My Funny Valentines

I've realized recently that kids make holidays much more fun. Clara is old enough to really get into the holiday hoopla, and since it takes so little to thrill her we end up getting lots of credit for very little work!

We began the day with pink pancakes. They started out as heart-shaped pancakes, then Jeremy told me they looked more like amorphous blobs than hearts, so we switched to circles (well, he just took matters into his own hands and started cooking circles, which was just as well).

For lunch we had heart-shaped sandwiches and heart-shaped jello jigglers (you may have seen the pudding-jello jiggler recipe in the February Friend magazine, if you get it). I duly noted that half the battle in any great holiday celebration is just walking around cutting food out of appropriately shaped cookie cutters. Genius.

For dinner, we went all out and had steak. Yes, Rachel and Jeremy bought and ate actual beef. Miracles do happen. We broiled it, and we spent most of the time in fear that our oven was going to catch on fire. Jeremy even busted out the fire extinguisher, read the instructions, then told me that if the oven did indeed catch fire that he would be sure to keep the kids safe but that I was otherwise more or less on my own. He is pretty clutch in a crisis. In the end, though, nothing caught on fire and the steak was decent. Maybe we'll make it a tradition and eat red meat every Valentine's Day.

Clarasaurolophus

Clara, as I may have mentioned before, truly loves dinosaurs. Her favorite show is PBS's Dinosaur Train, and she is always getting new dinosaur books from the library and from Goodwill. She retains an incredible amount of information about the dinosaurs we read about, and she can identify more than a dozen by sight. She is fond of talking about dinonychus's "terrible claw" (and likes to pantomine how a dinonychus can tear the flesh of other dinosaurs), and she is often torn about whether T. Rex or allosaurus is the "fiercest dinosaur to ever roam the earth." Sometimes while perusing one of her dinosaur books, she'll point out a particularly bloody carnivorous scene and say, "Look Mom--that is so fierce!"

The other day, Jeremy and I were reading to her before bed. She really wanted to figure out how to best tell apart the sauropods--what best differentiates an apatosaurus from a brachiosaurus or a diplodocus or an argentinosaurus. We decided that the brachiosaurus was the most distinctive, and we pointed out that she has a little plastic piggy bank shaped like a brachiosaurus. This shifted the conversation towards piggy banks and other money matters, and she reminded us of how, six months or so ago, Jonathan broke her nice froggy bank and that she was in need of a new one.

"You're probably right," I said. "It would be good for you to save some money, so when you're bigger you can go to college or go on a mission."

"Or go to the store," she responded.

"What would you get at the store with your money?" I asked. She had no real response for this (money makes no sense to her), so Jeremy told her that if she saved money for college then she could go to college and become a paleontologist. Well, this struck her as just about the greatest idea of all time.

"Mom," she said, "When I'm bigger like you and go to college, can I wear your clothes?"

"Sure," I said.

"OK. When I'm bigger like you, I'll put on your underwear, then your shirt, then your pants. Then I'll wear a jacket--your jacket. I'll drive your car to college with my piggy bank, and I'll be a paleontologist."

She's got it all figured out.