the wonderful / wacky world of Nomi

*Blogger is not letting me put spaces between the lines or paragraphs, so please excuse the weird, hard-to-read formatting!

Since we've been looking at old pictures, I thought I'd post one of my favorites of Naomi at 2, along with a recent picture of her at a friend's birthday party. How quickly she's grown! And almost seven now... A few comments from my delightful, growing, almost-birthday girl before I forget them...

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Naomi is the indisputably the slowest eater in the family. She doesn't really enjoy this status, but accepts it and doesn't really try to speed up. I don't like to leave her completely alone for the last hour of her meals, but have trouble staying at the table for such a large percentage of the day, so I try to do things like sweep the kitchen or bake while she's eating so we can still talk.

Anyway, I was doing this the other day while she lounged in her chair, examining an apple she had been eating for over an hour... "You know," she said to me, "Astronauts are lucky. Since there is no oxygen in space they could eat as slowly as they wanted to, and their apples would never get brown." Sigh.

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While brushing her teeth in the bathroom, Naomi called me in to share her thoughts... "I just realized something, mom. When we learn other languages, we aren't really learning what those words mean in English, we are learning what they stand for. Like if we learn "agua" we aren't really learning "water" we are learning this wet thing- what stands for this actual thing. It doesn't have to go back to English. Words just happen to stand for something."

I was amazed at her perception and her non-ethnocentric (lingocentric?) perspective! I think half of my college level "Teaching English to Non-English Speakers" class never understood that. But it's funny that the thought occurred when it did. I think we need less "school time" and more time to just be lost in thought... Who knows what we'd discover?

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We get our milk delivered by Smith Brothers Dairy. It comes on Fridays, and we usually watch out for the big white truck with black Holstein spots- the kids like to be the first one's to notice it's arrival. So yesterday we were sitting at the kitchen table when Naomi looked out the window and hollered-

"Look! The champagne truck is here!"

"Champagne!?" I questioned in surprise... "Wha....?"

"Yeah!" she said. "It's backing up the driveway!"

"Since when do we get champagne delivered?!" I said. "What about MILK!?"

"No, No. Champagne- you know, to burn in the fireplace!"

"You mean propane?"

"Oh. Yeah- propane. So the propane truck is here."

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Yesterday we wanted some crackers with our cheese, and took some out of the pantry that someone (really I don't know who) had brought over for one of the holiday get-togethers. They were a whole wheat sort that we've often had, but after a few bites, it was obvious they were not right. I examined the box and saw that they were best by 2006. Oops. I explained to the kids why they were less than fresh tasting, and we tossed 'em.

Today, we tried some cookies from a tin that weren't so tasty. (I know, we're a little picky I guess.) We didn't throw them out or anything, just left the tin on the counter. (Daddy will eat them!) Later Naomi came running over to me with the tin, the insignia of the "Royal Dansk" cookie company aimed at my face"- "Mom Mom! Look! No wonder these cookies are no good! They are from 1966!!"