Ngaire at breakfast the other day, covered with crumbs: “I’m all done and I need a cloth to wipe my hands because I am crumbled.”

* * *

Liam has discovered his tongue, in the pinching-between-thumb-and-forefinger sense, not in the verbal sense.

* * *

This morning, Liam picked up a spoon and cup measure Ngaire had been playing with, and instead of ripping them out of his hands, she went and got others for him, offered them to him (“Here you go, Liam!”), and then sat on the floor and banged the cups with the spoons with him.

* * *

I’ve decided it’s about time I started reading some Real Literature again, and have been reading Hemingway of late (The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms). Boy, I forgot how much I enjoy Hemingway … I mean, sure he’s a tad grim, but also very wry and insightful. I find his plain prose restful. I also read Graham Greene’s The Quiet American and enjoyed it very much. I started re-reading A Clockwork Orange but found myself mainly skimming it for old favorite sections, so I’ve decided to move on for now and approach it again some other time. Next up: Things Fall Apart and Watership Down. Yes, I’m approaching the Classics section at the library alphabetically; why do you ask?

In other cultural news, the Husbandlet and I made our annual pilgrimage to the Shakespeare Theatre Company’s Free for All to see a teenage-angst version of Hamlet, and then paid actual money to see Antony and Cleopatra, which I had never seen before and which was good in the sense of being Shakespeare I had never seen before but not so much in terms of the actual performance, which was bland. Ah well. We are planning a Shakespeare, red wine, chocolate and cheese evening with some friends … who says a liberal arts education is for naught?

* * *

Speaking of which, I was talking with my friend Jessica today about our husbands. Her husband Adrian is quite a bit like the Husbandlet, if more of a law geek than a science geek. Anyway.

Me: “They’re like two peas in a pod.”
Jessica: “They’re like two pens in a pocket protector.”