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7 Quick Takes

7 Quick Takes

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1.  The other day Bella announced to me: “Mom, we have zero pumpkins!”

I think she really understands the concept of zero. What fun that is. I really didn’t expect her to get that one for a while. She can also count to ten and has a decent grasp of the concrete idea that numbers count objects. She also kind of knows how to count past ten in that she can start at 40, say and count 41, 42, 43, 44, etc. She doesn’t know how to string them together yet… 10, 20, 30, 40, 50, etc.

2.  Sophie was playing with one of Ben’s trucks, driving it along the windowsill: “Bonny Bobby Shafto! said the man in the truck.” I love the way she incorporates nursery rhymes into the fabric of her imaginative play. She has such a poetic soul.

3.  At the Moms Day Away retreat BibleToys.com donated a toy for each attendee. I picked up a Noah’s ark and a boat with Jesus and the 12 apostles. Bella and Sophie have loved playing with them though I’m not sure how much of the play is centered on Bible stories. The other morning I caught them giving the apostles and Noah’s ark animals a milk bath in their cereal bowls. Oh dear. I had to wash them all down as they were coated in milk and bits of Cheerios.

4.  On Saturday Dom and the girls watched a bunch of You Tube videos, a bunch of clips of how they make mustard, ketchup, cheese, etc. The other day I was reading a book that had a description of elephants trumpeting in it and realized that they’d no idea what that sounded like so I found some videos of elephants. And that led to more videos of chickens and nursing pigs and fainting goats and horses. (All the videos of horses seem to have been put together by 13 year-old girls. Lots of syrupy pop music and running horses.) I love You Tube. It allows us to put together a sort of DIY Sesame Street and Mr Rogers without the annoying bits in between the segments. Such a great educational tool.

(In a nice bit of synchronicity, Simcha and I are thinking along the same lines today. Except her last clip and commentary is way cooler than anything I’d found. Wow:

The phrase �communion of saints� came into my head.  Even as all the voices come together, there is a very poignant sense of separateness and longing.  Seeing all those individual faces in their separate frames, you can�t forget that each voice is a person alone, sitting in front of a webcam, hearing nothing but himself�and yet someone with skill and love took these little bits from the darkness and made them into a unified song of great beauty.  I couldn�t help thinking that this video is sort of like a shadowy prefiguring of what the Lord will do at the end of the world.

)

5.  Bella: “Sometimes when it’s quiet, I put my hand on my heart and hear God talking to me.”

6. My dad installed a tile back splash in the kitchen. So very cool! Now every time I go to put something in the sink my eyes drift to the tiles: Shiny!, I think. The wall behind the tiles was painted with a cheap flat paint that could not be wiped clean. As you can probably imagine it was pretty gross.

Having to move everything off the counters means that the counters are now clean and that lots of stuff got thrown away or put away. The whole counter thing is now much spiffier. I was even inspired to clean off the kitchen windowsill.

Another nice fringe benefit was that dad had to move the stove to install the tile. Can I tell you how much disgusting dirt was under the stove that had not been moved in the two years we’ve lived here? So that’s been cleaned up as well.

Since he’s been here, my dad has also fixed the kitchen sink, which was coming loose and leaking water into the cabinet below; cleaned the shower and tub and replaced some missing grout therein; and he is planning to paint the bathroom. So my floors have only been vacuumed twice since Anthony was born and the laundry is behind and toys are everywhere; but lots of other things are looking quite nice round here.

7. Anthony seems to have got a wee bit of a cold. Little coughs and sneezes and snorts. And lots of snuffling when he nurses. And Sophie has a runny nose and cough too. Of all the illnesses that can strike, however, I’ll take the common cold. It’s not fun but neither is it dramatic like a stomach bug or the flu.

Jen has more quick takes at Conversion Diary

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