Grace Under Pressure

If you don't want to read about vomit, skip this post.

We've had a raging stomach bug in our house this week. I am amazed at how well Larkin and Finn deal with adversity.

Larkin was the first down. She woke up sick at about 3am, but after her bed was cleaned up and re-made, she decided to set herself up to watch a movie on the couch with a blanket and a puke bowl. She didn't think she would be able to sleep with such a sore belly. Every 30-45 minutes we'd hear a musical little call of "moooore puu-uuke," signaling the need to empty her bowl. She was totally fine with us napping between episodes and was chatty and cheerful when we (read: Emile) got up to help her out. She didn't eat anything the next day, but there was no other indication that she had been sick.

Finn also experienced the worst of it at night, starting about 2am the next day. Now, Finn *adores* his beauty sleep and was mostly confused and disappointed that his body was waking him up so regularly to engage in such pointless and revolting business. He made several disparaging comments about his "stupid, puking body" the next day and then slept 12 hours that night.

Then it was my turn. I was a hopeless, woozy, drooling, teary, disgusting mess, making deals with the devil in the hopes of staying in bed 10 more minutes before another sojourn to the bathroom. I tried to go to bed at 6:30 pm in order to escape life. I hardly got out of bed the next day.

Ah, for the resilience of youth.

Opprobrium

On our way home after a fun day of Scienceworks and geocaching, I stopped at the small-town Talent liquor/hardware store to pick up some rum for Emile who has been enjoying the occasional mojito lately. The kids like picking a drink out of their wide selection of mixers while we're there, although they were bummed when they stopped carrying chocolate milk. This time, Finn chose cranberry juice and Larkin chose orange juice.

The kids were both very thirsty after our busy day. It was a Friday night and business was booming at the liquor store. On our way out into the crowded parking lot, while the door was still open into the busy store, Larkin raised her orange juice into the air and hollered: "Leeeeeet's Driiiiiiiink!"

Emile wanted to know if people were giving me dirty looks, but I confess I didn't make any eye contact after that point.

Imaginary Play in the New Millenium

Larkin and Finn have been having an at-least-once-a-week playdate with their young friend Hunter (Born on Larkin's birthday, 6 days before Finn). Today, I was listening in while they constructed lego merchandise in their small-town store.

A local giant was rebuffing all their attempts to make friends and offer gifts. After an imaginary internet search, it was determined that the giant was grumpy because its family had died long ago and it was very lonely. When they explained that it wouldn't be lonely any more if it became their friend, they all exchanged cell phone numbers and lived happily ever after.

Context Is Everything

My favorite out-of-context quote of the day:

"I'm going to entertain myself by being naked and looking at this magazine."

Context:

Finn was fresh out of the bath, waiting rather impatiently for his bedtime snack to be served. His favorite science tools catalog was near his place at the table.

Wagglers

Did you know eyebrow waggling is a learned skill? I highly recommend you grab the nearest small child and demand they waggle their eyebrows. You may get results like this:

Speaking of waggling, Larkin recently waggled her front tooth right out!

All she wanted from the tooth fairy was an electric toothbrush. When the tooth finally came out, she was very concerned that perhaps the tooth fairy hadn't planned ahead and she reassured us that we could leave her and Finn home alone while they slept to go buy one. Clearly, she doesn't credit the tooth fairy with enough foresight.

Child-Sized Marathon

Yesterday, we sent Emile off on an evening bike ride and picked him up around nightfall so he wouldn't have to brave the long uphill ride to our house in the dark.

These days, Larkin and Finn are usually pretty sleepy and ready for bed around 9pm, so we did bedtime snacks and got into sleepwear before the scheduled pick up. We met Emile at the Talent entrance to the bike path around 9:30, Finn talking the whole way about how he was very tired and about to fall asleep.

Josh H. had ridden Emile back to Talent, so the kids were excited to see him and chat him up. When Josh took off, Emile was busy putting the bike rack and his bike on our car. Larkin and Finn started running large circles around Emile and the car (Larkin in her night shirt and sandals, Finn barefoot in his pink horse PJs). After they had gone around 10-15 times, I remarked that I should have been counting to keep track of their progress. They liked that idea.

I sat in the driver's seat with my arm out the window so they could high five me on their way by... I was thinking they might circle another 15-20 times, tops. Meanwhile, Emile finished mounting his bike and got in the passenger's seat. I started throwing out random factoids with each number (well, for each number I could think of one)-- ages of people they know, significant dates, the meaning of life, the universe and everything, etc.

They got all the way up to 100 before they stopped! They were running the whole time, although they had slowed slightly by the end. I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation:

Figure our car is about 15 feet long, 4 feet wide. Add some leeway since they were actually looping quite a ways away from the car and figure they were running about 50 feet with each lap. Add in the 10-15 times they had already circled before I started counting, and they ran a total of about 112x50=5600 feet, or just over 1 mile. Not an insignificant piece of exercise at a time they'd normally be sleeping.

I nursed a bruised and tingling high-five hand all the way home, and Larkin and Finn slept very soundly last night.

You Say You Want An Evolution...

Recently, Larkin has been regularly transposing "evolution" and "revolution" in sentences. It works for many parts of speech!

While sword fighting with Finn and Hunter: "We're staging an evolutionary war!"

Random car question: "So, humans are revolved from chimpanzees, right?" Finn sounded downright astonished at this turn (heh) of events: "You mean, if chimpanzees spin around enough they'll turn into humans!?" He was ready for an experimental trip to the zoo.

Science Works has regular science talks, and after taking them to last month's talk on the volcanoes of Hawaii, Larkin is ready for more. They gave the subject for the next one and Larkin regularly asks when they'll be having the "Revolution Science Talk." Granted, that might be interesting... but not what they have planned.