The Girl lost her first tooth on Sunday! It came out while she was eating pancakes. She spent the rest of the day beaming with gap-toothed pride.
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TW is redoing the downstairs bathroom, which involved buying a new top for the sink. The sinktop came in a huge cardboard box, which, as any parent of young children can tell you, is an irresistibly tempting toy for young kids. Naturally, TG and TB descended upon the box, and set about making a fort of it in the family room.
(When I was a kid, we had a pretty good grapevine for relaying news of any major new appliance purchase in the neighborhood. The idea was to get a hold of the big empty box and play with/in/on it before it got taken away or rained on. Refrigerator boxes were the best -- they made great tanks -- but stoves, tv's, or just about anything big would do.)
The kids quickly came up with a disappearing act. I brought up another big empty box from the basement, and they created a sort of habitrail with a blanket covering the connection. Then they put on a magic show. TB got in the box, and TG draped the blanket over it. She declared "abracadabra" a few times while the boxes rattled mysteriously in sequence. Then she'd lift the blanket, and voila, TB had vanished. She re-draped the blanket, said "abracadabra" a few more times, and he was back.
Of course, once wasn't enough. Each of us had to play every role, including me. We hadn't quite appreciated the size limit for the magician's assistant until I tried crawling through. As I tried making my way to the secret compartment, TG declared that "Daddy! Your butt is ruining everything!," a statement to which there's really no graceful response. But they enjoyed it, and I couldn't argue the point.
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Last week the four of us went to a basketball game. At one point, the crowd chanted "de-fense! de-fense!" TG chanted "T-Rex! T-Rex!" When TW asked her why, TG said "a T-Rex says 'Grrr,' and scares the other team!" Makes sense to me.
