Can't even blame it on Blitzen

Remember when you got your first email address and you loved email from anyone, including dirty jokes, smartly photoshopped animals and inspirational poems? Now all that crap and sometimes their senders are unilaterally dismissed to the junk, ahem, recycle bin. Well, I always remember written by Irma Bombeck that amounted to a message about appreciating life. She commented something like "if I knew how short life was I'd have burned those candles shaped like rosebuds". There are a number of other sentimental woulda, coulda, shoulda's. You get the idea.

Now, overlay this sentiment with the fact that I have really really loved those Pottery Barn Reindeer FOR-EVVVER. If you aren't familiar, they are a kitchy version of Rudolph and friends acting out a quality of their name: Vixen is cloaked in a plush stole, Dancer is meant to be twirling, Blitzen, well, you get the idea. They are stupidly priced. I could never justify buying any of it. After adoring the whole motif since graduate school when I had to couldn't afford to spell reindeer, much less have frivolous dishes, I treated myself to the set of bowls 2 years ago.

They are ceramic, hand wash only and have a metallic band prohibiting them from going in the dishwasher. Ridiculously impractical!

Yet....

SOSOSOSOSOSO fun for little boys. Truly, what am I going to do? Use them for the soup course at Christmas dinner? No. I'm going to bust them out for as many meals as possible, let the boys wager on whose got which reindeer, and seek out bowl-able meals and maybe even throw a sandwich in them from time to time so that we don't accidentally miss using them on any day during Advent.

Well, as of today, Ms. Bombeck,we've got one down, seven to go and I will not be sad for a minute.

I could say that I wasn't warned.

We lurve books.

Our kids lurve books. A comment on a recent report card for one of the twins was:

"He is an avid reader and it is sometimes difficult for him to transition from independent reading to a different activity" Translation: canIjustreadonemorepage?????

The 9 1/2 y.o. inhales books with an astounding speed coupled with retention. Case in point, in second grade, at 7 y.o. he picked up "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe" from the classroom library, completed it during school hours and 9 months later recounted meticulous details about the story before watching the film for the first time.

We try to keep them all three boys at 7 & 9, stimulated, age-appropriate and happy, i.e. not the last three Harry Potters, Star Wars graphic novels, Dumas' Three Musketeers or Pokemon.

We've done pretty well, with some good advice and creativity, keeping their love for reading engaged and appropriate. On a recent trip to the library, the three of them and I agreed that we would start Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events. I've heard good things about the series. Kids seem to like them and we've been needing a new series. This was a Wednesday. We began "The Bad Beginning". By the time we hit our driveway, in under 5 minutes, the parents were killed in a blazing inferno, setting the three orphans off on the inspiration for the title.

By Friday's commute home, bearing in mind that thanks to my mom, I don't drive them on this 10-15 minute trip to school everyday, I was horrified by what we were hearing. To give an idea, the guardian had just backhanded the 12 y.o. boy, after caging the infant. I turned off the CD and said, "do you guys *like* this book?!" To which, they uniformly responded, "can you turn it back on ?!"

At this point, my 9 y.o. makes a vague reference to liking the second book.
"what do you mean", I inquire.
"I finished it at school", he says.

To clarify, it is a 190 page book. He actually participates at school. He's finished it in 2 days. I'm really in trouble with this one. But I digress.

"does the second book get any better?" I ask, giving serious consideration to home schooling so as to shelter my babies from anything ugly, scary or bad.....like the book I'm playing for them.

"MOH-M...it is the *series* of *unfortunate* events. Can you turn it back on now?"