Sometimes my kids love to read my blog, but a lot of the time they find it very dull. "Have you written any good posts lately?" Joe will ask me. Usually I say, "Nope, only boring ones." He loves the posts that talk about funny things people say; he will read them again and again.
I am cautious about writing those posts, because much depends on context. Joe wants me to write a funny post about the guinea pigs but I am not sure how well guinea pig humor would come across in this space. Even apple-peel guinea pig humor, which keeps the crowds rapt around here. (If you use an apple peeler-corer-slicer and feed the resulting long strand of peel to the guinea pigs, hilarity ensues.)
So maybe I will tell you about Stella instead. Last month we were all walking together to get ice cream. "Scoot over," I called to her. "Over to the right side of the trail." Learning to share the bike trail is a rite of passage around here. She was happy to cooperate, if a little vague on the rationale. "Oh!" she answered brightly. "Are there trolls on the other side?"
Mostly, she sounds like a grown-up girl when she talks these days, but she has some sweet little remnants of little-girl speech. She moves her chess pieces "diNAGally" instead of diagonally; she asks a "queshun" instead of a question. (Hey, language geek friends, what other English words have that /stʃ/ phoneme sequence?)
Tonight we had a sad interruption at dinner, sparked by saffron pilaf. I was serving leftover rice under freshly cooked lentils, with leftover chicken on the side. I think I'm going to make Thoughtful Thursdays part of my weekly meal framework, serving simple legume-based meals as a reminder of the poor around the world. (It is a little weird, I know, that the inaugural Thoughtful Thursday dinner featured the world's most expensive spice, but like I said: leftover pilaf.) Anyway, Stella was not happy about that rice. "It has lots of vegetables hidden in it," she said woefully. "Look at it, darling," I told her, "it has bits of onion, cooked until they're sweet and tender, bits of garlic ditto, and a pinch of saffron. There is nothing yucky in the rice." Her objections continued. "You're a nut," I said, and though my tone was not at all unkind she fled the table. She returned to a conversation about nuttiness and related insults, and her distress was only intensified. "You're saying I'm a nut and my family is wacky," she wailed. "That's not very nice."
Niceness may be in the eye of the beholder, but I leave it to the reader to assess the truth of my assertions.
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