Milestone Minutiae

Henry was riding a bouncy-airplane at the park when Luke climbed on the back.  Henry turned around to Luke and said, "You're too late.  I already took off."  And then Henry seemed kind of mad that Luke wouldn't get off!

Henry has long been reporting that some of his teeth are wiggly - the current count is four.  I guess having brothers who are losing teeth is so much fun he wants to join in, too. Luke and Emmett are starting to learn how to type.  Right now they're using a free website, but they've been surprisingly willing to practice.  They also want to learn how to make mods for Minecraft.  These are little java programs to make small modifications to Minecraft.  Luke really wanted to get started, so I signed him up for Code Academy, a website with tutorials for a bunch of programming languages.  Their survey of users ages only went down to 13, so I clicked that box.  Emmett joined Luke a few minutes later, and they both worked at it for over an hour the first day.  Today Luke decided to do the typing some more, having realized that improving his typing is going to make coding a lot easier.  I guess I'll have to figure out the Minecraft mods thing to kee...

Emmett has gotten good enough at throwing and catching a baseball that we can pull of a reasonable game of pickle with Luke and Henry running the bases.  Fun!

We went to the Clark Planetarium today, and Henry came home with the planets of our solar system more or less memorized in order starting with Pluto*   I guess he did spend a bunch of time running back and forth along the alley with the planets hanging and asking me the names, but I really wasn't expecting him to know all their names. *He knows it isn't a planet - the planetarium left their scale model of Pluto hanging, though, and replaced it's display sign with one about all the dwarf planets.

Henry is the child most likely to ask when we will be getting new dogs.  Today when he asked, I explained to him a little about how we will probably get greyhounds again, and we need to work with the rescue group to find our dogs.  And then he said this: Henry: "We should get one greyhound and one not-greyhound." Me: "What other kind of dog do you think we should get?" Henry: (pause) "One greyhound and one Zoe." Me: "Is that because you want a smaller dog, or just because you really liked Zoe?" Henry: "I liked Zoe."

... things I should record here, too: Luke was sobbing because Stephanie told him he couldn't open a soda right before we went out for dinner. Stephanie said to me with exasperation, "I'm an ogre." Henry helpfully chimed in, "You are the perfect size to be an ogre!" and Stephanie had to disambiguate for Emmett the true Golden Rule from his meta-Golden Rule: Hold others to the Golden Rule and grant them their just deserts.

Emmett's ipod has been missing for months.  I had pretty much given up on finding it, when I heard laughter from the other room.  Henry ran out to tell me the news. "Emmett found his ipod!" he yelled.  "In his treasure box !"