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When 5yr old E plays with crayons, I watch in fascination as her inner artist emerges.  She takes 6 crayons at once and tucks each one between the fingers of her left hand, while coloring with one in the right.  When she needs to switch colors she never puts one down, she just tucks it behind a different finger and chooses a different color.  It is exactly what I’ve seen artists do with multiple paint brushes.

The other day at dinner I comment on this to Kerry.  “You know why she does that, right?” she asks.

“No,” I say.

“She doesn’t want anyone to take her crayons if she puts them down.”

I realize that she’s correct.  Oh well, I like my interpretation better.

The theory behind a flex spending plan is great. Put some money aside for health care expenses, get a debit card, pay your bills out of that fund. You don’t even need to keep receipts, it’s all done automatically.

Except when, months later, the flex spending people say “yeah, that $10 copay you had 3 months ago? We want a receipt for that one.” Because sometimes the computer kicks out certain expenses as anomalous and now they want proof.

Or in this case, they want the receipt for the $250 glasses I bought specifically to use up the money at the end of the year. Still trying to find the darned thing. True I could just save every receipt – but in a context where you know ahead of time that you’re not going to need 90% of them, and most of them are of the $10 copay variety, it’s pretty annoying to have to go through the trouble.

So my oldest, who is in first grade, was asked at school “Who knows what their Mommy or Daddy does for work?”

Her hand shot up. “Make money!” she said.

I’m sure it got quite a laugh, but she didn’t intend it that way and didn’t understand what was funny. That’s how we’ve always said it in the house, ever since they were little – “Daddy’s off to go make money.” So we explained to her that everybody “works” to “make money”, but that doesn’t mean we actually create the physical money, it just means that people give us money to do stuff so we then come home and give that money to Mommy to spend. 🙂

The other day I’m called in to the bathroom where my almost 3yr old son points out something on the rug. Turns out it is a piece of hardened toothpaste. I begin digging at it with my fingernail.

“How about the nail clippies?” he asks.

Smart kid. I take the nail clippers (which are conveniently right on the edge of the bathroom sink, right in front of me), and clip out the offending gunk. “Great idea!” I tell my son. “High five!”

After delivering the necessary high five he says, just as nonchalantly, “You missed some.”

Today at a friend’s, the kids are playing in one room and the fathers are keeping an eye out from the kitchen. My soon-to-be 3yr old son comes out, puts his hand on the door between the two rooms and says, “I close this?”

“No,” I told him. “Leave that open.”

“Why?” he asked, as kids his age tend to do.

“Because we have to watch you,” I said. “In case anybody falls and hurts himself.”

The boy looks at the door for a minute, points to the *window in the door* and says, “You see me through that.”

I turned to the father next to me and said, “Ya know, I’ve got nothing to say to that. He’s got me.”

So we were Irish in a big way yesterday.  Not only were the kids dressed head to foot in the stuff, but I came home for lunch to a corned beef sandwich shoved in my hand.  Quite tasty, if I must say.

Later that night we had green eggs and ham for dinner.   Green eggs are easy to make, a little food coloring in scrambled eggs and you’re good to go.  None of the kids seemed to want ham, and I didn’t have any anyway, so we went with bacon.  What the heck, green bacon.  Worked surprisingly well, the food coloring really spread out.

The boy wanted green mac and cheese, which was a little trickier.  Hard to blend smoothly, came out more of a mottled blue and yellow.  But he seemed to like it.

For dessert, green milkshakes.  Vanilla with coloring, they don’t really dig mint.

4yr old, to 6yr old, over the breakfast table: “Try to guess the song I’m singing in my head!”

Over last summer I started having this pain in my fingers. Just in the morning, and only for a few minutes – a couple of flexes and it was gone. But for awhile there it was quite painful, enough to give me pause before that first bend because I knew it was going to hurt. I ended up going to the doctor about it in November, and after a quick blood test the nurse practioner told me, even though I am young for it (39), that it was rheumatoid arthritis and I’d need to see a specialist to determine the extent. I remember asking at the time, “Is that just an indicator, or, …” and she said, “No, if this says you have it, you pretty much have it.”

Cut to this week, when I finally got to see the specialist. He tells me, and I quote, “I hate those tests. Those put my kids through college. The majority turn out to be false positives.”

I love that idea – the majority turn out to be false positives. I realize that he’s exaggerating, but that would mean that the test is more often *wrong* than it is correct. He goes on to tell me that the doctor should have explained this to me, and I tell him that no, the NP actually said what she said above.

I’m waiting on the new, “real” blood test, but the rheumatologist(?) said that my level for the original was way low, certainly in the false positive range, and he thinks that rheumatoid for me is a dead end. “So don’t go home and Google it,” he says.

“Should have told me that 3 months ago,” I tell him.

So, just a big shout out to my nurse practioner for that little F up.

Today my daughter Elizabeth was sharing her book with her younger brother. A lift-the-flaps book, I watched as she reached a page with a pyramid of alphabet flaps on it. “I do H,” she told her brother when she got to that letter, “Because it is in my name. H for horse.”

“Confident in how to spell her name,” I thought.

“Ok,” she told her brother, “You do I.”

It’s baaaaack….