the world according to Owen

"Mom, look! I can smush up blueberries and make juice handprints on the couch!!"

Seriously.

I don't care if the kid has been reading since he was three, there are some cylinders not firing up there.

I fought the car and...

Poor Daisy, my stout and helpful basset, ran into a car this afternoon. She got off easy this time: a splint, a few stitches, and the Cone of Shame.  She does, however, most definitely need a Hound Cake.

every dog has her day

Mom: (mixing a bowl of batter)

Isaac: Hey, Mom! What you makin'?   (Isaac is drawn to the sound of the mixer like a moth to flame)

Mom: Pound cake.

Isaac: Is Daisy birfday?

April

April, the month when all of my whiteboard markers have given up the ghost, and my lunches consist of PB&J or freezer meals.
Five weeks til summer vacation!

the games we play

My kids have a game. The adult translation of this game is, more or less, jumping on the couch while yelling your favorite word as loudly as possible.
Their favorite words, in descending order of popularity, are luggage, semicircle, murphy, and buttcrack.

I have no idea where these children came from.

I spent most of today in a teacher-training session, being trained by an old, jowly fellow who takes the fixed and vocal stance that we should go back to explicitly teaching grammar in the classroom. Like, subordinating conjunctions and dangling participles and all. The general horror at the very idea was nearly palpable.
The crazy thing is, he totally convinced me. In two hours he presented English grammar in its entirety as an elegantly patterned and systematic whole that allows us to make sense of how our minds perceive the universe (Seriously. I was not on drugs. That is what he said, and it seemed perfectly logical at the time.). My less-word-nerdy colleagues were less entertained by the presentation, but fairly entertained by how excited I got about it...glad I could help.
I am ready to sashay myself back into the classroom and heroically mend some split infinitives.

My dog is asleep on the couch, exhausted after a week with her barking buddy.
Daisy is your typical basset hound - what looks to humans like near-catatonia is, in dog reality, exemplary good manners and demure disposition. She never barks, she never jumps on people, she never bothers the chickens...she never really gets off the couch for any reason at all unless the kids are eating a snack.
Until Mom's dog comes over for a week. Daisy and Athena go way back. All the way back, in fact, to being virtual adoptive littermates. And when Athena is around, Daisy totally gets her groove back.