I'm guessing that Anita will enjoy this post....
My seven year old son has taken to pasting helpful notes to objects around our house. The other day, for example, he felt that everyone should know that he and his five year old sister had named their bedroom door.
A close-up of the note, in case you can't read it...
...indicating that the door's name is now evidently "Bingo." I didn't bother to ask for an explanation, because my children's answers to such questions tend to be unsatisfying. Why, I might ask, did my daughter christen our swimming pool "The Darkness of Woe?" She has no good answer for that, nor for why our cat is now "The Queen of All Swimming." I've found it's better to just accept these mysterious appellations without insisting on an explanation. Fortunately my son did not feel it was necessary to label the cat.
Sometimes the notes are more instructional in nature. When I woke up Saturday morning, for instance, our pipes were frozen -- a fact I only ascertained after using up our single allotted toilet flush for the morning. I checked the outside thermometer at 6:30 am, and it said 29. The sun was just coming out, and one nice thing about living in Northern California is that even when it gets hella cold at night, the days tend to be relatively warm, even in winter. I went back to bed, figuring that the temp would easily be up to 33 degrees by 7:30.
It wasn't. Apparently there was a cold front moving in or something. So there I sat, at 11:44, obsessively checking the thermometer, which had read 32 so long that at any minute I expected the LCD display to add a little :P or LOL next to the temperature. How can it possibly still be freezing outside? I wondered. And how long until this Venti Carmel Macchiatto kicks in?
Anyway, back to my helpful son, who labeled the toilet thusly:
Again, a close-up:
I'm pretty sure he meant "flush", but you get the idea. Needless to say, I heeded the warning. Fortunately I eventually got the water running so that I never did have to see what lurked beneath that lid.
Mattress Tags: humor toilet
My seven year old son has taken to pasting helpful notes to objects around our house. The other day, for example, he felt that everyone should know that he and his five year old sister had named their bedroom door.
A close-up of the note, in case you can't read it...
...indicating that the door's name is now evidently "Bingo." I didn't bother to ask for an explanation, because my children's answers to such questions tend to be unsatisfying. Why, I might ask, did my daughter christen our swimming pool "The Darkness of Woe?" She has no good answer for that, nor for why our cat is now "The Queen of All Swimming." I've found it's better to just accept these mysterious appellations without insisting on an explanation. Fortunately my son did not feel it was necessary to label the cat.
Sometimes the notes are more instructional in nature. When I woke up Saturday morning, for instance, our pipes were frozen -- a fact I only ascertained after using up our single allotted toilet flush for the morning. I checked the outside thermometer at 6:30 am, and it said 29. The sun was just coming out, and one nice thing about living in Northern California is that even when it gets hella cold at night, the days tend to be relatively warm, even in winter. I went back to bed, figuring that the temp would easily be up to 33 degrees by 7:30.
It wasn't. Apparently there was a cold front moving in or something. So there I sat, at 11:44, obsessively checking the thermometer, which had read 32 so long that at any minute I expected the LCD display to add a little :P or LOL next to the temperature. How can it possibly still be freezing outside? I wondered. And how long until this Venti Carmel Macchiatto kicks in?
Anyway, back to my helpful son, who labeled the toilet thusly:
Again, a close-up:
I'm pretty sure he meant "flush", but you get the idea. Needless to say, I heeded the warning. Fortunately I eventually got the water running so that I never did have to see what lurked beneath that lid.
Mattress Tags: humor toilet
Labels: Anecdotes, Exemplary Police Work, Family
| posted by Diesel at Saturday, January 13, 2007 |
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Leave a comment! |
Your children are so helpful! And they can talk to doors, swimming pools, and cats? That is quite an accomplishment at their realtively young ages. Although the experts say we pick up foreign languages better at a young age. Or does the door speak English?
You might want to keep your daughter away from the Harry Potter books, though. Knowing the true name of a cat is a sign of the occult...
If you'd dared lift the lid, you'd probably have found a turd resting atop a sheet of ice. Now, that would have made a great photo for your blog!
That reminds me of those old British lavatory signs: "Do not flush while train is standing in station".
Of course that would be in an ordinary household washroom. Why, I never did find out. I was scared to ask.
-wolfe
There was a farmer had a door,
And Bingo was his name-o:
B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O, B-I-N-G-O,
And Bingo was his name-o!
God love 'em at this age! You can't make this stuff up. Now that I've dealt with two teenage boys and have a girl on the cusp of teenagery, I look back on those years with such affection.
btw- wtf, I knocked a half inch of ice out of my birdbath yesterday! It is not supposed to be this cold in Norcal!
I have not laughed so hard in a long time. Give your son my sincerest thanks.
