Danny: Will you play with me?
Mommy: No. Remember how you got out of bed five times last night and exceeded your “Mommy...” quota? I thought you wanted excessive attention, and the best cure for that is less attention. So I said I would not play with you today.
Danny: I do not need any “Mommies” at bedtime, only I actually want to speak freely.
--Can you believe he just barely turned five?
“Mommy, what is one divided by infinity?”
--Eric.
“When I was seventeen, I decided to take calculus primarily so I could help my children with their math homework. I hadn't expected to need it for another decade, though...and now I don't remember any of it!”
--I ended up just teaching Eric about asymptotic functions and avoiding limits. (Whew!) If I don't remember calculus now, what will I do after another ten years?
“How old are they???”
--The staff at the Homer family's dental office. They overheard my math homeschool lesson in the waiting room. I sat and graphed the function y=1/x to answer Eric's question about dividing by infinity.
“I blame their Daddy. His idea of a bedtime story involves circuit diagrams.”
--Grandma Homer, to the aforementioned amazed dental staff. That's not entirely fair. Jon's bedtime stories also include humorous chronicles of a mad-scientist, excited electrons, and, as of April, checking off cub scout requirements. Who says my Aspie-esque engineer lacks imagination?
Worksheet: Put an x over the picture that doesn't belong. [It displays three hats and one boot.]
Danny: And I think these three are all winter things and this one [a baseball hat] is summer so I am crossing it out.
--Not the answer the author was intending, but well-defended. I took it.
Left: Bear prepares for homeschool hopscotch. We color-coded his feet to match the Ls and Rs on the floor.“...and a circle is a ball! And a square is a box! And a triangle is a pyramid! And a trapezoid is half a pyramid!
--Danny. Wow. Brilliant boy. Awesome spatial sense!
Grandma Homer: Perhaps Heavenly Father gave Danny amazing spatial sense to help compensate for his sensory integration issues.
Gail: ...[gapes]...That's...maybe...I hadn't thought of it like that!
[I told an amusing three-part bedtime story about a language acquisition spell gone awry.]
“Maybe the spell works better for different languages because the interpreter speaks some better than others...Maybe the interpreter could program the spell to have a delayed start...”
--Eric. Aww! He was debugging a spell instead of a program! His imagination is coming right along...(It turned out the spell worked, but only after three days of immersion in the target language.)
“...Thank you, thank you, Sam-I-am.”
--Danny reading Green Eggs and Ham, out loud, in its entirety, with Jon listening on the phone. That was a spectacular parenting moment. He earned his milkshake!
“And this is a bacteria and these are white blood cells and the trampoline is the body and it is sick...”
--Danny, playing with different colored marbles, after a lesson on germs.
“There is a high likelihood that I will go to bed on time if you do not buy me a cookie.”
--Eric, to Grandpa
Danny: Why did Grandpa buy us cookies?
Mommy: Because he's a grandpa. He likes to spoil his grandkids.
Danny: You mean he wants me to be naughty?
--Spoil, not spoil rotten.
“At least I'm allowed to read on Sentry Duty. And I won't hang for sleeping on watch.”
--Gail. I've spent much of the last two weeks parked outside the boys' room to enforce Bedtime Curfew.
“Toilet? Yes. Follow...”
--Danny, the signing star, to A-, a cute Deaf boy, during a play date. In ASL, his grammar was fine.
“Some things are so universal...”
--Gail, watching end-of-visit negotiations between mother and child in ASL. I didn't catch every sign, but I got the gist.
“What's really messed up is having a kid who can read before he's potty trained.”
--Gail, sharing maternal reminiscences with another woman.
“Today is our nonaxdodecatrothalunaversary!”
--Which, being interpreted, meaneth, “the ninth anniversary of the day we got engaged.” Jon sent me a dozen roses to celebrate. What a sweet man.
Jon's roses. February 12, 2009.[Watching The Pirates of Penzance]
Mommy: [snorts and chokes with laughter]
Eric: Why is that funny?
Mommy: Because he doesn't know how to talk to girls. It is not a good idea to propose by saying, “Are any of you girls so ugly that you're desperate enough to marry me?”
Eric: Why?
Mommy: It is never a good idea to say, hint, imply, or even ask if a girl is ugly.
Eric: Why not?
Mommy: ...Just trust me on this one.
--I neglected to point out the other flaws with Frederick's proposals, like offering to sisters en masse.
[At the statistical psychology lab at Notre Dame]
Eric: Why can't you just use the actual number? [Note: What he meant was the absolute value, or distance from a line, whether that distance is positive or negative]
Steve: Well, we could, but the math would be much more complicated that way.
Eric: Why would the math be more complicated??
Steve: Because it would make a V instead of a line
Eric: But why would that make the math more complicated?
Steve: [Pauses, groping for an answer] Does he know any calculus...?
--I'm flattered he even considered it a possibility! But I expect it will be another year or two.
Mommy: Why are all the lights off in the basement?
Danny: Because there are blind scary monsters down there!
Mommy: But if they're blind, why does it matter if it's dark?
[Watching Seven brides for seven brothers:]
Mommy: ...so Milly yelled at her husband for acting stupid--
Eric: Actually, he wasn't being stupid, just uncivilized
Mommy: [pause] Okay, she yelled at him for leading his brothers into acting like animals
Eric: How...?
Danny: Oh! I know! One brother pretended to be a cat to trick the girl and then he kidnapped her and I think that's how he acted like an animal!
Mommy: [laughing helplessly] Um, that logic is irrefutable. I think additionally, though, that they acted uncivilized because they didn't respect the girls' agency.
Eric: How does kidnapping a girl not respect her agency?
Mommy: Eric. Think about it.
Eric: [stares owlishly for a minute, then shakes his head in defeat]
Eric: [gets frustrated]
Grandpa: Eric, do you want this instead?
Mommy: Eric. We're trying to understand--
Eric: [crying] But first I need to CALM DOWN!
Mommy: [stunned] Okay.
--We gave him some time and space, and he calmed himself down, and then he explained. I felt like singing Hallelujah!
“It wasn't a Mommy moment, exactly, but A- giving me a spontaneous hug was very rewarding.”
“I have no idea how to sign 'He went as a diplomatic envoy to liase with another clan...''”
--Gail, in an email. We were coordinating the cover story as to why Richard the dog wouldn't be around during a play date.
“He thinks that because I can't see him, I can't hear him.”
--Sister G-, about A-. It was cute.
Below: Two of the more intricate train tracks we designed. Remember, it was winter, and the trains were the only big toy we brought to Grandma's house.
