Always Remember That

It all began when Mallory, who had been serenely eating a peach, suddenly threw the fruit down on the counter with a heavy sigh and said, "What's the point of it all, anyway?" and stalked away. "Pardon?" I said. She stopped and spun around and grinned. "Oh, nothing. I'm just practicing for when I become famous." "Ah. Well, right now you are not famous, and right now you are not allowed to fling fruit." "Someday I'm going to be famous," she said. "For what?" "I'm going to be a superstar and be on TV. In fact I want you to take me to the TV place right now so I can have my own show!" "It's not quite that easy, honey. You can't just demand that they give you your own TV show." "Well, maybe next year. I'm going to have my own show and be famous and I'm going to call myself Megan O'Connor." "Why not Mallory K____?" She gave me an exasperated look. "You...

Phoebe, being almost four and apparently convinced that she has the power to bend the world to her will, has taken to speaking to us like this: Phoebe: Mommy, are you going to clean up the house today? Me: No, I hadn't planned to -- Phoebe: You ARE going to clean! You ARE! or Phoebe: How much longer til we get there, Mommy? Me: Ten minutes. Phoebe: No, one minute! I said it's only one minute! or Phoebe: Let's go to Applebee's for dinner tonight! Me: No, everybody else wants pizza. Phoebe: No! We are going to Applebee's and you know it! How many times do I have to tell you that? Mallory, on the other hand, is either being totally literal or totally cryptic. First, the cryptic: Mallory: I saw a friend of mine at the park today. Me: Really? Who? Mallory: HOT. Me: What? Mallory: Don't you get it? HOT. You know. HOT. Me: I don't...oh. You mean your friend Summer? or Mallory: Can I have dessert? Me: What would you like? Mallory: Cold. Smooth. Spoon. It's like ...

I understand why people get vanity license plates, and I even understand the fun of getting a vanity license plate that is kind of hard to decipher, like NVERL8. I don’t, however, understand vanity plates that are just plain old misspelled. I just saw one at lunchtime and of course now I can’t remember it. But, for example, oh, here’s one I recall: WULFPAC. Now what this is meant to signify is “Wolf Pack” – the NC State team – but WULFPAC is just wrong. No one spells Wolf Pack with a U and no K. It’s obvious that this person wanted “Wolf Pack” on his license plate but it had already been taken, so he settled for WULFPAC instead. But it looks ridiculous. As do, let’s see, TWINMOMM (because who spells Mom with two ms?) and LVHOCKY. You may love hockey, but there is no such thing as hocky. This is a case where being offered second-best should be grounds for declining altogether. If I had filled out my children’s birth certificates only to be told by the governing authorities that yes, I c...

For the past week, and for the first time in their lives, my children have been falling asleep without me in the room with them. My children are seven-and-a-half and almost four, so I wouldn’t take it amiss if you were to say that this has been a long time coming. Here’s the thing. Chris snores, which is not his fault, and I am a super-sensitive princess type who cannot handle any kind of noise whilst I try to sleep. So when we moved into our current house I started sleeping in the guest room. Around that time, Mallory, who was about seven months old, suddenly decided to stop sleeping through the night, or to let me return her to her crib after a period of rocking or nursing, so the easiest thing to do – since I had to be up early to get to work – was to just bring her in the guest bed with me. And eventually she stopped sleeping in her crib altogether, and subsequently also rejected the toddler bed we bought as a replacement, so it was the guest bed (the geen bed, she called it, becau...

One week of summer down!

We told Mallory we would start giving her an allowance if she would perform certain chores every week (which have yet to be determined - I'm such a disorganized housekeeper I can't even think of any chores that I consistently do every week). She asked if she could spend the money on anything she wanted, and I said yes, but that she needed to plan ahead and save up if there was anything special she wanted and so on. She got a gleam in her eye and said: "I know just what I'm going to buy with my first allowance! A new Build-a-Bear, my own computer, and my very own cell-o-phone!" I think she's going to be a little bit disappointed when she learns the true value of a dollar.

In the midst of a squabble last night, I heard Phoebe say: "Mallowee, remember what Daddy always says? ' You have to be nice to your sister !'" I have to say that it's awesome that not only did my mom and sister totally understand my concern about Visible Books yesterday, but they also came up with solutions for me. My family is cool. Nerdy, but cool.

I still love my Kindle and never want to be parted from it. However, it's just the worst thing ever when I download a Kindle book and then end up hating it. When you hate a library book after 50 pages, no big deal -- you just return it. When you hate a book from the bookstore, it's a bummer, but at least you can pass it on to someone who might enjoy it or trade it in at the used bookstore or donate it to Goodwill or even just put it on your bookshelf* to add to the aura of high-brow literacy in your home. A Kindle book, though -- you can't do anything with it. It just sits there in your account. You can't give it away. You can't trade it for something better. You can't even delete it -- it exists eternally in your Kindle memory, a reminder of the $9.99 that you'll never get back. Fortunately this has only happened to me twice, in almost six months of Kindle ownership. But it rankles. Oh how it rankles. *This is how weird I am. In my quest to rearrange my di...

Well, that seemed to pass in the blink of an eye. Here's Mallory on her first day of first grade: Here she is on her last day of first grade: The finger signifies that she's done with grade one, as she put it. The uniform that was too short for her on the first day of school was replaced with her current uniform...which became too short for her in, oh, about December, but which I forced her to continue to wear for the rest of the year because those things are expensive and I didn't want to buy another one until I absolutely had to. Clearly I need to buy uniforms two sizes two big at the first of the year, so that there's a chance they'll continue to fit until the end of the year. Sigh. Here's Phoebe, who decided to be a princess this morning: "I'm closing my eyes because I'm happy," she explained. And here are some entries from Mallory's journal. I find it funny that she can spell weekend correctly, but apparently just chooses not to. Most ...

I may have mentioned before that Phoebe is not a morning person. Every morning when I walk into the girls' bedroom and say, "It's time to get up!", she responds with some kind of complaint: I'm too tiiired to get up or My eyes are burning or My stomach hurts or My legs are cramping Today, however, she rolled over, sighed heavily, and then said in a pitiful whimper: But Mommy, my heart is beating! And was, of course, quite put out when both Mallory and I started to laugh.

This weekend I was, as Chris put it, a whirlwind of toil. I vacuumed, I mopped, I laundered, I swept, I scrubbed, I went to the grocery store. In addition, I took the kids to a carnival and worked on the attic, which is now about 75 percent cleared out, go me! And, most importantly, I found my camera, which had been missing for about a month. Which means that today I'm going to post some pictures. Chris and the girls before the third annual Daddy-Daughter Dance, the first one Phoebe attended: Phoebe has a huge quantity of fancy, ribbon-festooned dresses at her disposal, which she insists on wearing when we go to the store or out to the park. Before the dance, however, she pulled the oldest, most faded, most tight across the chest and short at the hem knit sundress out of her drawer and said: "All my other dresses are too itchy -- I want to wear this one." Children. Who can understand them? It's not likely that the girls will be attending the fourth annual Daddy-Daught...