A Tender Moment

K put together a stack of three Lego cubes that had pictures of animal heads, bodies, and feet or tails on them; when assembled with all the sides facing the same way, they make up a complete animal. He showed us the side that had a dog, and said, "You know why I made this for you? To remind you of Comet so you won't miss her so much."

Just because

After Shabbos, K, Papa, & Daddy were watching the last few minutes of a football game. D left the room and we heard the lid of the cookie jar, and when Papa went to see what D was up to, he'd disappeared. I spotted him hiding behind the chair in the living room but didn't let on that I'd seen him. A few minutes later he came back in the family room and we asked him where he'd been.
"I was hiding," he said.
"Why?" we asked.
"Because I just wanted to," he answered.
He climbed onto my lap, and I kissed him, and asked him, "Then why do you smell like oatmeal raisin cookies?"
"I don't know," he said with a straight face. "I was just hiding because I wanted to!"

Every Minute Counts

D wanted some vanilla yogurt, but we were just about to make Kiddush and have dinner so I told him he could have it for breakfast. Later, he said he wanted to sleep in the sleeping bag, so he went upstairs and got 2 sleeping bags out of the closet and brought them downstairs. He dragged the red one into the kitchen and announced that he was sleeping there. Why? "Because I want to have vanilla yogurt for breakfast the minute I wake up, so I want to sleep in the kitchen so I won't waste any time."

D Comments on Life:

D, while eating a bowl of Life cereal:
"I'm soaking my hard, hard Life in the pool of milk!"

Who's counting?

K & D slept over Sunday night, and when Dovid picked them up in the morning, I kissed the kids goodbye. I said to D, "That was so much fun--will you come and sleep over again?"
He answered, "Yes, I will sleep over at your house 200 more times before I die!"

Context is everything

It only takes a conversation with a preschooler to remind us of how much a child's experiences color the way he interprets the world. Some examples:

K was reciting the poem, "One for the money..." and he asked me to repeat each line after him. When I repeated the line "Two for the show," he stopped me. "Not 'Two for the SHOW..'" he said, "Two for the SHUL."
Oh. Excuse me!

I was reading to D from an ad for the circus: "Hold on to your hats!"
"Why does it say 'Hold on to your HATS?" he asked. "Why doesn't it say 'Hold on to your KIPAHS?"

I read another line from the ad: "The Greatest Show on Earth!"
"Why is it on EARTH?" D asked. "It should be in a PLACE! On the GROUND!"

The Wedding Planner

D was drinking orange juice out of a plastic bottle that had a top shaped like a football helmet. This led to the following conversation:

D: Mommy and Daddy got this at their wedding. They BOUGHT it there.
Me: You can buy things at a wedding? I didn't know that. What else can you buy at a wedding?
D: Um- not kosher ham. And hamburgers, and oranges, and tomatoes, and chicken, and cucumbers.
M: What is a wedding, anyway? What's it for?
D: It's for people when they get older.
M: Like a birthday?
D: Yes. If you're a boy you have a Bar Mitzvah and if you're a girl you have a Bat Mitzvah.
M: How old will you be when you have a Bar Mitzvah?
D: 10.
M: How old do you have to be to get married?
D: 15.
M: Did you go to Mommy and Daddy's wedding?
D: I don't remember.
M: What about K and T?
D: Not T, she wasn't born. I don't know if K and me were there.
M: Maybe you were home with a babysitter?
D: If I was home with a babysitter, it was you.

Bones?

In our city/suburban existence, we are so far removed from the original sources of our food that sometimes it's easy to forget that kids have no idea where much of their food comes from (Jewel, of course!)
Case in point: yesterday, K was sitting at our kitchen counter, finishing up some leftover popcorn. When it was nearly gone, he asked me, "Bubbie, can we make more popcorn? There's only bones left!"

Wuh's up?

The grandchildren & their parents were on vacation this week. Tuesday afternoon, my cell phone rang--it was D.
"Bubbie, guess where we are!" he exclaimed. I knew where they were, but I played along.
"7-11?" No. "A restaurant?" No. "The park?" No. "The museum?" No.
"OK, give me a hint," I said.
D answered, "It starts with a "wuh."
"A 'wuh'?" I asked him, wondering what on earth a "wuh" could be. "Hmmm- I give up," I said.
"Wuh-sconsin!" he yelled happily.

What's so funny?

The boys slept over last night, and this morning D crawled into bed with Papa. A few minutes later, the clock-radio went on.
"What's that?" D asked.
"That's the radio," Papa explained. "It's like an alarm clock."
"Oh. That's funny!" D said. Then he paused, and, very seriously, asked, "Why is that funny?"

