Category: Family

Tina the three-year-old gets more three-years-old with time.  She looks for excuses to insist on having her way.  One recent trend has been to insist that one particular fork is her “salad fork” and therefore cannot be used for main dishes.  (We have never made such a distinction at our dinner table, so I have no idea where she is getting this.)  Whenever Jacinta makes a salad for herself, Tina will shout, “I’m getting my salad fork!”

Yesterday, Jacinta made herself some eggs for breakfast.  As usual, Tina wanted to partake of the bounty, and went to get a fork.  “This is my egg fork!” she announced–and ever since she has refused to use that fork for anything but eggs.

Happily, we already have one fork identified as the “dinner fork,” so we don’t have to go buy a potato fork, a meat fork, an asparagus fork, and so on.

Yesterday, Teresa the five-year-old went on a brief kick of identifying eye colors.  “My eyes are brown!” she announced, and then, looking at me, “Your eyes are blue!”

Tina the three-year-old could not be left out.  Staring intently into Jacinta’s eyes, she exclaimed, “Your eyes are … white!”

Then, looking at me, “Your eyes are … white!”

Jacinta asked, “What color are your eyes, Tina?”  “Um … white!”

I suppose it’s a hard concept to grasp:  why we call my eyes blue and Jacinta’s eyes brown when there is so much–well, white in there.

Well, I’ve really fallen off the blogwagon recently.  I’m trying to reform my ways for Holy Week, though, so here’s a post for today.

The College has a committee in charge of communications which we call “the Communications Group.”  We were supposed to have a meeting today, so I showed up, only to find out that the meeting had been cancelled.

Seems that cancellation was not effectively…communicated.

Yesterday I put in a telephone call to a priest, and as it turned out I called his cell phone while he was celebrating Mass.  Luckily he had it set to vibrate!

When he called back, he set me at ease about the timing of the call:  “It was good–I was getting a buzz during consecration!”

Yesterday, Teresa the five-year-old asked whether men grow beards when they are old or when they are young.  About to reply, “When they are older,” Jacinta suddenly thought to inquire about how old old might be.  “Is Uncle Robert older or younger?” she asked.

Teresa laughed.  “He’s older than Papa!  Because he’s bigger!”

Robert is more than a decade younger than I am, but I have to admit that he’s bigger.

Last night I was talking with Emily Tonkowich, who serves–among other things–as the dance teacher for our little community.  This year some of the college students asked if she would teach them the tango.

She gladly obliged, of course, but had an interesting time teaching them to move their hips.  It’s an awkward thing to begin with, you know, telling someone to move those hips more, but there was always at least one guy who would protest:

“I don’t have hips!”

Um, the fact that they don’t curve and all that doesn’t mean they aren’t there.  Hmm.

In the midst of an imaginary game in which Tina the three-year-old pronounced herself “a princess,” she also proclaimed herself a “Halloweena.”

This had us stumped for a few minutes until she returned to the theme and restated the word as “ballerina.”  Ah–and yes, she’s dancing at the time.  OK.  My guess is that Halloween is when little girls dress up all pretty, and little girls dress up all pretty for ballet, so….

Tina the three-year-old is a dramatic little cutsie.  For a while recently when she did not get her way she would flop on the floor and cry, “Nobody likes me!”  This morning she tried a variation:  after the customary floor-flop, she sobbed, “I don’t like anyone!”

Regina the seven-year-old, who is flirting with the age of reason, tried reasoning through the problem:  “Don’t you like Tina?”

Trapped!  “Mmmmmm,” Tina responded, unsure how to break through the objection, but unwilling to admit defeat.  Then she changed the subject.

Jacinta pressed the kids today with a parental pop-quiz:  Who was the third child of Adam and Eve?  The boys pondered, but Bernadette was confident:  “They had two boys and a girl,” she said, “I remember that.”

“Two boys and a girl?” Jacinta repeated, wondering.

“Yes,” said B., “Cain and Abel and Beth.”

This kid could answer subtle questions about the Trinity, but it looks like time to review Genesis.

The very morning that Cardinal Bergoglio was to be elected pope, he read this in the Office of Readings:

“Why do you treat your servant so badly,” Moses asked the Lord.  “Why are you so displeased with me that you burden me with all this people?  Was it I who conceived all this people? or was it I who gave them birth, that you tell me to carry them at my bosom, like a foster father carrying an infant, to the land you have promised under oath to their fathers?  …I cannot carry all this people by myself, for they are too heavy for me.  If this is the way you will deal with me, then please do me the favor of killing me at once, so that I need no longer face this distress.”

Seemed to me an ironic juxtaposition.