Category: Parenting

Slow week this time. We’re all ready for Spring so that I can usher the kids outdoors and they can do something more physical than playing Lego Batman. The kids are so starved for exercise that they ask me to “play chase” just about every evening, which usually involves me pretending to be a villain from Lego Batman and chasing them around the living room. Only Mandy occasionally latches on to the fact that Batman does not flee from his foes, and she’ll run straight up to me and punch me as hard as she can in the crotch. And with that, Mr. Freeze or the Joker goes down. It’s all very America’s Funniest Home Videos.

Boy, some delightful behavior out of my girls this week. Geralyn made a big batch of chocolate-covered strawberries for Valentine’s Day and the leftovers were put in a large tupperware container for future enjoyment. That evening after we had retired to the basement I went upstairs to investigate suspicious pitter-pattering. I had just made it to the base of the stairs leading to the top floor of the house when I heard a thunk and saw out of the corner of my eye a pink flash going from the landing up the rest of the steps.

The thunk, it turns out, was the entire tupperware of a dozen or more chocolate covered strawberries, with which Mandy was trying to abscond to her room before she decided to dump her stolen cargo and make a run for it. I can only imagine Geralyn’s apoplectic reaction if I had been just a few seconds later and it wasn’t until the next morning that Mandy was discovered, in bed but smeared with chocolate and surrounded by sticky strawberry stems.

Then the next night Sam did her part by taking what seemed to be several gallons of bath water and relocating them to the bathroom floor with the aid of a bucket. I discovered the ensuing quagmire about the same time that Geralyn was freaking out in the basement on account of all the water following the laws of gravity and pouring out of the downstairs air ducts.

Of course, I shouldn’t sell the girls short. For every bit of facepalm-worthy mischief they manufacture, they do something else really sweet. Sam has gotten to where she picks up her toys every night without being asked and will toss out “I love you” comments out of the blue. And the other night after I had turned the TV off and played with both of them for an hour or so Mandy looked up at me and said “That was fun playing blocks with you. You’re a really good daddy.”

And folks, it doesn’t get much better than that.

Busy with other stuff this week, so here’s two quick pictures just to keep the chain unbroken. I think they’re making hot chocolate or something after playing in the snow that a vengeful Mother Nature dumped on us. Also, tattoos.

I have to say, I’m thinking about bringing this whole series of parenting updates to a close. There doesn’t seem to be much energy in them, and at least Sam is getting old enough that while I’ve long ago passed the point of etching all kinds of embarrassing things about her on the Inernet’s gleaming surface, it’s still starting to feel a little rude to blog about her.

Which isn’t to say that I wouldn’t want to do some semi-regular blogging about parenting and my kids. And honestly I still think it would be totally cool to continue to photograph my kids at least once a week every week until they’re grown up. You could make a hell of a photo album for each of them as high school graduation gifts and it would be priceless. But I may change the format a bit. I dunno. I’m going to think about it.

Oh, hey, that’s right. Pictures!

Not much happening this week. I did get to spend some one-on-one time with Mandy thanks to some overscheduling of Daddy-Daughter classes, and Yoga. We went to the former. This is nice because I often feel like I didn’t get the same foundation with her that I got with Sam when she was the only sibling. It’s also odd how Mandy is often a different person when it’s just the two of us. She’s much more affectionate with me and more likely to engage with me in play instead of doing her faux snob routine. That she apparently reserves for everyone else. And getting her bathed and ready for bed is SO much easier when Sam isn’t there to suggest “Hey, let’s pretend we’re dogs and TOTALLY FREAK OUT!”

Sam is doing really well with her reading, which now includes words like “Hunt’s Tomato Ketchup” and “Press OK to see a list of recorded shows.” The other night she read three books to me. On the one hand, this was nice, because I just had to lie there and I think I may have dozed off a little. On the other hand, it takes about five times as long as my reading to her. But I suspect she’ll pick up the pace. The unexpected consequence of teaching her to read, though, is that she is learning how to navigate things like the DVR to bring up her own shows. Only sometimes she decides to check out our shows as well. I came down on Saturday morning to find her and Mandy watching the decidedly NON kid friendly show Caprica, the prequel to the recent Battlestar Galactica remake.

