Which one is it?

I was looking for something in a cabinet today and came across a ring I purchased in Japan many years ago for approximately $5 at a grocery store. Here's the sad part: it looks EXACTLY like my wedding band. Exactly. So it's quiz time: which one is which?

Ring A:

Ring B:

Give up?

Keep going . . .

The answer is . . .

Ring A is the real deal.

But really, could you even tell?

So our next door neighbors opened a retail jewelry store this year. They sent us a Christmas card that was really a thinly veiled invitation to come to them for "all of our jewelry needs." What they haven't seemed to figure out in the six years we've lived here is this:

WE HAVE NO JEWELRY NEEDS! NONE!

If we did, we could just fulfill them all at the grocery store.

p.s. I did these photos against the faux wood grain of our faux wood table just to drive the point home as hard as I could. This is the kind of people we are. Faux.

Summer Etymology

This summer, M asked me out of the blue, "what does popsa mean?"

Popsa, popsa, what the heck is popsa? I frantically consulted my mental dictionary.

"Well," pipes up E, "I know that cle [kll] means 'cold,' so popsa must mean 'nice and.' "

Get it? Popsicle=nice and cold.

"No," corrects M, "I think popsa means 'hard and colorful and.' "

Now you know.

Tooie's First Prayer

Tooie spontaneously burst out in prayer last night after his sister said the official version of the family prayer. Here's a transcript of it:

Heavenly Father.

Grateful . . . day.

Not be 'cared of monsters . . . and . . . white . . . alligators.

Jesus Christ.

Amen.

What goes on in that teeny-tiny head of his, I wonder.

Quiz Time!Gi

E and M were working on making alphabet books the other day. See if you can identify all of these drawings by E that start with the letter A:

1.

2:

3:

4:

Give up yet? Here are the answers: 1=apple (duh) 2=Appaloosa 3=Ariel (duh again, for all you mermaid fans) 4=animal

These kids crack us up. That's when they're not driving us crazy.

The Perfidy of Marmot Dads

We got invited to go to the pool with Max and his family on Friday. E made snacks for everyone to share--graham crackers and peanut butter, a family favorite. In my haste, however, I left them on the counter as we were rushing out the door. E asked as we were pulling into the parking lot if I had forgotten them.

Me: Oh no! I did! Daddy will probably eat them because he won't know they were our pool snacks. (Marmot Pa was home watching Marmot Babe.)

E: Why would he do that?

Me: (somewhat unfairly) Oh, that's just how he is.

E: Yeah, he's always eating the LAST cookie or the LAST scoop of ice cream or something.

M: (out of the blue) (and with a deeeeeep sigh) He's a hard Daddy to live with.

E: He sure is.

zziiiiiiiippp

That's the sound of me zipping up actual pants on my actual body. Why does that merit a blog post, you ask? Because I spent many many months wearing hideous pull-on pants with big nasty elastic panels on the front. That were still too small and tight. But I have, miraculously, graduated to zip-up pants because the latest and greatest marmot is now on the outside instead of on the inside, bless him. (I still sometimes have a hard time getting undressed because I yank and pull on my pants to try to get them off, forgetting that they zip. It's been a while.) 

Anyway, he's the cutest little marmot you could imagine, and now that he's almost two months old he can make eye contact and make little cute noises and be interactive. Let's find a photo or two of him.

Oh wait, that's where you still can't see him yet.

There he is in all his marmoty glory.


And here he is today in his Sunday best.

And now I have to go because the girl marmots are fighting and the baby marmot is crying and hungry and THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is why I never update this blog.

Amen.

Sometimes this happens when you turn 40

Sunday being my grand 40th birthday, I decided to take extra care with my appearance. I blew dry my hair. I wore makeup (such as it was). I put on my nicest tent dress that made me look least like a watermelon lurching around on two legs. Speaking of legs, I shaved them. Things were looking up. Then when it came time to leave, I couldn't find my shoes that matched my dress. So I had to wear very black sandals with my very pale blue dress. On my special day. (Just as well, probably, because my tan sandals, which I remembered where I had hidden about halfway to church, don't fit my newly swollen feet.)

