to talk and laugh and sing and yodel. (Well, maybe God didn't intend that last one. Was there yodeling before the Fall? I am skeptical, personally.)

When you want to say something you bring your vocal folds together and push air through them. They pulse rapidly, creating a buzzing tone that you shape with your throat and tongue and teeth and lips. (And velum. The velum is the most unappreciated articulator, even though it is largely responsible for keeping you from sounding whiny and nasal.)

The size of your larynx plays a key role in the pitch of your voice, because more mass in the vocal folds = fewer pulses per second. An average man's vocal folds might vibrate 120 times per second, meaning his voice will fall about an octave below middle C. An average woman's vocal folds will vibrate about twice that fast, giving her a voice roughly an octave higher. My voice is pitched a smidge higher than usual, at about the E above middle C. (You can hear me talking at the beginning of the video embedded here if you're curious. I don't walk around talking like Glinda the Good or anything.)

So I am used to my son's big pre-man feet, and I accept that he's taller than me forevermore. But his voice keeps throwing me for a loop. I keep turning around and thinking, "Who's that MAN in my house? Why is there a MAN in here?" And then I think, "...whoa, that's my son with that big manly voice."

Tonight in the van I was trying to estimate his fundamental frequency (I bet you wish your mom was a speech pathologist too!), humming along as he spoke. I'd put it at about the G below middle C -- not so terribly low, but unmistakably different from his brothers' voices.

I know it will just keep dropping as he matures, since one of the effects of androgens is to enlarge the larynx. You can measure growth with pencil marks on the wall, sure, but you can also measure it with a descending scale on the piano.

Tonight I was imagining a future in which all of my boys will go tripping down that scale, and it left me a little wistful. I'm going to hold onto my memories of our drive tonight -- of my firstborn and my baby talking together, her chirping soprano interweaving with his beginner baritone.

Love and Fudgesicles

I went searching in my archives for a recipe at Sarah's request, and I stumbled across a post I had completely forgotten. I never published it, because it was long and I thought it might sound boastful, but it was about sharing my faith with my children. It was such fun to read -- a fantastic window into our family's life six years ago. That's what I love about blogging: the record of events and thoughts and quotes and stages. It slips away so quickly if I don't record it.

As I've become less anonymous I've done more self-censoring. I suppose it's inevitable but it's also a shame. In the octave of Easter, even before it surfaced in the royal wedding, I kept running across this quote from St. Catherine: "Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire." I was kneeling in the Adoration chapel, asking why I kept tripping over this quote. I said, "What would you have me do?" And the answer, mysteriously but unmistakably, was "Write."

So I'm writing.

(And also feeling utterly naked.)

Since I am already feeling naked, I will share a story that my inner editor would most likely have blue-penciled a couple of weeks ago. I was at Mass this morning, sitting across from a young family that leaves me feeling like a slacker. They've had four kids in rapid succession and yet they are always, always there at daily Mass. Back in the fall when I brought Stella to a weekday Mass, I got the distinct impression from the dad that he thought she was a bad influence on his kids. (She's not a fan of sitting quietly in the pew, my Stella.)

Do you do that unfortunate thing when you feel disapproval from someone else, that thing where you find yourself looking for something to criticize in return? "Well, my daughter may be a shrieking lunatic, but hey-- your tie is totally crooked!" No?? It's just me?? [heavy sigh and firm resolve] I have struggled with that unfortunate thing ever since.

Today I was there alone, while they were muddling through with their four little ones. Usually their kids are preternaturally well-behaved, but their newest baby is very new indeed and the older ones were wigglier and noisier than usual. At one point the dad asked each of the two oldest if they wanted a swat. As you might expect, they assured him that they did not.

Ten years ago that scene would have unleashed a torrent of strong feelings in me. (OK, actually, "strong feelings" = judgy judgy judgment.) Way to teach your children about the love of Jesus there, Dad! That's why he said, "Suffer the little children to come to me, and forbid them not, for in the kingdom of God I shall swat such as these." Or something like that.

But the certainty I had ten years ago about my parenting philosophy has been eroded by the reality of mothering my children. Ten years on I am able to see the irony in feeling superior to a parent whose children usually sit quietly and participate while mine erupt in unpredictable plumes of mirth and fury.

The reality is that the research on long-term attachment parenting outcomes is not as clear as Dr. Sears likes to say it is. The reality is also that Alfie-Kohn-esque discipline strategies can leave you up a creek in the short term. I continue to believe that it is worthwhile to teach children to do the right thing for its own sake, but OH do I see the utility of an occasional threat or bribe. I cannot know how it will all shake out in 20 years' time. Will my children be faithful Christians as adults? Will theirs? None of us can really know, and so I have come to think it's wiser to give each other the benefit of the doubt.