“It’s a show about a girl who has a robot for a friend!” Sam exclaimed when I asked her what the heck she was watching. “Only she’s not really a robot. She’s like a ghost or something.”

This kind of pissed me off, because I hadn’t watched the show yet and she hadn’t given me a spoiler warning. Time to figure out the parental controls on the new DVR.

Of course, the big news is that Sam turned 6 recently. Six! Geralyn was in charge of the birthday party, and she opted for a more girl-friendly activity like crafts. The party was on a Sunday, though, so I somehow found myself standing at a table full of five and six year old girls trying to coach them on how to properly string little plastic beads on lengths of fishing wire. “Just do it right!” is, apparently, not helpful advice.

There were also gifts, and the big winner was actually a remote controlled car from Ger’s godmother. Mandy even proved deft at piloting the little gray blur across the carpet, though judging by the number of wrecks the thing has and how they wanted to take it into the bathtub, the driver is apparently a tiny Ted Kennedy. …What? Too soon?

The other day we switched cable providers to someone who gave us a DVR bundled with the service. This meant that we said goodbye to TiVo after more than eight years. It also meant a transition period where there was not a bank of kids’ shows to be dialed up. The result was that Sam and Mandy watched live TV for a few days, which while being downright barbaric, did teach Sam some things. Namely:

1. Cats can trim their own nails with the new Emery Cat Board
2. You must be over 18 to order
3. Call now and you’ll get a bonus, second board for free

Seriously, it’s like all she talked about at dinner one night.

Had a bit more going on this week. Sam finished up her pom pom class with a flourish, amid a gymnasium full of parents looking at each other and saying things like “Yay! She’s shaking a colorful thing! And shouting stuff! Yay!” Sam had a blast, though, and received a medal and more pom poms. She’s still deliberating whether to return for the next semester of classes.

Sam also had a big milestone this week: just shy of her 6th birthday, she finally lost her first baby tooth! She was totally on board for this and almost overenthusiastic about the event. The tooth fairy rewarded her with a dollar coin in the middle of the night, which is sure a heck of a lot more than I ever got.

Monday was a holiday, so we all went over to the local children’s museum/science center to gawk at the traveling Curious George exhibit. A very world weary (not to mention 6-foot tall) George padded out to wave at the children, then periodically disappeared behind a door labeled “Staff Only.” Still, the girls loved it.

A couple of days before that, I guess I should note, we had a “daddy daughter day” when Geralyn took a day off to attend an all day scrapbooking marathon. Because we had coupons, I took them bowling. The alley at least put little bumpers up to block the gutters, but as it was I had to help Mandy squat down in the lane and give the bright green kiddie bowling ball a good shove. Later, she dominated the Dance Dance Revolution game in the arcade, proving that at age 3 she’s the most coordinated one in the family.

Snow! I mean, more snow!

I’ve noticed that Sam is being a lot more empathetic lately. I think all kids learn to read emotions, like they know when you’re pissed or when you’re happy and they react accordingly, even if it’s usually in a self-interested way. But Sam seems to be cluing in lately on how others feel and letting it affect her own mood. The other morning I was getting ready for work and couldn’t find my iPod Touch. For me, this is like not being able to find my kidney or something, and I was flustered because I thought I might have left it at the gym. Sam, who had wandered down to say goodby to me as she does most weekday mornings, picked up on my agitation and started looking everywhere with me. Later that night when I came home Geralyn said that Sam had been preoccupied by my missing device and had been looking for it all day because she said it made me unhappy that it was lost. When I eventually found it (on top of the entertainment cabinet in the basement, duh) Sam was giddy with joy. Good girl.

We had a pretty slow week this time around, so not much to report.

