Unsinkable

So I pick up Kate and Anna after I leave work and get the kids from school.   And it's a tight fit in the Saturn with two car seats with two kids in them, and three adults.  Luckily Anna has a tiny butt and can squeeze between them!  But I had a playdate with my sisters to hang out and play 'Dance Dance Revolution,' so we had to make do with the ride situation.  In the car, I tell Kate I watched 'Idlewild' the night before, because she highly recommended it.  I loved it as well, and it turns out that it was the only movie Kate's cried at in a long time.

I tell Kate that I didn't cry but I got a little teary.   "Well, it's probably more emotional in the movie theater." she says.

I agree.  "Yeah, you probably don't pause the movie to change the laundry."

Kate is outraged, but I defend myself saying that the kids were out of underwear and I wasn't going to send them to school and my mom's house commando.  

Anna laughingly says that she totally would have sent them without, but then gets serious and asks if she's supposed to make D wear underwear to bed because, you know, she doesn't. 

I tell her that's fine with me, but daytime wear requires, you know, something under it.

And all of a sudden Dillon pipes up from the back seat: "Mom, I am REALLY WORRIED!  About my p—- (he uses the anatomically correct term, I'm not typing it so that I don't get my domain blocked as porn or something).  I don't want to zip it up in a zipper!"

I assure him between the outburst gut-wrenching laughter that is EXACTLY the reason we wear underwear.  It was so funny because I am not sure anyone has ever communicated that precise thought to him before, but he was able to piece together the idea from our innuendo!  I was stopped at an interminably long red light, otherwise I would have certainly had to pull over.  Kate, Anna, and I laughed the rest of the way to my house.  

When Dharma gets hungry, she has a somewhat obnoxious way of letting people know.  She digs in her bowl, which sounds like a mix between a game of kick-the-can and 'Stomp'.  Rose has become acutely aware of this.  

Yesterday, my mom is watching the kids while I work late and Dharma starts to complain about her hunger.  So Rose hops down from the table, goes to the closet where we keep the dog food and says, "I want to food Dharma".

Not bad… 

When Dillon was a little guy, maybe 18 months or something, he decided he liked beer bottle caps.  He started a meager collection with (I believe) a Guinness, a Newcastle, and a Corona.  Eventually, he shared his collection idea with his aunties Cheri & TJ and his Grandma Vickie and Aunt Mary Ann, and now it is not uncommon for us to leave one of their houses with a small bag of bottle caps.  I've been handing these to Charles and sort of forgetting about them, and then the other day the subject came up, and Charles said, "you wouldn't believe how many of those we have now."

I forgot about it again until Dillon saw a recent bag and he wanted to play a game with them.  He's big on games these days.  His first idea was that we throw them at each other.  I vetoed that one.  Then he suggested "we could just slide them across the table at each other!"  I nixed that one too.  (I know, I'm no fun at all!)  So then he decided we should sort them to see all the different kinds.  That was fine with me.  

We dumped the bag that he had seen onto the counter and started to sort.  Rose joined in the fun.  We were through a quart-sized ziplock bag full in no time, and I asked Charles to bring up the rest from the basement.  It turns out he'd been dumping them into a small garbage can, and it was almost entirely full of bottle caps.

At Dillon's direction, the kids picked "teams"- Rose was Newcastle, Dillon was Corona, and I was pretty much everything else.  Dillon had a pretty safe bet, I think everyone drinks more beer in the summer and Corona with lime is a hands-down favorite on both sides of the family.  The kids were hilarious, albeit somewhat disturbing- "Mom, I just gave Rose a WHOLE BUNCH of Newcastles!" 

"That's great, honey, you are a fantastic big brother!"

And just the fact that Rose spotted a Newcastle cap sandwiched between two Corona caps clenched in her brother's fist was pretty impressive…  

So after sorting through the caps, Dillon won with about ten pounds of Corona caps, Rose came in second with about five pounds of Newcastle caps, and I was a distant third for quantity, though had an impressive diversity of caps, from Ice House to Soy Sauce (some would say soy sauce is better to drink…) Lakefront, Sprecher, New Glarus, Sierra Nevada, Red Stripe, Peroni, MacKesson, Killians, etc.  The ones featuring animals are the kids' favorites, though, I need to find this Elephant beer that we have one cap from… And then at some point I need to figure out a plan for what to do with twenty-five pounds of bottle caps.

I'm thinking something like the Art Bar…   Any other ideas?