DAUGHTER FODDER

One reason I love my youngest child:

Last week Macey went upstairs to use the potty. She’s been doing this lately… she seems to like the upstairs bathroom better than the downstairs one. I don’t really know why. Regardless, she had been gone for some time, so I called up to her and asked what she was doing. I couldn’t make out her reply so I went upstairs.

ME: What’s going on up here?
MACEY: I pooped, and my poop stinked, so I gave it a courtesy flush.
ME: A what?!
MACEY: A courtesy flush!

Don’t ask me where she got the concept of a “courtesy flush.” But I totally believe her that it was justified.

One reason I love my oldest child:

Couple of weeks ago at dinner time, Lily, out of the blue, turns to me and says, “Daddy, tell me everything you know about vampires.”

I laughed out loud, because there was an edge of urgency to her voice, like she knew something I didn’t know.

So, I spent the next five minutes telling her about vampires. I started with the obvious stuff: they have pointed teeth, they drink blood instead of eating food, they burn up in sunlight, you have to put a stake (“What’s a stake?” “It’s a big pointed stick”) through their hearts to kill them, they can turn into bats and wolves and mist (“What’s mist?” “Like fog?” “Oh, okay”), they sleep in coffins…

Every time I paused, Lily would say, “Daddy, keep telling me about vampires.”

I had to really dig deep to think of what else I knew about vampires. They can’t cross running water (right? I think I read that somewhere), um… I seemed to remember that to be sure they were dead you had to cut their heads off and fill their mouths with communion wafers--but I keep this bit of knowledge to myself. I mentioned that Nosferatu was one of the first vampires (in the movies, at least)… both girls are familiar with Nosferatu because he makes a cameo appearance in a SpongeBob SquarePants episode (yeah, really).

And that’s why, an hour later when The Scientist came home from the barn, the entire family was sitting around the computer watching Nosferatu clips on YouTube.

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