Techno-kids

Since they were born in the 21st century, K & D have no idea that all of the technological things they now take for granted didn't exist several years ago. Cell phones; iPods; DVD's; all these things lead kids to see the world through a kind of techno-lens. When I was a kid, we attributed things we couldn't understand to "magic," but now is there anything at all that can't be conceivably explained through some electronic device? Apparently not, according to D:
On Sunday we were in the park, and we saw a girl flying a kite. D said, "She's flying that kite and it doesn't even have a string." I explained that the kite did have a string, but that we couldn't see it because we were too far away. "How could the girl fly it if it didn't have a string?" I asked him.
He answered, "Maybe she has a remote."

Husband-in-training

Tonight I was talking to K on the phone, and I told him that it was his parents' anniversary. "I know that," he answered patiently. Then I asked him if he knew what that meant--what's an anniversary? He knew that, also: he said, "It means that Daddy has to buy Mommy something."
As his mother says, K's future wife will be very thankful that she taught her kids so well!!

What a sweet boy...

Today I asked the kids if they remembered going to see the Water Show. They remembered the people water skiing, and the people hanging from giant kites pulled by speedboats. Then I told them that the lake was gone. I explained that there was a lot of rain and the earth around the lake gave way, and all the water drained out, so now there was just mud. I told them that all of the people who worked there--the boat drivers and the water skiers--had to find new jobs now.
D was very concerned. "Where will they get jobs?" he asked.
"I don't know, maybe in a store or a restaurant," I told him.
He thought for a minute. Then he said, "I know--two of them can work at Target, and two of them can work at the ice cream store!"

Out of sight, out of mind

We were at the park watching K's soccer game. There were a couple of ice cream vendors pushing carts around in the park, and D had been clamoring for ice cream, but his mother said no. He tried a few tactics in an attempt to get her to change her mind.
"It doesn't cost any money," he said.
"It doesn't? How do you know that?" we asked him.
He pointed to the cart, which had pictures of ice cream and the name of the company (in Spanish). "See, it doesn't have any numbers on the sides," he pointed out.
His mother didn't give in. "After the game, there's a barbecue," she told him, "with hot dogs and chips and juice boxes."
"I don't want a hot dog," he answered, but this didn't convince her either, and she just said, "OK, but we're still not getting ice cream."
That seemed to be the end of it. But a few minutes later the game was over, and both parents and K started off towards the barbecue at the other side of the park. D decided to wait with us and T, so Mommy said they'd bring back food for us. No sooner were they out of earshot than D, eyeing the ice cream cart, turned to his grandfather and said, "Papa, do you have any money on you?"

How to tell if you're a boy

My daughter told me she asked D how he knows he's a boy. I'm not sure what sort of an answer she was expecting—but D looked at her as if she were the single most thick-headed individual on the planet, and said, "Because I have a Kipah!"
When they were at our house, she asked K the same question. He said, "Because I don't have a sheitel or any clothes that are pink."

My new cleaning ladies

K and D were here the other day, and besides being in cleaning mode for Pesach, their favorite toy at our house is the vacuum (go figure--why did I buy all those toys?), so while we were eating dinner, the kids took two bites of their food and then left the table and went into the family room and started vacuuming.
About 15 minutes later, their father went in there, and a moment later he came back into the dining room and said, "Please tell me that one of you tipped the couch over on its back." We all looked at each other blankly. Then we got up to look, and sure enough, K and D had tipped the couch over so they could vacuum under it. Fortunately, they were both standing on the same side of it at the time, so no one was crushed!
Later, D came into the dining room and crawled up on my lap and took my face in his hands in that endearing way little kids do when they want to make sure you are really listening to them, and said seriously, "Bubbie, do you have cleaning ladies?" When I said that I didn't, he said, "You don't have to get any cleaning ladies, because K and I can be your cleaning ladies." (Hey-can I have that in writing? And bring it out in a few years, say, when they're teenagers?)
Today when I got home from work my daughter was here again with the kids, and Papa said they had called him on the phone and asked him if he would pay them to come over and clean. They came over and vacuumed the couch some more, and he gave them each a dollar. They plan to use their earnings to buy Slurpees.
At this rate, their parents will have to start talking to them about opening IRA’s!

Times Have Changed!

K and D were playing with an old 35 mm film camera. After clicking away for several minutes, K asked me, "Why aren't the numbers changing? It still says 'zero'." I answered, "There probably isn't any film in the camera."
K looked puzzled. "What's film?" he asked.

