Category: Uncategorized

Claire is peppering her conversation with baseball expressions. Her favorite is “right off the bat!” – often used correctly to mean “right from the start!” but sometimes it goes awry: “I was trying to cut a big piece of turkey but a little one came right off the bat!”

Another favorite bit of commentary is “straight off the list” – not baseball-specific per se, but she accentuates it with an energetic “Safe!” motion with her arms on the “straight” part, a la home plate umpire. Very dramatic, until she follows it up with, “right, Mommy???”

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Claire is still working on telling jokes. Henry repeats jokes and riddles to us all the time, and they’re genuinely funny. I’m not sure Claire realized he’s just memorized them from things he’s read? Anyway, she does her best to be equally amusing. And for every ten that don’t land, she accidently gets a truly funny one by mangling vocab halfway through. The Thanksgiving edition:

Claire: How do you feed an alligator cranberry chutney?
Entire family, suppressing eye-roll: How?
Claire: You put the cranberry chucket in a bucket and give it to an alligator!!!

It’s two days later, and Henry is still saying “cranberry chucket in a bucket” and chortling to himself.

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H, listening to me & Kevin: What is savory?
Me: delicious, but salty, not sweet
H: It’s like “savor”
Me: right, you savor something when you enjoy eating it slowly, it’s so delicious.
Claire: like I savor Cheerios!!!

I laughed almost to hooting: Cheerios might be almost the opposite of savory or savoring? I need to be more specific in my definitions.

PS: Primer is done:

And the first coat of paint is done:

It’s looking sort of “electric lime” whereas I’m hoping it will settle for more of an “optimistic avocado”. This is a wet coat on top of a white primer, so I’m hoping it will mellow/darken a smidge once dry? There are bits in the corners that look more like what I’m going for. I’m hoping for energetic, but maybe not quite this … bright. Hmm.

PPS: The second-grade adjustment has officially worn off, and we’ve decided Henry has finally completely outgrown his nap. Wow! end of an era. (Something that it will take the parents a while to grow out of… that total shut-down at 12:30-4 has been a mainstay for what? 5 years? 6? This is an enormous change for us.) Unfortunately, Claire hasn’t outgrown her nap one bit. (Cue the screamy tantrums for anyone who doubts it. Her brain literally melts when she’s tired.) Henry proposed that he pretends to go nap but really just reads silently for an hour. Magnificent child.

In the last week the house has suddenly gotten very festive, and it’s almost entirely thanks to the kids. I set it off. First, on a rare night where no one went to sleep (very rare since the beginning of Sept, they’re both still tuckered out by the school schedule, Henry even went so far last weekend as to explain how great naps are, he didn’t used to like them but now he does…), and in a quest to use up some of the kitchen craft stash, I taped up a few leaves next to the microwave.

They’re sort of performance art – they fall constantly, and we have to reattach them.

Claire took one and put it on my dinner table décor, so then I added many, many more – so pretty!

Well, by the time I’d woken up the next morning, Henry had added a candy, pumpkin or candy corn tied with a string to all the important doors in the house. He also added a jack-o-lantern for each of us to gaze upon. 🙂 I was delighted. And then he kept going… a Happy Halloween sign with a jackolantern at each end for the book shelf:

A ghost + pumpkins for the fish room shelf.

A fireplace-sitting pumpkin to keep Claire’s pumpkin from her very first pre-K field trip company (the field trip to the farm was a HUGE deal. She brought a lunch in a lunch box! And rode a bus! With a seat belt, not a car seat! And the farm had a pig (so immense, and so totally not what she thought pigs were like. She’s still talking about it. And after much worrying about whether they’d run out of pumpkins, they didn’t! and Claire chose one she thought was perfect. Now it’s living in a place of honor on our fish-room fireplace. And now she would like to go on her next field trip tomorrow.)

Claire is no slouch, she absconded with the hole punch, made impressive art, and taped it to her already-awesome pumpkin.

Then Henry made a large ghost family and taped it to the end of the counter. (We’d talked about not taping things to paint, and this was astute of him – a large display surface, but these cabinets are not on my protected list.)

And then he outdid himself after reading all the Halloween picture books when I finally got them down: a creepy tree with a spider web, plus bats. He looked up the phase of the moon that day on his moon calendar. (I love the accuracy.) If he’d asked, I probably would have been cranky and told him not to affix sparkly star stickers to my horrible 1980s oak cabinets but he didn’t ask and I love stickers. Happy October!!

Henry has officially run out of orange construction paper and is down to his last sheet of black. 🙂 I am so enthusiastic about getting more, I love that the house is getting more and more Halloweenish. Kids are awesome.

I was pleased that the kids were so impressed when I brought a tiny pumpkin home from the grocery store. And now it’s sitting with the fall pumpkin holders, lending some beauty to dinner.

And it makes the prettiest view from my vantage point on the couch.

Something tells me we will go through a lot of tea lights this year.