Miscellania

It's been a while since our last post. I was going to post over the weekend, but then we all got sick. I went to work yesterday and got diddly accomplished, so I stayed home for part of today. Here are a few tidbits of the last few days:

We had brownies for father's day. I had two on my plate at once (father's privilege). Ben chastised me, saying that if I ate both of them then I would die and my teeth would fall out. Apparently we've been stressing dental hygiene so much that Ben now equates tooth decay with death.

Ben drew me a card for father's day. There was a picture of me and him, and he was wearing his Ben 10 watch. (See Ben's post a bit further down to find out about Ben 10).

Neal woke us up in the morning a few days ago by playing Anne Marie's dancing Santa who sings Santa Claus is Coming to Town. (He had seen it in the attic previously and forced Anda to take it down). It was cute because he was trying to sing along. I have a video of the boys dancing together that I'll try to post--not sure if it will work. In case I can't figure out how to do it, it is a perfect example of Neal copying Ben 100%. He kept looking over his shoulder at Ben to make sure he was doing it right.

Neal woke up in the middle of the night recently, crying. I went in and asked what was wrong, and he replied, "Monsters!" I have never heard him say that word before (although he's certainly heard Ben say it a gazillion times, and he himself has pretended to be a monster many times). I asked Neal where the mosters were, and he said, "I don't know." I went to get him a drink, and while I was gone he cried about monsters again. He ended up sleeping with us. The event is more significant when you remember that Neal still doesn't like to talk, so it was quite an accomplishment for him to explain what the issue was.

This next story could be considered hearsay. However, since I'm not offering it to prove the truth of the matter asserted, I think it ought to be ok. Last week in Relief Society the lesson was on being self sufficient. One older sister (probably 70 or so) told about how her father had paid for her first year in school, but she had some fun and was not careful, so she had to get a job. She continued, "So I got a job as a stripper at ...." I imagine the collective gasp drowned out the rest of her sentence, and everyone turned to stare at her. Turns out she worked at a biscuit factory stripping the cardboard from the biscuits at some point in the production line.