A midday visit, with pictures

Sarah and the kids were in town today so that Jake could retake a couple of parts of the test for the gifted program. He was sick and on meds when he first took the test, and didn’t score highly enough on the math, at which point Sarah went, “WHAT?” because the kid is a math genius. So I got a call around lunchtime, and Sarah gave Jake the phone to tell me that he had scored 100 on his math, and 97 on his verbal. Which both utterly rocks and guarantees his entry into the gifted program. Couple that with the fact that his [Aunt Meryl-advised] essay won him a trip to DC to listen and talk to some real, live moon-walkers (the astronaut kind, not the dancing), and his bar mitzvah last month, this is one very exciting time for our young man. Sarah was only too happy to take the kids out for a celebratory lunch. So, since they were two minutes away, I said, “Want to stop by for a while?” and of course, they did.

Tigger was curious, yet worried. He took to the high ground pretty much the whole time.

He stayed upstairs. As for Gracie, she never moved from under the bed. It’s naptime, dammit, and those kids are always so noisy.

Max decided to curl up in The Chair That Swallows You Whole, thus proving its name.

This, of course, initiated the usual reaction among children: Me too.

And me, too. Except in my own way.

Jake, as the oldest of the four, did not deign to curl up in the chair. You’ll have to go over to Sarah’s site to see pictures, or maybe I’ll just take pictures of him next week. He’s got an actual job here, as I’ve hired him to help me organize and categorize my comic collection, which will then be put into file cabinets when I finally find the kind that I like at an affordable price (lateral, wooden files, if you know of any good places to get them). I’ve pretty much blown my budget for office furniture for the year with my new bookcases (due at the end of the month, woo-hoo!).

We also watched an episode or two of SpongeBob, and I must highly recommend “One Krab’s Trash” as what may be the funniest SpongeBob ever. (“Oh my gosh, it’s a shopping list!“) [And by the way, um, spongepedia? Spongepedia?) I had laughtears falling, I was laughing so hard.

There is now a rule in my house that no child is allowed upstairs without adult supervision. That’s because I have a handgun in the house, and when the kids come for an expected visit, it is firmly locked up in a clamshell that disables it from being used as anything but a club. But it’s been a while, and I didn’t think about locking the clamshell until they got there. Sarah had to dash back to Ukrops because she’d left her purse there, so I figured I’d better go upstairs and lock up the gun. Max, obeying the letter of the law, came upstairs right behind me. Note that I never said they had to have permission. Just supervision. All children are born lawyers, and will parse the hell out of any rule you set down. Max stayed on my exercise machine while I locked up the gun and put it out of reach. After that, I didn’t mind if they were up on the landing while we were downstairs, but I do insist that they stay in sight (and out of my office and bedroom).

All in all, a nice break. We used to have lunch together every Thursday. Perhaps we should bring back that tradition.