Hiding the knives

Josephine: I want a shaky peepee like yours.
David: oh?
Josephine: I used to have one...
David: really?
Josephine: But somebody cut it off!
David: oh no!
Josephine: And it blooded everywhere!
David: I bet!
Josephine: giggle
Josphine: JUST KIDDING DADDY!

hey, where did we go, days when the rains came...

We went to the hood's potluck and slip n slide extravaganza last night -- and Lucy scored a portrait of herself from the artist around the corner. It was a black-and-white lined drawing, which he happily told her to color. So later, sprawled across our filthy family room rug, she asks me, "Can I color my eyes blue?"

Whuh? I quickly judge that this is not a question of artistic freedom, of making the sky green and the grass blue. (After a year with the Unitarians, I say make it blue and eat it too!) Ununnhuh, next thing you know, I'm finding rhinoplasty in our Google cache.

"Uhhh, you COULD make your eyes blue. But why would you want to?"

"Because I like them better."

"Really??? Ha! I think brown eyes are beautiful."

Silence.

"Can I?"

"Fine, if you want to break my heart."

"Okay."

The Mind of the Artist

Earlier in the year, at the first of a series of parent conferences to discuss the academic goals of the 4-year-old... we told Lucy's teacher that we thought Lu could maybe try drawing without stencils. Perfect boat after perfect lion after perfect snowman -- that's all she brought home.

But now the artist has been revealed!

See here:

Her influences: Fra Filippo Lippi?

The artist is loath to explain her work, but she deigned to reveal a few plot points: In the left, you see the Sunday School teacher. To the right, you see the poor little girl dragged to Sunday School by her father.

Take two:

Now the father is yelling! NO! You must go to Sunday School! Girl is still unhappy and teacher is positively limp with misery. Not sure what is falling from the sky -- some sort of bird-baby-Jesus?

So, you're thinking, poor Lucy. Forced to go to Sunday School by that mean father who still wishes he had made more of his fleeting Sunday School encounters with the young Mariah Carey on Long Island. (Little does he know that Dreamlover was actually about a boy she saw eating Ritz crackers at church. Could it be??? He should try to find her on Facebook!!)

Anyway, the interesting part about this series of work is, Lucy has never been to Sunday School in her life! Not once! And I can't imagine what she thinks she knows about it. (I'm so disillusioned by what this tells me of the artistic process. I'm beginning to wonder if Thomas Kinkade isn't even American!)

Lucy does have a friend who goes to Sunday School and, on Friday, when we happened to have this little friend in the car, I said to her, "Hey Clara, what do you do at Sunday School?" Clara says: "We sing songs. Have snacks. Then, if it's not raining, we go out on the playground." "Well," I say, "that doesn't sound too bad, what do you think, Lu?"

The artist said nothing.

Here she is, looking all angelic herself, after pre-K graduation:

Just who is this Mano??

Aie! Margaret screams, as she herds ants on our dining room floor. Mano! Mano! Come here, Mano! And then, a few days later, Josephine is talking on my cell phone (not the new one, which Auntie Pamela provided after the last was thrown to the floor in a pique of rage. Why don't people call me back?? Really? No really, it wasn't me.) Anyway, Miss Phinie-Weenie is on the phone chatting with... Mano?? Again, who is this Mano?? They just giggle and run away.

Lulu, do you know this Mano? She looks thoughtful. "No, no I don't."

"Margaret, who is Mano??" "Mano!" she yells cheerfully.

I think it might be their secret baby.

Ear Wax

Lucy has a friend at school who knows all about big-girl things like Hannah Montana and home heating costs because this friend has a BIG SISTER! And this big sister recently visited Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum and now all the pre-kindergartners have heard about this amazing place where people are made out of WAX!

Lucy pauses in the telling of the story of this incredible place to ask, briefly: "Is that like ear wax??"

Last night, we were out in the garden, watering our baby bean plants. "I'm like a mommy!" shouts Josephine, cheerfully spraying water all over my feet. And then the girls meowed and made nests with their arms to carry their baby kittens (pretend), until they had to do something else, so Josephine carefully laid her kitten under the Rose of Sharon, where Lucy traipsed over with her Clifford on a leash. And Josephine cries, "LUCY! You stepped on my kitty!!" And Lucy yells back, "JOSIE! I can't even SEE YOUR KITTY!"

Odds and ends

Josephine just peed in the potty and announced, "Princess pee!" And then she marched out to the family room, where Princess Margaret had collapsed on the veterinarian surgical table. (This is where we treat the poor little dogs who drink soda and cats who look too long at the sun.)

"No touch princess!" Margaret commanded.

So big changes in the Royal Castle these days.

Our new au pair arrived two weeks ago from a very small village in Austria, replacing Julia who seemed to think such things as "university" would be more rewarding than caring for the Royal Family. Sigh. First Julia, then Supergold, and now Ted Kennedy -- and frankly, I am glad bad news doesn't come in quadruplets.

I can not stress enough how much I liked Julia. You know if I didn't you would have heard much more about her...

Supergold, by the way, was the little fish that we brought home from the county fair on Sunday night. (That is, 36 hours before we discovered him listless on the bottom of an old flower vase.) Oh, my first book! "Mired: The Short Life and Fast Times of Supergold."

Oh! The other things we won at the county fair! Lucy -- a third-place ribbon for her painting. I call it "Square Rainbow"...see here:


I entered a half-dozen chocolate hazelnut crinkles in the over-hyped drop cookie competition -- and I got honorable mention, but that's really not very good, I don't think. (I blame the chocolate. Or actually, I blame myself for not thinking to buy the semi-sweet chocolate specified in the recipe and instead, hauling over the step stool, scrambling around the top shelf of the pantry, and emerging with a half-eaten bag of old Nestle chocolate chips...)

Next year, I might try filled cookies. Less competitive, I hope. Or maybe I'll just transfer my unrealized ambition to my children and force them to raise prize-winning tomato seeds. That makes the most sense, right?

Okay, okay, okay

I'm not making any promises!

Our trek (no mountains, but an awful lot of SUVs on the NJ Turnpike) to Cape Cod was lovely. The girls peed in the potty, ate lots of gummy worms and candy buttons, caught baby toads -- c'mere, frogggggy! c'mere, c'mere, c'MEEEER! -- and got attacked by a family of teenage ducks in a freshwater kettle pond. No worries there. Adolescent ducks don't have teeth!

Most embarrassing moment: Josephine, sweetly licking an ice cream cone at Arnold's Lobster Bar, shouts to a nice-looking couple in the parking lot -- "Go WAY! Go way people, broke your head! Go!" (Crazy gestures!) "Go way, broke your head! Fly away, people!"

When I ask Lucy, "What is wrong with these babies?? Why are they so crazy??" she says to me, "You need to ask God. He made them. At least he made their bones. The doctors made their skin, I think."

I have no pictures because...the babies broke my camera.

Now that we're back we're enjoying the rule-crazy pool that we joined for the month of August. Last Saturday: Twin 1-year-olds spotted in the baby pool wearing matching Lilly Pulitzer bathing suits. They climb out and their skinny bikini-mama wraps them in matching pink Lilly cover-ups, which is to say that those babies were wearing $300 worth of summer wear that will last exactly 58 days...

Okay, off to health-care reform rally!