This is a copy of Margaux’s letter to Santa. It reads:

Dear Santa:

How have you ben? I wunt a cumeleun [chameleon] an elephant and a roodolf costoom [Rudolph costume].

Love,
Margaux

Love the “how have you been?”

And this is a copy (bad quality pic taken w/my phone) of a Christmas card we sent to a much-loved former babysitter. We had M draw a picture on it. The picture is a squirrel in a tree, and a dog at the base of the tree. The dog is saying “Ho, ho, ho–SQUIRREL!” (Which is funny if you’ve seen the move Up. All the dogs keep getting distracted by squirrels.) And if you’re wondering about the yellow…yes, the dog is peeing on the tree.

At 6:50 this morning, Margaux started messing around with my Mac – an application called PhotoBooth. For those of you who are non-Mac, this app allows you to take pics of yourself with the laptop camera and manipulate them with filters.  I didn’t pay much attention and after M and Cindy left for school, I went to check email and found this picture looking at me…

Margaux came into the kitchen while I was washing dishes, wearing the outfit below. In her purse was a (toy) cell phone, a wallet, and a wrench. She pulled the wrench out, left the purse with me and said: “Let me know if anyone texts me. I have to go fix something,” and walked off with the wrench. Still don’t know what she “fixed.”

I should teach her to change the oil.

You know it’s been too long since you’ve ridden your bike when you find arachnids using it for a home:

Latrodectus mactans cozily nested in my bicycle fork.

Luckily, Margaux pointed out the web before she and I got on the bike.  Black widow spiders are quite beautiful, but I’d prefer they didn’t nest in my garage, much less my bike!

With the help of a long screwdriver, I gently persuaded her to leave.

🙂

Although it’s a mild (and, incredibly, rainy!) summer, the temp is creeping towards 100 this week. So Margaux and I went down to Perkins, OK, a few miles south of Stillwater, to visit their “splash pad.”  Good on ya, citizens of Perkins, because it’s lots of cool free fun for the kids. It’s basically a bunch of sprinklers and sprayers built into a pad of concrete. The kids splash around, the H2O gets recycled (hopefully filtered and chlorinated?).  Here’s M playing:

Then we wandered around the little park there, where they have a caboose:

Then we returned to the car to find this:

It’s Margaux’s first flat tire! Yay! But to tell you the truth, 5-year-olds are useless at changing tires. She didn’t do much of anything helpful, except point out how hot it was. She didn’t get the tire out, jack the van up, or even pull the lug nuts off! Useless!  Finally, we found a job she could do…sit in the van and monitor the air-conditioning system and DVD player while I changed the tire.  But we did get the spare put on, had lunch in Perkins, then went by to see our friends at Discount Tire in Stilly.

Meanwhile, Fergus was busily monitoring the home air-conditioning system, and guarding his toys:

So we were on the way back to Stillwater, driving north I-35, when I got this tweet from the Nat’l Weather Service (I don’t tweet and drive. I checked my feed when we stopped for dinner.)

As it happens, we were in Ardmore, so we booked a hotel and exited the interstate. As we did so, we spotted a nice rainbow…the first Margaux had ever seen. At first she was a tad critical, pointing out that a) it wasn’t a complete bow, and b) “I can’t really see the purple stripe.” But I was able to convince her that it was, indeed, a rainbow, and after that she was pretty excited.

We’re looking at a forecast for “scattered strong winds” and large hail tonight. Made me think of our snow storm a month or so back.

If we get any gi-normous hail balls tonight I’ll post pictures of them.