The girls, especially M, were in fine form for the birthday festivities. M wrapped up a plate for me, a broken Santa Claus figure of hers, and a Japanese book of mine. She got soooo excited at dinner time and told me "Wait Mommy! Wait! You don't have to get a plate for yourself! Here! Open this!" And then I had to gush about opening my own plate for my own dinner. It was very sweet. She was also gratified by my surprised and pleased reaction when I opened my very own book that she had wrapped. (It makes sense, after all--I had already purchased it, so it MUST be something I like.) She rushed around the table and insisted on serving everyone. I had made some apple slices and carrot sticks for the kids, and she made sure that everyone had the same amount, lined up in the same formation, on their plates. That all was very nice.

But then came the greatest indignity of all. I was putting sweet little Tooie to bed with a bottle. He gave me his half-finished bottle and looked at me with a funny look on his face. "What's wrong?" I ask. "Are you going to vomit?" (NB: this is perhaps the all time stupidest question you can ask a 1 1/2-year-old when you think he might be about to vomit.) To his credit, he answered me with a weak "yeah." I had just enough time to grab him and jump (or rather lurch) off the bed before he hit me with the full force of his vomit capacity, all over my nice Sunday dress. We rushed to the bathroom where he did his thing for a few more moments, all over the floor and the bathmats and both of our clothes. Marmot Dad wants to know why on earth I didn't just put him directly into the tub when I got to the bathroom. I have no idea why. Perhaps I was just thinking that on my 40th birthday I was covered in pre-digested fishsticks and ketchup and bok choy and pine nuts. On my special day.

p.s. Oh yeah, Marmot Dad's birthday was on Monday. It was nice enough. No vomit.

Miscellaneous funny things

Here are some gems from the girls of late:

Tonight at the dinner table as M was trying to tell us something and E was interrupting--

"I'm trying to talk to you but E keeps destructing me!"

I took all the kids to the dentist on Tuesday (a fool's errand, I know) for my checkup. The girls had beads they were stringing on thread with needles, which keeps them occupied for long stretches and worked great. Until, of course, M broke her string and dropped all her beads, then lost her needle in the chair, and then sewed her necklace to her dress while she was working on it (after gathering up beads and needles again). But overall the children were exceptionally well behaved, even Tooie who sat on a chair and played with a pony. People kept coming into the exam room and remarking on how well behaved they were being. At one point the dental hygienist said, "you children are really being good while your mother is busy." "Well," answered E, "that's the kind of children we are." 

Of course, that's not always the kind of children they are. Last weekend Marmot Dad told E to get out of the muck and mud in the back yard, which muck and mud we have in spades. "No, father," answers E, "I must follow my heart." I think he almost blew a gasket.

And finally, little M has been having a great time playing Cinderella. This usually works out well for me, because she likes to do lots of cleaning and scrubbing while she's Cinderella. Of course, I get a lot of criticism while she's doing it, because of course I have to play the part of the wicked stepmother. One day when she was really getting into her role, she climbed up on a chair and confronted said wicked stepmother: "I always do all the work, and you always do all the play, and THAT'S . . . NOT . . . FAIR! So STOP BEING STEP! I am ALWAYS nice, and you are ALWAYS step!" So that's the new label in our family--as in, "wow, that person is really step!"

Tooie's latest tricks are singing an almost unrecognizable version of Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and a pretty good rendition of Happy Birthday.

Perhaps we're doing something right?

Our latest topic at home is money. E and M are earning some by picking up rocks in the backyard. I've also decided that it's about time to do allowances on a regular basis. So I'm talking to E about an allowance and explaining how it works and all. She wants to know what she has to do for her allowance. I explain that it's not necessarily for work she does, although we expect her to help out around the house, but just for her to save or spend as she sees fit. "But Mommy," she protests, "I just wouldn't feel right about getting money for doing nothing." 

!!!!!!!!!!

"Foster that attitude" says Marmot Dad.

M, on the other hand, toils not, neither does she spin. When we introduced the concept of work-for-pay, she sat at the picnic table while E ran around picking up rocks. M asked a few questions about what things cost, notably bubble gum and lollipops, two things I refuse to purchase. "Aren't you going to pick up some rocks?" I ask. "Well, I'm deciding if I want bubble gum or a lollipop," M answers. She finally decides on a lollipop, which costs $.06 at the local grocery store. So she picks up . . . . 6 rocks, no more, no less.

