whim emerges

While on vacation at the beach, we were all in our skin-exposing bathing suits after a big lunch and noticed that our bellies were larger than normal.

Our 3-year-old son had a particularly large belly, and we all laughed at him.

Annoyed, he shouted: “Quit giving me food!”

My three-year-old twin boy is learning to dress himself.

Last night, he tried to put on his own socks. After several minutes of frustration, he gave up, exclaiming: “I can’t do it! My toes keep getting in the way!”

My 3-year-old son loves to dig in the dirt in our yard, fill his toy dump trunk, and then dump the load on our driveway. Yesterday, I swept the driveway while he was napping. When he awoke and joined me outside, he looked at the pile of dirt that had now moved off the side of the driveway and asked: “Hey Dad, why is this dirt clean now?”

My 8-year-old daughter dyed her hair black last week in preparation for Halloween.

Given that my hair was once black (before it turned grey), she asked me if I would dye my hair, too. Previously, my children had decided that I would dress up as a basketball player for Halloween; by adding black hair, and black-painted fingernails, I became a Goth basketball player.

So, last night, my wife dyed my hair jet black. When I looked in the mirror, I wondered who this imposter was. I missed my greyness. I worried hard to attain all those grey hairs.

But then, as I walked my daughter to school this morning, a neighbor noticed that we were both sporting black hair and wondered what was up. I responded by saying that I wanted to be like my daughter. She looked up at me, beaming.

Now, as I embark on washing my hair several times a day, impatiently waiting for my normal hair color to return, I’ll remember her smiling face at that moment and not feel so bad.

While on vacation, my 5-year-old son befriended a young boy named Devin. As Devin arrived at the pool one morning, my son shouted a most unusual greeting:

“Hey, Devin! I see that your rash is all gone!”

(Young Devin had been wearing a t-shirt in the pool, because of a sun rash, but arrived this day shirtless.)

Last night, while reading to my two daughters about personal hygiene and the importance of a good night’s sleep, I asked if they could tell me why sleep is important to the human body — that is, what happens to the body while you sleep.

My six-year-old’s response was intriguing:

“While you’re sleeping, your brain forgets some of your thoughts so you can have room for new thoughts tomorrow.”

A second round of pink eye has run through the family; 4 of the 5 kids have had it this week. (I’m not sure how the fifth kid has avoided contamination…)

We treat pink eye with special eyedrops, and their application is not particularly popular… or simple. For the babies, we have to pry their eyes open, and even then we often miss as a hand swats the bottle or a head turns suddenly, causing the drop to land harmlessly on the cheek.

While my wife was dispensing eyedrops to our 4-year-old son, he seemed to think that the drop made a direct hit in his eye. He exclaimed:

“I think you got it.”

Then, after a brief pause…

“Mommy, what does ‘I think’ mean?”

My 6-year-old daughter brought home the following short essay, an assignment she completed in her first grade glass. Look past the spelling errors and you may notice, as I did, that it has an interesting lyrical quality to it…

“If I were a snowflake I think it would be cool to come down frum the sky. But in the summer I would melt. In fall I would get rety to come down.”

As I was dressing my three-year old son for a family Christmas party, I told him:

“Man, you’re looking handsome.”

He replied:

“Yeah, but you’re not.”