One thing I have noticed it that since Mandy has grown up enough for Sam to play with, they really do play a lot together. In fact, they will often now elect to omit me and Geralyn from their playtime entirely, which at first was kind of cool (relief! dishes! e-mail!) but at the same time I can’t help feeling that this is kind of sad. I’ve had to actually go to the trouble of inserting myself into their play, and to be honest a lot of times I get distracted. Is this that “growing up” thing that everyone kept telling me would happen? Are they going to move out of the house soon?

We had a great Christmas again this year with my sister and mom in town to help celebrate and tame the girls. Photo dump!

See you next year.

Man, Mandy is three. Three! That’s hard to get my head around, but I’m told these things happen. She’s certainly been looking forward to her birthday party, even if it was low key and we just had Grandpa and Geralyn’s godmother over for dinner –chicken nuggets and mac and cheese per immutable tradition. Still, there were presents, which Samantha did her best to immediately co-op, as sharing is a concept apparently best pro-actively enforced.

Sam continues to practice her spelling and reading almost obsessively, to the point where she’s spelling new words out to herself and getting better at writing things. She was thrilled recently to get a letter from Santa congratulating her on this, proclaiming that if you in fact read between the lines this put her at the TOP of the “Nice” list. She’s generally rolling with the whole Santa thing, with one exception. Geralyn took the kids to an event where they met Santa, and also in attendance was an “elf.” I put that in quotes because it was obviously someone’s grandpa that had been crammed into an elf suit –all six wrinkly feet of him. Sam kept giving this fellow dubious glances, and on the way home she commented that she didn’t think that was a REAL elf, because REAL elves are small. And didn’t just sit there staring into space. Perceptive girl.

I’d like to close by pointing out that this week has two of my new favorite pictures of Mandy. I somehow managed to get great lighting on this shot of Mandy with her birthday cake. And then there’s this pic of her taking a time out the next day.

Short update this week, but I’m sure I’ll have lots to talk about in the following weeks. Here’s a couple of pictures to keep the 307+ point combo going:

If the children look more …stained than usual, it’s because I took these at the end of the day. All bets are really off after dinner (really, during dinner), since we figure everything is soon going into its/her respective washes anyway.

I did have an amusing conversation wtih Sam the other day, though. I had come home from the gym and was still a bit sweaty. She looked at me and said, “Daddy, why is your hair all wet?”

“It’s sweat. From exercising.”

“What’s sweat?”

“Well, when your body gets hot your skin produces a liquid called sweat so that you can cool off. Actually, I think it’s when the sweat evaporates that the cooling happens.”

“Oh.” She thought a moment.”And if you get thirsty you can drink the sweat!”

“Eaugh. No, you wouldn’t want to do that. I think sweat is closer to pee than water.”

“…WHAT?”

“Well, I mean, it’s not really clean.”

“Daddy?”

“Yes, Sam?”

“I’m NEVER going to exercise.”

“Fantastic.”

So there you have it. Thanks a lot, sweat.

I mentioned last week that I had elected to let Sam start watching the Star Wars movies, starting with Episode I. We finished watching this first movie the other day, and Sam made it through just fine until the end when Qui Gon Jin was killed (OMG SPOILER!) and she cried like a little girl. Interestingly, right after the movie ended she ran to get her Star Wars figures (one of which was actually Qui Gon) and started acting out the climactic scene. Eventually she started altering it to reside more in her comfort zone and Darth Maul was eventually trounced horribly before the murder could take place. So, psychological coping trumps movie continuity again. Much like how I’ve always fantasized that Jar Jar Binks was horribly murdered three seconds after his introduction.

In addition to recreating scenes from movies, Sam has taken an interest in authoring books using her burgeoning mastery over letters and, occasionally, punctuation. Each morning she’ll sit down at her work table, pound out her harrowing tales, and staple them together into book form. I halfway expect to come down one morning and find her head buried in a pile of dirty coffee mugs and cigarette butts.

I have one of her books here entitled “My Day as a Flower”, which I will transcribe, along with approximate translations in brackets:

Cover: “As pratforyw” [???]

Page 1: “frst da asa sed.” [First day as a seed.]

