CarpeBanana

The roots I want to give my children  ~ and myself ~ in A Simple Way to Pray: Martin Luther, the 16th Century Reformer, Tells His Barber How to Empower His Prayer Life (gotta love the title). Helmut Thielicke is quoted as saying, “To work without praying and without listening means only to grow and spread oneself upward, without striking roots and without creating an equivalent in the earth. A person who works this way is living unnaturally.”

My friend Lorri reported that Stanley had spent time with their family last year and observed that he ”has a wealth of knowledge but he never said one word at our house which was actually kind of annoying. At least he minds his manners. Please tell him we said hi and hope that he is being as polite in your home as he was in ours.”

Well, he is polite. And quiet. In fact, so much so that this morning as I sorted laundry I found myself wondering about the Ethics of Flat Stanley cloning. To be frank, this Stanley who is visiting, seems a mere shadow of the Stanley of storybook fame, sort of a soul-less clone.

Yesterday he accompanied Miss Dog Lover. However, she did not take him to Bible Quizzing practice, he stayed home alone during that time. I think she was afraid he was too light to be able to use the jumpseats effectively. We’ve seen even seven-year-olds who are told to go eat some doughnuts so their seats don’t alert continuously. Seems you’ve got to weigh in at around 50 pounds to quiz.

Today he was with Mr Music. The best experience of the day, naturally, was during piano practice time. Mr Music is working on major triads. That sets the piano to vibrating. But Stanley really found his niche on practicing reading the flats. Mr Music was playing E instead of E-flat in What a Friend and so Stanley helped by pointing out the flats, as that is naturally an area of interest for him. He was disappointed to learn there is no S-flat, but then Mr Music pointed out to him that in music a flat can also be re-named as a sharp, if you just drop down a note, so that Stanley really can be either “Flat Stanley”or “Sharp Someone Else.” We are unclear what that name would be but guessed it would be something starting with ‘R’ as that is the letter before ‘S.’ So maybe “Sharp Rupert.” I think he looks a bit like a Rupert, don’t you? And a sharp one at that.

Tomorrow we may give Stanley the chance to work with Devastatingly Handsome who is now up to the point of filling in one of the drainage ditches, having finished laying pipe today. That could be a dangerous job for a little guy, though, so maybe he’ll just supervise from the kitchen window.

Oh, my, what to blog about today? So many things compete in my mind.

Of course you want to hear about the dream I woke from this morning. I had been to a really odd yard sale with various people and they were showing off their treasures. Sadly I can only remember two. One lady (I have no idea who she was) had bought a set of bathroom cabinets with the sliding mirrors, however, the mirrors had been replaced with sheets of plastic like those plastic paint-your-own-Christmas-ornament things the kids like to do, with “gold” lines between the shapes. The sheets were supposed to look like Tiffany glass once you painted it. The lady could hardly contain herself about how beautiful this would be in her bathroom with her toothpaste and tweezers showing through.

A man (I’m pretty sure he was my college environmental biology professor) had bought a good-sized metal shelves and a set of matching empty mouthwash bottles which he was insisting on calling “decanters.” It was his plan to line them up and fill them with all different brands of mouthwash (hmmm, I notice both of these items allow colored light to shine through. Wonder what that says about the snack I had at bedtime?). He also thought it would be a thing of beauty (maybe atrocious beauty?). He went into lecture mode and began speaking about how mouthwash companies used to only make a few kinds: if it was red, you knew it was Lavoris; if amber, Listerine; if green, Scope; but that life is no longer so simple. Then he began talking about notes left by the Green Phantom and how life could have been different had the Post-It been invented at the time of the Green Phantom.

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Or maybe you want to hear about Stanley’s visit. Yesterday was his day with Miss Dance. He slept late:

Then “helped” her review for a geometry test:

He accompanied us to dinner at a friends’ house but was feeling shy so spent the evening in my very large purse. Today he is with Miss Dog Lover. At the moment they are playing Trouble.

