Vignettes

A conversation with a five-year-old:

B: Put your shoes on.

Alec: They're sandals, not shoes

B: Yes, they're sandals, Mr. Precision

Alec: No Daddy, it's Alec

*****

A cautionary tale:

They tell you that the Internet is dangerous for kids.  That you should carefully monitor where they go, especially sites like Youtube.  But the thing no one tells you is that the real danger of Youtube is that your child may watch cooking shows and then be inspired to do things like combine flour and water into a reasonable facsimile of a pie dough and then make a pie with grass filing and pretty impressive lattice crust - all on the floor of her bedroom.  Or you may wake up to find she's been inspired to get out the powdered sugar, butter and food coloring so she can experiment with making frosting.

Although I will give her credit that she did a decent job of cleaning up after the frosting.  And the most damnable part is what a good job she does on these experiments.  If they were disasters, it would discourage her from doing it again.  But no, she made a pretty good frosting, put it in plastic bags and piped it onto cookies for her brothers.

Summertime

We are having a very nice, relaxing summer. Back when it was time for B to put in requests for Sundays for the summer, I realized that 1) we had both just gotten raises and 2) he has lots of time off banked already. So since the reason for him to work Sundays is to either get overtime pay or comp time, we decided to treat ourselves to a summer off. The branch libraries are closed on Saturdays in the summer, so except for an obligatory Saturday at the regional library (which still has Saturday hours), he has no weekend hours this summer. I still have them, of course, but we've still managed at least one weekend day off together for the past month except last weekend. Lovely.

The older kids are having a great time at camp. Katherine has reunited with her camp friends and Alec is learning how to swim. If they could only stop bringing viruses home, life would be great (I have been trying to mail a package for the past 2 1/2 weeks, and no kidding, every single day I thought I might be able to make it to the post office another kid would get sick). When they're not running fevers, though, they're having a great summer. See?





Exercise: 25 minutes on exercise bike