Page 2: “frst da awef a stem” [First day with a stem.]

Page 3: “frst da wef a flowr” [First day with a flower.]

It makes a bit more sense with the accompanying illustrations. She has also produced others in this series, including “My day as a pumpkin” and “My day as a tree.” And actually, I’m surprised and pleased at how quickly she’s improving even in the course of a week. Her sophomore effort, “My day as a tree” clearly displays greater command of spelling, putting spaces between words, and use of the unreliable narrator technique.

Mandy seems to be mellowing a bit, but still engages in her own signature brand of mischief. The other day Geralyn e-mailed me this photo. That is, as you may know, a “chocolate per day” Advent calendar that has been strip mined of all its delicious ore. This would have been no big deal had it in fact been Christmas day, but even the most cursory examination of a regular calendar showed that it was merely December 3rd.

After berating Mandy for eating 23 pieces of chocolate in one go, Geralyn asked how this act of confectionary larceny made her feel. One must suspect that Mandy’s reply of “Not good” referred in equal degrees to both her conscience and her tummy.

On a cuter note, Mandy seems to have developed an odd but amusing habit whenever she goes for a ride in the car. Up until a week or two ago, she would randomly pipe up with the somber assertion that “You shouldn’t step on power lines.” She would dispense this sensible advice this with all the air and gravity the subject deserved, and would repeat it ten to twenty times per car trip. Recently, she has updated her observation to “Some animals run away,” which she now reminds you of every few minutes. For no discernable reason. One wonders what her next proclamation will be. Personally, I can’t wait.

We had a great week last week since my sister and mother came in to visit for Thanksgiving. The girls love seeing their aunt and Nana, and we love looking up to realize that someone else is going to give them a bath or read to them. (Also, seeing my sister and mom is great.) Finally, there was a ton of food and over the weekend we threw Christmas decorations against just about every household surface to which they’d stick, including the children.

You may also notice from the pictures that we made a family outing to the world famous St. Louis Arch and went all the way up to the tippy top. Geralyn, having worked there as a tour guide during high school, was able to regale us with various facts about the height of the arch, the number of steps, and various datelines related to its construction. The kids didn’t like the waiting in long lines parts, but they did love the observation area at the top where we could marvel at the skyscrapers and parks of downtown St. Louis, Missouri on the west side and the casinos and strip clubs of Sauget, Illinois on the east side. Truly we got the entire spectrum of delights.

In other news, I recently decided to further Sam’s geekification by exposing her to the Star Wars movies. I figure she’s ready. What I hadn’t realized, though, was that there is considerable debate among the nerdigalian about the proper order in which to view even the movies –never mind the animated Clone Wars movie, the TV shows, or the Ewoks Christmas Special. Some people seem to recommend a Roman numeral soup of viewing sequences, like “IV, I, V, II, III, VI.” What? To me, these are the insane ravings, burbling from the mouths of some asthmatic, lunatic zealots and based on logic so byzantine that it defies my simple mind. So chronological order it is. Sam enjoyed the first hour and a half of The Phantom Menace that we watched last night, and even though the notorious pod racing sequence was her favorite, she tells me that Jar Jar Binks is “an idiot” and that she hates him. So there’s hope.

Man, what is it with Mandy and her hair? Not only did she hack a good chunk of it off that one time, but any time you try to do so much as comb it lately she completely freaks out. If I suddenly hear shrieks of absolute horror and rage coming from her bathroom, I can usually be pretty sure that either the hyenas have breached our defenses again, or Geralyn is trying to put Mandy’s hair up in a simple pony tail. Usually it’s the latter.

Sam’s new thing lately is learning to spell words by repeatedly sounding them out. Only she sometimes gets stuck on the first sound in the word, which can be annoying if you’re trying to have a normal conversation and end up feeling like you’re talking to Porky Pig on a bad day.

