Sorry for lack of posts...

My semester is winding down and that means everything is due and I'm pretty busy. I'm looking forward to summer.

The girls are partially to blame, by refusing to say or do anything of remarkable cuteness. Children are not so fascinating that I'm willing to type out their breakfast menus or petty spats with each other. They must do their part by being interesting. It's the least they can do for the attention lavished upon them.

Imogen has been going to school quite ordinarily without being either deplorably bad or angelically good. She has nothing more exciting than a spelling bee and History Day coming up. For history day she will dress as a Native American from Montana and recite a paragraph about the state. Montana is a dull state but all the interesting ones were taken. There is a shortage of interesting states and they don't go very far in a class of 14.

Genevieve has also been neither atrocious nor saintly. Perhaps I should be grateful. I'm very suspicious of saintly behavior, viewing it as either a cover up for what is really happening or a short stage to be followed by a disproportionately long period of the aforementioned atrociousness.

Yesterday we went to Incredible Pizza. Think Chuck E Cheese's, but with better games. The girls had a great time, and as they were crawling through those plastic tubes from ball pits to slides, I collapsed on a bench to look around me. I shouted a compliment to the woman sitting next to me regarding the prettiness of the baby on her lap and I could not help but think that this place was everything that is wrong with parenting. It's brightly colored and plastic (in other words, unattractive). It's loud with shouting, music, and a discordant symphony of beeps from the various rides and games. It was so overstimulating that Imogen was wired for the rest of the day and Genevieve came home and fell asleep before dinner.

And they loved every moment of it. Oh well.

Dreams

Imogen asked me several nights ago, "Do grown ups have dreams?" I laughed and said, "Of course." Now, every night, she tells me to have sweet dreams.

One mustn't be inaccurate in our pleasantries.

Chess

Some of my fondest memories of childhood include playing chess with my father. It was time I spent with just him. My mother and I spent time shopping, trading jokes and laughter. My father and I shared books and chess. I haven't played in years and I'm honestly no good at it. But today we bought a chessboard and sat down with the girls to teach them.

Imogen's attention span toward it (and I suspect, her aptitude) was greater than Genevieve's. First we taught the names of the pieces and then we set up the board. While Imogen concentrated on this, Genevieve made the king and queen kiss. The differences between my daughters are very apparent.

We taught them how the pieces moved and set up very simple situations to teach capturing. Imogen was thrilled at such revelations like when a knight is on a white square, all the squares he is covering are black and when a bishop starts on a certain color, he will only ever touch that color square. She was excited by every capture. She traded her queen for a knight and congratulated herself. Jeremy played intentionally badly so she could find ways out of as many checking situations as possible and that is mostly what her game consisted of. No plan was formulated, no attack was mounted. But who cares. She had fun and it was her first game. And she gets to spend time with her daddy, who is much better at chess than me, and will probably play many more games with her than I will.

Not kid pictures

But they are cool pictures.

more black and whites