Abby was ticked off this morning that Travis didn't call on her for family prayer. He told her we could make a prayer chart next FHE to make sure everyone got a turn. She beat us to it; before she walked out the door to meet the bus, she handed me this:
Prar frst Momy
Praer sekit Abigail
prear thrd Dad
prear frth Dylin
And that's the new prear chrt.
Thursday, November 8, 2012
Tuesday, September 18, 2012
A Thought
Gouging eyes out. Ripping ears off. Scrape, slice, skin. Shred. Grate. Chop. The things we do to our vegetables are inhumane.
Saturday, September 8, 2012
Abby Musings
A few hilarious things Abby has said in the past few weeks:
(Coming out of Primary) "Mom, look at my picture of the tenth leopard!" Of course, I then had to explain leprosy to her. Which led to her coming home from kindergarten saying, "Muneer was sick today. He had leprosy." She whispered the word as she leaned her head into mine, eyes as big as dinner plates. This might actually be possible: I discovered how very many immigrants attend her school when, exiting the bus, she shouted, "Mom! The principal of the whole school is brown and she even speaks ENGLISH!"
(Coming out of Primary) "Mom, look at my picture of the tenth leopard!" Of course, I then had to explain leprosy to her. Which led to her coming home from kindergarten saying, "Muneer was sick today. He had leprosy." She whispered the word as she leaned her head into mine, eyes as big as dinner plates. This might actually be possible: I discovered how very many immigrants attend her school when, exiting the bus, she shouted, "Mom! The principal of the whole school is brown and she even speaks ENGLISH!"
Monday, June 4, 2012
A True Carnivore
Abby has a strong streak of compassion running through her veins, so it always surprises me how she views animals. They are, simply put, animals. I'm the opposite; adults can take care of themselves (generally), while animals are subject to our whims and suffer for it. A few Sundays ago, she held up this weird picture of a creature that had zigzags all over it. When I asked what it was, she said, "It's a pig. It's being cut up to make ham." "Oh! That's very nice, Abby." At her preschool picnic, I asked her if she wanted to eat a fried chicken leg. "Yeah! That sounds great!" A few minutes later she was licking the last bits of flesh off the bone (she'd never had fried chicken before. I guess she liked it.) and said happily, "Mom, I'm eating meat off the bones of a dead animal! But the bones are really fragile because it's dead." Huh. I hear of many children who refuse to eat meat when they discover it comes from animals, but my daughter, a kid who takes care of anyone she perceives as needing help, thinks it's great.
Friday, May 4, 2012
XOXOXO
For the past week or so, a strange conversation happens several times a day:
Abby: Dylan, do you want a hug and kiss?
Dylan: NO! (as petulantly as you can imagine. This is not feigned grumpiness.)
Abby: No hug and kiss for you, then.
Dylan, frantic: Hug and kiss! I want a hug and kiss!
Abby: OK! (hug and kiss ensues)
I hear this all of the time around here. All of the time.This can happen five times in a row and still Dylan falls for it.
Things could be worse.
Tuesday, April 24, 2012
The Time I Almost Offed My Grandfather
Note: Don't read this if you have fantastic grandparents. You just won't understand. And count yourself lucky.
Note #2: I started writing this when my grandfather was still alive. It was too good to pass up finishing the post. I'm hoping most of his problem was mental illness and things will be much better in the next life.
If the CIA decided to use my grandfather as an 'interrogation technique', they'd have to employ him in an offshore holding center: torture isn't legal in the US. Is this because he's a fighting machine? An ex-spy, perhaps? An assassin? No. It's because he talks. Non-stop. He's also racist, bigoted, narcissistic, and somewhat malicious. He has nothing good to say about you to your face, and rarely has anything good to say about you behind your back. Maybe you think I'm exaggerating and only see the worst in him? I invite you, wholeheartedly, to spend four hours with him. Dementia has made him nicer, so you won't feel the full force of his personality, but you may begin to see where I'm coming from.
That said, Dad and Grandpa and I went to the British Isles and France together in 1994. I was fourteen. We went because Grandpa wanted to see his name on the plaque at Omaha Beach on the Normandy coast of France. (His name wasn't on the plaque; he was never at Omaha Beach. The sole purpose of flying three people out to Europe that summer was to get his name on a plaque for a battle he never fought in. I mentioned the narcissism, right?)
I must have thought he'd transform into a normal person on the flight over or something. The naivete of fourteen. Before the intensive Uzbek summer death camp ten years later, it was the most miserable experience of my life. He proceeded to grievously offend every non-him person in London -- to the point where I wouldn't sit next to him on the subway for fear of being lynched by association, stuff his packs with useless (useless! and gross! See this post) items to the tune of some 90 lbs each and then expect us to carry them for him, and TALK. He talked all day long, everyday. I hadn't been subjected to the monologues for more than four or five hours at a time, so it didn't occur to me that it was possible for a person to talk that much. It's not conversation, either. In order to have a conversation, the other person has to be able to complete a sentence. No, there was no breaking in.
Relentless noise is not something I deal well with, perhaps because of him, and after, oh, say, six to seven days of this, I was at the end of my rope. Grandpa and I were standing at the edge of the subway tracks, while my dad was standing back against the wall, zoning out. No one else was in the station. All of the sudden, I thought to myself, "I could push him onto the tracks. No one would know, not even my dad and even if he did, he wouldn't say anything." I was overcome by this urge to just do it and be done with it; never to listen again, never to endure the horrid remarks, to save everyone from his cancerous personality.
