Say hello to random.


I finally broke down and got a new phone.  I loved my old phone.  I loved the size, the user interface, the features, the feel of it in my hand... It had one of the bigger screens on the market, yet it still fit into my pocket.  I resisted for more than a year and even cheated on my phone with an iPhone for a couple of days, but then I realized that was just a youthful dalliance and I went back to my first love after successfully fixing the broken screen.  I resisted "upgrading" for the longest time, but finally caved last month, not because I needed to have the latest gadget on the market or because I was "eligible" under my plan, but because my old one just started to randomly restart itself and go through a 15-minute boot up process at the most inconvenient times, like when I'm using it to navigate to a meeting I'm late for but haven't yet committed the address to memory or when I was trying to take a picture after The Dormouse won her first karate trophy and The Caterpillar was so excited for her, she ran out of the stands, into the ring and tried lift her four-year-older sister up on her shoulders a la the final scene in Karate Kid. I tried many things to fix my phone and that kept it limping along for more than a year, but I finally gave in to the old adage, computers are like milk, when they start to go bad, the only thing to do is just throw them out and get more.

My new phone is "better" than my old one, but I still miss her.  One difference is the voice of the audible directions lady on the navigation system.  Despite it being the same program, this voice is decidedly sexier than the old one.  So now every time she says, "take the exit onto route 17," in my head I hear, "take the exit onto route 17... and I'm not wearing any underwear."


The girls both go to children's classes during the last hour of church and it's usually my practice to ask them what they learned when I go to the room to pick them up.  This is probably more to determine if any brainwashing has happened while I was away and whether I need to do damage control rather than out of actual interest in what they are learning, but it's also a topic of conversation in the car on the way home that doesn't involve the following exchange:

"Stop it." 

"No YOU stop it!" 

"No YOU!" 

"STOP!" 

"You."

"STOOOOP!" 

"That's enough. Everyone stop."

*whispers* "you stop"

"SHUT UP BOTH OF YOU! NO MORE TALKING IN THE CAR EVER FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIVES!" 

(You can probably guess what part of the conversation is staffed by adults.)

Aaaanyway...

Last Sunday in the car on the way home, I asked The Caterpillar, "What did you learn in church today?"

"We learned how they used to communicate in the olden days.  Like with smoke signals.  Or by writing a letter." 

Suddenly, I feel incredibly ancient. 


 And in the same conversation on the way home from church, somehow a discussion of Adam and Eve came up.  Someone asked "Where did Adam and Eve live?"

 The Caterpillar started in with the Arnold Horseshack method of answering a question and said, "Ooo!  Adam and Eve lived in the Enchanted Forest."

We of course laughed and then she realized she was wrong so she corrected herself, "Oh wait! No. It was the Garden of Even."

Dormouse: "Right. And the animals only came in 2s, 4s, 6s, or 8s."

See what I mean about damage control?


One of the rules at The Caterpillar's dance class is that when they wear their actual costumes for the actual performance, they are not to wear any underwear.  I know this seems strange at first, and it did to me too, until I realized that a) they wear dancers' tights that are meant to take the place of underwear and b) no matter how un-french cut any leotard might be, little girls' underwear desperately wants to be seen. So you can pull them up, you can push them under, you can roll up the leg holes, you can buy different kinds, you can make them wear a size smaller, it doesn't matter. Their underwear will be hanging down under the leg holes of the leotard within five minutes of starting to dance.  No one really cares about this in weekly practice, but on stage and for pictures, it's considered a bit gauche.   

 Last week was picture day and therefore the first time I put The Caterpillar in her good dancers' tights with no underwear. After explaining the reasons (because, of course, that was an Issue) I pulled up her tights to her waist and stepped back to grab her costume.  

 She wiggled her hips back and forth a couple of times and then announced:

"This feels... unusual."


You know it's gotten hot when you lose your kid at the outdoor nursery and then when you finally find her, it's here and in this position, with a look of ecstasy on her face:


Of course, then everyone else has to get into the act.

Over Memorial Day weekend, we drove out to a farm in rural Virginia. I just really wanted to pick strawberries and make jam  But when we got there the strawberry fields had been closed because they'd been picked over the day before.  As it turns out, it was one of those agritainment places. They often bother me, because they're charging ridiculous piles of money to see and do things that they would normally have to hire and pay people to do for them. But then again, my kids are city kids and we hung around because I'd like them to know the difference between a dog and a goat, just on principle.

I'm not certain this was the best place for that kind of an education.



At the same place, there was a nice pond where you could fish if you brought your own equipment.  They claimed it was stocked with fish, but I'm dubious.  What it did have, however, was a large duck, goose and pigeon population.  

So what do you do when you want to sleep under a tree next to a duck pond, but you don't really care to have flying fowl defecate on your head?  This guy has the answer.


I guess he just doesn't care about his wife.