Saturday morning with the teens

Just a few snippets heard around our house this morning:

Sarah:  The wifi's down.
Me: Ask your dad if he has any tips or tricks.
Sarah: Daa-aaad!  The wifi's down!
Mike: [feigning terror, wailing]: Oh no! The wifi's down!  What are we going to do?!
Sarah (to me): Well, I told him, and he didn't do anything about it.
Me: You didn't ask him to.  You just whined about it.  Try this: "Dad, my wifi isn't working. Can you please help me with that?"

___________________________________

[background information: The kids and I have been learning Korean in preparation for our trip to Korea next year.]
Noah: [mumbling and complaining in Korean]
Me (to Noah): aniyo! anchuayo!
Me (to Mike): I just scolded him in his native language. Very satisfying.

________________________

I was baking a bunch of potatoes.  Sarah was hovering around the oven, waiting for them to be done.  I opened the oven, took one out, and held it out to Sarah, who refused to take it because it was hot.  I set it on the counter and started singing one of the songs from the Wiggles that the kids used to love when they were little. 
Me: Hot potato, hot potato...hot potato hot potato....hot potato hot potato, potato... Take it, honey!
Mike: Potato, potato, potato...
Noah: Ooooo! Wiggy wiggy wiggy. Ooooo! Wiggy wiggy wiggy

Clearly a deeply intellectual song, and we all remember the words all these years later.
___________________________

[background information: Mike is taking the kids to Kuk Sool classes this morning. This afternoon, Mike and I are taking Sarah to her state gymnastics meet and will be gone for several hours.  Noah is not going. Ten minutes before they're going to leave for Kuk Sool, Noah comes flying out of his room, charger cord trailing behind him like a freakish high-tech tail.]
Noah: I'll be waiting in the car!
Sarah: We're not leaving for another ten minutes.
Me: Plenty of time to have an apple or an orange....
Noah [slightly annoyed]: No thanks, Mom. I'm good.
Me: Well, I won't be here the rest of the day to nag you, so I have to get it all in early.

Buggy people

The pest control guy was supposed to come today between one and three o'clock.  Plenty of time to get some school done in the morning before picking up around the house in preparation for someone to be in every room of it.  I was in mid-sentence, reading our current book while the kids ate breakfast, when the guy called.  He asked if he could head over right then, which was three hours before his earliest scheduled arrival.  I said yes, put the book down, threw on some pants, and started scurrying around, barking orders like a drill sergeant.  There was a huge pile of laundry in the middle of the floor, so I was standing there with an armload of underwear, yelling, "Pick up everything off the floors and put your dishes in the dishwasher!  Don't leave food out; we don't want the bug guy to look at our filth pit and think 'No wonder these slobs have bugs!'...."

Sarah interrupted with, "Um..Mom?  He's on the porch and the door is open, so he already knows we're buggy people."  I turned around (still clutching the family's underwear), and sure enough, there he was at the front door, smiling.  He must have called me from my very own driveway.

Biscuits, anyone?

Apparently I let my students get too comfortable during reading time.  Especially since one of them doesn't function very well in the morning and would sleep till noon if I let him. This is the same child who got a sticker on his chart when he was two years old, for not waking Mommy up until the first number on his digital clock was a six.  But I digress.

I was reading, and they were supposed to be listening.  Noah was stretched out on the couch with his eyes closed.  He could have been paying really close attention and envisioning the scene in his mind...or he could have been sleeping.  Hard to tell.  So I gave him a little poke in the ribs and asked him a plot question: "What do you think she wanted Reuben to do with the money?"  He stirred, and then he mumbled, "No, thanks."  I looked over at Sarah, who was wide awake and paying attention, and she burst out laughing.  I said, "I'm not offering you a biscuit; I'm asking a reading comprehension question to determine if you're paying attention!"

Would You Rather?

