Helpful distinctions

Knowledge is knowing that a tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting a tomato into fruit salad.

Knowledge is also knowing that a pterodactyl is not a dinosaur, because pterodactyls can fly. Wisdom is not putting pterodactyls into fruit salad.

(My apologies to Pinterest and whoever originally made the point about fruit salad.)

"Daddy, I think what you really are is a battleasaurus." Meg

Dead man's bones

"Mom, look what I have in this treasure chest. It's a dead person, a skeleton."
Me: "Oh, is it like his coffin? His sarcophagus?"
Meg: "No, it's where I put his bones so no one would know what happened to them. And this is a cool-looking chest. That's why I decided to keep his bones in here."

Our young apprentice

Tonight Jonathan's spoon was making lightsaber noises.

"Vmmmm..... vmmmmm....bzzt! vmmm.... vmmm... vrrrrmmmm."

Kate thought this was hilarious and started helping her spoon make lightsaber noises too.

"La! Laaa! Laa!" whack, whack, whack.

Jonathan told her, "Obi-Wan has taught you well. But he did not teach you everything. No, no, wait, that was Shi-Fu. Shi-Fu has taught you well!"

Star Wars, Kung Fu Panda. We know the greats.

Well, obviously

Meg: "Oh no! Peso is stuck in front of the tar truck, and it won't be able to get through!"
Me: "Why is there a tar truck under the ocean? Are there roads and parking lots down there?"
Meg, matter-of-factly: "No, it's fixing the cracks in the bottom of the ocean."

All conversational roads lead to Octonauts

Meg managed to boggle even me today by bringing in the Octonauts. It all started so innocently, too. We were listening to a CD of Greatest Hits of 1949 and I had to try to explain the whip-cracks in the Mule Train song. That led to a description of a whip, which led to Indiana Jones, which led to the Ark of the Covenant. Then we had to talk about the real Ark, as opposed to the Spielberg version, which led us directly to the Meg version.

Me: "It was a box covered inside and out with gold, and it had two long sticks to carry it by. There were statues of two angels on top. And Moses put the Ten Commandments inside."
Meg: "Why?"
Me: "Because that was how God told them to make it."
Meg:  "They should have colored pictures of Octonauts and put them on the box. That would have been more fun."

Boggle, boggle. I pointed out that Octonauts hadn't been invented yet, and furthermore God wanted people to think about Him when they saw the box, and they could make statues of angels but they couldn't make statues of God because they didn't know what He looked like. Meg still felt Octonauts would be much cooler.

Jonathan, inventively, said that angels are like Octonauts in a lot of ways: they go on missions, they help people --
Meg: "The way angels are NOT like Octonauts is that they DON'T HELP SEA CREATURES. They could probably help a land creature, but they aren't much of a swimmer."

Meg on China's foreign policy

Meg, indignantly: "They should not treat a man [our president] like a screaming dinosaur boy!"

Kate update

Kate just added another skill to her repertoire. She started walking unsupported. She's still mostly at that step-step-tumble stage, but on Tuesday she took four or five steps in a row in the Anthropologie dressing room. I'm really kindly disposed toward Reston these days -- Meg prayed for the first time at Trader Joe's in Reston and now Kate has walked there. Good associations.

Back to baby news... we're at thirteen months and Kate has pushed out seven teeth, five on top and two on the bottom. She now expresses her feelings more firmly. She's still happy, in general, but I can no longer assume when she starts crying that it's because someone trampled on her. They might just be refusing to hand over an Octonaut -- oh the horror!

Bowties are cool, too.

As Meg and I passed the Doctor Who merchandise at the mall, two girls were lifting down a stack of fezzes. "I like fezzes," one said.

I tried. I really did. But I couldn't resist. I said it. "Fezzes are cool."

And the girl smiled. "Yes, they are."

Halloween on the high seas

Meg's new great love is the Octonauts, so she wanted to be Captain Barnacles for Halloween. I was not quite prepared to make all of us Octonauts costumes, so we expanded it as The High Seas. Jonathan wanted to be a mathematical pirate, I wanted to be a mermaid because I realized I'd never been one (!!), and Kate got to go as the ship's mouse.

We used a pile of our leftover moving cardboard to create a pirate ship in a corner of the living room and created a treasure hunt - the map, of course, was found in a bottle. Meg was quite pleased to discover in a linen closet a whole treasure chest of CANDY!

I suggested to Meg that perhaps next year, she could go as a princess. She was unimpressed.

"No, next year I'm dressing up as Shellington."
"Why not a princess?"
"It's not really my style. I'd rather be Shellington."
I pursued the question. Finally she explained, "Princesses are BORING."

Well, that does cover it.