Eva's Morning Song

My daughter woke up this morning, pulled the guitar out of the bedroom, walked into the living room and began strumming a song. It went something like this...

"Mommy love Eva..."
"Elias love Daddy..."

Most of the song was unintelligible and consisted of Doo-doo-doo=doo's, but these lines stuck out. Eva is very possessive. About everything. She's especially possessive of her claim on Mom. She'll often be heard saying "Mine Mommmy!" very loudly when Kris is hugging me or even Elias. This has thankfully lessened in recent months, but the lyrics of this song make me think i hasn't completely gone away.

"Mine Mommy, Bro Daddy" - Eva

Morning Economics

Elias and I had a discussion about jobs and money yesterday. It started because he was playing video games in the office while I was working which is normally not a problem. This day though he kept tapping me on the shoulder and asking for help. I don't mind this in moderation but I do work at home and therefore I do have to get something done during the day. :) As such we eventually had to boot him out of the office. He was pretty upset by this so I picked him up, took him to the couch and tried to explain (not the first time) about jobs and money and how those relate to food, toys and housing. During the conversation somehow we got on the subject of what would happen should we not pay for our house, and I told him they would take it away. (The nefarious conspiracy of 'they'!) This really upset him.

"WHY WOULD THEY BE SO MEAN!?!?!" Elias cried.

Kris and I both explained that a lot of work went into building our house and us not paying for that work would cause someone else not to be able to afford food and housing.

On my bike ride this morning I thought up a story I could tell Elias to highlight how this whole system works. When I arrived home I asked him if he wanted to hear it. "YES!" he replied. So I pulled out a colored pencil, a piece of scratch paper and this is what I came up with.

I told a story about his Uncle Jerry, who builds houses. Uncle Jerry wanted to buy some presents for his grand kids for Christmas, but he needed to earn money first. Elias was hooked at this point. He already knew that Uncle Jerry owned a 'Construction Company' and he's always believed all good things come from 'construction companies'. :) Anyway, Uncle Jerry needed $100,000 to build this house, so he went to bank to borrow it. He built a beautiful house with a guest house for Grandparents to stay in. After completing it he needed to sell it for $200,000 to account for all the work and time he put into it as well as to afford presents for his grandkids. Elias took the bait...

"We could buy that house!"

So I drew a picture of our family and said we needed $200,000 to buy this house. Where would we get it?

"From the bank!"

Not sure how I feel about that comment. I wish he'd said "Save up for it and pay cash!" but alas I set myself up with the story. :) We worked out a deal with the bank to borrow the $200k and pay it off slowly over the next 30 years. I botched some calculations but I think he got the idea. I have to remember to not be afraid to do multiplication on paper in front of my 5 year old. Not everything has to be done in your head!

Now our family had a new house, Uncle Jerry had the money to pay back the bank and buy his grandkids presents and the bank made some money on the transaction so they could buy things for their families as well.

Then I asked the question.

"What would happen if I lost my job and we couldn't pay for our house?"

"What?"

"The bank would have to pay for their loan somehow, so they'd need to sell the house to someone else."

"NO!!!" said a very concerned Elias

"Well Elias, you know what we would do if I lost my job?"

"What?"

"Find another job."

"YEAH!"

I think all in all it was a successful story, except for the calculations of loan payments. After the story Elias got REALLY excited and has been modifying and updating this picture adding trees, extra rooms, basements... He added some of his friends to the picture of our family and more detail to Ryka. He's excited about this house thing.

Dishes

I asked Eva to put her dish up on the counter after she was done eating. She complied and then her brother put his dish in the sink when he was done. Then he started filling it with water and trying to rinse it. I asked him if he wanted to do dishes and he said "YES!" So we brought out the stool (and of course Eva climbed on). He washed all the dishes from dinner in a sink full of soapy water and then rinsed them and put them on the drying towel. We had to hover over the kids to make sure the knives weren't doing any extra slicing today but other than that they (mostly Elias) did all the work.

My dishes are clean! Of course, my floor is soaked! :)

AT-AT Morning

Elias had a cold last night. He was up a lot coughing and hacking. He didn't show it much when he woke up though. We were still in bed and heard him tearing into the lego boxes and pulling out pieces. After 20 minutes of this he came into our room and asked for some help finding more legs for his AT-AT. He already had 2 built and he needed more. I got up and dug through a few bags until he came across some arches that apparently fit the bill. The picture above is his AT-AT from this morning.

After building that I offered to turn on Star Wars V so he could watch AT-ATs in the movie and he said "Yes!". Once he was in the office though he decided that he'd rather play Sim City first, then watch AT-ATs. After 15 minutes of Sim City he got down and went to build more things with legos. He's been trying to construct the 2 legged cousin, the AT-ST. He's now back in the office watching Star Wars V (finally). He wants to watch AT-ATs and then AT-STs, so it looks like I'll be bringing out number 3 of the Holy Trilogy after the AT-AT scene. :)

Funny Quote

This cracked me up. Going from windows to mac I find my concept of "normal terminal usage" is completely different these days.

"I liken starting one's computing career with Unix, say as an undergraduate, to being born in East Africa. It is intolerably hot, your body is covered with lice and flies, you are malnourished and you suffer from numerous curable diseases. But, as far as young East Africans can tell, this is simply the natural condition and they live within it. By the time they find out differently, it is too late. They already think that the writing of shell scripts is a natural act."

blogging from my iPod.

I can't believe I never thought to try this before. I can actually blog from my iPod. It's like blogging from a computer except it's smallr and harder to type on. Still, most of my 'lounge' surfing is done on this this thing, so I'll have to try this again

Octopus Story

Elias drew us a story this morning. He bought this special lined paper that has space at the top for drawing pictures and lines at the bottom for writing a story. Today it was just a picture.

This is a story about an octopus in a cave. The cave is all the little circles with the line around them. Below the octopus is a mother crab giving its baby crab to the octopus. I'm not sure why the mother crab wanted the octopus to have its baby crab, but they're all smiling so it must be all right.