Gentle Sunshine Sunday and P's Two Cents

4-11-2010

Here's my first attempt to add some very current pictures of P -- let's hope it works! (If so, I've finally gotten to the point where getting pics to family is "easy" -- that is, this takes less than five minutes. This, suffice it to say, AFTER J took 30 minutes to add pics from our camera to Picasa (if I would have done it, I'd have taken an hour. I am SO DUMB with this stuff.) Anyway, I'm still holding out hope that adding pics here will get easier -- and you all will benefit in the long run.

We had a nice weekend -- M family over on Saturday night, along with their new yellow lab puppy Brinkley. P calls him "Binky." I think the nickname has already stuck. Today we enjoyed an uplifting church service and then spent the entire afternoon with the B family in Fulda (Dad D and Mom J) -- dinner followed by the community theater production of "Anne of Green Gables" in which not one, not two, but six B offspring took part. And four more awesome B kids were at home with D and our P, who slept the entire duration of the play. All the B's did terrific, and we greatly enjoyed the relaxing time both watching the play (and me reminiscing about fun productions) and visiting with the B's. We also met JB's parents and marveled at their experiences -- J's dad is a retired pastor who was an assistant pastor for a time in Stamford, Connecticut (a skip over from Norwalk, where our J vicared!) and J's mom is a German-speaking Ukrainian by birth who last saw her parents at age 6 during WWII, managed to immigrate to the U.S. at age 18 in the mid-1950s, and generally has lived through enough hardship and heartbreak to put us to shame (I'm leaving out lots of incredible details), and yet radiates warmth and kindness. Amazing. God gives perspective in so many ways.

So we moseyed home in the late afternoon sunshine and chilled on the porch for awhile. P decided to organize his cars in several places (see pics above) -- SUCH a typical activity for him. J and I were discussing evening plans (you know, the kind that don't address what actually NEEDS to be done but rather what we WANT to do), and I threw out a few movie ideas, which J shrugged off. Then I said to him, "Well, what other happy movies can you think of to watch?" And after a pause, P looked up from his cars and said simply, "Ning-ning," his word for "Lightning," the main character in Cars. J and I just started laughing. P is so much smarter than we give him credit for -- and it's slightly unnerving at times like these to realize that he understands 85-90% of what we're saying because he throws in his two cents. Of course, when the Little Diplomat saw us laughing, he really pressed his case and rattled off the names of the other Cars characters -- "Doc," "Wee-ja" [Luigi], "Ma-ma" [Mater... I try not to take this personally :)], "Darge" [Sarge] -- as he promptly went in the house and sat on the couch, expecting us to put in the movie right away. Maybe he WILL be a lawyer like his Uncle C. Thank you, Pixar, for expediting the argumentation education of our son at his ripe old age of 21 months. And no, we didn't actually watch his selected movie but another Pixar flick -- which he actually loved. Maybe we're going to move beyond Cars someday!