Archer: Are you Aunt Suzanne’s dad?

Me: No, you know what I am to her. I’m her what?

Archer: Her sister?

Me: No…

Archer: Her brother?

Me: Yes! Who is Aunt Suzanne’s dad?

Archer: Grandpa?

Me: Right. Who’s my dad?

Archer: Grandpa.

Me: Right! Who’s your dad?

Archer: You!

Me: Right. Who’s your brother?

Archer: Jonah.

Me: Who’s your sister?

Archer: Pamela.

Me: Who’s my brother?

Archer: [thinks hard] …Nobody?

Me: Right! It was a trick question. But I didn’t fool you, did I?

Archer: [excitedly] No. ’Cause my brain said, “I never heard Daddy say he had a brother before.” So I added that to my brain and then I took away the brother and my brain said, that’s right!

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I asked them to get together the things they’d need for an overnight. They disappeared into their room and came back out into the living room a minute later with an armload of stuff apiece. But Jonah forgot his socks, and he was feeling lazy, so he said to Archer, “If you go get me some socks, I’ll give you…” (and here he thought for a moment) “…a hug!”

Archer said, “OK!” at once and disappeared back into their room — whereupon Jonah leaned over to me and whispered, “I’m actually going to give him a hug and a kiss!”

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It took him just a beat to answer definitively, “My wiener.”

Hey, he’s only saying what the rest of us are thinking.

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“Do you know what ‘sketch’ is? When two people take off their clothes and kiss. In bed!”

Looks like it’s time to have that little talk with him…

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“I’m trying to make dry ice.”

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• Roger Moore (who played The Saint on TV in the 1960’s) is behind a new push to revive The Saint yet again. Although he’s in good company (e.g., Barry Levinson), if past performance is any guarantee of future results, the new Saint will be sucktastic, at least compared to the canonical pulp-novella Saint from the 1930’s.
• Way 11c: on Thursday Ken Jennings lamented the loss of the old meaning of “gay” exactly as I did in 2006 in the above-linked Saint post.
• Strangeness update: the closer we get to consummating the Microsoft acquisition of Danger, the more I feel like Charles in the classic Ray Bradbury story, “Fever Dream.”
• They stole my idea: the celebrated guerrilla-performance-art group Improv Everywhere planted sixteen “agents” in the food court of a Los Angeles shopping mall. At a signal, they suddenly staged a musical amid unsuspecting shoppers. Many years ago, in college, I tried to sell my friend Steve on the same idea: I wanted to perform the “Moses Supposes” number from Singin’ in the Rain in the school cafeteria. The main difference between me and Improv Everywhere is that they actually execute their hare-brained schemes…
• It’s been a good week for darnedest utterances from my kids:
  • Me: It’s a homework night. (for Jonah)
    Jonah: Aww.
    Archer: Yippee!
    Jonah: Wouldn’t you rather play with me, than me doing homework?
    Archer, leaning forward and whispering: Then I can play with your toys.
  • Most mornings, Archer and I drive Jonah to kindergarten, and then I drive Archer to his preschool. We have recently developed a ritual for that second leg: we each chew a piece of gum, spitting it out when we arrive. Here’s how Archer chose to stage that ritual last Wednesday: “You give me the gum and I open it and take one myself, then I close it and give it to you and you take one. I unwrapper [sic] mine and you unwrapper yours and throw your wrapper away in the garbage. When we get to preschool you spit your gum into my wrapper and I spit my gum into my wrapper too. You spit yours first.”
  • Jonah, who’s been learning about Europe in kindergarten, identified Italy (the “boot-shaped country”) on a map. Trying to recall the name of the island off the tip of the “boot” — Sicily — he ventured, “Shitaly?”

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Archer: What if a boot came down a slide and kicked someone off?
Me: Then you’d have to say, “I’m sorry, I didn’t see you there. Are you OK?”
Archer: Why?
Me: Well if you throw a boot down a slide and it hits someone, you have to apologize.
Archer: What if I didn’t throw the boot?
Me: Then no boot would go down the slide and hit someone.
Archer: What if it did?
Me: Well boots don’t go down slides by themselves!
Archer: Why?
Me: They’re inanimate. They don’t move unless someone makes them move.
Archer: What if it went down the slide by itself?
Me: That would be one amazing boot.
Archer: What if it kicked someone?
Me: Then that person would probably say, “Hey, who threw that boot?!”
Archer: But no one did.
Me: Right.

That satisfied him, and he rolled over and went to sleep.

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“I’m eleventy feet mad at you!”

A little later in the same argument Jonah had composed himself enough to construct some plausible deniability:

“Mommy, you have to calm down. You disturbed my thinking when I was running down the hill.”

Four and a half years old, ladies and gentlemen, and already mastering the rhetorical technique of deflecting blame onto the accuser! That’s-a my boy.

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