DS is a foodie like his mother. Yesterday while playing restaurant, I was DS' sous chef and suggested a yellow block could represent Swiss cheese. He looked at me with horror and quickly said, "No! Jarlsberg." Made me smile.

Please tell me, aquinas, that your son was wearing a chef's hat

DD14 has a dog who is... well, okay, it's an adolescent Aussie... this dog is... er-- quite.a.handful. Speaking charitably. Mostly I laugh about this. She has all of my DD's most prominent character features.
LOL. She's proven almost impossible to train for obedience because a human trainer cannot possibly respond QUICKLY enough for her...

We call her DD's "Flying Monkey," due to the dog's nature, behaviors, and her obsessive fixation with my DD.

DH was sitting on the sofa with said dog, who was looking deeply concerned by DD's disappearance from the room (she'd gone to get her watch)... upon her return, DH announced "THERE's the Monkey Master" in a sing-song voice.

I dryly answered-- "I prefer to think of her as the Wicked Witch of the West." (This remark should be instantly understandable to anyone who has raised a PG daughter through her teens.)

DD14, almost before I finished that sentence:

"That's the Wicked Witch of the NORTH West to you. And you'd better behave or I'll use my creature against you.

An imaginary one. He also insists on wearing a sock on his left hand as an oven mitt to protect him from the blazing oven he made out of books on the sofa.

Perhaps you could work on a Parisian accent to complete his look as a cheese connoisseur?

My DD has become a serious bread-snob in addition to her unfortunate cheese addiction which began in Paris. It sounds like the two of them could have a lovely afternoon together. In the right surroundings, of course.

Ha! But you know my more modest roots...he needs Mum's Montreal accent.

On the bread front, I think he'd gladly enjoy tasty bread with an older woman, especially if there's Fougasse to be had.

Maybe we should make bread as a weekend project! All this bread talk is making me noshy.

DD14's "artistic vision" today:


"I title this panel.... "Ew."


She is turning a head shot of the Flying Monkey into... er...

well, Marylin Monroe. A la Warhol, I mean.

Dogs, lacking opposable thumbs, should NOT wear eye makeup. They have terrible taste.

Yup. Hair-ilyn Monroe.

She's aiming squarely at "WTH is THAT??" as a viewer response. Who says that photography isn't art?

She has just apologized to me for turning out to be a Surrealist at heart... and is now playing the emo-kazoo, with piano accompaniment. She spent the morning with my DH and a bunch of adults, including a respected textbook author and emeritus professor of entomology, happily educating the public about honeybees.

My kid. She's quirky all the way to the bone.

We are at Hyde park visiting the home if FDR. I show DD3.8 the room he was born.
Dd: what, his mom did not go to the hospital?
Me: no, back then, it was common to give birth at home.
Dd: hmmm. Who pulled him out?
Thankfully, at that point, the kind lady next to us started to laugh and asked dd how old she was.

@HowlerKarma, She read "Breaking Stalin's Nose" which resulted in me having to give her a history lesson and reading "A Children's view of history" WWI - Korean War. She decided that Communists were crazy and she likes Capitalism better.

We'd been away for a week's vacation, and got in last night. I walked DD8 up the street to her BFF's house, ostensibly to get our mail, which her family had graciously agreed to collect for us, but also to see if BFF was available to play. A sleepover was decided, and as I walked the two girls down to our house, DD was excitedly chatting up a storm... until, in mid-sentence, she felt it necessary to exclaim on the night sky, featuring a full moon framed by broken clouds all around. She declared it to be the best view she'd ever seen, and lamented that she didn't have a camera or her ipod.

I handed her my phone, and although the image really didn't capture well, it's currently my background.