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Or maybe you have a hankering for the word of the day, from wordsmith: 

malacia (mu-LA-shuh, -shee-uh) noun   1. An abnormal craving for spiced food.   2. Softening of the organ or tissue.

The challenge here would be to use it in ordinary discussion. Maybe something like “One unfortunate result of giving in to malacia was her tendency to dream about translucent objects.”

Only it wasn’t malacia. All I had was an ice cream bar.

This morning Miss Dance told me I am “atrociously beautiful.”

Whatever.

Flat Stanley arrived at our place Sunday afternoon through the printer tray, thanks to Comfy Denim’s linking us to his launch pad at Training Hearts. Our Stanley is a bit different than the one that visited at the Denim’s as our printer does not do yellow. (Good news: no danger of jaundice for Stanley here at the Banana’s.) His first stop was off for trimming and a bit of lamination in case he sits in on any science experiments with Miss Dance.

Here is his report after spending 24 hours with Miss Language:

Last night Stanley went to church.  He spent the night in Miss Language’s Bible case (Dad did not want him being disruptive).  When she got up this morning, he got to get up too, but he didn’t find it a particularly thrilling day.  Most of the time he just sat around waiting for Miss Language to finish her schoolwork, and as he was taped on her back (for carrying convenience), he mainly saw the backs of chairs.  However, he did get to help pour milks at lunch, and he got his very own small fish sandwich!

The high points of his day were getting to see the new Thomas “Elvis” Jefferson dollar (hey, Thos. looks like a rock star on that coin) and Miss Dog Lover showing him her beautifully illustrated book about eggs.

Maybe he’ll have a more egg-citing day tomorrow…

These cute fellows have arrived at our school, bearing no school supplies other than smiles and bananas: 

Miss Dance provided the four small clips, and Miss Language the heavy-duty bookmark. Thanks, girls! Now school should be more fun than a barrel of monkeys, right? A barrel of monkeys declining nouns; drilling vocabulary; and tackling math!

“Never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.”

Experienced readers of this blog get exactly one guess at which Bananalet came out with “If I had antennae buried in my head, they’d be poking out right now because I’m really excited” ~ followed by a small sound effect, not unlike the sound of formerly buried antennae popping out of a bug’s head.

And you need to know that earlier in the day I had mentioned to Miss Language that she had better say or do something interesting as she is falling behind in bloggable events. However, this was not her effort. She was in the room at the time of this antennae-popping comment and simply said, “How do you expect me to compete with that?”

I was going to call this a rant but that is too strong. It is just a rambly discussion.

There are a lot of “random memes” going around. Does that even make sense? How can a meme be random? I’ve done the 6 random things meme, the 7 random things meme, and now I am resisting the 8 random things one.

But I digress.

I don’t think we can do “random.” I don’t think we can do the equivalent of reaching into your brain and pulling out X number of random slips of paper. I think we can do a stream-of-consciousness thing where the relationships between what we are listing may appear to be random to someone else, but at least in my brain, everything connects to everything else in a truly frightening and mind-numbing way. I’ve never been to Grand Central Station or anything like that but I think the human brain has it beat bigtime. And that the internet pales by comparison for connections.

And also, I can’t type “random” without adding a silent ‘e’ at the end. Or “ransom.”

I remember reading once that “Beauty, like truth and contact lenses, is in the eye of the beholder.” Well, I don’t believe it about truth, and I sure hope it isn’t true of beauty, either. This lamp, which the catalog assures me “has old-fashioned character with modern charm,” and I can only assume by implication is considered beautiful, is one of the last things I would want in my eye. Or in my home.

We discussed items in this catalog at length at lunch Tuesday ~ there are plenty of, uh, interesting items. Mr Music was shocked by the price on this (he’s more used to Goodwill prices, LOL) and thought surely a robber would break in to steal such a lamp. Devastatingly Handsome assured him that it would probably scare burglers away when they saw that dripping pinkness. And I observed that you could use the hook part to impale thieves. Maybe it would make a pretty snazzy addition to the home arsenal, after all.