Seven Quick Takes Friday

1. DOB got sworn in yesterday. They don't have a general swearing-in ceremony here like in the bigger counties--you just call the courthouse and they have a judge with a quiet calendar do it. You get to practice actually walking up to the bar. Just in case you found that hard. Now he just has to finish all the rest of the paperwork and wait for his card.

2. The twins are far more keyed in to their surroundings than the older kids, and so they are having a great time watching animals outside. (While D2 just stands there--"Where? Where is it? I don't see it!"--and yes, I have informally checked his vision, he can see distant things fine, it just takes him a loooong time to switch gears or make sense of the outside world.) Their favorite, by far, is the slug. Any time they see one, they stop and watch it, fascinated, pointing "That way! There it goes! Bye-bye, slug!" Since there are banana slugs, D1 has concluded that the darker-colored ones are chocolate slugs.

3. Rocketboy (or should he now be Copterboy?) is home for a week or so before he heads out to Afghanistan. He came over for spaghetti last night and I think three out of four of the ducklings out-ate him. This is not encouraging.

4. Techboy and family close on the sale of their house next week, and are moving to the Farm until they get their house built. This should make it even easier for the cousins to get together.

5. D2 has been having outbreaks of random itchiness. I have been trying to write down what he eats to see if I can find a cause, but I have also tried cutting way back on his sugar consumption, which had been creeping upwards, and he hasn't had any since. So I'm going to suspect it is excess sugar, which is nice because it doesn't require reworking everyone's menus to avoid.

6. However, in defense of D2's ability to make sense of the outside world, he discovered gravity the other day. "Why is it," he asked, "that when I let go of things, they always fall down? Why don't they fly up in the air, instead?" We then had a discussion on things that do fly up in the air, but I tried to refrain from giving him any pat answers. I still have hopes of seeing him turn into a physicist. Or something.

7. We had to take the blind down in the duckling's room because it had a string we could not make safe. This was fine in the winter, but now that sunrise is at five-thirty or thereabouts, the kids were waking up WAY too early. Her majesty improvised a curtain out of shower rings, safety pins, and denim, which keeps the room adequately dark and can be taken apart into component parts once the children are no longer in that room. And now blissful silence reigns until 7 or 8 again.

Oh, and bonus points: Happy Birthday to DOB! Also it's Law Day! Coincidence?

More Quick Takes.