A little snarky, I know.

I was driving home a few minutes ago and I saw an older man driving one of those cute, zippy little sports cars that men often seem to buy when they are having a "mid-life crisis". I think this one was a white Miata.

And I got to wondering. If men are buying vehicles to prove that they are still virile, then the car surely represents his actual "manhood", right? So why are these cars so often small, and fast?

cat update

We have decided to keep both cats. They are getting along much better now, though they still annoy one another sometimes.

Tiamat has learned that she can scratch the children and my son is enamored of playing roughly with her. We've had to set up a system of negative consequences for him having new scratches on his face, arms and/or hands. It seems to be helping, but both big kids still want to pick her up constantly. She is a remarkably patient cat and we are lucky to have her. She has her annoying habits, though. She is a licker and a meower. I've never heard such a loud cat that wasn't part Siamese. I suppose, since she seems to be a total mutt, that she could BE part Siamese, but if so it certainly isn't something one can see by looking at her. She's a calico (who looks like a tortoiseshell, as the white is confined to two spots) with yellow eyes.

Sozo got really loud for a while there, but it turned out that she was in heat. We got her spayed so that won't happen again, thank goodness. A Tonkinese in heat is LOUD. Sozo still spends just about all of her time in the bathroom in the little "cat condo" I bought for her. She's quite the anti-social animal, even taking into consideration that she is a cat, but she will put up with me extracting her from her condo at night after the kids go to bed. I put her in my lap and pet her while I sit at the computer. She allows this for a while, then retreats back to her condo. Hey, at least she's happy.

Motivational techniques

"If you wash everything, I'll give you a star! And then I'll give you a smiley sticker!"
My son, watching me put dishes into the dishwasher this morning. Can you tell he is in kindergarten?

puns

This morning I was getting the "big kids" ready for school and walked into my bedroom to check on my middle kid. She was sitting on the toilet and I heard her pee.
I said "That's great, I heard you pee, honey!"
Well, she starts laughing and laughing and I have no idea what about. Finally I get an answer out of her. "I don't pee honey!"

whatever would we say?

Yesterday I was driving my two "big kids" (6 and a half and nearly 4) to synagogue. the nearly 4 year old was babbling about Gd. she's a talker. she told me:
"if we met Him...
we wouldn't know what to say."
i wasn't expecting something quite so profound. sometimes she is fascinated with the idea of Gd. yesterday morning was definitely one of those times. i've been trying to teach her for ages that Gd isn't a person and therefore has no gender but she usually calls Gd "Him" anyway. but she does seem to understand that Gd doesn't have a body, that Gd is bigger than anything else and that Gd is "alone".

she recites the shema to me every night in Hebrew. i love hearing her say it.
shema, yisrael: adonoy elohaynu, adonoy ECHAD.
listen, israel: the Lord our Gd, the Lord is ONE.
but echad is also translated as "alone". i gave her that interpretation once and have regretted it ever since. she latched onto the word. she latches onto words frequently. so i've been trying to teach her that it means not that Gd is lonely, away from us, but alone among divine beings. we'll see how well that goes.

the other two kids aren't interested in religion. we'll see how that goes, too.