Something Lighter

Well, yesterday was just a great big cryfest, wasn't it? Ug. File under Things I Should Shut Up About.

So let's try to keep it a bit lighter today, shall we?

Penny asks the weirdest questions. Especially when we're riding in the car and she hasn't got anything else to do but ponder random shit.

"Mom, why can't we have a fox for a pet?" Because we don't keep wild animals as pets. "But what if there was no where else to live?" That doesn't even make sense. If you want to take care of foxes, maybe you can work for a zoo someday. "No, I want to be a police!"

"How many da- How many months until I go to college?" (She usually asks "how many days" it is until some event entirely too far out into the future to count days. I guess this time she realized that it would be a ridiculous number, even for her.) Well, let's see. Ten years left in regular school, so that's 120 months. Plus the... six months between now and when you start the third grade, so 126 months before you start college. Why? "I just wanted to know."

And she's weirdly persuasive, at least to her brother. Last night's conversation
Penny: "I'm going upstairs to play. Alex, you can come with me, if you want to."
Alex: "I'm coming upstairs! I want to play with you!"
Matt, to me: "Our daughter has a bright future in sales."
Me: "Next, I'm looking for her to get him whitewashing a fence."

Alex likes to repeat things. Especially things Penny says, though Matt and I are close seconds. Really, he just wants to talk. A lot.
Alex: "I got pants!"
Me: "Yep, and so do I."
Alex: "And I do, too!"

He likes to help me make dinner in the evenings, though, which is utterly adorable. Of course, his "help" is confined to putting things in a pot and occasionally stirring, and generally makes the process take longer. But it's cute. And I've found that letting him help me increases the probability of his eating it. (Last night, he ate a whole bowl of tortellini soup -- including the zucchini and spinach and onions -- because I'd let him dump things in the pot for me.) And he likes to nibble on the vegetables as we're cooking together. I let him -- if he's going to spoil his appetite for dinner, by all means let it be spoiled because he ate too many veggies, right? He'll eat things standing on the kitchen stool that he would never touch if I put them on a plate in front of him.

He likes to help me make lunches, too, by putting the tops on sandwiches (usually crooked) and counting the rolls of lunchmeat as I put them in Penny's bento box.

So in summary: kids. Totally cute, if sometimes a bit incomprehensible.