Days of miscellany

A good friend recently posted a graphic of how many questions she is asked in a day by her four young children.  I identified completely.  Sometimes the questions are mundane, other times varied:
--What's for dinner? (that's usually asked after an unsatisfactory breakfast)
--What is the purpose of the Postmaster General?  (after observing the imprint on every mailbox "approved by the Postmaster General")
--Could Adam and Eve read?  (asked by a 6-year old after a particularly hard day of learning to read) I'm still trying to figure out that answer to that question.
--What part of your body is your dangles?  (asked in the middle of grocery shopping one afternoon and resulting in a lot of "shhh-ing" by me.)  That one took some particularly good sleuthing to figure out.  The boys had been listening to a cassette tape (yes, we still have a player of those) at night with little rhymes to skip to.  As I put them to bed one night, son #1 says, "See, that's what they're saying...knees and dangles, knees and dangles...1, 2, 3."  Well, of course it really said:  knees and ANKLES, but the slightly malicious little voice on the tape recorded it as "knees andddddankles, knees andddddankles" so as to create much confusion and embarrassment for small children and mothers everywhere.

The other thing begun to take more note of is the variety of books I come in contact with during any given day.  Today I read from:  a book about the history of the Pony Express, a storybook about pirates, the Bible, a children's biography about President James Buchanan, a science book which explained the tilt of the earth and seasons (I then had to watch a lecture on Khan Academy on the subject because my 3rd grader understood it but I didn't quite get it from the book!), began to read "From the Mixed up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler" (to see if it was appropriate for the girls to read--been a long time since i read it) and I didn't read (as I did yesterday) from a history of England under Queen Victoria's reign, and I didn't get to the regular read-aloud book about southern Indiana during the Civil War.  I will read before bed from my Josephine Tey library book "The Daughter of Time" and feel very foolish for not knowing more monarchical British history, and I will listen to 4 chapters of the Bible read aloud to me.  I feel like I usually cover a lot of turf during the day.  And I'm tired by the end of it!  But nonetheless, I'm thankful that I have the freedom, liberty, ability, and library access, to read, read, read.

January begins

We've been on vacation from school, and currently the kids are on vacation from home (spending a couple of days with my parents).  This has afforded me time to get the bathrooms to hospital-grade clean, scrub out stains from their bedroom carpets, dispose of small items of trash from their rooms and clean their desks in preparation for school to begin again on Monday.  The weather has been pretty miserable and their usual outside time has been truncated.  The other neighbor children have gone back to school and that has left them at a little bit of a loose end, so I'm thankful we return to routine on Monday.

We forgot to make a gingerbread house before Christmas, so by the time we remembered they were $2.00 at Aldi. They were most excited that not only were they able to make it, but they could eat it the next day.  Usually we keep it around as a decoration and have had to use a hammer to finally crack the inedible, fossilized remains!







Reading through the Bible.  This year I am re-committing to reading through the Bible in a year.  I have committed to this several times before and never done it consistently.  This time, I should be able to do it as a nice-voiced man reads me the daily selections on my iPod.  I mean, really, I should be able to do this!!