Very nice

Breakfast this morning:
Henry requests toast with jelly. I slice up a banana for James. Henry immediately runs over to James's place and holds his hand out like the tax collector, demanding that he share. James resists. Henry persists. His hand is extended in front of James's nose, wherever James turns.
At last, James puts a gummed banana round into his brother's palm.
Henry crows delightedly: "He did it! He shared! James is a very nice man!"

True story

Peter reported having a conversation today with a friend about a visit by her young niece, age 5. The niece was so charmed by the friend's pets and other amenities that she declared she would like the friend & the friend's husband to be her parents, in preference to her own. When it was time for her to leave the friend's house, she told her parents that they were destroying her life.
"That's nothing," said Peter. "Just listen to this shit. The other day, Henry told Leora he wanted to kill her... with a gun. And he told me he was going to skin me and cover me with fire."
His listeners were suitably horrified.
"Where is he getting that from?" they asked, aghast.
"Beatrix Potter," Peter replied.

Not for the faint of heart.

Don't turn your back on this one

This happened while Peter was about five feet away, washing dishes.

No pictures

I've been meaning to say something here about how, despite the evidence of recent posts, our life is NOT in fact all Victorian morality tales for infants, but then we took a turn for the still-more Dickensian; we all succumbed to colds, which started out with fever & chills, developed into tubercular hacking, and in Peter's case, pneumonia. The whole, dreary, weeks-long episode appears to be on the verge of closing, although with its last gasp it apparently exhaled a noxious miasma of stomach flu upon us.  Dad used to quote a friend who said that having young children at home was like living over an open sewer, and it was amusing at the time. Just at present, however, we are not amused.