E is saving up for whatever Disney Princess Polly Pocket toys she might be able to locate and purchase (after visiting a friend who reportedly has an entire closet full, curse the child and her parents). I introduced her to the concept of an auction (which she calls an "option") by scouring ebay for used sets. I'm hoping against hope that some garage sales might come through for us, too. I'm not up on these things. I don't know if they're even still carried in stores. But ebay almost always comes through for me.

In other news, I just heard from M one of our favorite phrases we hear in this household: "E, let's play My Little Ponies with our own human bodies."

Puppy Love

To say Tooie loves puppies is a laughable understatement. He LOOOOOVVVVES puppies (fittingly, he was born in the Year of the Dog). He has supersonic puppy detection hearing and can hear a puppy barking about 5 miles away. He can see puppies out the car window who look like mere specks of dust to me (and keep in mind, he rides backwards in the car).

So we were shopping for a birthday present for a party E and M were invited to (at Chuck E. Cheese, to my GREAT dismay, all fodder for another entry once it's over, I'm sure) and he saw the puppy of his dreams. We brought it home of course. Here he is wearing the puppy and doing his favorite thing, saying goodbye to tissue paper as it gets flushed down the toilet:

Another shot of the same activity:

Running from the Mommy Papparazzi (who can figure out how to spell those Italian words, after all?)

Not even a great puppy backpack can keep you happy all the time when your sentences are only one word long:
As you can see, he likes to wear the puppy for all kinds of activities (like making playdough), and he has to have it in the car, and he prefers to have it at bedtime:
The best part about this puppy? The "tail" snaps on to the back of it and it becomes a BABY RESTRAINING DEVICE!!! What evil genius came up with this??? Yes, I have purchased a baby leash. I figure that once Tooie 2 arrives on the scene I won't have enough hands to deal with kids in the parking lot, and I can't stay home forever, so Tooie's puppy will have to start using his powers for evil and not for good come June.

In other Tooie news, and speaking of evil genius, the boy is a madman in the kitchen. He loves to cook, or should I say "cook." It starts at the sink. He'll announce "water," "cup," "bowl," "poon," and he expects that his wish is your command. Then he fills up the bowl with the cup and stirs vigorously with the poon while muttering "cook cook cook" to himself. Until such time as I hear a loud splashing noise that indicates about five gallons of water have just been poured all over the counter and floor and we move on to another activity.

Like eggs. If any eggs are in sight he yells "egg! crack! egg! crack!" until you let him choose an egg or two and give it a desultory whack against the bowl. Next stop, salt.

Don't leave a whole container of salt on the kitchen counter. This is my only advice for you.

Ditto sugar.

Appliances are his latest love. He adores the salad spinner. He likes to put small toys in it then lie down next to it on the ground so he can watch the inner basket go round and round while he pushes the plunger. The other night, Marmot Dad was making a salad, and Tooie was playing with the spinner. He noticed something was missing, so he ran to the kitchen, got a stool, pushed it over to the salad bowl, grabbed a handful of greens, and ran back to put them in his spinner.

He also just discovered the "food processor" attachment to the blender (yes, that would be the same blender that he broke just last week). He likes to put all the parts together (sans blade) in order and yells "help!" if he can't figure out one of the pieces. Then he pushes the buttons. I let him push the buttons tonight when I was actually using it, and it scared him so badly that he had to run screaming from the kitchen.

It happens that way sometimes to even the best chefs.

I am a soccer mom

E is playing soccer this spring. So far we've mostly loved it, except for two little glitches. The first is the abominable snacks that are apparently expected at the end of every game--so-called "juice drinks" and fluorescent-colored "fruit" leather and other non-food items. We took apples and oranges when it was our turn and were met with shock and disdain from the kids on the team, even though I had spent at least an hour cutting the apples to look like rabbits (a special treat requested by the girls).

The other difficulty is the question of sporting gear. The kids are required to purchase a city jersey, and I actually think it's really nice--reversible so they can be a different color depending on the week, and they can wear the same one until they outgrow it because it's the same for all the age groups. Then there are all kinds of optional gear you can purchase: matching shorts, socks, etc. And THEN there is the specialized gear that I think it's crazy to buy for a four- or five-year-old, like cleats (cleats!). But of course E noticed that she was dressed differently right away, and we've had several tearful moments while I explained that her shoes were just fine and that maybe it wasn't such a great idea to WANT to look like everyone else.

