Random Thoughts

• Teddy thinks Daisy and Junie are the same person, and calls them both "Saisy." Incidentally, the "face recognition" feature on my phone ALSO thinks they are the same person.

• On the other hand, the face recognition feature on my phone thinks Teddy is about five different persons. 

• Goldie and Teddy were particularly cute playing with Goldie's Floppy Guy one day. Teddy was very much in awe of him, calling him "GUY" with great emphasis.

"GUY."

• We made this insect collection while learning about insects the last few months and we're just so…proud of it. I'm not sure why. I think it just looks nicer than we imagined it would.

• The other day Sebastian said, "Mommy, I just happened to notice this...I don't know why...but the Carpool lane says 'Express only' from Mapleton to Springville, and then it just says 'Express' until you get to Lehi, and then it only has the diamond symbol from Lehi to Point of the Mountain, and then it says 'Express' AND has the diamond in the newly constructed part, and then just the diamond again to Salt Lake, and then 'Express' and Diamond until it ends."

Oh…right. Yes, of course! He just happened to notice! Could happen to anyone!

• He's also been making drawings like this:

And this:

This one is a real intersection (that weird one in Draper…if you've been there you know the one. You have to do a mandatory U-turn instead of a left turn). The other one may be too, for all I know. Seb loves to draw arrows and write words in that enlongated font they use on the road to make it look normal-sized when you are driving quickly over it.

• Related: you know those lane divider lines—the dashed ones between lanes going the same direction? I read an article about how most people greatly underestimate their length. I asked the kids how long they thought the lines were, and they (like most people) guessed they were two or three feet long. Seb, the Observer of All Things, was closest, with his guess of eight feet. (They are actually TEN feet long!)

(Here is Seb in his costume for the opera "La Bohème." He was so cute.)

Teddy "helping" Seb cook tortillas

• The boys wanted to sleep outside in the tent, and I said they could if they did everything themselves. And they did! Put the tent up, brought all their stuff out there, and put it away the next day. They took it very seriously (I saw Seb making a packing checklist for Malachi) and it made me think maybe we actually will go camping again sometime. Putting up the tent always seemed like such a huge pain, but last time we went Abe and Seb were only 7 and 5…. Now they could do everything! While I just sit and watch! It sounds great.

• The kids and I (and some of Abe's friends, of their own accord…BLESS those darling 14-year-old boys!) did a bunch of Fall-ish yard work (cutting down shrubs and bushes and so forth, and planting bulbs and enlarging flower beds…which sounds very industrious of us, but since I haven't worked in the yard for about two years, you shouldn't be too impressed)—and it resulted in so much yard waste to deal with! We filled our own garbage can, and begged space in three of our neighbors' garbage cans, and still had several piles left! On Wednesday after the garbage truck came and emptied the garbage can, we immediately filled it up to the brim again with more grass and branches. Then we went somewhere, and when we got back, the garbage can had been emptied…AGAIN! The truck must have come back by and seen it full, and just thought he'd missed it? Or maybe just taken pity on us and emptied it twice? Either way I felt just euphoric about it. I had been worrying about what we'd do with our garbage all week, and now I felt giddy with happiness that we wouldn't have to deal with it! I could hardly stammer out the good news to Sam fast enough!

If you had told me twenty years ago that a twice-emptied garbage would induce such feelings of joy, I would have thought you were very strange.