This and That

Our lives have been rather boring lately...as you can tell by my lack of posts. I guess boring is a good thing because although nothing amazing has happened, nothing terrible has happened either.


Tyler came home the other day with a very brown shirt. It wouldn't have been such a problem if he hadn't gone to school in a WHITE shirt. I guess he and some second grade boys were "play fighting" at recess. One of the boys "wanted to see how tough I was" so he dragged Tyler across the ground, totally covering the front and back of his shirt in mud. I'm not exaggerating. It was covered. His jeans had several muddy patches, too, but those didn't stand out quite as much.

Because Tyler was a willing participant in this recess activity, I felt he was ultimately responsible for what happened to his clothes. (I need to tape our "you need to make better choices" talk so I can just press the play button every couple weeks.) As a consequence, I made Tyler wash his jeans and shirt himself. After 3 washings, stain remover, and a bleach pen, the shirt is still too stained to wear to school. So, Tyler has to do work around the house to earn enough money to buy a new shirt for school. (Don't tell him he can find one at Walmart for <$5!) Do you think he's old enough to clean up dog poo yet? *evil laugh*


The other night at dinner Tyler was talking about school and suddenly asked me if I realized that sand is a liquid. I disagreed with him and told him it was a solid. This conversation was repeated the following night at dinner but he refused to believe my argument that sand is actually a solid. This morning I showed him a magnified picture of grains of sand (thanks Uncle Ron). He agreed with me that a single grain of sand is indeed a solid. I reasoned with him that if a single grain of sand is a solid, a handful of those grains would still be solids, although they may move together like a liquid. He still looked doubtful. While he was at school, I emailed his teacher to see if they had covered this specific question. She said they had not. After a couple emails back and forth, I suggested she talk to Tyler about it. I told her that if SHE told him sand was a solid, he would believe it. I have noticed a couple times this year that I am being nudged right off that mom-knows-everything pedestal so his very young, very pretty, single teacher can have a seat. Anyway, when he got home from school today, I asked him if he had discussed the liquid/solid issue with his teacher. He said, "Yes, we talked about it. She said sand is a solid, so I believe you now that it's a solid." Hmpfh. Later he asked me if I thought a car was a want or a need. I told him I needed to ask his teacher first.


Here are a couple pictures of Clara from today. She is suddenly looking SO big! And she is so fuzzy! She will be 10 weeks old on Sunday.




Ron heads to Europe for 8 days tomorrow morning. Somehow his traveling is so much worse when it's over the weekend(s)! Hopefully that trip will be "boring" too.