I recently also blew Sam’s mind by introducing her to the concept of homonyms. The realization that “light” (as in from a lamp) and “light” (as in not weighing much) are said and spelled the same way, yet meant completely different things literally shorted out her brain for a few seconds as it tried to make the least bit of sense out of this. Then I drove it home by telling her about homophones, like “know” and “no” or “tale” and “tail” or –OH MY GOD!– “to,” “too,” and “two.” I decided to pull back and not bring up heteronyms, though.

The funny thing about this is that it reminded me of how god-like adults sometimes appear to children in their wisdom and power. Sam was just starting to get her brain around the ways that letters fit together to make words, much less the idea that “row” is always spelled the same, but can refer to either an argument or something you do with boat depending on how it’s pronounced. Now her favorite thing is to have me toss out more and more of these linguistic oddities like some kind of language magician, and honestly I’m starting to run out.

Ooh, wait, I just thought of another one: bass (fish) and bass (instrument). Good one. Oh! And I can throw in “base” to really mess with her. Heh heh heh…

One of the lessons I’ve had to learn about being a parent is how hard it can be to play the bad guy and how necessary it is. I love my kids and want them to love me, but I often have to do things that REALLY piss them off. This seems to be coming up mostly with Mandy lately since she’s at that age where she will just mess with you for the sake of messing you. But the other night I had to endure making Sam hate me, even if it was just temporary.

She and Mandy had been playing “let’s take everything out of everything else and put it everywhere” in their bedrooms, and while this is fine they have to clean up. I set Mandy to picking up in her room, but for some reason Sam started moaning and crying.

“Sam,” I said. “What the heck? Clean up.”

“Help me.”

“No, you made the mess, you clean it up.”

“Daddy! Whenever I have to clean up alone it makes me feel sad inside.”

“Oh, I am totally not buying what you’re selling, Sam. Get over it and clean up.”

Maybe 10 minutes of crying and floundering followed, during which I sat on the edge of her bed and occasionally poked her with the butt end of a hobby horse.

Finally she sat upright and glared at me. “You’re not my friend anymore!”

This actually stings every time she says it, but I stuck to my guns. “Uh huh. Clean up.”

“But you’re really hurting my feelings.”

“Because I’m asking you to clean up the mess you made? That should not hurt your feelings. You need to suck it up and get tougher feelings and CLEAN UP.”

“But my blessings book says God knows how I feel.”

“He also said ‘Obey your father and mother.’ BOOM! OWNED! I had more years of Bible school than you can count, Sam. Clean up.”

This went on for some time, and I only finally got her to clean up by letting Mandy sit in Sam’s coveted deep end of the bathtub. But still, GEEZ.

(And lest you think I’m some kind of monster, I did try several times in the course of this to hold her and calm her down, but she was having none of it and wouldn’t even let me sit next to her. This one had to be ridden out.)

The interesting thing about conflicts with Sam and Mandy is that they kind of roughly map on to how conflicts played out between my parents and me and my sister (hi Shawn!). Like Samantha, Shawn would be much more likely to directly lock horns with you, arguing and fighting head to head to get her way. I, on the other hand, was more like Mandy in that I would most often ignore you completely or mutter something noncommittal if I had to, then just go and do whatever the hell I wanted as soon as you turned your back. People who know us might say that these traits persisted into my and Shawn’s adulthood, so I guess I know what I have to look forward to in my own kids.

Of course, this means I have advance notice for the purpose of planning and scheming.

Just a quick update this week, but I do feel compelled to mention one incident which has so far set the high water mark on my children’s miscreant behavior.

The other night I was watching the kids when I turned my back just long enough to watch a short segment of a TV talk show. The girls disappeared into the laundry room, which in addition to the washer and dryer is inhabited by our cat and his litter box. I swear, not more than a few minutes had passed when I realized that they were being too quiet, which is NEVER a good sign. Hearing laughing and cries of “Bad cat!” I tracked them down to their hiding place, opened the door, and promptly flipped my lid.

Most surfaces up to four feet high in the whole room were smeared with clotted kitty litter, and the girls were busy rubbing the gunk into the hapless cat’s fur. Sam had apparently filled a bowl with water to aid in this fiendish alchemy, and the stuff was EVERYWHERE. Upon seeing me, Sam immediately shouted “Mandy did it!” even though I COULD TOTALLY SEE HER WITH TWO HAND FULLS OF GUMMY KITTY LITTER.

