Kids – Page 10 – Writing Wrongs

Definition of a good book

One that makes you miss your stop on the way home from school.

This is what happened to Andrew yesterday. He was reading on the bus ride home and didn’t notice his stop had come up. Fortunately, on this part of the route, the bus does a loop, so he rode back a spot that was only a block away from his usual drop off.

I bet you want to know what book he was reading.

The Hunger Games

We’ve been having some good conversations about it too. Or almost conversations, because some of my answers are: “You have to keep reading.”

He did ask me why Haymitch was drunk a good deal of the time. I told him that if he reached the end of the book and he still didn’t understand, we’d talk about it. Actually, I think it makes a good discussion topic.

And if you haven’t guess, I really enjoyed The Hunger Games. I thought Andrew would really like it, too. The book fits his “girl books that boys would like” category, which is also something he’s been urging me to write.

I’m thinking about it.

Quarantine

Yes, that’s the sign they’re going to nail to the front of our door at any moment. Kyra’s been sick for three days now. Andrew succumbed last night and this morning can’t even watch TV because he can’t stand the sight of cartoon food, never mind the real thing.

So, we woke up at five this morning. Then the kids fell back asleep after about an hour. Andrew is still asleep. Miss B, industrious even in ill health, is drawing and coloring pictures, cutting paper and so on. It’s a good thing she can do this all day long. She is also learning Chinese. No, really. She is. She doesn’t take being sick lying down.

(Full disclosure: it’s a TV show ala Dora the Explorer, only instead of Spanish, it’s Chinese.)

Thank you very much, Mr. Earworm

I don’t know where Andrew picked up on this insidious bit of 80s music. He’s been singing: “Dōmo arigatō, Mr. Roboto” for a week now, over and over again. So I finally asked, “Have you heard the entire song?”

He hadn’t.

YouTube to the rescue! But first, a little background. From Wikipedia:

The song tells part of the fictitious story of Robert Orin Charles Kilroy (ROCK), in the rock opera Kilroy Was Here. The song is performed by Kilroy (as played by keyboardist Dennis DeYoung), a rock and roll performer who was placed in a futuristic prison for “rock and roll misfits” by the anti-rock-and-roll group the Majority for Musical Morality (MMM) and its founder Dr. Everett Righteous (played by guitarist James Young).

The Roboto is a model robot which does menial jobs in the prison. Kilroy escapes the prison by overtaking a Roboto prison guard and hiding inside the emptied-out metal shell. When Jonathan Chance finally meets Kilroy, at the very end of the song, Kilroy says,I am Kilroy! Kilroy! ending the song.

Aren’t you glad you asked? Okay, I realize you hadn’t. Enough, then. I’ll leave you with the musical stylings of Styx:

Best. House. Ever.

besthouse

Go on. You know you want a house with a laser tag arena, not to mention a grand BR (for bathroom). True, there’s no living room, but who needs that when you have a pool with water slides and a lazy river, plus a hot tub and two saunas. And a game room. I think there’s enough “living” going on in this house. You can even play tennis!

Do you like Andrew’s token nod to academics with the homework room on the left there? I asked him about it and he said, “Well, you need someplace to do it.”

I guess so.

Rubik’s Cube conundrum

So, we’re watching the Super Bowl halftime show (was it me, or was The Boss a bit winded, and dude, what’s with the soul patch, but I digress), when Kyra helpfully hands Andrew his Rubik’s Cube.

Kyra: Here you go, Andrew, I mixed it up for you.
Andrew (almost too stunned for words): Wha–? KyRA! How could you?
Kyra (innocently, but maybe not): I wanted to help you.
Andrew: Oh, NO! I have to give this kid at school a cookie every time just to solve it.

I had no idea a cookie was the going rate for the Rubik’s Cube solution, did you?

German: the language of love

So, the other day, I was helping Andrew study for his first German vocab quiz. He kept saying the article die (sounds like dee) as die (as in roll the die or die, irregular verbs, die!). He couldn’t remember the word for table (der Tisch)

I was helping him with pronunciation when Andrew commented: “Wow, you sound just like my German teacher.”

Six long, arduous years studying German. Vindication. At last! It was so worth it.

After a while, Bob called him over and whispered something in Andrew’s ear. Andrew’s eyes went wide, he held a hand over his mouth to keep in the giggle.

“Go tell that to Mommy,” Bob said.

Andrew marched over and said, “Ich liebe dich.” Then, “What? What did I say?”

He was still laughing because he’s twelve and anything that sounds even remotely off color delights twelve-year-old boys.

I told him: “You just said, ‘I love you.'”

So he said it again. And again. And Bob observed: “German, it’s such a beautiful language.”

I gave Andrew my sage advice for pronouncing German words: “When two vowels go walking, the last one does the talking.” That’s worth at least two years of German right there.

Andrew was suitably unimpressed. So I added, “Inch by inch, Russian’s a cinch, yard by yard, Russian is hard.”

“Ich liebe dich,” was all he said.

Fortunately it’s only his second day

I found this on the little sticky note widget on my computer this morning:

guton morgan mami how’s the das buch

Yes, Andrew is taking German this quarter. Fortunately it’s only his second day.

In which the baking club meets

The first two meetings of the Baking Club went very well. You might have noticed the link in the Twitter feed to The Pioneer Woman’s Spicy Molasses Cookies. The kids were skeptical at first, seeing as neither chocolate chips nor frosting was involved.

They changed their minds when they got their hands on the dough. We had a lot of fun rolling the cookies into balls then chasing them around in the sugar. Then, after they baked, we all couldn’t stop eating them. I wouldn’t say they were gone in sixty seconds, but they did vanish in less than twenty four hours.

Last night, we had girls-only Baking Club. Andrew went off to earn his Boy Scout Soil and Water Conservation badge and Miss B and I stayed home to make cupcakes.

Now, earlier, she bought a cupcake kit with her Borders gift card. However, when I went grocery shopping, I managed to purchase a cake mix (just in case), but no baking powder for the from-scratch variety. (Hey, I’m a quick bread/drop cookie kind of gal; I almost never use baking powder, so don’t have any on hand. That thump you hear is all the foodies hitting the floor in a dead faint.)

So, next week perhaps we’ll tackle from scratch. Hey, it’s an object lesson. First, we see what a cake mix provides; next, we’ll break down all the component parts and mix it ourselves. Dude, I didn’t even plan it like that.

The cupcakes were a hit with one and all. We ended up with twenty. Then, one mysteriously disappeared. It wasn’t Miss B. She was too busy creating our likenesses with frosting, pink sugar, and those little candy red hots. The boys weren’t home yet. The cat was asleep. The culprit?

The dog, in stealth mode (and believe me, she doesn’t do stealth all that well), nabbed it, and just it, leaving its brethren intact, if a bit shaken.

Andrew had one when he came home, then doubled back for seconds.

“Are they good?” I asked.

“Cha yeah!” he said, accompanied with an eye roll.

This can be loosely translated as: “Why yes, mother, they are excellent.”