We’re lying side by side, reading. A book for him, a screen for me.

Me: I want a cupcake.

Him: What? Where’d that come from?

Me: This post I’m reading. See?

I point at the word. CUPCAKE. It looks somehow magical, evocative, as if it were spelled out in actual cupcakes instead of plain old letters of the alphabet.

Me: I think cupcake is one of my ten favorite words.

Him: Hmm. You know, I don’t really like cupcakes.

Pause.

Me: That’s all right, I’ll have yours.

Wonderboy: My hearing aids aren’t working.

Me: Oh, are your batteries dead?

Wonderboy: Huh?

Me: Do you need new batteries?

Wonderboy: What?

Me: Come here, let me check your hearing aids.

Wonderboy: I think my batteries got dead.

(And yes, we can communicate in sign language as well, but during this conversation I was holding a plate in one hand and a giant slice of pizza in the other. Priorities.)

Just one week ago, Jack was in his prime. Ruddy, round-cheeked, he had a cheerful grin for all the world.

Then he went out one night and got lit up.

Now, sad to say, that once sprightly youth has aged before his time. He spends his days on the porch, cantankerously frowning at passersby.

Let this be a lesson to you, children.

“It’s rather an unusual case,” said Madam Chairwoman blandly. “The prisoner is a poet. You will all, I know, cast your minds back to the many poets who have written favorably of our race—’Her feet beneath her petticoat, like little mice stole in and out’—Suckling, the Englishman—what a charming compliment! Thus do not poets deserve specially well of us?”

—from The Rescuers by Margery Sharp

The esteemed and sleek-whiskered Mouse Chairwoman is quoting from “Ballad Upon a Wedding” by Sir John Suckling, one of the English “Cavalier poets,” those  dashing, witty, and sensitive 17th-century Carpe Diem fellows who came out in support ...

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Once upon a time, there was a very tidy cupboard.

Then along came young Sir Destructalot.

Having wreaked maximum havoc, he paused, well pleased with his efforts…

…and looked around for new frontiers.

Enticing prospects beckoned at the far corners of his world, but first he would have to figure out how to bridge a perilous gap.

Triumph! And now bravely through the tunnel he strode, scoffing at those who would take the more conventional route around the table.

Eagerly he made for the row of tempting treasures on the shelf, their bright colors practically begging him to pull them free of their wooden prison.

But just ...

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What I should probably try to chronicle tonight is how Jane, Beanie, and I came to the conclusion this morning that Plutarch is garlic. (That’s a compliment.)

But it’s late, and I only have a few minutes here, and the pieces of today that might disappear if I don’t write them down are small moments, not big conversations.

Teenagers playing Rock Band in my living room with abandon and zest; I loved that.

Rilla screaming, squealing, shrieking, scurrying the loop of kitchen and living room, daring (begging) one of our visitors—a tender-hearted eleven-year-old who is wise in the ways of big-brotherhood—to chase and ...

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Well, my day went something like this:

Drove to children’s hospital for Wonderboy’s appointment with our favorite specialist, the esteemed yet down-to-earth doctor of genetics. Only one of my boy’s many many physical anomalies seems to be genetic—the albinism—but Dr. J is also a dysmorphologist, which means she takes an interest any kind of birth defect or abnormality, whether its origins are chromosomal or developmental-in-utero. She’s the doctor who laughed at my possibly insulting analogy two years ago, when I said that dealing with specialists in so many different departments of the hospital was like trying to walk a bunch of ...

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Because I sliced my thumb and forefinger while washing a knife this afternoon (nothing serious) and don’t feel like doing much typing.

And because you can’t ever go wrong, can you, posting pictures of scrumptiousness like this?

Yesterday he managed to snag a bottle of barbecue sauce out of the fridge and I thought Ohhhh, baby, you don’t want to put ideas in people’s heads…I already want to eat you all up.

I hate to break it to him, but I think he’s a little too big to play Tom Thumb.

Here’s something fun: the Cloud Appreciation Society. Float on over to check out some amazing photos, learn about the different types of clouds, and marvel at the Cloud of the Month. I particularly enjoyed the Society’s manifesto:

WE BELIEVE that clouds are unjustly maligned
and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.

We think that they are Nature’s poetry,
and the most egalitarian of her displays, since
everyone can have a fantastic view of them.

We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it.
Life would be dull if we had to look up at
cloudless monotony day after day.

“Fight blue-sky thinking.” Hee. Here’s the rest.

I ...

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