Like I said, I flipped out and started screaming at them. Realizing that this kind of reaction was on a WHOLE other level than my typical admonishments, they both bolted and headed for higher ground (i.e., upstairs) while I continued to scream at them and the newly crusty cat looked up at me with a kind of “Where the hell WERE YOU?” expression. Hearing the promotion, Geralyn ran up from the basemen to ask what was going on, saw the laundry room, and then she flipped HER lid.

In the end, the girls had to clean up everything (under protest, natch) while I hosed down the cat in their bathtub. The cat, I believe, was mostly praying for death. Not necessarily his own.

We had a pretty good Halloween this year. As you can see below, Mandy was a fairy type thing complete with wand/cudgel, and Samantha was Supergirl. The best thing about Halloween was the pose Sam struck below, which pretty much captures every picture of Superman I’ve ever seen. She’s surprisingly easy to direct.

When we went out to hit the houses, Mandy started by going up to doors, screaming “I GET SOME CANDY!” and then lurching for the candy bowl if the unsuspecting homeowner let it anywhere near her. Seriously, if the person was distracted at all, Mandy would end up literally raking candy into her bag. We had five tons of candy at the end of the night, and here’s a fun fact: our children can’t be trusted to stay away from it. The morning after, Geralyn found a cache of candy wrappers behind some furniture, evidence of the girls’ clandestine trips to the top shelves of the pantry where we had stashed the sugary goods. So we punished them by not taking them to donut breakfast on Sunday morning. There.

We had carved our own pumpkins earlier in the week, and this was some fun. Mostly because of the way Mandy reacted with horror upon learning what kinds of things are actually inside a freshly punctured pumpkin and how those things smelled. Hilarious. Sam and Mandy ended up painting their own little pumpkins, which amounted to slathering every color in the rainbow onto the gourds, but they had a blast.

There was also cupcake decorating on the day before Halloween, and Geralyn went all Martha by topping them with candies like gummy worms (with cookie crumb “dirt”), gummy brains, gummy pumpkins, candy eyeballs, and more. We even let Sam do some of the piping, with pretty good results.

Man, week 300? I’ve been doing this for three hundred weeks? Doesn’t seem like it. Sorry I don’t have anything special planned. I guess I could dig up some sparklers here somewhere…

Actually not a particularly eventful week all told. One cool thing is that Sam has started to sound out words she sees, so I’m pretty sure she’ll be reading on her own soon. For some reason she’s also started to show a keen interest in volcanoes, though mostly for their immense destructive power. She regularly tests my knowledge of all things volcanic by quizzing me.

“How do scientists study volcanoes without getting killed?” she asked this morning.

“Well,” I said, “They study them a lot when they’re not erupting. Or they may leave machines behind that record or transmit observations from erupting ones. Or they could study them from far away, like in an airplane.”

“What if they were flying in a plane and the volcano erupted and the lava shot up and killed them all!”

“That would be …tragic.”

“Yeah, that would be awesome.”

To divert the conversation a bit more from Sam’s misunderstanding of the word “tragic” I brought up YouTube and did a search on “volcanos.” This brought up many pleasingly amazing videos, which Sam watched with interest. At one point, though, I had to leave the room for a few minutes to attend to Mandy, and when I came back I found that Sam had apparently clicked through to a series of “related videos” to see more at the end of each clip. And just so you know, YouTube somehow thinks the subjects volcanos, swine flu, Perez Hilton, Sailor Moon, and evil chipmunks are related through some mysterious logic. Consider Sam’s horizons expanded.

Mandy continues to push the boundaries of our household rules and common sense, as is listed clearly in her current job description. Her latest thing is climbing, so it’s not unusual for me to come into a room and find her halfway up to the ceiling thanks to some ramshackle scaffolding consisting of toy boxes, bouncy balls, and wicker. We are working on this. Hopefully we will not need the assistance of gravity to teach any lessons.

