A special treat on a school half-day: a trip to McDonald’s for two orders of large fries to be consumed on the ride home.

Wait a minute. My car still has that new car smell.

“Are you dropping French fries?” I said. “You better not be dropping french fries.” My voice got louder. “I don’t want to find any petrified French fries under the seats three years from now!”

My old van had petrified French fries under the seats. And straws. And Lego box parts. And Legos. (Legos are everywhere.) There were petrified fries in the spare tire compartment under the rug in the cargo hold! Ugh!

“Bradley?” my voice was quite loud. “Did you just drop a French fry?”

“No, mom.”

“Oh Bradley,” Gregory pleaded, “please don’t drop any French fries. Our mom’s the devil when you drop a french fry in her car.”

Message successfully delivered.

I was having fun testing settings on my camera the other day after kindergarten let out.



The kids noticed me taking pictures and wanted in on the action.



After each set up, the children would run over and look at the shot on the little LED screen.



So, I thought I’d post them up on the blog so the kids could see how they came out!



You all are so cute! Oh, I mean, handsome!



I love it when the kids look right at my camera.





Here, they were playing a game called “slingshot.”



That’s my Gregory on the left. Tallest kid in school.

Gregory hates all vegetables. In fact I can’t think of one pure vegetable that he regularly eats. He likes tomatoes, (as in pizza and spaghetti) but I think that’s technically a fruit. He likes sweet potatoes, but that’s technically a legume. And as long as we’re talking technical, I believe macaroni and cheese is officially classified “cardboard box.” I am thankful, however, for small steps toward normal eating habits. For one, he has graduated to eating peanut butter and jelly (the all fruit kind!) on whole wheat for lunch now (instead of cardboard boxes every day). And he actually begged, as in whined, for “more fruit” at the grocery store.

“Why the sudden interest in eating a more healthy diet?” I said.

Always the competitor: “Because then I can beat you in arm wrestling more.”

Bradley’s method of sidewalk snow removal is to make a snowball, throw it in the path of an oncoming car…



…then watch as the car drives past and crushes the snowball.



Of course, since the snowball method is quite slow, every now and then, Bradley gives in and throws and entire shovel-full. (Check out that back action. Wouldn’t it be nice to be a kid again?)



From my upstairs window, it seemed as though Gregory was falling asleep on the job.



Turned out, he was just trying desperately to make sure his dad would be able to see through the windshield. (How sweet.)



Then he managed to get the broom stuck under the windshield wiper. “Dad! Help!”



Mike to the rescue!



Trust me, they’re not fighting over who gets to shovel snow. They’re fighting over who gets to play with the cool shovel.



I think Bradley won.



So Gregory went back to shoveling the sidewalk. His shoveling method involved kicking the snow with his big toe. Very effective.



Mike surveyed the situation. First we had rain, then sleet, then snow, lots and lots of slushy snow, then more sleet, then rain. Then the whole mess froze over night. Instead of a shovel, Mike needed a jack hammer.



So he got out the snow blower. Helped a little bit, but not much.



I can see his backache already.
Notice Bradley and Gregory are conspicuously absent from these last photographs. They had long since given up the notion of helping dad with the shoveling chore.

As for me,
I was a big help watching from the window, don’t you think?

After taking a short survey, this web site says I’m a chocolate chip cookie: “traditional and conservative, most people find you comforting. You’re friendly and easy to get to know. This makes you very popular — without even trying!”

The horribly awful, terribly ironic thing about this is that I have a chocolate chip cookie (or two or sometimes three, maybe even an entire stack, like in the picture) for breakfast just about every day. Keep in mind that my breakfast time is most people’s afternoon snack time. While the “traditional and conservative” part may be right on, I have no idea if anybody finds me “comforting” being that I’m kind of a control freak, and well, I’ve never been the popular kid in school, so I doubt that part, but if you are what you eat, then it’s true. I’m a chocolate chip cookie.

Note to my children: Eat what I say, not what I eat.

Quote of the day: Bradley was having a staring contest with Kaptain Karl: laying stomach-down on the floor staring eye-to-eye, noses so close there was twitching. Suddenly, Karl’s eyes grew thinner, all purring ceased. “Oh man, I better leave snookums alone,” Bradley said. “He’s giving me that Darth Sidious look.”

