A COUPLE QUOTES

Not much motivation or time for blogging lately. There are many other things to do, but I will get back into it soon. In the mean time, I wanted to document a couple things I heard today, so I remember them years from now. The kids and I all spent some time out in the sunshine (!) today, which was so nice. At one point, Greta came whizzing by me, full speed. She stopped and turned to me and said in between huffs, "Santa told us that if we don't find his pack, he's going to cancel Christmas!!" Oh dear. I felt myself wanting to go into a little speech about how, "well, you know there's a lot more to Christmas than the gifts in Santa's pack, blah, blah, blah. . . " but I managed to bite my tongue and just let it be her game and let her remain in the moment. That reminds me, Greta also recently said to me, "Mom, when I hear stories and stuff I can see them in my mind."

Being outside was glorious, since we've been rained in since we returned from our trip. Mali was climbing as high as she could in the fig tree (this is a change in her: a year or so ago, she was much more cautious, and would barely leave the ground). She was looking up and said, "Mom, when I look up into the blue sky I feel like I am inside a painting."

Oh, one more thing. Lately, our history lessons have been pretty awful. They've been much more violent and cruel than what we are used to. Anyway, the other day we were learning about the first king (Hammurabi) who ever wrote down laws. As a precursor, we learned about how unjust other kingdoms had been during that time. Anyway, I was reading some of the laws and Mali was telling me what she thought of them. Well, one of the laws in the "Code of Hammurabi" was that if someone pokes out someone else's eye, he shall have his eye poked out as well. I asked Mali what she thought about that, and she kind of laughed like it made no sense. She said, "If that happened, then everyone in the world would be hurt and no one could help anyone else." I was proud of her for understanding that, and, of course, brought up Gandhi's quote, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."