My 6yo has been having some trouble with his temper lately. This is a new thing for him; for a long time he was the sweetest and meekest of my children. In recent weeks anger has been smacking him around capriciously-- something minor will leave him enraged. This afternoon I sent him to his room to calm down and went up a few minutes later to check on him. "What was that about?" I asked him. "Hell," he answered instantly. "I think hell took over about a quarter of my brain."

At bedtime he got angry again. He has, and hates, the earliest bedtime. "I'm not going to put my clothes in the hamper," he fumed. We talked about it for a few minutes, about flexing your doing-the-right-thing muscles so they get stronger than your doing-the-wrong-thing muscles. "I'm too tired to do the right thing," he grumped. "Doing the right thing even when you're tired is the very best practice for your doing-the-right-thing muscles," I assured him.

He put his clothes in the hamper. "I'm doing this," he said with definite displeasure but no further defiance, "because I love you."

That's my highest hope: that when it is crunch time for them as Christians, that they will choose what's right and say to God, "I'm doing this because I love you." Will they? Do I?

***

I started this post three weeks ago and buried it in my drafts folder because (a) who wants to be naked in public? and (b) it kept getting longer, with no tidy ending in sight. After that Mass three weeks ago I thought to myself, "Instead of feeling so awkward around that family all the time, you should just love them the best you can. Take them a meal now that the baby's here." Today I finally did, lentil soup and corn muffins and a box of fudgesicles, assembled during the most tempestuous afternoon I can remember. The three youngest kids took turns wailing, and an older brother punctuated the wailing with poisonous sarcasm. I dropped that dinner off while my boys squabbled in the back of the van, with a prayer that we could all be more gracious to each other.

Maybe I don't have a tidy ending because motherhood isn't about the tidy or the endings: it's messy, it's gradual. It's love disguised in a box of fudgesicles and in fumbling efforts to be patient, and you can only hope the message gets through.

Soppit

I can't get through Love You Forever without crying. I am sure that if I had encountered it pre-kids I would have thought it was too creepy for words. The idea of my MIL driving over to our house with a ladder tied to the top of the car so she could climb in the window -- no. Just no. But I had kids first, and so it always leaves me verklempt.

Yesterday I started reading it to one of the kids, and as I read siblings kept drifting over to listen. When I got to the dying mom page I had to stop, of course, because I was choked up. "Oh, yeah," said one of the older boys. "Mom always cries in this one." "Like with Clown of God," another chimed in. Which is exactly right -- that's the other one that always gets me.

I sing the mom's song to a particular tune, a musical phrase that ends still sounding like there's another line coming. I do it that way on purpose, because loving your children isn't the kind of job you finish. Finally, at the end when the son sings to his daughter, I resolve the melody. I figure that's when I'll know I've taught them what I hoped to, when I see them passing it on to their own children.

So yesterday I was taking a little longer than usual to get un-choked-up and my 11yo jumped in to help me out. He picked up where I left off in the text, and then he sang the song the same way I do it. This left me even choked-uppier, because that's what it's all about, am I right? He sang the song!

In the middle of the the song, though, the toddler whacked him on the shoulder and yelled "Soppit!" [stop it, in case that's not clear]. We all burst out laughing, even the whack-ee. It seemed perfect to me: there's no opportunity to be overly sentimental around here, because the reality-ward yankings are frequent and potent.

(I am so sleepy. I want to finish this post before I go to bed, but the cost is going to be phrases like "reality-ward yankings.")

This morning I was dozing in bed when Pete brought me Love You Forever. Pointing to the cover picture, the one with the 2yo boy, he said, "Will you read up to this page?" "Sure," I said, "but why do you want to stop there?" And he said -- oh, I can't believe how sweet that boy is -- he said, "Because it makes me sad to see you cry."

I hugged him and said that sometimes good truths make us cry just like sad truths do, but that I don't mind crying about good truths. I said we could read as much as he wanted, and I dove in.

More kids drifted into our room as I read, and everybody sang along when it was time to sing. Except there's a new version of the song now: you get to the middle and you yell "Soppit!!" in a peevish toddler voice. We were all laughing all the way through, and at the end one of the boys said, "Look, Mom, you don't have to cry when you read it now. We made it so you can laugh instead!"

Tomato, to-mah-to

We were talking about nursery rhymes in the van and Pete said, "What's the last line of this one? Mistress Mary, quite contrary, how does your garden grow? With silver bells, and taco shells, and...?"

I said, "You know, actually, it's cockle shells. People don't usually have taco shells in their gardens."

Quick as a wink he said, "Yeah, people don't have silver bells in their gardens either, so what's wrong with taco shells?"

I think his mental image of her garden is probably pretty different from the illustration in my childhood Mother Goose book.

