Category: she said

Not twenty minutes ago TheWeeOne and TheMommy had a very revealing wake-up conversation.

Mama, I really just want to get out of earth.
Why do you want to get out of earth?
To play.

How are you gonna get out of the earth?
In an airplane.

Were do you want to go in the airplane?
Um…to college.

Are you going to play just in the airplane or at college?
I want to play all day.

What are you going to do when you’re done at college?
Come back to the earth.

I might need to put some more money in that college fund.

After seeing a sign promoting the classic car show LaGrande asked

What’s a classic car?
A really old car.
We have a classic car then.
No, our car isn’t old enough. Grampa Troy has a classic car, his old Corvette.
(with some surety now)
[Our neighbor] has a classic car.
He does?
Yeah, in his car you have to roll the windows up by hand!

—-

Not ten minutes later I sneezed. And lately I’ve had some wing-dinger, ear blasting sneezes. I usually startle at least one mermaid. This time it was in the car and I scared The Mommy badly.

Holy Cow! That hurt my ears!
(TheWeeOne emphatically snatched her plastic baby-doll and hugged her close)
That hurt my BABY’S ears!

While eating grapes and having a philosophical discussion with The Mermaids about what it meant to be “on” the table, (another post) the subject came up about whether or not the book, on the table, was moving.
I said it was moving, very quickly, in THAT> direction. (at THAT point I gestured to the east) referring vaguely to an earlier discussion about the rotation of the Earth.
Abby, gave me a quizzical look and I said:

I know we’re moving that way because…look..where did the sun come up this morning?
(she pointed straight North)
What? C’mon, where did the sun come up?
(she pointed straight North again) It came up TH^AT way!
No it…

Emma, at this point, was quietly picking seeds out of her huge red grapes and listening casually to the inane and even banal conversation about books and movement. I brought her into the conversation for some, shall we say, levity. She is usually very observant, I think, and would help me set her sister straight.

…Emma?
What?
Where did the sun come up?
IN THE SKY!!

Abby felt re-invigorated in her position.
I was duly straightened.
Emma? She ate her grape.

The Wee One postulated and explained to us exactly why the carrots we were leaving out for the Easter Bunny were so important.

The Girl will eat her carrots and the Boy will eat his carrots and then they will fall in love and kiss each other and leave eggs ALLLL over the place.

Then with a mock crawl stroke she added

Like a swimming pool!

We delivered frozen cookies to the neighbor just now. They were ordered last month in yafr (yet another fundraiser).
The neighbor likely forgot she had ordered them and asked

Did I already pay for these?
Yes.
Okay. I just ordered some more from my grandson!
(now addressing the girls in that singsong kid voice)
We are going to have cookies coming out of our ears!

A momentary somewhat uncomfortable silence followed while the girls parsed this strange sounding idiom.

The Wee Mermaid broke the silence with a nervous giggle and said

Well, our ears aren’t like that

A few days ago, in a sentence, I referred to the wrong Gramma.
I mean really, how many of us have used the wrong name before?

Don’t answer that.

Suffice it to say that the three year old mermaid set me straight.

No Dada! We’re goin’ ta GrammaNana’s not GrammaTeeta’s… because GrammaNana has MaggieMae and GrammaTeeta says ‘YumSchmum’.

I sat corrected.

Tonight I was half-heartedly playing with The Mermaids and trying to eat a nutritious dinner of corn chex.
The Mermaids are always interested in “stealing” a bite or two using the baby bird method*.
Tonight they helped me clean out three bowls and the last one had a little extra milk(soy) when the baby-birding began in earnest.
I couldn’t keep up with the little tweets and they were so demanding I paused and said,

What do I look like…?

I wasn’t able to come up with anything so Emma smartly filled the space;

You look like a man without a horse.

I have no inkling where that came from but as it turns out…she is so right.

—
*They just walk up casually and open their mouths usually with an added “ahhhh”.

The Wee One woke up this morning with an urgent service call and yummy legs after a fun and perhaps over-long day yesterday; I will post more on that later.

Actually only one leg was yum and so The Mommy stretched it out for her and massaged it a little bit so that it wasn’t yummy anymore.

I am glad The Mommy was already in the field to take this particular call as I would have required tier three support, for a definition of yummy, and the customers legs would have stayed yummy and tingly well beyond our service level agreement (SLA) for an operation of this nature.

Now that I have placed this episode in the knowledge base repository any tier-one technician should be able to appropriately resolve a service call like this.

Note: Successful resolution assumes adequate understanding of the localized dialect associated with the colloquialism* at oh five hundred in a fog of sleep without adequate lighting, corrected vision, or proper footwear**.

* There is a high level threat that the colloquialism is further obfuscated by the continued use of an oral obstruction device ( OOD) made of plastic or gum of arabic and sugar.

** Technician must be adequately trained to ignore sharp pain inflicted on the instep of a bare foot by heavy and/or hard foreign particles such as an OED (Oxford English Dictionary) or IBD (Improvised Barbie Doll). Legos and jacks are also known to work well for this application.

Last night La Grande Mermaid was proudly reading her autobiographical student-of-the-week poster to me.

My favorite color is green.
I like to go swimming.
My favorite animal is a frog.
I go to school in a car.
PSHHH!
What?
[ muttering loud enough for The Mommy to hear ] …half mile.
What? [she repeated]
Nothing honey, it’s just that The Daddy thinks we’re funny for driving to school.
You only go a half mile. You could walk or bike or pogo stick to school it is so close.
[overdoing it a bit now I continued]
I ride my bike sixteen miles to work every day!
[without so much as another breath and without any malice Abby retorted]
That would be your poster, not mine.

Indeed it should.
And for that matter…it just did.