Language through a 5-year-old's eyes

I was watching something on TV in Spanish, and the characters started laughing. Charlie noticed they were laughing, and here's the brief conversation we had.

Charlie: "Mom, how do people laugh in Spanish?"

Me: "The same way we do."

Charlie: "But laughing is in English."

Me: "No, it's not. Laughing is universal. People laugh in every language in the world."

Charlie then proceeded to try out a wide variety of laughs. When he was done, he said: "Mom, did I laugh in Spanish???"

Scaring Daddy

The kids had "ugly sweater day" at school last week. Here is what Charlie wore to school. It doesn't show in the picture, but the headband has blinking red lights on it in addition to the big elf ears.

Right after I took this picture, I told Charlie he could go and wake Daddy up. I didn't really think about what Charlie was wearing. Or the fact that I normally wake him up and not Charlie. Or the fact that Seth tends to freak out easily when woken from a deep sleep. Nor did I take Charlie's quirky personality into consideration.

So instead of going up and just telling Seth it was time to wake up like I thought he would, Charlie turned on his blinking red lights, snuck into the dark room and proceeded to silently hover over Seth's face until he woke up. The result was that Seth opened his eyes to tiny blinking lights and huge ears an inch from his face, which startled him pretty good. He said he's just glad he didn't impulsively punch Charlie upon waking.

This kid never ceases to crack me up.

Sam's 10th Birthday

We had Sam's 10th birthday party last week, which entailed having nine 3rd and 4th grade boys over at our house. There were several more we could have invited, but we finally had to limit him to just inviting school/neighborhood friends. They spent the first hour running around the house chasing/wrestling/attacking each other in every room of the house. Then Seth braved the cold and brought the whole crew to a large snow pile in town so they could go sledding for an hour. It did kind of double as his birthday party, too, after all. Only a couple of sleds broke and there were no major injuries so I considered that a success.

Then came time to feed them. Fortunately we had enough food to keep them happy and they managed to sit down and be relatively still for a few minutes. Want to know what nine 10-year old boys talk about when they are all stuck together in one room? Poop. That's pretty much it. Try as we might to change the topic of conversation (and we did!), they kept just circling back to poop. It started by sharing every story they have ever heard/experienced involving poop...which then became making up outlandish stories about poop...which digressed into just spastically shouting the word "Poop!" at random....and finished with a chorus of songs such as "Poop! There it is" and "I Poop." 

Ok, I'm not being completely honest. To be fair, they did occasionally change the topic to farts.  At least that was when parents are within earshot - I seemed to notice a change to the topic of girls from time to time as I moved further away from the group. It honestly terrifies me to think how the conversations go when adults are completely removed from the picture.

That was followed by an all out nerf-gun battle all over the house. And then we tried to settle them down with a movie - which worked for the first half of the movie anyway.

All in all, they had lots of fun and our house survived with only a few minor things broken aside from my dreams of having a somewhat tasteful and organized party at a sound level of under 80 decibels. I was unable to capture the crew all in one place long enough to get a picture so you'll just have to do your best to visualize it all.