Oh, and while we're at it...

Since we're going back to Holland next month, I thought it high time to post these neat pictures of European-style lights (that, and the winter games are on):

JAMBOG time!

(See here for a list of rules.)

A Drink
From Days To Come
"We checked in with the hostess and sat at the bar to drink a Coke and enjoy the cigarette smoke while we waited. Scott was talking about something at work and I was sitting in the bar stool leaning on the bar and sipping my Coke ..."

A Light
From Focht Tales

A Food
From The Real Food Revolution
"I tell my kids that we're going to have bird's nests for lunch."

Something Cold
Need I say more?

Free ice cream is here again!

I will not miss this again, quotha. (Somehow I have missed it every single year I've lived where there are Brusters.) Michael was aghast when I told him, all gushing and bubbly, about my discovery and my plan to dress the girls up in their pyjamas, and wear my bathrobe over my sweats, because that's the closest thing I have to actual pyjamas, at least that could be worn in public.

Gold and dross

I'm sure you all have seen (or heard of) that little demonstration of time and priorities using a box of sand and some bricks. Someone performed it in our Sunday school class a few years ago, but I'd read of it elsewhere, and I think it's a terrific visual presentation.

Basically, you have a box full of sand, and a stack of bricks, and you're told to make them both fit into one box. If you try to cram the bricks into the box full of sand, you will discover that they will not fit: they simply will not occupy the same space. But if you put the bricks into an empty box (Ha! I caught you, a la Sherlock Holmes! I never told you that you had an empty box! [but then, as I told someone recently, who was complaining about S. H.'s habit of making himself look clever by withholding important information so that the reader could not out-guess him, Come on! This isn't Encyclopedia Brown we're reading! You're not supposed to figure it out on your own!]) , and then pour the sand in around it, then it will fit (at least more so). The idea is that you have to start off with the really important things in life, and fit the less important things in around them, or else the unimportant things will crowd out the important things.

Such is the way I feel about this season of my life. The more bricks I try to cram in, the more swiftly the sand flows out of the hourglass of my life...oh, well, never mind the metaphors. This is not, by the way, a roundabout (and that word always makes me think of England) announcement of the end of my blog, merely a meandering mulling over the sparseness of posts recently.

Sometimes blogging is sand. Fun sand...sandcastle-building-worthy sand...lie-lazily-in- the-sun-and-ignore-my-cares sand...but sand nonetheless.

All right, now I shall go off and do the dishes. Again.

I couldn't have said it better myself...

...especially about the imposting and the sorcering.

Fetch and carry

One of the most mind-numbing aspects of keeping up with little people, whose energy and creativity seem limitless, most especially in comparison with my own, is the setting things to rights by insisting on believing that everything has its proper place, and should, ideally, stay there.

Far more minute - and thus more irritating and camel-back-straw-breaking than the endless repertoire of dishes, dusters, and laundry - is the unending courier duty of patrolling the hallways, counters, couches, tables, and tupperware drawers to ensure that used tissues, clean laundry, dirty laundry, foodstuffs, hairbrushes, papers, utensils, and the like didn't get misplaced by little hands. Jane and Ella are fond of picking things up and just following me around the house, distributing random items in their wake, quite apart from their intentional foraging expeditions, where they hide the magnets under the bathroom sink, because they are making popcorn. As if in space, objects drift casually through the house, coming to rest peacefully in the odd nook or cranny.

There seem to be two possible destinations for these unfixed objects: in full view, which is annoying to me because it gives the appearance of clutter and makes me feel, no matter how much time I spend running around putting things away, that my house is falling apart and I just put that away three times already this morning and what's the use of it all, or out of sight, which is only slightly more dire, because it may turn out to be something that we may require before we happen to discover its resting place. Asking Jane where she put the nasal aspirator is decidedly unproductive.

Legs and letters

I am constantly amazed at the little bits of profundity Jane pops out with. I should be writing this all down in her baby book. But at the rate I am going, I am doing well to remember to share it with Michael that night, let alone blog about it. Two clevernesses come to mind, however:

This morning she was admiring herself in the mirror and reading off the letters on her shirt. Now, she knows all her letters and the main sounds they make, but we've kept it simple thus far and only introduced her to the short vowel sounds. In absence of formal school time, I've taken to spelling out short words whenever I can and walking her through the sounds. Her shirt read, 'Dept. of Cute,' and she was happily reciting the letters.

So I decided to make a giant leap forward and introduce her to the concept of long and short vowel sounds. Leading her to the garish letter magnets on the fridge, I spelled out CUT and explained how, without an E, the U made an uh sound, but when you add the E, it makes the YEW sound! Never missing a trick, she said, 'Let's add the Z!' And then proceeded to line up all the rest of the letters, in order of colour.

Then this evening, she was running around sans-culottes. As I washed the dishes, I overheard this ensuing conversation:

Jane: Jane's legs are naked!
Michael: Yes, they are.
Jane: Jane is wearing no pants!
Michael: No, you're not wearing pants.
Jane: Just legs!