Oh, and tell Bingo thanks too.
HAHA! LOVE IT! This post is definitely an inspiration ... I will almost certainly highlight these pics on my site soon, and hopefully send you some more readers so you don't have to start showing your boobies ;)
Sooooooo charming. I wish when we grew up we didn't lose the way back to magicland. I'll stop just about anything I'm doing just to listen to the stories kids make up. Love 'em!
Y'know what, I want to get like some plaques from Home Depot and put 'em on my doors. Like, give em fancy names for my rooms and stuff. "Oh, the Formal Parlor? Wait -- this is a bathroom! And a dirty one!" and I can laugh.
Did you see my post on "Zodiac"?
Hey, now there are some helpful kids! Mine once taped arrows all over the house directing people to those areas they thought visitors would have trouble finding in our one story, three bedroom, shotgun house. We also decided not to ask, the answers are always so scary.
Robin - Thanks for the warning.
Al - My blog is a bit too highbrow for that sh*t.
Wolfe - That is worrisome.
Allen - It's just not the same.
Claire - Yeah, the cold weather is getting a bit old. I mean, this is why I left Michigan.
Gregory - Will do.
Anita - Good. Nobody wants it to come to that.
Notaclue - My kids come up with some phenomenal stuff. Sometimes we play a game called Stuck Rock and Bodiana (basically me tickling my kids under a blanket) that my son invented when I was 4. He's Stuck Rock, and his sister is Bodiana. No idea where he came up with those names. Some day I want to write a children's book about them though.
Malnurtured Snay - I did, although technically you have to link to me to get me to read it. Hey, I don't make the rules. Well, ok, I do.
Kat - My son has done the arrows thing too. The other day I wanted him to set the table so I re-placed his arrows to lead him to the kitchen and then in a loop from the silverware drawer to the table.
I am such a loser. My doors have no names...
So she calls the pool "The Darkness of Woe" and has no good answer why?
Diesel, I believe you're raising a poet there...possibly a surrealist.
That's a great story. I love sort of listening in to the kids playing and the names they come up with for things. My son has named the one drawer under his bed "the fuji drawer". I'll have to post a picture of it some day. Suffice it to say, all junk goes to fuji. Fast forward to some highbrow modern furnishings catalog with a toy box called...a fuji box for a pretty penny.
Sorry, that post just brought that love of all things children out in me.
Naming things was one of Adam's first privileges and heaven's delight. Seems your children are carrying on the tradition with intuition and style.
enjoy these lovely/charming moments while you can, Diesel, trust me, the notes they'll be leaving for you down the road will be anything but... (said the mother of two boys who used to do cute things, too.)
as a wise man once told us, "They don't stay Puppies Long..." so true. so true. sigh xox
Fab - Come on, that's not why you're a loser.
Drive-By - She is definitely unrestrained by the need to make sense. She likes her hobby horse too. Maybe she's a dadaist.
G - "All junk goes to Fiji" is a good contender for a new tagline for my blog.
Joe - Indeed. Did you read my Thanksgiving post about how my son used to tell me he loves me "God's number"? That one definitely has some kind of innate spiritual sense.
Neva - Geez, way to bring me down. Well at least I'm retired now, so I can enjoy them while they're still little.
After reading both this and the dinosaur post, I am SOOOO glad that you've retired! Good for you! I took a year of retirement last year and figured WTF, I'd rather use it now than later. What awesome, amazing and intelligent children you have. They're phenomenal.
If only I'd thought of naming house parts, we'd have saved a ton of dough a PetCo (and sorrow). When we went thru the "fish phase" we ended up leaving a rock with a cross painted on it on a shelf in the bathroom, since we had so many burials at sea. When T was 3, he named a fish Sockaboutto (my spelling), and we recently laid to rest a hermit crab named Smitty Wormamen Jensen. Smitty was named after a character from Spongebob Squarepants (or so I've been told), but when questioned about Sock, the answer was so terse, we left it alone. The crab plague continues, as we've got a mass burial arranged - Smitty + Frank Zappa, who was meant to replace him, but instead started losing appendages quite suddenly upon being introduced to his roommate, the Poopsmith.
Angela - They are both amazing, each in their own weird way.
Zogmama - Wow, that's quite the parade of ill-fated creatures. Other than the door, we have only 2 pets -- 2 relatively innocuous and healthy cats. I think that's going to be it for us. Oh, and remind me not to get to close to the Poopsmith.
You should see my PetCo frequent buyer's club card ... it has a little Angel of Death insignia on it. Actually, I do quite well with mammals. We have two stupid dogs and two rodents of unspeakable origin. And a lizard. And the Poopsmith - named for a character on Homestar with a job worse than mine.