Overheard

Another entry for the Farmer family dictionary.
Present tense:glow
Past tense: glew?
Used in a sentence: Wouldn't it be cool if your shirt glew in the dark too?


Tina and her friends were playing beauty parlor. It was quite the elaborate set-up.
Later, I asked Tina if she had fun. Her response?
"Yes, but I didn't have a chance to be beautied."





There are a number of meals that I fix which I just put grated cheese in a bowl on the table. Everyone is supposed to just take a little cheese and sprinkle it on the soup or pasta or whatever. The kids really like cheese, so they will often take a little extra and eat it plain. One night at dinner John picks up the cheese to pass it. The child who had just served himself cried, "wait!" John looked at the plate and said, "you already got some cheese." The child said, "I only got topping cheese. But I didn't get my 'plate' cheese." You know how they say eskimos have so many different words for ice. I guess that's how it is for us and cheese.

Poor Tina. She was just marveling at something she thought made her unique. She came and proudly showed me her foot. "Look at my blue cut, Mama." Turns out it was a splinter, quite big too and yeah, it had to come out.

When I fix salad I always use romaine lettuce and for the biggest outside leaves, I usually cut out the ribs in the middle. Taryn loves to eat these. David saw her eating one and since it was near dinner decided he was hungry too. He comes into the kitchen. "Mama, I want one of those." "One of what, honey?" "One of those yucky things."


Taryn was collecting all the erasers in the house into a small backpack purse. I was talking to a friend one day about my housekeeping failures. I explained about Taryn's collection, how we needed the small backpack, so we dumped out the erasers, how the erasers had found their way onto the steps where they were being set up into little eraser communities. My friend looked sympathetically at Taryn. "Taryn you poor girl. Trying to be organized in all that chaos." Taryn, a bit surprised, says, "Oh no. I was just keeping them to throw at Joseph."

John told me this one. He has a CD in his car he loves to listen to (The Incredibles Soundtrack) and he had it quite loud because he had been riding with the convertible top down. Later when he was going somewhere with Tina and Rebekah he turned the car on and the music came blaring out. Rebekah quickly put her hands over her ears and winced. Tina simultaneously bobs her head and in her deepest little girl voice says, "Oh yeah!"

I guess I should preface this little story by mentioning that Rebekah loves food and never misses a chance to eat. A friend of Rebekah's was telling her how she had gotten some immunizations and had been paid $1 for each one she had gotten. Rebekah nodded a bit sympathetically and told of her immunization experience (which incidentally was rewarded by a few stickers from the doctor). She seemed unfazed by the seemingly unfair rewards offered until her friend added, "and I got a milkshake afterwards." Rebekah's eyes lit up, "Lucky!"


David has this little game he likes to play with me. When I carry up baskets of laundry from the basement, he likes to block the doorway until I get to the top. Once I arrive he mechanically pulls his arm down and steps to the side (with appropriate sound effect, "shoonk"). And then I say, "Thank you Gate." One day as I was walking down the hall he calls, "Mommy, the gate is following you."

When we were hiking on Taryn's birthday, David did a great job. He walked a long way for such a little guy. At one point where there were rocks or roots or something on the path, David saw that it was a bit of a problem for him. He calmly said, "Need a hand, Dad." John, of course, reached down to grab his hand and help him. Once he was over the obstacle, David calmly said again, "Finished with need-a-hand."

The kids had requested something once again that wasn't going to work, and John had told them so. He said to ask when he was in a good mood. Then he jokingly added "Unfortunately for you I'm always in a bad mood." One of the kids responds, "That's why we always ask Mommy first."