epigrains

This week is Kara's first Spring Break. She didn't need to be told twice how great a thing it is. "Yaay!" she says, flinging her arms up in the air. She's in Kindergarten. Not third grade or middle school or high school--kindergarten! For whatever reason, her Spring Break is going well. Yesterday, she played at a family fun center in town with a friend. Today she is going over to her Grandma & Papa's for the day and spending the night. Then, Friday, we are taking a short family weekend to see an aquarium, and our hotel has a pool (thank you Priceline!) She is so tall and skinny, flipping that hair around behind her. Who is this little person? We were brushing teeth last night (actually, she was flossing. She takes flossing quite seriously) and singing made-up versions of "Baa Baa Black Sheep." Baa baa black sheep have you any wool? No I don't it's gone to school. Afterward, she remembered we are reading the Chronicles of Narnia, and so we put aside the oversided book of Irish folk tales and legends and picked up Narnia just after Polly has vanished from the attick of mad scientist Uncle Andrew.

One of the new things I've inserted into her bedtime routine are proverbs. We read a few epigrams from the book of Proverbs each night. Sometimes, if we hit on a particularly illustrative or useful one, we might say it together a few times, or talk about what it means. Two nights ago we hit on Proverbs 13.20 "whoever walks with the wise becomes wise, but the companion of fools suffers harm." (NRSV) "You know Kara," I said, "if everyone on earth simply memorized this proverb, our prisons would be emptied of half their contents; the crime rate would be cut in half; many who are dead today would still be living; and the general suffering and grief of many lives would be eliminated!" That said, we have begun memorizing that particular proverb together.

Some other news: L has begun a cereal quest. That is, she has decided to eat every single cereal available for the sheer curious doing of it, and, most important, she's blogging about it! You can cultivate a taste for her grain-diose serial of sugary mastications at by ingesting cerealfest every morning as part of a well-balanced blogfast.