Friday Independence Day Hodgepodge

Four Things

Image by Jeffrey Hamilton, via Unsplash, license.

Due in part to the holiday and in part to travel, I will be mostly or entirely absent from here until as late as July 16. In the meantime, I wish you a happy Independence Day.

1. Little Man, who just turned six, has his own amusing equivalent of way back in the good old days. When he wants to talk about something that happened long ago, or bring to our attention what a big boy he is, he will preface whatever it is with, "When I was four and a half..."

2. During a drive some time around their birthdays, the kids decided to list what each family member was best at. Here is what they came up with:

• Little Man: Memory
• Pumpkin: Vision
• Daddy: Being Wise
• Mom: Wrapping Presents

As Dave Barry, who I am sure would be proud, might say, I am not making this up.

3. My daughter, now eight, had just finished her first big-girl sleep-over summer camp, and I was driving her home. Meanwhile, Mrs. Van Horn texted me with a request for an ETA while running errands with Little Man.

Dad won! he suddenly piped up. In his lexicon, that meant I was home before they were.

Naturally, I had missed the text because I was driving and sent the appropriate message as soon as I was home. Little Man read the notification when it popped up on his mother's phone.

4. So, yes. Brownie camp went well for Pumpkin, which was a relief, in part because we realized after sending her there that it was the same camp one of her aunts attended and hated when she was a kid. But we were also naturally apprehensive about how she would handle being away from home for so long.

I was less so the day I dropped her off: She objected to me slipping and calling her "my little girl" on the drive over. And then she seemed eager to be rid of me once we got there. It didn't occur to me until later, but the cute, impatient frown she shot at me at one point did much to put me at ease.

On the way home, some of the things she told me about were getting to groom horses, learning how to use a bow and arrow, and sneaking out to catch frogs at night with one of the other girls.

-- CAV