She was pretty much reconciled to her non-matching shorts and her thrift-store shoes, and then this last game (where, I have to say, she played her little heart out and really got into the fray and gave that ball heck) she was apparently talking to her little sartorial-splend-i-fied friend who had all the gear you could have and then some while they were on the sidelines waiting for their turn to get back into the game. Here's what came of that--

On the way home, E says to me in the car, "My friend S says that her shoes are faster than mine."

Mom: "Really? I thought you were running pretty fast out there."

E: "Well, I was, but S says her shoes are faster."

Mom: "Do you think that shoes make you fast? I think it's probably your feet and your legs and all the practice that you do running and playing soccer."

E, thoughtful: "Yeah, shoes couldn't make you go fast. It's your legs. And it's being strong like an oak (one of her favorite expressions from Mulan)."

Mom, trying to change the subject: "So, do you think soccer is fun? Are you glad you're starting to play?"

E: "I think soccer is really fun. Even when people lie to you about their shoes."

Birthday Wishes

We have two birthdays to celebrate, each for a Marmot Uncle. MU #1 turned 32 last week (32? yes?) and we figure he had enough fun celebrating in ROME to last at least until 33 (one can only hope, anyway. We might go to the local gelato place in his honor). MU#2 turns 41 (which I understand is "the new 40") tomorrow. Must have been a curse to grow up with an April Fools' Day birthday. But many happy returns all the same, to both of you. (We did remember Midwestern Marmot Aunt's birthday back in February but apparently marked it with a moment of silence rather than something as festive as a blog entry. Many apologies, MMA. We don't function well in February, what with all the snow and cold and darkness. Makes you wonder why we chose Feb. to get married.)

Theology 101

E's nativity play last week, as reported by Marmot Dad:

"OK little Jesus, it's time to put on your swaddling clothes. You're just the funniest little savior. Now, you need to wear your swaddling clothes to be a good example to all the other babies."

M has her own issues regarding the Holy Family. She insists that Joseph, not God, is the father of Jesus. "Well, Mommy," she explained (patiently, and speaking slowly, for Mommies of somewhat dim intelligence), "the people who are with the baby are the parents. So Mary and Joseph are Jesus's parents. Joseph is his real father. Heavenly Father is just his extra father." Heck, it makes sense to me.

Finally, E got a little ribbon at church a couple of weeks ago that said "I am a Child of God." She loved it and wore it to preschool the next day, although once we got to school she asked me a few times if she ought to wear it into the school. She was afraid that maybe the people at school didn't go to church or believe in Heavenly Father. I assured her that they probably did. But after school we stopped at the city rec center to sign up for swimming lessons and she took it off then (for the same reasons). (Although, let the record show that she had no qualms about asking the kid sitting in the entryway who his favorite princess was. Sure, she'll proselytize for Disney but not for God.) Anyway, I suggested that it would be just fine to wear her ribbon even around people who didn't go to church or whatever, and then if they asked her about she could tell them what it meant and that she went to church etc. etc. etc. Her eyes lit up as she suddenly understood: "like a missionary!" Then she took it one step farther: "When we get home, I'll put on my ribbon, and we can walk to the end of the road, and if I meet anyone who doesn't believe in Heavenly Father I'll tell them about him! I'll be a missionary to the end of the road!" 

(Some of us feel as if perhaps we were missionaries to/at the end of the road at one time.) 

Alas, when we got home and went to the end of the road no one was to be seen, believer or infidel.

. . . but screw your courage to the sticking place . . .

Our little E is positively Shakespearean in her expressions sometimes. Today on the way to preschool we were waiting to make a turn into a parking lot during class break. The college students just walk along without ever noticing any cars that might be about to run them down (like ours), and E finds this very disturbing. "They don't pay attention at all!" she huffs. "That is very dangerous! They could get run over!" Today she found new words to express her exasperation: "they just fix their minds on what they're doing and don't think about cars that might run over them." Fix their minds. She kills me.