A little help from a brother

K and D had unfolded a long pad of the old-type computer paper- the kind that has all the sheets connected--on the floor from the front windows all the way into the dining room. They counted the sheets--there were 31. After several minutes of the kids walking on the paper, the sheets became separated in a couple of places. I asked the kids if they thought there were still 31 sheets, now that they weren't all attached together. They weren't sure, so we decided to count them again; since there were now 3 separate lines of paper, each of us would count one set and then we'd add them up.
K's set had 17; D's had 12, and mine had 2. K started adding the numbers, but he soon ran out of fingers.
What to do? No problem: he asked D, "Can I use your fingers?" D readily agreed.
Epilogue: since even with all of our fingers we didn't have enough, we resorted to using the calculator.

Too old

On Friday, I drove K and D to school. I took D to his classroom, and when he was all settled, I went down the hall to K's room. He had just finished hanging up his backpack and was about to go into his classroom. I said to him, "Your class looks like so much fun--can I come?"
"No, everyone in my class is 4 or 5," he said. "There's no one in my class who's 56!"

Upscale kids?

K and I were waiting outside the store while his mother was inside with D, buying him new shoes. It was breezy, and we caught a whiff of brewed coffee from the cafe inside the store. K asked, "Hey, why does it smell like Starbucks?"

Must be some kind of alien creature...

We were talking about outer space and the planets. I told the kids that nothing lives on any of the other planets. No people, no animals, not even plants.
D said, "Not even a marmoset?"

A real threat

K was angry at Papa. He said, "The next time I sleep over here, I'm bringing rocks so I can throw them at you!"

A man, a plan, a canal...

I was reading "Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel" to the kids. On one page, it says that Mike Mulligan and Mary Ann dug the canals... I wasn't sure that the kids knew what a canal was, so I asked them.
K answered, "Yeah, a canal is a river that's smelly."

Hide and Seek

We were playing hide and seek. D and I (with T) had already had our turns to hide; now it was K's turn.
K: I'll hide, and you count to 100.
Me: That's a long time to count.
K: OK, how about 80.
Me: Why don't you hide, and just say "Come find me!" when you're ready.
K: No, you'll hear my voice and you'll know where I am.
Me: Good point. OK, how about if we count to 40. You counted to 40 when D and I were hiding.
K: But I won't have enough time.
Me: We'll count slowly.
K: OK, but count really slowly, as slow as the slowest animal in the world.
Me: What is the slowest animal in the world?
D: A pygmy marmoset.
Me: Really? A pygmy marmoset?
D: Yes, a pygmy marmoset.
Me: OK, we'll count now, and you go and hide.
K left the den and went upstairs. D and I started counting to 40. Really slowly.
After we got to about 20, we heard K yelling something from upstairs, but we couldn't hear what he was saying, so we went into the living room.
K: I can't find a good hiding place!
D ran upstairs.
D: Should I help you? I know a good place!
K: OK- but will you find me?
D: No.
D came downstairs.
D: K isn't hiding in the bathroom, so don't look in there.

Now it's out of the bag

D wanted to make tea, so I gave him the basket of tea bags and told him to choose the kind he wanted. He picked up a box of Celestial Seasons tea and took out a bag. "What is this?" he asked.
"It's a tea bag," I answered. I realized that he probably didn't recognize it as a tea bag, because he's used to seeing me make tea with Lipton tea bags, that have a string and a tag, but the Celestial Seasons tea bags don't have them.
"It's a little bag that holds the tea," I continued. "The tea leaves are inside."
I turned my back to get the hot water, and when I turned around again, D had torn open the bag and was pouring the tea leaves into the cup.
Hey, it makes perfect sense--that's how we use everything else that comes in a bag!

Real chicken

We were eating chicken, and D announced, "One time I ate a real chicken."
"A real chicken?" I asked.
"Yes," he nodded. "It wasn't dead."
Trying not to laugh, or choke in the process, I asked him, "Where were you when you did this?"
"In Illinois," he answered.
He then went on to describe how the chicken was running around in the store, and he chased it, and caught it, and ate it!

Evil Twins

K & D were watching a Caillou DVD. Caillou has the flu and can't go to school, but he tells his mother that he wants to go anyway because he doesn't want to miss the puppet show.
Caillou's mother says, "But if you go to school when you have the flu, your friends will get sick, too. You don't want that, do you?"
Caillou says, "No." But D turned to K and said, "We do, right?"
K nodded and said, "Right!"
(Two evil little grins.)