CarpeBanana

Groundhog Day, one of the best days of the whole year, is fast approaching. Tomorrow will be Groundhog Eve, also known as the anniversary of the engagement of Carpe Banana and Devastatingly Handsome to be wed ~ ergo, a very romantic holiday.

The festivities are beginning. The halls are decked:

Cookie dough is chilling for baking tomorrow in the shape of groundhogs to stand atop snowy mounds of vanilla ice cream surrounded by Hershey syrup shadows, if the day proves to be bright.

A little craft awaits Devastatingly Handsome (DH: don’t peek).

And the Bananalets will celebrate by competing in a day of Bible Quizzing. Their team color is orange so the girls have new quiz bracelets:

Since everyone seems to have a diagnosis these days, I’ve been looking for one and I think I just found it over on my friend 40winkzzz’s blog. She says she is “A Person Who Thinks Too Much” and I think this describes me to the proverbial T (wouldn’t you love to know where that idiom comes from? I would.).

In true diagnostic style, we should have definite diagnostic features:

first, an acronym. We cannot clearly expect to be taken seriously with a clear-cut name like 40winkzzz gave it, so how about PWTTM, NOS disorder. That is, “Person Who Thinks Too Much, Not Otherwise Specified disorder. The NOS allows us to open the diagnosis up to thinking too much, regardless of subject ~ whether it is analyzing our children’s behavior, the clothes worn by people around us in Church, the points value of the sauce on our hamburger, what we can blog about next, whether or not we’d want to live in a yurt, the meaning of a particular passage in Greek, what’s for dinner tonight with nothing thawed, or whatever else. NOS is very handy.

then of course we have to have some rule-outs - things that are similar but should not be confused with our syndrome. The first one that comes to mind is Beats A Dead Horse Syndrome (BADH Syndrome). People suffering from BADH Syndrome overlap symptoms of PWTTM, NOS as it looks like they are thinking all the time; however, the savvy observer can tell they are really doing the opposite and just replaying something they already have thought about.

and we need a list of criteria for diagnosis.

* early development of worry line wrinkles on forehead

* unexplained presence of a dictionary in each room of the house

* spends half an hour a day or more making, organizing, or looking for missing lists

* stares at walls trying to recapture previous brilliant thoughts

* writes blogs about strange and meaningless bogus diagnoses

This morning we were trying to do our Latin lesson when something I said obviously resonated within Mr Music and he began drumming to a tune and paying no attention to the origin of the phrase Deo Volente.

My mind wandered, too, to thinking of how different things resound within each of us depending upon how God has tuned us, just as if we are each different tuning forks resonating to various frequencies. Mr Music sounds most often if the stimuli is related to music, history, or sports. He sounds a lot in school, going off on all sorts of interesting rabbit trails. Each of the Bananalets sounds to something different, some to many freqencies and some to only a few.

It is a lot like when you are at a parade and the huge drums march by causing your whole being to vibrate in a slightly unpleasant way, but you are powerless to stop it.

We can ask God to re-tune us, I think of the hymn Come, Thou Fount of Every Blessing: Come, Thou fount of every blessing/ tune my heart to sing Thy grace. 

Yesterday we observed Miss Language dissect a heart and saw the heartstrings, so I am thinking about those strings being tuned to what pleases God, and thinking about what things resonate within my own heart.

What is it about song lyrics that you never seem to get them out of your head? Although we make the best of that by doing memory and drill work to tunes, still, we have experiences like this ugly one:

Mr Music: Mom, how come the sign says, “Free hugs, kisses, and cookies” but we just get the hugs and kisses and hardly ever any cookies?

Mom: Two out of Three Ain’t Bad.

And that Meat Loaf song is probably my most hated song of all time. My brother thought it was rivaled by one which I am gratified to say I never knew, something about “I don’t wanna work, I just wanna bang on the drums all day.” Now that is a song Mr Music could love.

I have been tagged by Anne with a book tag. Tags are a little like accidents ~ if you saw them coming you could be prepared. If I had known this one was coming, I would have had a better book at hand ~ either something impressively deep or at least funny (most likely a toss-up between two of my favorites, Name of the Rose or Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. But, here are the rules, and I will not cheat.

Book Meme:

Rules -

1. Pick up the nearest book (of at least 123 pages.)
2. Open the book to page 123.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the next three sentences.
5. Tag five people.

The nearest book (our computer is on the kitchen table) is a library book left by Miss Dog Lover, One of Us by Nikki Amdur. When I spied it there I could only hope it had fewer than 123 pages, but, alas, it has 133. The required sentences, (again, sorry I could not cheat and do better):

“Oh, she is, Mom, she is.”

“Well, then, maybe I will,” she said, smiling at her.

Nora smiled back.

Who to tag? OPCkid, because she was sorry Anne had not tagged her, too. And that’s all for tonight. I have followed all the rules I am inclined to at the moment.

Buzz likes to go where I go. But I do not always have a pocket, so I made this for Buzz so he can hang on a loop or lanyard.

Buzz is happy with it. I am happy with it. The striped denim was from the leg of little Osh Kosh overalls worn by all the Misses here, then as shorts by Mr Music. That makes me smile.

It always surprises me how satisfying making something is. That seems a strong evidence of being made in the Creator’s image and a small foretaste of heaven.

Announcement for those of you who know and love Miss Language, AKA OPCkid ~ please vote in the blogpoll found in the sidebar here. Thank you.

~ note ~ spelling has been standardized ~

The Tooth Fairy

     I don’t blame my old man he had a long day and then I lost a tooth and then he got a present and went to my room and took the tooth and replaced it with a gift. I feel bad for those old guys like Washington, and Thomas, Ben, they probably didn’t get toys. They didn’t have teeth!

     I hope every time I lose a tooth I can get a air foam blaster. 

The Dear Nephew has a birthday party this weekend, train themed. Dear Nephew is a young teen who is into trains. I know nothing about trains. Here is the problem: I always like to take the perfect gift. That is a pride thing, I know. But still, the perfect gift, it seems would be something for his H-O scale sets, preferably something we make ourselves or at least pull together as a gift. But since I have only the foggiest memory of what he has, that knowledge only goes so far and it is not anywhere near the station.

Sigh.

Any omniscient train gift experts out there? At this point, if no inspiration chugs down the track, I will be fashioning a train out of rice krispie squares and putting it on top of a box holding a gift card. I think I can… I think I can… I think I can… I think I’m out of steam on this one.

Things like this tend to make me wonder why I even bother teaching the Bananalets to read. Although I understand what the signs are supposed to mean, there surely has to be a better way to communicate. If not, we need a whole new language.