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Here’s another hypothetical situation for you to ponder.

Wife, working in the kitchen with a toddler clinging to her leg and crying, to husband: “If you want to eat dinner, please come get your son.”

Quiz:
What should the husband’s response be?
A. No thanks, I’m not hungry.
B. He looks fine to me.
C. Sure, I’ll be right there.

Answer:
If you need me to tell you the answer, you are not ready to be married.

Today we are celebrating Saints’ Day.

That’s right, today is the 44th anniversary of the New Orleans Saints. And that was quite a game they had yesterday, beating the Steelers, so they really can celebrate.

Oh, and we went trick-or-treating yesterday. Although we shouldn’t really call it that because I think our kids never said that phrase once. I don’t care if they don’t say that, but I did make them say “thank you” at least.

Anyway, here are our boys’ costumes:

Alpha:

A Stormtrooper, of course.

Beta:

Luke Skywalker, which is hard to tell and people guessed everything from Darth Maul to the Emperor. Beta was getting annoyed that no one could tell he was Luke. It’s a BLUE lightsaber, people! That means he’s a good guy! I’m not sure either, but I think it’s the Luke from Jabba’s palace.

Gamma:

Everybody loved Yoda. Next time, though, I need to carry him on my back while I wear a sleeveless tunic thing.

And here are some nieces and nephews:

The Stormtrooper, Yoda, and Captain Rex were store-bought. Everything else was hand-made.

Now it is time for another PSALM.

The boys got a Lego Star Wars set for their birthdays, and this is how the set looks and what it does (except for the green plate – we had that already).

This is the Clone Walker Battle Pack 8014. See the walker in action! Watch it move!

(It’s a big file, so you might have to click to view it. That way it doesn’t slow down the whole blog)

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Gamma said his first sentence yesterday: “Throw hat”

My wife called me from the store. She said when she went to get him out of his car seat, he threw his hat and then said “throw hat”. He wasn’t mad – he just wanted to throw his hat.

Contrast that with Beta’s first sentence multi-word phrase: “Momma’s spoon“.

He might not have had the apostrophe and ‘s’ in there, but he meant it. We were at the dinner table. He picked up my wife’s silverware, held up the spoon, and said “Momma spoon”.

There was no throwing involved.

And Alpha? No one can remember his first sentence. He was very good with his speech from the beginning. And maybe we, as new parents, didn’t know to remember the transition from single words to multiple words.

In case you’re wondering, the first words for each were:

• Alpha: “Uh-oh” (said whenever anybody dropped anything)
• Beta: “Ba” (it meant ‘ball’ and ‘bottle’ and maybe some other things too. I think ‘ball’ came first)
• Gamma: “Momma” (said just about all the time, for just about anything)

Some of you may recall last week’s post about the bid for tree removal.

We were going to have a tree felled because it was

• dead,
• leaning over the garage,
• and almost scraping the power lines

If it fell, it would have crushed one end of the garage (where all my tools are, and storage boxes – no cars are in the garage) and knocked out the power (leaving live power lines on my yard). That’s why we wanted to hire professionals, and that’s why it was going to be a few hundred dollars (what with the bucket truck and all).

Here’s how it looked before (a few years ago, but you get the idea):

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We have a troublesome tree, so I asked some tree service how much it would be to get rid of it.

Here is their bid:

What it says is
“Take down and put on ground $400” and
“Remove tree $300”

What they meant to say is that it will be $400 to take it down and then another $300 to remove the debris.

What I think should be written is this:
“Take down and put on ground $400” and
“Remove felled tree $300”

Otherwise, I could say that I don’t want them to put the tree on the ground – just remove it. Then I would pay only $300.

But, unfortunately, I learned earlier this week that mistakes or misunderstandings in quotes and bids are not legally binding.

So I can’t take them up on their offer to remove the tree without taking it down first.

I’m a little late with this, but that shouldn’t matter.

Alpha brought home some things he did in school. Because children’s drawings are so fun, I thought I’d share them with you. The first two are from his booklet titled “September Poems”.

Crocodile

I like this one because the person isn’t just sitting on the crocodile – he’s sitting on a chair on the crocodile.

Jack and Jill

My favorite part of this is the song. Alpha read into what Jack and Jill would be doing while they were on their trip. And, apparently, they like to sing.

Shamrocks

My favorite part of this drawing is that he was given the picture to color, and he drew the surroundings too.

He knows enough to know that plants don’t just float in the air. You can’t just leave those shamrocks by themselves – they need earth below them. And whoever drew the original staggered them, so Alpha has the ground rise and fall so that each shamrock has what it needs.

This was a counting booklet – the first page had one shamrock, the second had two, etc. In the interest of time and non-redundancy, I omitted the other pages.