More Love

So Marmot Dad passed up an opportunity to broadcast live from Carnegie Hall in June so he would not miss the birth of Marmot #4. True love. (Of course, he also hates to travel, even to as exciting a location as NYC.)

More Vomit

Today I had another coughing fit, this time in the car. E said "Oh no, Mommy, here it goes again. I'm so sorry." Then after some more violent coughing while I was trying to cough and drive and all that she said, "hey, please hand me my backpack." It was sitting right next to me in the front. "Why?" I asked between coughs. "Oh, just because." But I know this child well. So I asked, "Are you afraid I'm going to vomit on it?" Sheepishly, E answers, "yeah." Ah, she is her father's daughter.

In other news, M came to preschool with me today to read stories to E's class. Here's what she wore: one purple tutu, paired with some green silky athletic shorts and pink cowboy boots. Plus a blue necklace and a great big pony. She looked like a dream.

Tomorrow is our very own princess party. Wish me well. It might kill me.

So This is Love

** Note: This is for immature audiences only. Actual adults may be offended by the yuck factor.**Particularly you, Aunt.**(She seems to think that our family does nothing at all but talk about diapers and vomit.)

Our neighbors sent us home last night with a Disney songbook, so we spent family night singing the girls' favorite songs, invariably the sappy love songs and not classics like Zippity Doo Dah which are what Marmot Pa and I would have chosen. But as it turns out, those darn love songs were prescient. Almost immediately after we stopped singing, I was seized by a violent coughing fit and vomited into a metal trashcan. (It would perhaps be Too Much Information to inform readers that I had had a copious amount of broccoli for dinner [sidenote: Tooie is utterly cute when he says "broccoli"].) Anyway, Marmot Dad offered of his own volition to clean out the trashcan for me, and then he did. Bless his little marmoty heart. If I hadn't known it before, I know now: he is my knight in shining armour. This is not, I might add, his only vomit salvation. When E was a child he caught her vomit one night in his bare hands. I teared up. Now you must understand that there are few things that gross me out more than vomit, especially little kid vomit from kids who have not learned to chew properly yet. Although I have to admit that I have gotten a little desensitized to the whole enterprise. I've been known in the last few months to have grabbed Tooie as I hear him gagging and direct his little vomit directly onto my own chest in order to save the bed from a terrible fate. Oops--I hear someone gagging in the back now (I'm not making this up). Such is the fate of us parents of small children with quick vomit triggers.

Revenge of the Fairies

Today was the fairy tea party at the library, the event that I stood in line for an HOUR to get tickets for (so humiliating). The tea party itself was fun and all, but the best part was the after-party play. It was fairy tea party land at our house for hours afterward. At dinner, Fairy M was our helpful fairy and insisted on climbing on the shelves in the pantry to get out dishes for all of us, and served us tea at the table (out of an old yogurt container), and ran to get towels when things were spilled at the table (multiple times), and referred to her father as King of the Fairies, or sometimes just Your Majesty. Then when the girls and I were picking up their very messy art table and Marmot Dad was sitting on the couch, she solemnly observed that "the Fairy King is a lazy king."

It was charming to see the little girls dressed up in their finery. E did not wear a plastic bag tied to her front (as she did to school last week), but she did wear a gold sash around her elbows (???), and M insisted on wearing only one glass slipper . . . you know, like Cinderella . . . making her sound like Peg-leg Pete as she clomped through the library. M's dress turned out just fine despite the fact that I finally gave up on the zipper bottom that wouldn't come straight and just wadded up some fabric and sewed over it until it lay flat.

Perhaps their favorite part of the tea party was when we went downstairs to the library and they each got to choose about five books and we read them ALL right there on the library couch for about an hour with no little brother climbing on us or escaping somewhere.

I'd better go see what His Majesty is up to.

Our Sordid Life

Or I should say my sordid life, and only my dream life. I dreamed last night that I kept smelling cigarette smoke in the house. Finally one day I smelled it coming from Marmot Dad. I confronted him and he brushed me off. Later on that dreamday/night I opened the door to our under-the-stairs closet (a secret desire for a two-story home?) and there he was with a cigarette in one hand and a flask of whiskey (in a lovely engraved gold flask) in the other. "A-ha!" I said, or words to that effect, "I knew you had a secret life!"

