I heard her telling Noah that the wise men brought three gifts to baby Jesus: gold, Frankenstein, and murder.
When I asked her to start a load of laundry, she sighed like a martyr, and I chastised her for her attitude. She said, "That was just a sigh of contentment, Mom."
She drew this picture of Marty the cat, thinking about a cherry:
We were having a deep discussion today about which came first, the chicken or the egg. The kids had all kinds of ideas and opinions on that, and then I said, "I think God created the chicken and then it laid an egg." Sarah immediately replied with complete over-confidence, "Nope. The egg was first." She was as definite about it as though she created the world herself. Oh, to be six years old and know everything again!
We rescued our kitten from the Humane Society when he was six months old and tried to make him a housecat. But this boy was born to be wild. He was restless and not content in the house. He could never get rid of his excess energy and was always trying to dart out the door. An old saying came to my mind: If you love something, set it free. If comes back to you, it's yours. If it doesn't, it never was.
So I bought little Jason a collar and a tag and set him free. Well, not totally free at first. We would take him out in the fenced yard for "supervised visits". He proved himself trustworthy, and it made me happy to see him run full speed across the yard, climb the tree, chase butterflies, and chew grass. He was completely content. When he came inside, he was full of affection and had a much calmer personality.
Eventually, I started leaving the window open and letting him come and go as he pleases. He always comes back. Then he started joining me on my morning walks. He trots along next to me like a little dog.
He climbs trees with Noah:
He likes to go fishing with us:
This morning, Jason came flying in through the window, meowing like crazy and so covered in branches and burrs that I barely even recognized him. The kids and I spent a long time cleaning him up and combing burrs out of his fur. In retrospect, he looked hilarious (like a walking, meowing bush), but I didn't take time to get my camera, because he was in distress.
Remember my earlier post about flying creatures in the house? Today I realized how the bird got into the house in the first place. It was lucky it lived. Today, Jason appeared in the window with a dead sparrow in his mouth. He jumped into the house and flung the carcass down the stairs. He stalked its lifeless body as it bounced down the stairs, and then he pounced on it, flung it up in the air, and stalked it again. He caught it between his front paws:
Then he tossed it up and caught it in his back paws:
Finally when blood and feathers started flying, I removed the poor thing.
I gave Noah a box and asked him to pack SOME of his huge collection of stuffed animals. I knew it would be too much to ask him to pack all of them (since he has named them all and considers each one a personal friend), but I thought he could do at least half.
Almost an hour later, he had packed three animals, and he was leaning over the box explaining to them, "Just because I put you in this box doesn't mean that I don't love you. You just have to stay in here for a little while, and when you come out, you'll be in a nice new house!"
I had Sarah do a writing exercise called "All About Me" to practice writing sentences. I supplied the questions, and she had to write a sentence to answer each one. Here's what she wrote:
What is your name? My name is Sarah. How old are you? I am six years old. What do you look like? I am a nice person. (I loved this answer, because she didn't focus on how gorgeous she is, but on her nice personality)
And my favorite.... What is the thing you like most about yourself? I can do anything.
Noah tore the carpet out of the hall and discovered very nice hardwood underneath it. It's under the carpet in all three bedrooms, so we're considering taking out more carpet. The problem is all those darn nails, staples, and worst of all, tack strips that formerly held the carpet down. Mike, Noah, and I have been working on pulling all that out, and we've discovered that you can't be too rough or else you scratch the precious hardwood. You also can't be too gentle, or else you don't make any progress at all. It's slow, difficult, time-consuming, messy, sometimes painful work that requires the perfect balance of firmness and gentleness as you chip away the old, ugly sharp edges to reveal the hidden beauty, but it's worthwhile in the end; sometimes you want to give up and call in the professionals. Sounds a lot like parenting, doesn't it?
Just yesterday at CBS, we were talking about how being happy in your work is a gift from God (Ecc. 5:19). I'm happy to have the gift of work to do: tearing up floors and raising kids.
There he is, about to pull up the pad...
Discovering the buried treasure!
Now he's saying, "Why didn't we do this YEARS ago?!"
