Quotable EJ/Bad Mom

Out of nowhere, EJ just turned to me and said,

"Mommy, girls go on rocket ships. Boys can go...um...swimming in a pool."

Good to know. Sorry, little boys planning on a career at NASA---apparently your time has passed. The good news? You can relax in the pool while the ladies take care of the universe.

Also quoted earlier this week, upon receiving a freshly-baked, homemade banana muffin:

EJ: "Mom, this is a Ralphie muffin!"

Me: "What? A what muffin?"

EJ: "A RALPHIE muffin. Ralphie wears a hat, and this muffin is wearing a hat. It is just like Ralphie."

I realized at that moment that the muffin in question had a broken muffin cap, with only one side protruding from the base. It looked like a baseball cap, which is exactly what the character Ralphie from the Magic School Bus book and television series wears every day. A Ralphie muffin, indeed.

Here's one more, my favorite of the bunch. On Thanksgiving, EJ climbed up to my mother-in-law's piano and began "playing" Twinkle, Twinkle as she sang. My very creative mother-in-law heard this, and promptly came into the room with some masking tape and a marker. She marked the notes on individual pieces of tape, placed each tape label on a key spanning a c scale from middle c up, then handed me a piece of paper. She suggested that I write out the song for EJ to follow (see, she's very creative), and I did so. CC, GG, AA, G...I wrote out all four lines, then placed the paper on the music stand.

EJ immediately began slowly and methodically playing the piece, at first stating the names of the keys as she pressed them, but eventually singing some of the song's words as she found the labeled keys. We were all pretty impressed, but the best was yet to come. Once she had run through this a few times, she made this request.

"Momma, can you get Grandma back in here with the tape? I need more ingredients for my song. I'm following the recipe, and I want more ingredients."

Yes, the notes are the ingredients and the sheet music is the recipe. I just loved that she put that together on her own.

Unfortunately, I am not so great at putting puzzle pieces like this together. Take this morning, for example, when we arrived at her preschool 20+ minutes late because we overslept (I was up until 4:00 a.m. doing schoolwork), and I realized that she was one of two children without snowpants on. Today was the first snowfall of the season, and it was absolutely beautiful without being too cold, so her whole class was out playing in it. When we left the house, I had just assumed that they would be inside today---I must have converted into a real Virginian during my years away from the Great Lakes. EJ has great snowpants, it just never occurred to me that they should be used when it snows. Me = super smart.

When I came to pick her up, I was told that children also need shoes for the classroom, since wet boots remain in the hall. Well, of course they do. Did all the other parents figure this out, and bring shoes for their kids to use in the classroom during the winter? Yep. Thankfully, my daughter is unphased by my parental dullness, and appeared quite happy to be wearing some spare slip-on shoes that her teacher had on hand for such an occasion.

I guess Quotable Mom for today would be, "Who is that little girl's mom? Bringing her to school in boots but no snowpants, then not even packing classroom shoes for her to wear the rest of the day? Oh, wait. That mom is me. Zoinks."