In the same car trip one of his older brothers cracked me up. I wish I could tell you about the conversation that led up to his saying, "If you took away my computer privileges I'd wither away into a pile of dust. And ichor." But alas, he's less willing to have his funny stuff posted on the web.

From my kindergartner: a note and a quote

Pete spent some time laboring over a note to me this afternoon. "You're not looking, are you, Mom?" he asked anytime I came near. He wanted me to wait until it was finished. This is what he wrote:

I love you

if you rnt to bisee

if you dot mide if

you crd get me

sum flowrs then

I would dig sum

holes

Of course I dot mide, sweetie. Who could be to bisee to say yes to a request like that? I think we'll be putting in some petunias tomorrow, yucky weather notwithstanding.

As if that weren't enough sweetness for one day, do you know what he said to me on his way upstairs? He was trying to get me to come up while he brushed his teeth, and I was trying to finish...something I've forgotten now. He came over and hugged me, and he said, "I love you so much that touching you is like touching Jesus."

Oh OH I want to be the mother that little guy deserves.

Seven Quick Takes: Adrenaline Edition

I hope Jen doesn't hate it when I write posts that are stories in seven parts instead of seven unrelated bits of things. This is a story in seven parts.

1. I walked to the downtown movie theater after dinner -- my husband told me I'd enjoy the movie and an evening out is always a treat. Forty-five minutes in, my phone started vibrating. "Home calling," it said. I slipped out of my seat to see what could be going on.
2. My husband almost never calls my cell -- it's been months and months. He doesn't have a cell phone; he doesn't like cell phones. He usually figures it can wait. It was weird enough that he was calling at all, even weirder that he would call when he knew I was at the movies. It was a little like seeing a police car in the driveway: it doesn't have to mean that something bad has happened, but it means you'd better pay attention. My guess was that one of the kids at home needed stitches.
3. It wasn't any of the kids at home; it was our oldest. I had dropped him off for a Scout overnight at 5:15 like the troop newsletter told me to, but there were only two other families there. (Turns out the kids were actually supposed to gather at 7:15 -- a scheduling mistake made it into the newsletter.) We couldn't get any of the scoutmasters on the phone, but one of the parents talked to a friend of his at the campsite and told us it would be fine for the boys to head out there. Another mom said she'd take Alex to the overnight for me; it's happening at a camp about 15 miles away. I thanked her and pulled away.
4. This is why my husband was concerned to receive a call from the scout who was organizing the  event, saying he didn't know where Alex was and did we? We did not.
5. My arrhythmia fired when I saw "home" on the screen of my phone, and it didn't improve as I stood there in the lobby trying to figure out what to do. My husband and I talked it through and agreed that it was most likely just a mix-up. He said he'd wait by the phone, that I should stay and watch the movie.
6. My memories of this movie are going to be pretty vague. I was trying to pray and be calm, but I am the queen of the worst-case scenario. In a ditch? In the hospital? Abducted by this apparently helpful and involved Scout mom? My imagination kept churning and my heart kept racing.
7. It took us a long time to connect with the scoutmaster in charge of the event, and the scout whose call started the whole thing wasn't answering his phone at all. But I talked to Alex 15 minutes ago: he is with his friends, alive, and not hypothermic. (Yet. He left home with no rain gear and no jacket. It's not a good night for that.) He was teasing me on the phone about my worry, saying something about "s.e..ll my ...o..rg..a..n..s" over the staticky connection. "I love you," I said, extra-loud and over-articulated in case I sounded as fuzzy to him as he did to me. Such a relief to hear his voice, crackly and indistinct but unmistakably his.

More quick takes here.

Conversation II

I am so stuffed. I think that was actually a buckshot burrito.

Huh, I'm not stuffed at all and we ate the same thing. Maybe it's, like, an evolutionary development that I can digest my food more efficiently than you.

Maybe it's because you're a 14-year-old boy and I'm a 40-year-old woman.

No, I think I'm, like, homo sapiens 2.0. Next stop, laser vision!

Conversation

Can I get a crossbow if I promise to feed it every day and change its water and take it for walks?

Well, will you pay for its crossbow immunizations too?

Can't you help me a little bit with those? They're expensive. Maybe just a regular bow, then.

Nice try, Calvin. [Remember the Calvin strip where he asks for, I don't know, a pet velociraptor, and then a pet jaguar, and finally a puppy, or something like that? My kids think that's a great trick.]

A bow will be very useful for the zombie invasion. [Lengthy explanation of why arrows are especially useful against zombies.]

Not a fan of that idea.

Well, you'll be sorry you didn't listen to me when the zombies get you.

You can say, "I told you so, Mom."

But you won't be able to hear me if your ears have fallen off because the zombies got you.

You'll be a modern-day Cassandra.

From Greek mythology?

Yeah, she was cursed. She was always right and no one ever believed her.

That is the story of my life.