This wouldn't be quite so disturbing except for the fact that my most common dream is the one where I'm engaged to someone else while still being married to Marmot Dad and I'm trying to figure out how to get out of my new engagement (to my credit, I always prefer MD in my dreams, even while I'm dating other men).

Here's what Marmot Dad dreams about: flying. Yep, happy dreams about zipping around in space. What does this say about us????

In other news, E gave me a tongue lashing tonight. I said something about something gooey or gunky to Tooie while we were working in the kitchen together and E piped up imperiously, "Mommy! You should talk properly to Tooie so he'll learn to talk the way we do. If you use those silly words he'll never learn to talk right. So please talk just the way we do to him."

Curious.

Super Tuesday

Tuesdays are never very super at our house. Marmot Dad teaches a night class right after work so we typically don't see him all day long. That makes for a loooooong day for Mommy, too. So we've tried to fill up our afternoons with activities to make the time pass more quickly. Today we perhaps overdid it.

Let me mention first, however, that the overdoing it started early on when I went to vote. Usually it's a quick in-and-out process, but today I had to wait in line for an hour with two alternately active and clingy kids, explain several times that my last name is hyphenated and alphabetized under the first last name, and change my ballot card because the poll workers just assumed that I was voting in the Republican primary. All this before lunch.

Anyway, after we picked E up from preschool, we all ran for the car to get started on our activities. M ran a little too recklessly and scraped her knee on the concrete. She cried and cried and told me "I don't see my bnood (blood) coming out, Mommy, but I think some of my skin came off. Did it? Did it?" which of course was very traumatic for her.

Then we headed for the zoological museum of choice. Tooie was entranced by all the dead animals. He kept going from one to the other and laughing and pointing. When I asked him what they said, he almost invariably said "maw," which is what kitties say for him. Except for when we looked at the springboks and gazelles, which he told me say "neigh."

Next stop was the creamery for ice cream bars. M was excited to get one that was "chocolate all the way through."

Finally, we went to ye olde thrift shop because E has been pestering me for scriptures and cutting out pictures of people reading scriptures and taping them to the wall. Since we don't have much of a systematic religious training program in place for her, we thought this would be a great idea. We found a nice book with someone's unsent postcard inside ("Look, Mommy! Mine comes with a bookmark!") for E, while M chose a version in German ("M, this book is in German." "Yeah, that's what I wanted. A Derman one."). They were very excited to read their scriptures, so excited, in fact, that they chose scriptures for a bedtime story. So we read for a little while with some explanatory commentary from Mom. At one point I told E that people were mad at a prophet because he was telling them to do right things but they wanted to do wrong things. "You mean he wanted them to change their ways, right Mommy?" Exactly. M wanted to know why those people kept saying "yay." When we were done, E told me "I love to read the scriptures. Although they're pretty boring." Silly girl.

Monster Night

On a recent family night we had a monster drawing contest, with some amazing results:

This was my addition to the festivities->

A two-headed, androgynous monster.
M's monster is standing in front of a house with many windows.
Here's another M creation next to a front door with a doorknob and a wreath.
Marmot Dad made big points when he introduced the cooperative monster--head drawn by Daddy, body by Mommy, feet by E, all without looking. The girls are still talking about how surprised they were that Daddy drew a snake head.

E's monster with a house.

Another lovely E monster, this one with handcuffs and chains on.

Next time I'll have to post our bug drawing contest results, and perhaps even the mermaids (although Aunt's mermaid met an untimely demise and now resides in the outside garbage can. Sorry Aunt.)

We are so talented

Yes, we are sooo talented that we have managed to come up with two girls and two boys for our children. And not only that, we managed to have them in blocks, girls first and then boys. And one of each child in different seasons, a fall boy and a spring boy, a fall girl and a spring girl. Well, what can I say? It's hard to be so good, but someone has got to set the example for all those other silly families that have, say, all girls or all boys or a disconcerting mix of the two.

(Unfortunately we are not talented enough, apparently, to figure out how to upload the ultrasound movie . . .)

Revenge of the Righteous

(Disclaimer: If any of you have been laboring under the false notion that E is a perfect child or that I, heaven forbid, am a perfect mother, please read no further unless you want your illusions shattered.)