Bradley and Gregory were reading over the old Quotes and Thoughts archive and came across this one, from Dec. 9, 2003:

Quote of the day: An electric cable drapes over our driveway. Several months ago, my sons noticed something caught on the wire. Close inspection revealed it was a tiny green man wearing a blue parachute. I imagine a kid walking down the sidewalk tossing the little soldier into the air and watching the parachute catch the breeze. Bradley and Gregory wonder obsessively: Will the poor parachute man ever be rescued? Will he freeze to death up there if he isn’t brought down soon? Is there a forlorn child somewhere devastated by the loss of his parachute friend? Or, even worse, is there a tiny plastic family somewhere grieving for their missing plastic husband, father, son? In fact, my older boy is not convinced the parachute guy was actually thrown onto the wire. Perhaps he landed there when he bailed out of a plane, and the plane’s crew is still desperately seeking their lost comrade’s location. “Mom!” 9-year-old Bradley yelped today, “What if he’s really Santa and he needs to get back to the North Pole before Christmas Eve?!”

When he finished reading, Bradley laughed, saying, “I remember that!” He ran out to the driveway to look up at the wire. Sure enough, after more than three years, the little green parachute guy is still suspended there, though his blue parachute has long been decomposed. In all that time, we’ve driven underneath him countless times. There have been nights of subzero temps and summer days when the asphalt below oozed with heat. There have been major rain storms, ice, snow, wind so hard to knock you down, and yet, he’s still there, waiting. I wondered if Bradley still thought of him like a character in “Toy Story” — alive and trapped and desperately missed by little green plastic loved ones. But Bradley is 12 now, older and wiser, jaded perhaps. I asked him how he feels about his 9-year-old self’s tendency to give everything a persona.

He thought for a moment. “What if he likes it up there and he just keeps hanging on? Maybe he’s a spy, a squirrel spy, running messages up and across the wires? Maybe he’s listening to the phone conversations for the government. Maybe he’s…” and the list of possibilities, none of which included the notion that it just might be a plastic toy, went on.

Gregory was confused about the title of our family book, “City of Nouns.” See, he was just a toddler when the quote that inspired the title was first uttered. In a nutshell: I’ve been writing down and saving little vignettes from my daily life since 1996. This has produced quite an eclectic collection of “quotes and thoughts,” over 600 pages’ worth, but there’s not any one theme running through this book. It’s a book about everything, a “City of Nouns.”

Gregory looked perplexed.

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

“But what’s a noun?”

Aha! The perfect opening for a grammar discussion! “A noun is a person, place or thing. Can you give me an example of a word that is a noun?”

“Ummmm…”

“Train!” I shouted. “Bus. Sign. Girl. Backpack.” (We were driving to school.) “Now you.”

“Tree!” he shouted.

“Yes!”

“Street!”

“Yes!”

“Crossing guard!”

“O.K!” Seeing that this was working so well, I decided to introduce the concept of a simile. “So,” I said, “a noun is a person, place, or thing. Very simple, right?”

“Yep.”

“Here’s one that’s a little more complicated. Do you know what a simile is?”

“Nope.”

“Basically, a simile is a word used to compare nouns that are mostly very different, like when I say, “This car is like a sloth,” the car isn’t really a sloth, but it’s moving as slow as one. So I can use a figure of speech to describe to you how slowly the car is moving. Get it?”

“Ummm…”

“Ok, let me try another one,” I said. “Bradley’s backpack is like a UPS truck two days before Christmas.”

“That’s heavy!”

“RIGHT! Ok, you try.”

“Got one!” Gregory shouted.

“Let’s hear it.”

“I’m so cold, I can use my nose drippings as chop sticks.”

That’s my son, clever as Mr. Krabs’ dead rat sandwich. (Yeah, we watch SpongeBob way too much in our house.)

Quote of the day: “Just think, mom,” Gregory said the other day, “if you didn’t have us to keep you busy, you’d sit around all the time eating chips and getting fat.”

Considering I don’t have a mouth, that might be difficult.

(This photograph demonstrates why I prefer to be behind the camera instead of its subject, though my photography assistants do get an A for effort and no blur in the action shot!)

Sunset on time change day. Gregory and I went to the park where I reflected on the extra hour of light, happy that Gregory was feeling better after a weekend of coughing. Bradley and Gregory were both not feeling well enough in the morning to go to church so they stayed home with Mike. But me, I’m choir mom. There’s no excuses when you’ve got 60 parents depending on you to keep their children still and quiet during prayers. I set several alarms. I checked the Weather Channel. I was sure I got it right.

I’m happy to report I got up and made it to church on time without being an hour early or an hour late. (My choir buddies cheered! Yay me!)

Later in the afternoon, I was to meet with a client at 2. A few minutes after 2, Bradley came running into the room. “Mom! There’s a car out front! They’re two hours early!”