mathmom's blog

Luke has very interesting ways to use words these days. He talks a lot about a "car-bus", for example. My favorite habit is the following (I don't even know what to call it): popsicle-stick means popsicle, spider-web means spider, and pumpkin-seed means pumpkin. As in, "There's a hungry spider-web crawling up you, mama!" And, "I made this pumpkin-seed for you!" and "I'd like a popsicle-stick for dessert." No amount of correction seems to get through. By the time he's in college, I believe he'll have figured it out.

Last night we were singing through our Christmas Carol book. Actually, mostly I sing and Amanda dances. She looked at the picture of the angels on "Away in a manger" and said, "I like the angels. They're like big fairies!"

When Eleanor was younger (although not that much younger) I would say good night to her with the old poem: Good night! Sleep Tight! Don't let the bedbugs bite! But if they do, take your shoe, And beat them till they're black and blue! She thought it was pretty funny, and Eleanor made up more verses: Take a pot, and boil them till they're red and hot! Take your bed and squish them till they're good and dead! In all those years, she never wanted to know what a bedbug was, or if she really had to be worried about them. I had been hesitating to say the poem to Amanda. I'm not even sure that I knew why, except that my vague misgivings were confirmed the other night when I told Amanda the poem. "Mom, what's a bedbug? Are they real? Do we have bedbugs? If we did, would we really use our shoe? Can they climb under our sheets? How do you get rid of them?" I answered as best I could---we don't have any, they're real, we'd wash the sheets in r...

This weekend was Apple Festival up at Lutherock . We had a good time as always---just getting out of the weekend grind of errands and to-do lists is refreshing, not to mention driving on the Blue Ridge Parkway, hiking up and down trails through woods changing colors, meeting new people and old friends. Here are some highlights: Luke turns out to be incredibly afraid of fire, including fire in fireplaces. This was a problem this weekend, since the temperature in the morning was around 40 degrees, (although it got up to about 65 degrees during the day). When Michael lit a fire in the fireplace of the lodge where we were staying, Luke stood screaming at the door to the outside 3 rooms away, "I go out! I go out! Fire hot! It burns! Don't touch!" After about 20 minutes, he was able to sit in daddy's lap in the same room as the fire, but he was clearly still worried. I guess he got the message about fire, but perhaps I should have moderated it a bit. We did not tak...

At dinner today, Luke disappeared for a minute or two. He was in the kitchen, so I didn't think he was getting up to too much trouble, but he was out of our view. After a minute or two of ominous quiet, I got worried and got up to see what he was doing. Luke had opened up the box with the pantry moth traps in them---a piece of cardboard with extremely sticky stuff on the inside (see picture above---my first foray into putting pictures in blogs!). He had taken the two traps out of the box, and slid them on his feet. He was coming very proudly across the floor to show us his new footwear. I learned in that moment that it is possible to find your child side- splittingly amusing and incredibly annoying at the same time. He was so proud. He was so cute in those little traps. They were very hard to get off his feet! But he had been very naughty. One of the rules is that you can't laugh in these situations---it just rewards naughtiness. On the other hand, yelling uncontroll...