So this morning we were (or at least I was) rushing to get us all to the library in time for storytime complete with a picnic lunch we could eat on the way to preschool. E was being unusually recalcitrant, especially on the subject of socks and whether she would wear them and which ones she would wear and if she would wear them or not unless I cut off all little dangly strings and if she would put them on herself or make me do it. On top of this, when I sent her to her room for stealing her sister's hat THREE TIMES after being told THREE TIMES not to she told me that "you never ask me if I want to do anything, you just always tell me, and it's not fair!" This just happened to be the straw that broke the exasperated Mommy's back.

So, judge me as you will, the top of my head exploded and I ranted and raved at her for a bit. Mommy ranting, E crying, M jumping around saying "Mommy, I'm doing what you say! Look, I have my shoes on already," Tooie dabbling in the breakfast he threw on the floor--it was quite the scene. 

By some miracle, we made it into the car all together with no broken bones or blood vessels and turned on some soft music to soothe all of us savage beasts. E wanted me to turn off the music so she could sing something. So I turned it off and waited, and she started singing . . . "I see my mother kneeling with the family each day etc. etc. etc. love is spoken here."

I would have felt like a real worm if she hadn't sung it in such a self-righteous way, and if it hadn't been so funny when you think about it, and if I didn't know that darn it, she had a little lecture coming to her anyway! And I suppose I did to, and she gave it to me.

Heaven help us all.

More about Christmas

I forgot to write about our most important Christmas event--trying to persuade the girls that Santa is not real. We've never hyped Santa, and we've always told the girls that he is not real. And logically, they know that. But they don't really believe that it's true. So after Christmas, after the presents magically appeared under the tree and in the stockings, they had some hard questions for their parents that went something like this:

kids: "If Santa isn't real, then how did our presents get into our stockings?"

mom: "Well, do you think maybe mommy and daddy put them in there?"

kids: "Oh mommy! Of course not. You and daddy would be asleep at night!"

Ditto for the tooth fairy. At least we tried.

(This reminds me of my favorite StoryCorps story from the Christmas season. A woman who had raised six or eight or nine children on her own after her husband left them told her son about how she had managed to have Christmas for her big family on a severely limited budget. She told him, "In our family there was no Santa, of course. I wasn't going to let any man take credit for that." Or words to that effect. My other favorite Christmas StoryCorps story was about a doorman from a big apartment building or hotel in NYC or Chicago who had some actor or comedian come to him at Christmas and ask what the biggest tip he had ever gotten was. "$50" he answered. "Well, here's $100" said Famous Man. "By the way," he continued, "who gave you that $50 tip?" "Well, sir," said the doorman, "that was you, last year.")

The girls also spent much of the Christmas season playing one of their favorite games, Holy Family. They took turns being different people. For a while, King Herod was a big draw, but they couldn't remember his name and so would call him "King Whatever-his-name-is" or "King Haggard." One day Marmot Dad heard them playing King Herod. E was narrating the action: "Mary was caught in King Herod's ropes (he used a lot of ropes to tie people up during their dramas) and the Holy Ghost said to Mary, 'Run, Mary! Run!' " Kooky kids.

It's all your fault, Mommy

Everything is always Mommy's fault. I told the girls for a long time that they couldn't check out Aladdin from the library because it was too scary (see The Little Mermaid, below). Of course I eventually caved because M, in particular, assured me that she would NOT be scared, absolutely not, not her, nuh uh. Well, they got the movie from the library, watched it immediately, and of course M started calling out that she was . . . scared. I told her to stop watching, but she wouldn't. After the movie was over, she confronted me, tearfully: "Mommy! That was really scary! I got really scared! You shouldn't have let me watch that!"

As a followup, though, on Friday night we had "family movie night" and watched Aladdin all together. Afterwards, Marmot Dad said to M, "You weren't scared at all this time." "Of course not," she answered, "I'm in Primary now!"

Rapunzel Rapunzel

Here are two takes on Rapunzel by the amazing girls:

This is Rapunzel "with piles and piles of hair" by M.
Here we have a somewhat more nuanced treatment of the fairytale by E. Note the bird's nest and mama bird and the tower.
This has nothing to do with Rapunzel, but last week in church M drew all of this music and then used it as her personal hymnbook for the singing of hymns. She cracks us up.