Kid: Whatcha doing, Mama?
Me: I’m playing this game, Fallout 3. I’m not very good at it.
Kid: Why do you keep looking at your computer?
Me: I’m looking at a guide to make sure I don’t miss anything in the game while I play.
Kid: Isn’t that called “cheating”?
A post on MetaFilter noting the death of jazz singer Blossom Dearie took me to the excellent Schoolhouse Rock video she sang – Figure Eight.
My daughter came down while I was watching it and wondered at me for a while. She’d seen Schoolhouse Rock stuff, of course, but I explained to her that when I was a kid there were just four television stations, and only one chance a week to watch cartoons, so you’d better be there bright and early with your bowl of cereal on Saturday morning if you wanted to get in your good TV veg time. And how Schoolhouse Rock ended up teaching up stuff in spite of ourselves. And she thought I meant we didn’t have to go to school and just had to sit and watch cartoons instead.
The words. I have a way with them.
My seven year old is an endless source of amusement.
Last week, she managed to lose:
• Her sweater
• The shoes she wore to a birthday party
• The pants she wore to school(!) (she did come home in her Halloween costume, however)
The other day, she brought home her journal from school. One of the entries listed the three things she would bring with her if she were stranded on a desert island.
1) Her special dog.
2) Her Everything.
3) Her mom and dad.
Nice to know I made the cut.
The other day Hub was talking to #2 daughter about her bad habit of jumping in and trying to do stuff. Like, she’ll hear the first part of the sentence “I didn’t feed the dogs today” and jump in and start to do it herself before the rest, “Because they were barfing all night and they shouldn’t eat.”
#2 daughter was taking it pretty personally, because although she’s somewhat scatterbrained at times (takes after her mommlepated), she means well and she wants to be helpful. So she endured the scolding for a minute, then asked the $1m question:
“Why don’t we have this conversation when I pick up your dinner plates for you?”
Out of the mouths of seven year olds. All I could do was gawk, and applaud in my head. Nice comeback!
Well, maybe it is, but there’s not much going on lately so I’ll just bore you.
• There’s a huge lice outbreak at the elementary school. Rumor has it that 80 kids have teh boogs. We all hate the nit comb.
• The in-laws made it through Ike okay, although they lost power for over a week.
• I skipped my high school 20th reunion and went hunting instead.
• The mail carrier still sucks. Only both he AND his substitute suck. I just got two things I’d been waiting for in the mail today – one was postmarked 9/26 and one was 10/3.
• I’m really not getting into school like I was before. The class is enjoyable enough, but I just don’t think I’m up for it. I’ll probably take a break for a couple of semesters after this one is over.
And um… really that’s about it. Yay?
Hub swears he’s not making this up.
On a long drive with the kids the other day, he heard them playing “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Ruby Nose.” The goal was to reach across the backseat and grab their sister’s nose.
I guess with enough grabbing, the nose becomes ruby-colored?
Kids are so weird. I say that because deep down inside, I secretly want to play, too.
Given my history, it’s no wonder that I’m having nightmares about my Capstone course, which is the last required course I need to graduate. One nightmare involved my completely forgetting to go to class – a perennial favorite of the dream machine in my brain. The other one last night had my professor move the class to somewhere at U.T. and I couldn’t find the room until everyone was gone for the night.
In other news, the kid had the flu last week and had over 102 for several days. She finally went back to school today. Her new saying: “I’m going to ring your doorbell” = “I’m going to poke you in the bottom.” Her latest bedtime question: “Mommy, how is glue sticky?”
Apparently 8 years old is when the body issues start. Jo lost a bracelet off her arm tonight. She was already tired, and it was the last straw.
“I want bigger arms! I don’t like having little thin arms!”
It’s all downhill from here. 🙁