Sundry Vignettes

On our trip down to Tahoe, we stopped at a restaurant for dinner. It was one of those restaurants where they bring you a small loaf of bread on a board with a knife. Our waitress made what I thought was an oddly exaggerated statement of how sharp the knife was. She also made a point of mentioning that the knives included in the napkin-wrapped utensil sets were sharp steak knives. Finn has been fascinated with knives and cutting lately, so of course he ended up with the bread board in front of him and spent a great deal of the dinner slashing the loaf into ribbons. He uses sharp knives quite often at home... we watch him closely and move his hands into a safer position when necessary. We got odd looks from a couple of the other diners and I was sure our waitress was going to say something several times on her way by, but she never actually did. I had no idea why everyone was behaving so bizarrely and chocked it up to being back in California. I didn't realize until we were getting back into the car that Finn had decorated every one of his fingertips with a bandaid before we left home.

It continues to be very amusing to see how Eli and Larkin play when they are together. And people say young kids don't fully understand the fine art of compromise. The big, all-consuming game they played last time they were together was the Care and Feeding of Zombie Babies. Think about it. It's a dilemma.

A couple Eli and Larkin exchanges:

L: Oh no! A dinosaur is coming! Let's defeat it.
E: There are no dinosaurs. They were all destroyed millions of years ago when a giant meteor hit the earth.
L (exasperated): I KNOW about the meteor! I'm *pretending*.

L: Let's play wedding!
E: Uh... are we allowed to do that?

I have often been annoyed by the lack of an equivalent to "starving" for being very very thirsty (parched just doesn't cut it somehow). Larkin recently noticed this lack and (after a pause in the middle of the sentence in which it was required) inserted "droughted." I like it.

We have never tried to convince the kids that Santa Claus is real. We have also never told them that he is not (although last year I did ask Larkin if she wanted a gift we were wrapping for Emile to be labeled from us or from Santa). A few days ago, totally out of the blue, Larkin told me that she wanted us to pretend that Santa Claus was real this year. I asked her what that would mean and she said they should have stockings and presents "from Santa." (If she knew about air quotes she would have used them, I swear.) I asked if there was something she wanted us to do differently than last year in that regard (since we did stockings and presents, although we never specified who they were from). She said that she just thought it would be fun to pretend that Santa actually brought the presents that we bought, and we should talk about him more. Yeesh, Finn is going to end up confused.

And finally, it has been very cold lately. Larkin still likes to wear summer dresses, but will wear pants under them and a coat on top when we go outside. On this particular day, she was wearing a sleeveless summer dress. We were leaving the Book Exchange (which contained a large number of other people happily browsing for books), when she stopped very dramatically and announced loudly: "I shall need a coat, for I am dis-armed."