Over the weekend, my parents bequeathed to my children an old table leaf that has been used for play in our family since I was a child. First it was a ramp for cars. Then it was a slide off the couch. Then I left the room for a few minutes and when I came back they had created this:



They also thought they needed to change into church clothes to work in this office because "you have to be handsome" in an office. But then John suggested that their company was a tech start-up where casual dress rules the day. He even pulled out a back issue of Fast Company magazine and showed them a picture. They bought it, which equals less laundry. Woo!

Oh, and there's also this--when you've rearranged the living room furniture so the chair blocks the view of the TV from the couch.

Yesterday I was rushing the boys through an early dinner at 4:30ish as they both had basketball practice at 5 p.m. Edward has his religious ed class at 6:30, so I try to have him eat his dinner at after-school snack time and then have a snack between bball and class.

They were not in the mood. Leftovers are never the most popular and we'd only had a one-day buffer from the original meal (homemade minnestrone soup from Monday.) Even though they said they were hungry, they were just being pokey and goofy. I finally said, "You have to eat your dinner. That's the fuel your body needs for basketball."

Daniel responded, "You mean we are putting gas in our bodies?"

"No," I said. "Gas goes in the car. Food goes in the boys."

He did not miss a beat: "And gas comes out of the boys!"

Even I could not keep a straight face. We had a good laugh, but after about a dozen repetitions of the punch line, I had to explain the concept of diminishing returns. The more you tell a joke the less funny it is. This lesson was not absorbed. I finally had to spoon-feed Edward's soup and then declare car silence for the 5-minute drive to the gym. The second they were out of the car the giggles returned as they repeated the gas line all the way inside.

Thank goodness they are on separate teams!

This post may have an audience of one, but my mom asked about Edward's basketball after my sister posted videos of her two girls' games yesterday.



You can see Edward playing some tenacious defense, chasing the blond kid in the red shorts all over the court. Until the blond kid gets the ball, at which point, the defense shuts down. Let's just say this is all a work in progress.

In another installment of "Daniel says the darndest things," he called me into his room tonight to tell me that he was having the same bad dream he's had for several nights. It stems from a book we read at Halloween, where a school bus gets stuck on the tracks and the kids die. Later, a couple gets stuck on the tracks, and the ghosts of the kids push them off and save them (yes, this was a kid's book full of goofy, otherwise innocuous ghost stories, and no, I did not expect this storyline when I started reading it).

I told him to try to think of something different to dream.

"But the dream computer in my head keeps playing that one," he said.

Thinking I had a clever way to get him to deal with this, I likened it to his Leap Pad.

"OK," I said. "You know when you're done with a game on your Leap Pad, you pull out the cartridge and put in something else, right? Well, just pull out the cartridge with the bad dream on it, and put in something different, like one about our fun sledding trip today."

"Dad," he said, "My dream computer doesn't have a place for a cartridge. It's my b-, b-, b-" (he's saying this to give me a clue to the answer).  "You know."

"I have no idea what you're trying to say, Daniel," I said.

"My brain, Dad," he said. "That's where dreams come from."

Chastened, I wished him luck and left him to his dreams.