christmas lights

We put up some outdoor Christmas lights this afternoon. After we got home from church, T was asleep in the car, so I stayed with her, while J went in with mom. I am happy to say I dozed as well, which was very nice, having stayed up till past 1AM to put the finishing touches on my message today. Hope it went well. I thought it went alright.

Anyway, J has been pestering me all week to put up our lights, and I had put her off until the weekend, simply because I was too busy and it was too dark to do it, usually, when she was asking to. So today was the big day.

And I have to complain about the eavestrough clips that I bought to string up lights... junk! They don't stay on the edge of the gutter, they just fell off. And they didn't screw onto the end of a broomstick like advertised either. Or maybe my broomstick wasn't skinny enough. In any case, after several failed attempts to hang the lights up from the eavestroughs, I gave up and we went with Plan B. J remarked, "This is a lot more complicated than I thought it would be." We strung them through the iron hand rail up the steps to our place, and lay them across the top of the porch wall. Simple. Fun. Nice. J was a great helper. I said that we were going to feed the lights through the rail, and she tried to understand the usage of 'feed' in that context...

There are a lot of things in the English language that are so different, or difficult, that it's a wonder we can speak at all. But if you grow up with it, you learn by exposure. You just grok it somehow. The amazing thing about J is that she's able to understand things like expressions. How something means something other than what it says. Like "going out to take the air" (found in a Madeline book) means going out for a walk, essentially. Or "raining cats and dogs". Or "feed this line through here".

And T is following hard on her sister's tail. Not that she understands expressions, but she'll repeat everything J says after her. She has the 1-2 buckle my shoe rhyme down. She has trouble saying "construction paper"... it comes out like "strunk-shun paper" or "strunken paper". Most requested car song is "tzena tzena". If she hears something she likes she'll say "I love that song!" But if she doesn't, now she says "Me love not this song".

N and I were commenting the other day that it's only fitting that we have two children that love to talk. We reminisced that we were always getting into trouble at school for talking in class, so it's only fair that our kids are the same. We were hoping that at least one of them would be a little quieter, but alas, it is not to be. :) Not that I'd change a thing.