I didn't. I had to physically remove myself from his side and walk to the other end of the station. He looked askance at me, surprised that I felt I could just walk away from him mid-sentence, startled by my audacity. I got the cold shoulder for a while after that -- a blessing -- and I also didn't kill him. That's a win-win in my book.
Note #2: I started writing this when my grandfather was still alive. It was too good to pass up finishing the post. I'm hoping most of his problem was mental illness and things will be much better in the next life.
If the CIA decided to use my grandfather as an 'interrogation technique', they'd have to employ him in an offshore holding center: torture isn't legal in the US. Is this because he's a fighting machine? An ex-spy, perhaps? An assassin? No. It's because he talks. Non-stop. He's also racist, bigoted, narcissistic, and somewhat malicious. He has nothing good to say about you to your face, and rarely has anything good to say about you behind your back. Maybe you think I'm exaggerating and only see the worst in him? I invite you, wholeheartedly, to spend four hours with him. Dementia has made him nicer, so you won't feel the full force of his personality, but you may begin to see where I'm coming from.
That said, Dad and Grandpa and I went to the British Isles and France together in 1994. I was fourteen. We went because Grandpa wanted to see his name on the plaque at Omaha Beach on the Normandy coast of France. (His name wasn't on the plaque; he was never at Omaha Beach. The sole purpose of flying three people out to Europe that summer was to get his name on a plaque for a battle he never fought in. I mentioned the narcissism, right?)
I must have thought he'd transform into a normal person on the flight over or something. The naivete of fourteen. Before the intensive Uzbek summer death camp ten years later, it was the most miserable experience of my life. He proceeded to grievously offend every non-him person in London -- to the point where I wouldn't sit next to him on the subway for fear of being lynched by association, stuff his packs with useless (useless! and gross! See this post) items to the tune of some 90 lbs each and then expect us to carry them for him, and TALK. He talked all day long, everyday. I hadn't been subjected to the monologues for more than four or five hours at a time, so it didn't occur to me that it was possible for a person to talk that much. It's not conversation, either. In order to have a conversation, the other person has to be able to complete a sentence. No, there was no breaking in.
Relentless noise is not something I deal well with, perhaps because of him, and after, oh, say, six to seven days of this, I was at the end of my rope. Grandpa and I were standing at the edge of the subway tracks, while my dad was standing back against the wall, zoning out. No one else was in the station. All of the sudden, I thought to myself, "I could push him onto the tracks. No one would know, not even my dad and even if he did, he wouldn't say anything." I was overcome by this urge to just do it and be done with it; never to listen again, never to endure the horrid remarks, to save everyone from his cancerous personality.
I didn't. I had to physically remove myself from his side and walk to the other end of the station. He looked askance at me, surprised that I felt I could just walk away from him mid-sentence, startled by my audacity. I got the cold shoulder for a while after that -- a blessing -- and I also didn't kill him. That's a win-win in my book.
Sunday, April 15, 2012
How Religion Colors Our World
I was about Abby's age now -- maybe 5 -- when my dad explained the concept of atoms to me. I grasped the essence of what he said, as in , that the universe was made of tiny little particles so small that no one can see them. Of course, in our part of the world, we say our 'd's as 't's, so I heard 'adam' instead of 'atom'. For years, I pondered the little tiny men wearing animal skins who made up the universe. Imagine my surprise in the fifth grade when we had to construct a model of an atom: it did not look like a tiny man wearing animal skins. Enough said.
Today in church, Abby was coloring a rock (yes, one from outside) with a crayon and announces, "You can't make blue because it's a church color!"
Me, very confused: "What?"
"Blue is a church color, so you can't make it out of anything."
"No, Abby, blue is a primary color." Then, "Oh. Primary. Right." Then, "Well, that's not exactly what that means . . . " Then, "never mind."
On another note, Abby has been spending a lot of time fake reading in her room. I thought it was fake, at least, until I pulled out a brand new book tonight that she'd never seen. She looked at it and said, "Ooh, Mom and Me CookBook Have Fun In the ... k-i-t-ch-e-n. What is that word?" We haven't even worked on her reading for a long time. It just confirms my theory that all you have to do to learn something difficult is to introduce it to yourself and let your mind process it on its own without your intervention. It works! (This only works when what you're learning is tied to a system of thought, rather than when you have to memorize a whole bunch of crap dates from history class.)
Today in church, Abby was coloring a rock (yes, one from outside) with a crayon and announces, "You can't make blue because it's a church color!"
Me, very confused: "What?"
"Blue is a church color, so you can't make it out of anything."
"No, Abby, blue is a primary color." Then, "Oh. Primary. Right." Then, "Well, that's not exactly what that means . . . " Then, "never mind."
On another note, Abby has been spending a lot of time fake reading in her room. I thought it was fake, at least, until I pulled out a brand new book tonight that she'd never seen. She looked at it and said, "Ooh, Mom and Me CookBook Have Fun In the ... k-i-t-ch-e-n. What is that word?" We haven't even worked on her reading for a long time. It just confirms my theory that all you have to do to learn something difficult is to introduce it to yourself and let your mind process it on its own without your intervention. It works! (This only works when what you're learning is tied to a system of thought, rather than when you have to memorize a whole bunch of crap dates from history class.)
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