Mandy has gone through a couple of big milestones in the last few weeks. She’s 100% out of diapers (woo! it’s like getting a pay raise!) AND we’ve moved her to the big girl bed. And by “moved her to the big girl bed” I mean “took the gate off her crib and put it in the basement.” She did really well, and we’ve only been woken once by a muffled “thump!” followed by cried of “I fell out of the bed!”

It didn’t take any time at all, though, for Mandy to realize that with the crib gate gone, she could simply swing her legs out and exit the bed any time she wished. It took her another couple of nights after this to realize that if she avoided us, she stay up to prowl the house longer. You can guess where this led. One night when Geralyn was out with some friends I had put Mandy down and retired to the basement to watch TV. When Ger came home late that night she found Mandy asleep in her little pink arm chair after trying to waiting up for mommy to come home. Sweet, right? The next night I got wise and came upstairs to investigate strange sounds, only to find Mandy sitting at the kitchen table with a cookie in one hand and a soggy clump of orange snack crackers in the other. She looked up at me in surprise, paused for a second to think, then said through a mouth full of Cheese-its, “I just wanted a hug from you, daddy.” We even have a little latch high up on the pantry door, but she had pulled a chair over and ascended to the necessary heights to unhinge it and procure her snack. Are two year olds supposed to do this kind of thing?

You may also notice some pictures of the kids playing in the leaves. These are real leaves, imported at great personal expense from my front yard. The funniest thing was actually afterwards when Sam put one of those tall paper lawn bags over her head and started running into things while shouting “I’m a ghost! I’m a blind ghost!” Alas, I didn’t have my camera handy. Sam continues to like going to kindergarten, and apparently she’s got a few areas that she’s excelling in. The other day we got a message from the school informing us that Sam had displayed high level understanding of a story, including its message, themes, and morals. This was pretty cool, because I’m pretty sure the only phone calls my parents got from my schools were the ones saying that they had just beaten me with a plastic paddle for not doing my math homework. True story!

Human psychology is a weird thing. Under strange and sometimes contrived circumstances it can lead us to do bizarre things like paying $50 for a $20 bill or lose all our fortunes on an obviously lost cause. It can also cause us to take our children out in the freezing rain to Silver Dollar City and demand that BY GOD they’re going to RIDE THE LADY BUG RIDE and they’re going to LOVE IT and they’re going to STOP THEIR COMPLAINING.

But jesting aside, we actually had an overdue and very enjoyable family vacation this last week. We packed up the kids, the car, and Geralyn’s dad then headed to Branson, Missouri. If you’ve never been to Branson, imagine the trademark Las Vegas glitz, but stripped of its sinful indulgences and infused with equal parts wholesome family values and washed up country music stars. We rented a condo for a few days and hit the strip, and the girls LOVED it despite the aforementioned day or two of cold and wet weather.

Among the highlights was Silver Dollar City, where you can stand around watching a one-armed old man blowing glass and whittling a rocking chair –at the same time. There were also rides, which were much more enjoyable on our second, rain free day.

Later that same night we also went to go see a stage show about Noah’s Ark, which was at the grandly named “Sights and Sound Theater” which seems a lot less grandly named once you realize that people have been doing “sights and sound theater” for a few thousand years now. Both Sam and Mandy were entranced by the production, though, and really liked it. Sam in particular has become obsessed with drawing arks, and I’m afraid to serve her any mashed potatoes lest she decide to make an impromptu sculpture.

We also rode in an amphibious vehicle that had seen service in World War II, and let me tell you that when the driver of a vehicle that is currently rolling on solid ground guns it and heads straight for a body of water, your brain kind of freaks out. Once out on the lake, though, the guide invited us all up to drive the car/boat for a bit. Sam had to be coaxed into doing it, but Mandy readily jumped into the driver’s seat and started giggling and yanking on the wheel like she was trying to do donuts.

So, it was a great time and I’m really glad I had the chance to enjoy it.