Makes you wonder which he sees more often

The other day we were driving behind an SUV with a large dog hanging out the window. Emerson shouted out, excited:

"Hey Mom! Look at that goat driving that car!"

Undergrads say the darndest things

In addition to teaching a class this summer, Eric has four undergrad students who are doing research under his tutelage.

While instructing one of them in how to properly centrifuge a bunch of test tube things, the student asked if he had to put the cover on.

Eric explained that when the tubes spin they make the sound like when you blow over the top of a glass bottle but times 50,000 or some other ridiculously large number. If you don't cover them, he said, it sounds like a demon.

"How do you know what a demon sounds like?" the student replied.

It's a good question. And it became the first entry on the lab's Quote Sheet.

Now, I may not have an out of the house workplace right now, but I also hear a lot of funny quotes during the day and I think they need to be recorded. So this blog is going to function as my own personal quote sheet and also as the part of my brain that should remember all the funny stuff that Emerson says but which does not.

We'll start with this one when I went to get Emerson after his nap:
"Mom! (fake cough) I need water because I am coughing."

Look for the tag Quote Sheet to see them all together.

Father's Day funnies

I surprised Eric with a special Father's Day Eve date night on Saturday. After an excruciating departure from a hysterical Emerson, we made our way downtown for some fun sans kids.

We picked up tacos (three fish, three rajas con queso) from Taco Bus and ate them in the park over by the children's museum which overlooks the river and the campus. We washed them and the incredibly spicy salsa they came with down with a few beers poured into opaque cups. The temperature was perfect. We chatted some and spent some time just sitting quietly, watching people playing soccer and taking wedding photos and playing in the water.

After our mouths stopped burning we walked over to the Straz Center for a comedy show. There may have been some warning signs that it was not going to be stellar. It was billed as a four comic line-up of "up and comers." It was sold out but at showtime the auditorium was barely half full. But I wasn't worried; we used to go see amateur comics in SF from time to time and it was still funny, just sometimes not in the way they intended.

Let me just say this: all the comics' parents, and a lot of their friends, were in the audience.We may have been the only people there who didn't recently hang out with one of the comics.

It was almost really good. They had a lot of good ideas, they just didn't quite have their timing and language fine-tuned. One bit was about this guy getting mugged on a subway when the only other person on a subway was an 80 year old woman. And then some of the ideas weren't so good: one guy spent a good portion of his time doing an impression of Stephen Hawking in "unexpected" situations like at a strip club. He had the whole mechanical voice and everything.

I can't wait for next Father's Day.

Not our best parenting

One of the things I have really appreciated about being at home full time with the boys is that I can be completely focused on them and not always feel a little distracted. But, due to sleep deprivation and brain-melting hormones, results have been a little discouraging recently.

For starters, we continued the family tradition of letting our children crawl out of our bed when they hit around six months old. Eric started it with Emerson one morning when I left early to teach a 6:30am yoga class and Eric fell back asleep but Emerson didn't. Eric called me later that morning to tell me that he had awoken to the sound of a thud and then screaming. Unfortunately, I can now relate to exactly how he must have felt. On Saturday afternoon, I put Ethan down for a nap in our bed and then forgot to turn on the monitor when I came downstairs. I was deep in "In The Wood" on my Kindle when I heard a heavy thud followed immediately by very sad crying. He cheered right up once I scooped him up off the floor and I am optimistic that he is completely fine.

Later that day, we went out to do some errands together as a family. We were several minutes into the drive when Emerson chirped from the back seat: "Uh oh! You're not strapped in!" (He still thinks "you" refers to himself, since that's how we always refer to him.)

Yup. He was sitting in his carseat but not restrained at all. We pulled over, buckled him up and vowed to get a better night's sleep that night.