My back yard

Yeah, this was a drag. We had to get the sewer lines moved in our yard because of serious tree root issues clogging up the pipes. Why can't I spend money I don't have on fun things?

Pictures

Imogen tried on my sunglasses and I managed to get her to pose like this. Awesome.


The girls have been taking turns helping me in the kitchen. I had Genevieve cook the taco meat for me the other night. She sat there happily chopping it to death and Jeremy was very happy because he's a stiroholic and chopoholic and I am neither.



Yesterday Genevieve walked into the kitchen looking like this. Her hair always falls down, it drives me nuts. Earlier in the day, it was in neat pigtails. Now... it's not. She used to have on a navy skirt, but, she explained, she "didn't want to pull up three things" when she went to the bathroom, so she took off the skirt and only wore her panties and the shorts she is required to wear under skirts. I have no idea what's up with the snow boots.

Annoying genetics

Reason #426 that I know Imogen is Jeremy's daughter: She sits next to him on the couch watching him play his new Nintendo DS and gives him game tips.

The Mystery of the Mysterious Soap

Jeremy came to me recently, holding a bar of soap he had fished out of the trash can. (does he search the trash cans for things I've wrongfully thrown away? Honestly?) "Why is this is the trash?" he asked.

"It's a funny color," I said. "Something's obviously wrong with it." I wasn't looking at him, but I felt his eyes roll.

"It's SOAP!" he said. "You scrub it off and it's like it's a whole new bar of soap!"

"Fine," I said disinterestedly. I really wasn't all that passionate about the matter. We don't go through bars of soap very quickly, because I keep liquid body wash around. However, we have plenty of it in the cupboard, which may or may not have something to do with the fact that I like the idea of bar soap and tend to make purchasing decisions accordingly.

The next time I saw the oddly colored bar of soap, it was in the soap dish with the newer and normally colored (aka, simply better) bar of soap. And that was the last I saw of it. A few nights later I was waiting in bed for Jeremy to come to bed and he walked into our room from the bathroom and said, "You threw that bar of soap away again!"

This seemed rather unfair. His case was purely circumstantial, at best. "I did not!" I denied. "Then where is it?" he said, as if I'm some kind of Keeper of the Soap in this house.

"How should I know?" I said, still laying in bed.

"You really didn't throw it away?" he said. I could tell he was listening carefully. Our room was dark and he couldn't see my face. I'm a terrible liar and Jeremy always knows when I'm lying, but mostly by facial expressions.

"No, I didn't throw your soap away," I said firmly.

"How strange..." he said, finally believing me. He went back to the bathroom and stayed for a while.

When he came back I asked, "Been looking for the soap?"

"Yeah."

"Did you find it?"

"No."

Very mysterious. And no, I didn't do anything with the weird bar of soap. But if you ask me, we're probably better off without it. :)

Genevieve can read...

Genevieve reads short vowel one syllable words. Words like jump, silk, send. Without difficulty. This isn't really an amazing concept, except that no one has bothered to teach her to read. Just like no one really taught her to write.

She does startle me sometimes. Today we were watching the plumbing guy dig in our back yard with his back hoe though her bedroom window. There were chunks of concrete from him cutting and busting up part of our back patio. There was a muddy trench with tree roots and pipes that would be replaced. It's was noisy and messy and ugly and Genevieve pointed and said, "Look! A butterfly!"

A Question of Race

The other day Imogen was talking about Indians (by which she means Native Americans) and at the end of whatever monologue she had going on she stated that she would like to be an Indian when she grows up. I looked at my exceedingly white child, with her tiny freckles appearing across her cheeks after a summer at the pools (slathered in sun screen) and proceeded to crush her ambitions with a basic explanation of how one does not become an Indian, one is born an Indian, if your parents and grandparents are Indians, and so on. I pointed out several other races and talked about how they are from different parts of the world and even took a stab at explaining the difference between one's ethnicity and one's nationality.

She absorbed precious little of this, I'm sure, distracted that her chances of riding horses, shooting bows and arrows and wearing moccasins are pretty much nil. To get a clearer picture of this tragedy she asked me "What do Indians do?"

"Um... the same things the rest of us do... They live in houses, watch TV, wear blue jeans and drive in cars," I said, trying to paint a picture of modern American life. She was sorely disappointed.

She was taught some early American history in school last year. Obviously, comprehending long periods of time (from then until now) isn't Imogen's specialty (like, I suspect, most six year olds). I'm surprised she doesn't expect us to wear corsets, ride around in horse drawn buggies and milk the cow at sunrise.

Unlike Imogen, I'm not heartbroken that we've moved on. I like electricity and running water, cell phones and stores that sell everything and are open 24 hours a day. Modern life is stressful? Bring it on, it's got to be better than only bathing once a month and spending your life over a hot stove because no one's bothered to invent a microwave yet.

Bath Time

Speechless

Sometimes your children do things, and you can immediately respond with the appropriate consequences that they should face. You dispense justice easily, you feel competent and capable. But then, sometimes your children do something that leaves you so confused that you completely fail to act. They get away with heinous sins simply because they render you speechless.

Example? Glad you asked.

Today Imogen comes to me and complains, "I have to wash my clothes again!"

I'm barely interested. I manage a bored, "Why?"

"Genevieve peed on them," she said indignantly.

That got my attention. "She did? She sat in the basket and just PEED in them?" I asked? Imogen had a basket of clean clothes in her bedroom.

"No," Imogen said. "She peed on the ones in the dryer."

That's right folks. Genevieve crawled INTO THE DRYER to urinate on her sister's clean laundry. I called her over to confirm this very strange allegation, which she did willingly enough. I didn't even do anything about it. I told her not to ever climb into the dryer again, and I told her to change her clothes, but otherwise I just walked away, bemused.

Puppet show

Today the girls put on puppet shows for me with their stuffed animals. Imogen went first. She did several very short little skits involving two stuffed animals each, set to a song that was made up on the spot. For example: "Here is a little lamb and he was sad and lonely and the puppy came and played with him and they played all day long and danced. Then the puppy had to go home, but he came back every day to play. The end." Genevieve and I clapped dutifully.

Genevieve's puppet shows were shorter versions of Imogen's with less friendliness and more animals eating each other.

Then Imogen took the stage again, this time to give speeches about each animal holding up a stuffed version of each one. Here they are as best as I can remember. (I came in here as soon as it was over so I could write as much of it down as possible.)

So, animals according to Imogen:

Lions are extremely hungry all the time. They eat meat. They are very scary and mean.

Bears are also extremely hungry. I don't know what they eat but they are also scary. I saw a black one at the zoo.

Monkeys eat only bananas all the time. They climb up in trees.

Bunnies are scared of everything. They run away from dogs and cats and humans. You can have one as a pet only if it's not really extremely scared all the time.

Elephants are really loud. They make all kinds of noise. Well, not really lots of noise. They have this long trunk to get their food and put it in their mouth.

Dogs are good pets. Cows are not good pets so we kill them and eat them. But that's not what this is about. We don't eat dogs. If the dog is a big dog, he could be a hunting dog like in Fox and the Hound. Copper was a little puppy and then he went away and he grew up into a full grown trained huntin' dog. But this dog *holds up stuffed dog* isn't a hunting dog. It's just a regular dog.