Kibble

While tucking my youngest into bed late last night before retiring myself, I noticed that her pillow smelled oddly of dog food. "Perhaps the dog was laying up here with her?" I questioned silently. Scooping her up in my arms for one last hug and kiss, I felt dog food under her back. I followed the trail up and underneath her pillow I found some hair bands, hairbrush, comb, a book, some assorted Halloween trinkets and a tidy pile of dog food about the size of a small coffee cup. Rather than wake her up and clean it, I shrugged and laid her back down, soundly, to slumber the rest of the evening on her secret stash. In the morning I asked her about her treasures.

"Baby why do you have dog food under your pillow?"

"In case the doggies get hungry in the middle of the night." she said.

"Well baby I lock them in the bathroom at night where they sleep."

"No you didn't!" she exclaimed.

"Sweety, they are still locked in there." I said as I pointed to the door.

Realizing I had her in checkmate, she smiled and questioned "I love you daddy?"

"I love you too, Lydi-girl."

The Cleanupinator

Saturday was a day where daddy had some work to do and mommy wasn't feeling too well due to a headache. I asked the girls to go play rather than just stay glued to the floor in front of the TV. The two younger girls decided to go upstairs and cause yet-to-be-seen damage in the playroom. My oldest daughter decided to go to her room for some "me time".

From the den, I kept hearing sighs and soft exclamations of exhasperation like "why won't you just work?" This kept up for about 30 minutes. I figured she would come talk to me despite and overwhelming urge to sneak around the corner and just watch her little creative mind at work. I could tell she was in deep contemplation about something and just decided to let her figure it out on her own. Quietly a little red head appeared from around the corner and a big tear rolled down her face.

"What's wrong baby?" I asked.

"The Cleanupinator doesn't work." she said sadly.

"What's the Cleanupinator?" I asked.

She handed me a napkin with a neatly drawn almost-to-scale schematic as shown above. It appeared to be a table with voodoo dolls taking a shower and then a map to a worm hole in the space-time continuum. After a little explanation from her, I realized that her little entrepreneur mind is already at work coming up with the next big thing, just like her Daddy. See, the Cleanupinator is a brilliant attempt by a 6 year old to understand the basic laws of physics by swinging a pencil on a rope to push her dollies off her night table into a basket so she can then put them away when she cleans her room.

This turned into a 30 minute science experiment in the kitchen and a discussion on Newtonian laws as to why swinging a pencil on a piece of string can knock a hair clip across the table but barely makes an apple wobble.

She quickly understood that there wasn't enough mass in the pencil to knock her dolls off her nightstand and said "I guess i need to swing something heavier than a pencil to knock the dolls into the basket."

Watch out world. Baby, you will change the world for the better one day.

Daddy loves you.

Fruitcake

I have just decided to get back into regular blogging. I have to record this stuff because I think my daughters will just love it when they are older. I know I will.

This is a quick conversation I just had with Emma, my oldest daughter.

"Daddy was King Arthur real?"

"I'm not sure baby. Some think so, some think he was just a myth."

"Daddy what's a myth?"

"Well it's really just something that is passed from person to person. It's a story, usually with a moral, that is handed down like folklore."

At this point I was expecting her to ask about folklore.

Wide-eyed she responded, after a short pause, "Passed on kind of like a fruitcake?"

"Yes baby, like a fruitcake."