Friday Hodgepodge

Four Things

1. We often joke that Little Man may look like my father-in-law, but he is all me inside. He often has a firm idea of what he likes and will make sure we all know. I have two examples.

First, before Christmas, Mrs. Van Horn wanted to get a real tree since we'd be home for the season, rather than going out of town. As we were getting ready to go out to buy one, my son piped up. "We already have a tree." Upon hearing that, Mrs. Van Horn decided to go along with the artificial tree. Every morning during the season, he'd go in and switch on the lights once he got up in the morning.

Second, we're moving out of state some time in the next six months. I told each kid as I picked them up the Friday we made our decision. My daughter was excited about meeting new people on the other end. But my son immediately said he was going to miss his school and his friends. This didn't sit well with him.

2. In light of the previous post, accuse me of self-flattery if you wish, but nothing gets by my son, who has just turned five. He has Spanish lessons once a week, but I was surprised one day when, glasses in our hands, he raised one and said, "¡Salud!" I didn't think he got that from class, so I asked him how he knew that. It turns out he remembered it from a scene in Coco.

Obviously domesticated. (Image via Pixabay.)

3. Pumpkin recently amused me with the following formulation, which I overheard her use while playing with her brother: wild shark.

Accept no substitutes.

4. My daughter, nearly seven, has finally learned to snap her fingers. Upon learning of her interest in picking up this valuable skill, I remembered how long it took her to pick up whistling. So I warned her that finger-snapping might be like whistling in terms of taking a long time to figure out.

But then I decided to see if I could teach her, and got her to do so successfully a couple of times. (It's a little harder to explain than you might think.) With some practice over a few days, she became able to snap reliably, so I guess I was wrong about that.

-- CAV