Funny Episode #8,752,324

I have often wondered about what constitutes "weird." My friend Amy and I used to say, "You're weird! That's a compliment!" as though it were another way of saying, "Hello!" And my Color 101 teacher once looked at me and paused before beginning her answer to whatever query or comment I'd made with, "You are one weird kid, Jennifer." She went on to explain that this was a compliment - and to be honest, that was how I'd taken it. But still... Though I don't remember what exactly we were talking about when she said that, I do remember thinking, "What was so weird about that?"

And now I'm the mom of twin five-year-old whippersnappers. But another W-word comes to mind often, when confronted with their questions, responses, stories and, well... this kind of thing:


And please believe me, it is no coincidence that there are two oranges in two different, though identical containers with two 'name tags' on them next to the piece of paper with the boys' names and two arrows. No, this was a carefully constructed piece of conceptual art. And the artist made sure that he knew what was written on the 'name tags' before he decided which one was him and which was his brother. Leo thought that Pamela was a beautiful name, and so his brother inevitably got taged with 'Bio' (Eng = 'Organic').

We are reading James and the Giant Peach, now. A few chapters at a time. I let them watch the movie before we read it together, because I wanted to be sure that they understood the story, so that we could work on their English at the same time. I am learning to be sneaky about 'teaching' them English. They don't like for their parents to be their teachers, it seems. So sneaky I must be. Anyway. We spent a lot of time on the question of what happened to his parents and why. They were truly terrified at this part of the movie, and we ended up spending about an hour and a half on those few lines in the book. But what gets me is how utterly accepting they are of the absurdity of the story - how much they LOVE the absurdity, in fact. They laughed so hard at (our reading of) the Earthworm's shark shouts and so on, that I thought they would pee their pants!

Which reminds me of the Story of Peas. But that'll have to wait for the next blog post, because we're about to leave to go hiking... Ciao for now, and a happy weekend to you and yours!