We were playing a rousing game of  "Would You Rather?" and the question was: Would you rather have the ability to stop time or the ability to fly?  Sarah and I chose flight.  It seemed like a no-brainer to me.  I asked Noah why he wanted to stop time.  He said, "I don't; I just don't want to fly."  Sarah said, "How could anyone not want to fly?"  Noah replied, "If you could fly, you'd just get shot down by the government and held for testing."

Receding featherline

There's a rather..."special"...cardinal that visits us every day.  It appears that he might have had some sort of head injury, because his behavior is bizzare, and he's bald, except for one wild feather on top.  We call him Donald, because his wild hair reminds us of Donald Trump's.

There's a female cardinal that hangs around our yard too.  Donald has tried repeatedly to proposition her with his weird antics: fluffing his feathers in a lopsided way and doing strange dive-bombing type flights near her.  She's unimpressed.  She always just flies away without a backward glance at him.

Sarah: How sad.  She's not the least bit interested in him.
Me: Maybe she's holding out for someone more attractive.
Sarah: What makes a bird attractive?
Me: I guess one with all his parts and pieces in the right places.
Noah: And one that doesn't have a receding featherline. 

Update:  As of June 3, Donald has gone completely bald:

We might have to change his name to Telly Savalas.

Jesus

4/10/17 I'm reading Beautiful Outlaw by John Eldredge. Last night I read that if you want to know what Jesus looks like, ask Him, and then watch for Him to answer, but be alert to ways of answering that you might not be expecting. So I asked Jesus if I could see His face, especially His eyes. Then I closed my eyes and waited for an image of His face to appear. I saw nothing but the back of my eyelids. I asked and watched and waited several times and then went to sleep, having seen nothing. I woke up early and didn't want to get out of bed yet, so I read the Bible and had my devotional time, then turned on the TV. On the History Channel was a show called The Face of Jesus Uncovered.  I remembered my prayer of last night and thought, "I have to watch this."  It was about the process of using modern technology to make an accurate reconstruction of Jesus' face using the shroud of Turin. I watched the whole thing, and near the end, they showed His face. It filled the screen, and I realized, “There's the answer to last night's prayer!” But His eyes were closed. So I prayed, “Thank You for showing me Your face...but can I see Your eyes?” and right that instant, He (on the TV screen) opened His eyes. It was like He was in the room with me. I don't know if it was an accurate representation of Him, but the point is that He heard my prayer and answered me.

4/11/17 update. Jesus is so good! He woke me up early this morning and said, “Do you still want to see Me behind your eyelids? Well, here you go!” Ok, I didn't realize it at the time. I thought I just woke up because I had to pee, and I was aimlessly scrolling through facebook when this appeared:

I looked at the image, then closed my eyes, and there was His face behind my eyelids!

Gardening

This morning was perfect for working in the garden.  It has rained a lot recently, so the ground was nice and soft for pulling weeds.  Various birds, ducks, worms, and bugs were keeping me company, and Jesus met me there, as He often does.  I worked hard, raking out last year's leaves and dead stuff, and pulling lots and lots of weeds.  My back and legs ached from hunching over so long, and my hands looked like this:

After an hour, I could see the fruits of my labor.  The strawberry plants that I had been working around looked healthy and free to grow.

I felt good about my productive hour of work, stood up to stretch my aching muscles, and looked down the length of the garden.  From that perspective, I could see I still have so much work to do.  It was a little daunting.

Jesus brought to mind my friend who is discouraged about all the evil in the world, and as I surveyed my work,  I knew what He wanted me to tell her.  You can't stop all the evil and save all the animals in the world, but you can certainly make a difference in your sphere of influence.  I can't get every weed out of the garden, but the little corner I worked on today looks way better than it did before I started.  Tomorrow I'll do a little more.  So, dear friend, just do what you can, be happy with what you've done, and don't give up!

Racism

I made black rice, and Sarah refused to eat it, because it's black. I called her a racist, and she replied, "I'm not a racist; I'm a ricist!"