Clever Girl

*Bonus points if you read the title in a British accent, a la Jurassic Park.


Anna, my little naturalist, loves to catch fireflies.  She would do it every night if we let her.  Unfortunately for her, fireflies only come out when it gets dark, which is past her bedtime.  This means it has to be a night when we are willing to let her go to bed late.  That doesn't happen often, so when it does, it is, in her word "THE BEST NIGHT EVER!!!"

Recently, I was out of town for a week, so Sean had the kids on his own.  Daddy is a sucker for his daughter's big blue eyes, so she managed to convince him to let her stay up late and chase fireflies.  Joshua was staying the night at a friend's house, so it was just Daddy, Anna and Matthew outside.

Matthew likes to chase fireflies, but he gets bored with it pretty fast.  After a while, he asked Sean if they could play hide n seek instead.

"Matthew," Anna said sternly, "we are CATCHING FIREFLIES, NOT playing hide n seek!"

Frustrated, Matthew pouted for a while, and then he tried asking again.  Anna considered her brother  for a moment and then decided to try a different tack.

"Matthew, I know what we can do!"  she said.  "We can play a game!"

"A GAME?"  Matthew asked eagerly, intrigued by the notion of a new game."

"YES," Anna said grinning, "a SEARCHING game."

"A SEARCHING game?!" Matthew asked excitedly.

"Yes.  It's a game where we search for things.  And I will pick the first thing we will search for.  First we will search for...FIREFLIES."

"YAY!!!!" exclaimed my naive little toddler, and off he ran with his sister to play the searching "game."

One way or another, Anna knows how to get what she wants!

Folks, I Just Can't Make This Stuff Up

About two weeks ago, Matthew had gotten into a bad habit of opening the silverware drawer, pulling out everything he could find, and strewing the utensils about the house.  Being my "do-the-crime-do-the-time" kid, no amount of discipline seemed to deter him from this new hobby.  What did stop him, however, was somehow managing to jam the drawer shut.  It has therefore been about two weeks since we were able to get into that drawer.  We have been using whatever utensils were in the drainer at the time, which has cut down on dishes, but is pretty darn annoying.

In a seemingly unrelated event, last night we all went to church for our small group time.  I run a bible study for our youth group girls, and they all decided they wanted to go to McDonald's for our study.  My husband had the keys to our van - which I needed in order to transport the girls - so I had to interrupt the men's small group to ask my husband for the keys.  Our pastor, upon realizing I would likely be stopping at our house on the way to the van (we live in the parsonage next door to the church), said "Oh, she's going home, give her the fork!"  At this point, Sean reached into his bag and pulled out one of our forks.  From our silverware collection.  From our house.  I didn't really have time to question his as to why he had a fork in his bag; I could only shake my head in disbelief at the craziness that goes on in my house.

I also did not have time to stop at the house and put the fork away.  I had five hungry teenage girls piling into my car.  So I did what seemed to be the most logical thing to do at the time: I stuck the fork in the mailbox on my way to the van.

Fast forward to tonight.  I was setting the table for dinner and came up short a fork.  Realizing the drawer was still jammed shut tight, I mulled about what to do, when suddenly the events of last night popped into my head.  I walked out the front door, reached into the mailbox, pulled out the fork, washed it, and finished setting the table.

I am quite certain these are the sorts of things that do NOT go on at other people's houses.