Zoe’s friend was over last night, telling us about her dad needing to go to the doctor’s for some testing.

Me: “What kind of testing?”

Zoe’s friend: “Diabetic testing.”

Zoe (eyes as wide as dinner plates) : “They’re testing him to see if he’s EVIL?”

Me and Zoe’s friend: *???*

Zoe: You know, an evil, diabetical plan??

Me: That’s diabolical, sweetie.

Zoe: Oh.

Zoe’s friend: Diabetic is when all you drink is Diet Coke.

Zoe: Oh.

Zoe’s friend: I can’t believe you thought my dad was evil…

“Hi, Mom, this is Zoe. Ummm, there is a color of paper here? And, ummmmm, when I look at it… my eyes? Ummm, I just get a really, really, really, really bad headache? And I accidentally looked at the paper? And now, ummm, I just have a really, really, really, really bad headache, and so I was wondering if you could come and pick me up… Ok, bye bye.”

**beep**

“Hi, Mom, this is Zoe again? Umm, I still have a really, really, really bad headache from looking at the paper, and so I was wondering if you could come and pick me up right away. Ok. Bye bye.”

(I’m wondering what color makes my child’s brain hurt so badly. I hope it’s not pink, or her life will be over. Also — for the love of her brain — I hope she can stop accidentally looking at it.)

Tuesday night Jon, Jachin, and I went to the symphony. Utah Symphony was doing a performance called “Play! A Video Game Symphony” It was all video game music, all the time.

And it was amazing.

Who knew that video game music was so beautiful? Who knew that you could close your eyes and imagine a whole other world of sweeping, magical landscapes and winged creatures? Hmm, everyone but me, huh? Yeah, I’m not much of a gamer. But you didn’t have to be to appreciate the awesome music coming out of Abravanel Hall.

For the symphony, I told Jachin he had to wear fancy clothes. It was a problem because none of us really own fancy clothes. So I changed the requirement to “nice-ish” clothes. He came out of his room wearing his tuxedo shirt.

Good enough for me.

Also, when we asked him where he wanted to go to dinner for his fancy night out on the town, his response was “Subway”.

Never question the highness of our class.

This is from a homework sheet from Jachin’s Language Arts homework packet last week. When I read it, I almost peed myself.

Write one of each kind of sentence. Don’t forget the correct punctuation mark.

Declarative: Jachin Gale is awesome.

Interrogative: Is Jachin Gale awesome?

Exclamatory: Jachin Gale is awesome!

Imperative: Treat Jachin Gale like he’s awesome.

When he got home from school yesterday I said, “I read this sheet. It’s hilarious. It’s going on the fridge.”

To which he responded, “I was just rather surprised that Mrs. Whitehead accepted those sentences.”

Why would she not have? They’re the truth.

Jachin got out of the shower yesterday morning and said this:

“My hair smells like dad’s deodorant… which smells like sweaty diapers.”

To which my mind stumbled all over itself trying to figure out several things.

1) Why do I spend so much money on name brand deodorant when it smells like sweaty diapers?

2) Why, when I change 99% of diapers in this house, have I not had an occasion to smell a “sweaty” one?

and perhaps most confounding

3) Exactly what the crap did Jachin use to wash his hair?

The other night I was tucking Jachin in, sitting on the side of his bed, talking about the day. I held his hand and scratched his back. Then, just before I stood up, I lift his hand and kissed it.

“Ugg,” he said, wiping his hand on his blanket. “Don’t kiss me romantically.”

“That’s romantically?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said. “It’s how fancy men kiss women.”

“Umm…Ok.”

And I pictured myself as a fancy man helping Jachin (pictured here are a fair maiden) dismount from his sidesaddle perch atop a tall horse. Before romantically kissing his gloved hand.

I guess he had a point.

So now everything in this house (pertaining to Jachin) is threatened to be done in a romantic fashion. Such as “Go do your homework or else I’ll hug you romantically”,  or “Stop teasing your sister before I punch you romantically”. And without fail, these romantic threats are met with a frightened yelp by Jachin, followed by swift compliance.

Who knew that being romantic could get such results?

I took the kids to the BYU Museum of Art yesterday. They have a Walter Wick exhibit set up now that is amazing. After going through all of the I Spy sets and optical illusion photographs, we wandered the museum looking at other things.

We came upon Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe print:

“Do you know who that is… without looking at the name?” I asked Jachin.

“Umm… Britney Spears?”

“Close enough.”

Zoe bumped her tooth two days ago. Now, if this had happened to any other person on the planet, it would not be a blog-worthy event. But the fact that Zoe has a phobia about her teeth falling out, coupled with the fact that she has a flair for the dramatic, makes it blog-worthy, indeed. (Truth be told, if it were up to Zoe none of her teeth would ever fall out, even with the tooth fairy dropping some coin. If it were up to Zoe, she would just keep her baby teeth and grow in her big teeth behind them… in rows… like a shark… a really, really dramatic shark.)

So she bumped her tooth. I’m not even sure how it happened, exactly. I know that she was in the kitchen, but that doesn’t give us much to go on as far as reconstructing the event. It was a baby tooth. On the bottom. One that had been a little loose anyway. But once she spotted a drop of blood — mixed with an ounce of spit, which, when combined, ends up looking like a gallon of blood — she completely freaked and ran into the bathroom to look in the mirror. Then she repeatedly screamed for help. I went in and applied a tissue and showed her that it was not a gallon of blood, but rather a drop of blood. Mostly it was just harmless spit. But her loose tooth had been knocked a little askew and was now even more loose, and possibly on the verge of falling out some time before Christmas. She continued to freak out… only now with her mouth closed, as she was afraid that if she screamed with her mouth open, the force of the expelled air from her screams would cause the tooth to fly out of its socket.

