Pet

Chloe's been asking for a pet lately since she found out her beloved cat actually belongs to the neighbors which explains why we never had to feed it. We feel somewhat guilty for our gleeful perpetuation of that lie, so we are actually considering her request. She wants something that could protect her from the monsters that lurk in her room at night. "What about a goldfish?" she said, "they see in infrared light. What could possibly be cooler than that?" She said she has a much better idea that a stupid old goldfish.

Baby spider

The girls found a spider in their room at 6 this morning and it might as well have been a rhinoceros, exciting and dangerous and impossibly exotic. Their screeches of delight forced us deeper under the covers, as did the trampling of footsteps to get a flashlight for "spying it," as did the cries of "it jumped on my arm! it wants to pinch me!" You'd think that last one would get us up, but no; the baby was up every two hours all night and we both only half-heard these things, from a dream.


Finally a sound like the roof caving in roused us (and the baby again, of course), a sound caused by Emily thinking the spider had trapped her on the bed and the only solution was to throw a nearby large bucket of plastic dinosaurs in its general direction, which was also the wall shared by our sleeping heads on the other side. 

The spider, of course, turned out to be a vicious beast nearly as large as Chloe's pinkie nail. Upon finding out it was possibly a baby, they immediately decided it was unbearably cute and they named it Pinchy Pinchy and promised to take care of it forever, their whole lives, always, vows which lasted at least until breakfast. Where is the spider now? We don't know - with the baby's diaper and the plastic stegasauruses and the overturned potties we forgot about it, and can only assume it retreated back for its next appearance, at nap time or next week, with babies of its own.

From the archive: Koi

On the North side of town there's a duck pond for a yard. All kinds of exotic water birds live there that you could wish forever to see in the wild but never would even if you lived in Siberia and were specifically trying.

Jeff and I got in a fight about I don't even remember so I drove him all the way up to the north side to see the duck pond because I wanted to show him something really neat as a way of saying sorry without actually saying it.

When we got there, the harlequin ducks were chasing each other in a waddling funny way and the trumpeter swans came right up to the fence to inspect us. Jeff was smiling and about to forgive me when a fish flipped out of the water and landed on the bank right in front of us, flopping and gasping and all we could do was watch.

Charity

Someone keeps putting breast cancer awareness magnets on my car, little flat pink ribbons in a tidy row under the back side window. I liked the first one. It looked good. I thought someone must have confused my car for theirs; wouldn't they be surprised! But the second magnet couldn't have also been a mistake. Then the third - kind of weird.

Then this morning there were ripped-up pieces of a huge one slapped on the back, not in line with the others at all, just big and broken and angry-looking. Is this some kind of hint? Was I supposed to donate something?