Entries Tagged 'Family' ↓

At last a day with real snow, where I'm home anyway (by the time I got us shovelled out there was no way to even bother trying to catch a train) and the kids can come out and play.

There's enough snow that little legs will easily fall through it up to their knees and get stuck. But it's been cold enough that the top layer is nice and crunchy. In New England, much like in Alaska, we have 57 different ways to describe snow :). But this makes for a very interesting condition, because Katherine is heavier than Elizabeth, and Katherine falls through, while Elizabeth floats along on top. I got a picture of this, I hope it comes out. Katherine is stuck up to her knees and trying to push herself out, which ends up with arms going into the snow up to her elbows. Meanwhile Elizabeth is quite literally walking circles around her like a mountain goat asking "You ok, Katherine? You stuck in the snow?"

Katherine got to experience her first case of snow blindness, too. We went in for lunch after playing for awhile. "Whoa," she tells me, "It's dark. Are the lights on?" I explained snow blindness, and that it would go away. "Will it be like that upstairs, too?" she asked. I said probably not. But sure enough as she runs up the stairs I hear, "It's dark up here too!"

"What did you do at school today, Katherine?"

"We learned how to make birds."

"That sounds fun. How do you make a bird?"

"Well you take a piece of paper, and then you make a heart. You fold it in half to make a bird, and then you take the scissors and you cut the honkin wings."

"I'm sorry, you do what?" Did she saw "hawking" or something?

"You cut the honkin wings with your scissors." Sounds like "honking". How odd.

"The what kind of wings?"

"Honkin, daddy. The honkin wings."

"Oh. What are honkin wings?"

"You know, when you make the heart, and then you cut it down the middle to make the wings and you put the wings on the side, and then you cut them some more if they're honkin."

"Sweetie what does honkin mean?"

"Big big big big."

Well, duh. "The big honkin wings." It actually makes perfect sense, it just never would have dawned on me that she'd use a word like that.

It's funny how words work when you're 4 years old. You understand that "plus" means addition and "minus" means "take away". But "times" already meant something, it means repeating something some number of times, but when you say something like "three times five", it makes no sense. You wouldn't say to a person "I spun in a circle times three."

So as I teach Katherine her multiplication I've simply switched it to the end of the sentence. Instead of asking her "three times five" I ask her what "five three times" is. This is far more intuitive, she understands that "five three times" means "five and five and five". She can do that math.

I have no idea how to explain division yet. All I've got in my head is that old clip from the Beverly Hillbillies of Jethro talking about his "gazintas". Two gazinta four two times, two gazinta six three times, two gazinta eight four times…. 🙂

Last night at dinner I was trying to get Katherine to talk about her day. She has a bad habit of asking her mother what they did, and pretending that she's forgotten. In particular we were stuck on what they did for lunch, because Kerry wouldn't tell her and she swore she couldn't remember.

So the conversation went something like this.

"Ok. Let's work our way through the day. What did you have for breakfast?"

"Life cereal."

"And what did you have for snack at school?"

"Daddy, I didn't have snack, but I can tell you what it was. It was Oreo cookies and Pirate Booty."

"And what did you have for lunch?"

"I can't remember."

"Sure you can, you remembered breakfast and snack and those came first."

"Daddy, I have a memory book in my mind but my head forgot to sign it down!"

….Well, that's different.

The other night we're over the neighbors for dinner and playing the "Do you know how smart my 7yr old is?" game. I don't love that game. "Do you guys know what a homophone is?" the neighbor asks.

I honestly try to remember. She didn't say homonym, which I know. She said homophone. I take a guess that it's a word that has multiple meanings depending on the pronunciation (like read as in REED, versus read as in RED). "Nope," says the 7yr old, "It's two words that are spelled different, but sound the same. Like meet and meat."

"Then what's a homonym?" I ask.

He thinks about this and says, "They're the same thing."

I shake my head at that. That can't be right. So as casually as possible I pull out the cell phone, open up a web browser and go googling for it.

Sure enough, kid's right. Homophone and homonym mean the same thing. When the hell did THAT happen?

By the way, the word I was thinking of was "heteronym."

Update: You know, it's actually more complicated than this. Maven's Word of the Day tells me that homonym is the superclass to which both homophone and homograph belong. Specifically, a homonym is supposed to be spelled and pronounced the same (such as "grizzly bear" and "bear witness"). A homophone is what the neighbor said – sound the same, spelled differently. Interestingly a homograph is the thing I was thinking of, spelled the same but pronounced differently, like "I object to that large object."

Apparently a heteronym is a particular type of homonym where the word has to have an entirely different meaning. So I'm guessing that this means "I will read the book" and "I have read the book" would be a homograph but not a heteronym. "Look for minute details for the next minute" would be a heteronym. I think.

Today, at the mall:

Katherine: "This is like a library."

Daddy: "That's an interesting idea. How do you figure the mall is like a library?"

Katherine: "Well, look. Nobody's talking."

Daddy: "This is true."

Guys: are you worried about a little thinning on top?

You may want to consider having another cup of coffee.
German researchers said caffeine not only blocks the chemical known to damage hair follicles, but it can also stimulate growth.

But, don't get too excited just yet.
The study also found that you'd need about 60 cups of java a day to start seeing the effects.

Instead, the researchers are hoping to create a caffeine solution that can be applied to the scalp.

So apparently the solution is to actually take a shower in coffee?

I'd like to see the mouse that got shot up with the equivalent of 60 cups of coffee a day. Run that frickin maze in 0.3 seconds I'll bet.

"Daddy, are there still dinosaurs today?"

"No sweetie, they're all gone."

"Where did they all go?"

"That's a very good question. Nobody really knows. Just one day they weren't here anymore."

"Maybe they went up to Heaven."

"Hmmm, that could be. Very interesting idea. They might have all gone up to Heaven, I'd never really thought about it."

"Then I'm never going in there! I'd be too scared with all those dinosaurs running around, they would eat me."

"Oh, no, I don't think they the dinosaurs run around. I think they put a big fence around them and then you can go see them, like at the zoo"

"But Daddy," says Katherine, "What if they *didnt*?"

Came home from work today, and what is Elizabeth playing with?

Another pair of iPod earbuds.

?!?! That's just spooky. I'm looking at the things, which look exactly like the new pair I just bought, trying to remember when I'd brought them upstairs. I take them downstairs to my car…nope, my new ones are still sitting there.

That makes *5* pairs of these things.

At least I can account for this last pair — the kids really do have earbud headphones that came with some silly transistor radio they'd forgotten. But still, for a minute there I swear to god I though they were multiplying.

What's the name for that thing where you lose your ipod headphones (earbuds, actually), so you go out and buy a new pair (because you walk across town twice every day with them and you need something) for $20, but they're horrible, so you spend a week suffering with them (you can't return things that you stick in your ears, you ever try?) until finally you break down and buy another pair…

…and it's at this point that you think I'm gonna say "You find the original pair you thought you lost", right? Well, yeah. I did, right there in the garage.

BUT THEN I FOUND ANOTHER G$%^&*(D%^&N PAIR that I'd never seen before, sitting right in the junk drawer in the kitchen. That's like, irony squared or something. Alanis Morrisette's got me all confused about what that word's really supposed to mean.

So I now have:

• One ipod
• 2 sets of earbuds that were already in my possession
• 2 sets of earbuds that I've just purchased for $20/per.

If I get one more pair I'm thinking about implementing a day of the week sort of thing. I wonder if I can convince Kerry that now I need to buy more iPods?