Evening At Home

Here's a window into an evening at our house.

Inge reads.
Mona drinks milk.

Daddy takes pictures.

Lunchtime Vignette

What Happens When People Learn to Spell, or, Time to Wash the Car

A person approaching the passenger side of our van may observe this, written in a staggering but otherwise confident hand, upon the car door: 

CAR  

cAR

CAR

Cute Kids

Videos

I've started a YouTube channel where you can view a bunch of home movie clips that we've collected over the years. I'll be adding to the collection regularly. Here are some of the best so far.

On Making Announcements, and What to do During Naptime

From the bathroom, from Nelly: 

"Ahoy there!  I wet my pants!"

*** ***

We got up from our naps today to find Spurgeon's Sermons (hardback, Volume 9-10) lying around casually on the couch.  Lewis had been whiling away the time by reading it, and a good Sunday activity it was, too.  He professes not to have understood any of it, but he says he read a whole page anyway.  

Portraits

On Being Close

Here's a memory from a few years back:  once we asked Ingrid to name the four gospels, and she said, "Matthew, Mark, Luke, and Dr. Leithart." 

On Dignity, Not Having Any

This was one of those days, during schooltime especially.  Yesterday, now, yesterday was grand.  From the moment we sat down everything just clicked along, done in time for lunch, wrap it up, yay.  But today...school never really came to order, or if it did it was only for a fleeting and beautiful moment in between math exercises 1 and 2; and the rest of the time was spent putting out fires.  Sometimes I amaze myself: I can issue twelve directives in the space of ten seconds or so, and (this leads me to the problem), it's always the thirteenth that misfires.  See, moms get into this mode that is really hard to get out of. "You do this, you do this, you do this, stop doing that, and YOU...Oh hi, Honey.  How was work?" And if the kids have been giving plenty of opportunities, well, do the math.  One out of every thirteen goes wrong, and with twelve issued per every ten seconds, that puts us at or around six misspeaks in the space of a minute.  By this, I simply mean briskly telling someone to stop something he wasn't doing, or telling him to do something he already did ("Right away, please, and don't talk back to Mommy"), or any such thing that then has to be retracted and corrected.

Anyway, I'm getting to the point, really I am, this sort of thing gets exhausting and repetitive, and after it had happened several times already this morning, I made an announcement.  "Everybody!  Be quiet.  Mommy is going to sit down and collect my thoughts, and I don't want a single person to speak until I tell you."  With that, I majestically sat.  

It was sheer, unmitigated misfortune that I sat...on the cat.  

1979-1980 Surprise