Plane old day

One of my favorite things about Sarah is that she loves to make things and give them to people.  Today she presented me with a wrapped package and a homemade card on top.  Written in crayon on the card was, "Happy plane old day to Mom from Sarah".  Inside was a necklace that she made by stringing beads on floss.

Sign of the times

Noah encountered an unfamiliar word while reading and asked me what it meant.  I told him to look it up.  I headed for the bookshelf to haul down the dictionary that I got for high school graduation.  He headed for the computer.  Before I could even get the book down, he was telling me what the word meant.  While I was still trying to figure out what was going on, he waved my dictionary off and said, "I don't need that old-fashioned thing. I looked it up on dictionary.com."

Hi, Jean!

Today I subjected Noah to a thorough scrubbing.  He has clearly not been doing a good job keeping himself clean, so I had to get rough on him. His ears were caked with dirt and wax; his belly button had a layer of grime in it; his hair stunk; and his fingernails and toenails were too long.  I threw him in the tub and put earwax removal drops in his ears and gave them a scrubbing and scraping. Then I scrubbed out his belly button and dug into his hair.  While he was complaining about all that, I told him the way to avoid it is to have good hygiene.  He said, "Who's Jean?"  I explained that hygiene is all that stuff he hates...haircuts, nail trimming, teeth flossing, showering, etc.   He said, "Oh.  Well then I don't want to say hi to Jean.  I'd rather say bye!"

Vegetarian

Sarah came into the kitchen and got a bowl of carrots and some fruit.  She said, "This is a snack for Noah.  He decided to be a vegetarian today."  I always knew this day was coming....

When Noah was two, we told him that ham comes from pigs.  We didn't give him the graphic details, so he came up with his own explanation.  He thought pigs pooped the ham out.  He thought pigs pooped little strips of bacon too.  We let him believe that for awhile.  

I still remember the day when the lightbulb went on for him.  We were reading Laura Ingalls’ Little House in the Big Woods to him.  In the book, Pa shot two deer and hung them in the trees outside their house so the wolves wouldn’t get the meat.  Noah looked confused and asked, “So did the deer protect the meat from the wolves?”   Mike said, “The deer WAS the meat” and then we had to have the whole discussion about where the meat we buy in the grocery store really originates. He was three years old.  As I watched his face go from horrified to teary, I thought, "This kid is going to be a vegetarian."

Back to the present...
He was a vegetarian all day, but when I made bacon-wrapped chicken for dinner, it got the best of his vegetarian convictions. 

Kid writings

Every day, I give Noah a list of five words and tell him to write a sentence or two that uses them all.  I just recently started Sarah on it too.  On her first day, she wrote a poem that was so weird and lovely that my English professors in college would have approved.  Here it is:
The rainy day is melting quickly, 
dripping with ponds.

Today Noah wrote:
The farmer made his living milking the littlest cows that wagged their heads.

Monopoly Noah-isms

Noah, Sarah, and I were playing Monopoly.  Sarah had a monopoly on the big blue properties, and she had three houses on each.  Noah said, "I'm going to try to take her down, but it will be like chipping away at Pikes Peak with a toothpick."  After she won, Noah said, "You're so lucky, you should move to Kentucky!"

Snow ice cream

I went out in the blizzard to get snow to make ice cream.  Whipped it up with some sugar, vanilla, and milk, and this is what my family had to say about it:

Sarah: It's disgusting.  Tastes like clam chowder. (which she's never had, by the way)
Noah:  It tastes like banana spaghetti.
Mike: It's ok, but not worth wasting the calories.

I thought it tasted like whipped cream, so I put it in the freezer and will serve it on brownies or something someday and see if anyone recognizes it.