Have you ever heard someone scream with their mouth closed? It’s an interesting sound.

So now she was afraid to open her mouth. Which meant she couldn’t talk. She carried around a pencil and wrote on things when she wanted to talk. She wrote things like, “I am afraid my tongue will touch my tooth and it will fall out” and “I really want a drink, but I can’t open my mouth”. Also, her friend came over to play. Zoe mostly just lounged on the couch, writing updates on her condition to her friend while her friend watched movies.

Other than opening her mouth, she was also afraid to swallow… because what if the split-second before she swallowed, her tooth came out and then when she swallowed, her tooth went down her throat with her spit!?! So her closed mouth kept filling up with spit. Between writing notes to everyone, she would periodically go out on the deck and spit. Well, not really spit (she’s too lady-like to know how to spit)… she would hang her upper body way out over her toes and kind of drool while shaking her head back and forth violently, trying to break the spit string.

Soon she and her friend got an idea. They came up and asked — well, Zoe’s friend asked, Zoe only nodded and made hand gestures — if they could go visit Karen, one of the neighbors on the next street.

“Why do you want to see Karen?” I asked.

“Because,” Zoe’s friend said, “she’s good at helping when you get hurt.”

Karen, for the record, works for the Boy Scouts of America office. While I’m sure she is up on her first aid certificiation, I’m not sure there was a whole lot she could do to un-loosen a baby tooth. But finally I agreed to let them go over and ask Karen for dental advice, half expecting Zoe to come home with her tooth splinted with a small twig and some twine. But a few minutes later the girls came back looking forlorn, as Karen wasn’t home. They had run out of options.

Zoe didn’t eat lunch or dinner that day. She wrote notes about how hungry and thirsty she was. I tried to give her some cucumber slices. She took a slice and broke it into quarters. Then she took the tiny cucumber wedge and nibbled it like a hamster on the “good” side of her mouth. Then she frowned and threw the wedge onto the plate, as the cucumber was too hard to nibble, and would no doubt loosen her tooth more if she were to eat it.

She ran to her bed and cried. With her mouth closed.

I wish I were kidding about any of this, but it’s all true.

The next morning she woke up, found that her tooth had “re-hardened” a little, and she started talking. She said that her stomach hurt because she was so starving. And she was soooo thirsty. I took her some water. She drank a ton of it. Then she threw up water all over her bed.

All because she bumped her tooth.

Luckily, by my estimation, she only has about 12 baby teeth left to lose.

Deacon turned six months yesterday. Sadly, he had a check-up on his half birthday. I say sadly because a baby’s check-up always means a few pokes to legs with needles containing various illness preventing/cry inducing medication. And cry he did. But he tried to be tough, you could see it in his tiny face as his little lips quivered and fat tears rolled down his cheeks.

But before all the crying there was the basic “check up” part, where our sweet pediatrician comes in with a “Hi guys, how are we doing and stuff?” spoken in a tone sugary friendly and completely disarming. (I seriously love that guy.) Deacon — who was buck nekkid after being weighed on the little baby scale — responded by peeing on the examination table. I was a nano second too slow with the new diaper. “That’s okay,” the doctor assured me, “that happens sometimes and stuff.” But for the smallest of moments, I thought I saw irritation bubbling below his cool surface as he wiped up my kid’s pee and changed the ABC/Dancing Bears sani-paper on the exam table. But then the look was gone, and he sweetness returned.

He gently poked and prodded as he asked general questions… and the awesome thing about summertime is that my kids are home from school and get to accompany me to these visits and are very helpful at truthfully answering the doctor’s questions.

“So guys, how is Deacon eating?” And although the doctor uses the word guys in the superfluous way I use the word dude, my kids believe that the doctor is actually addressing them.

“Deacon likes Cool Ranch Doritos,” Jachin says.

The doctor chuckles, checking Deac’s ears. “I don’t think he can eat Doritos yet,” the doctor says.

“No, he really does,” Jachin assures him. “I gave him some at my birthday party and he grabbed it and wouldn’t stop licking it. It was crazy!”

“Yeah,” Zoe piped in, “and Dad gave him Cool Whip for breakfast yesterday morning.”

The doctor looks at me and smiles. “Oh yeah?” he says.

“Just a little bit,” I said. “He just licked the spoon.”

“Well,” the doctor chuckled, “Cool Whip is yummy and stuff, but it’s not healthy to eat Cool Whip for breakfast every morning.”

“I didn’t have any breakfast today,” Zoe says matter-of-factly. “Or lunch.”

“Well, I’m sure you’ll be having lunch soon…” the doctor says, holding up Deacon and probably wondering if it’s a good idea to give him to me.

“And plus,” Zoe continues, “Mom sometimes gives Deaky Pull-n-Peels.”

“Oh yeah,” Jachin says, “he loves those things.”

And there is was: in less than a minute my kids had spilled everything that I’d never planned on telling the doctor.

I thought briefly of how to play it, and then figured I’d just play it straight.

“Dude,” I said to my kids, “you aren’t supposed to tell the doctor that stuff.”

And the doctor just said, “Kids are good at spilling all of your secrets.”

No kidding, guys. And stuff.

Here is a video of Deac yesterday, doing what he loves best: his jumper.

Nevermind the little bit of Hershey’s syrup there on his upper lip… he just had a tiny bite of my ice cream.

What??

Our whiteboard pic of the week comes from Zoe: