the current hobbies in this house include:
learning japanese:
after printing out the hiragana and katakana characters and working with all the information they could google for several weeks, i got them some books, too. there are three i’m particularly impressed with:
the “jimi” books, wherein a disturbingly flat-affected manga-monkey teaches you hiragana and katakana, and crazy for kanji, which does a good job of teasing out the poetic etymologies of the much more difficult kanji writing, making it easy to understand and remember hundreds of kanji characters, in a quiz-laden format my ten-year-old finds entertaining.
facebook time-wasters:
if it makes you ashamed of your own lame addiction to learn that my 10-year-old enjoys farkle, my 6-year-olds think feeding and selling fish and pimping their fishtanks is awesome, and they all enjoy mobsters 2… here you go. consider yourself shamed.
tying balloon animals:
EG found a book of 20 balloon-tying patterns, and was pretty interested in scary-clown origami. have i mentioned how much i love my amazon prime membership? i have no idea how their business model works; all i know is that free two-day shipping on everything i need at the lowest prices on the planet is freaking awesome. after 10 minutes of reading reviews, got the “best balloons that all the professionals use,” qualatex, for $7.50 for a bag of 100, plus an incredibly well-designed balloon pump (the thing inflates both when you push the pump in and when you pull out, which is pretty nifty) for another $7.50. and now we have a giant black octopus on the twits’ light fixture, an army of green and purple poodles, and lopsided mice with googly eyes named “P32,” “carbon-14,” and “francium.” and if you noticed that their names have a radioactive theme, then you must also be interested in the next hobby on the list,
chemistry:
“chemistry” sometimes means “mixing all chemicals in the kitchen that seem likely to explode (and if you think there’s no fun to be found there, you’ve probably never added gelatin to a baking-soda-and-vinegar volcano.) sometimes it means “culturing bacteria.” sometimes it means “helping mom cook, especially if it involves yeast.” and sometimes, it just comes down to “attaching yourself permanently to mommy after the 15th baking-soda-and-vinegar erlenmeyer flask tried to eat you.”
on a final note, if you were ever unsure of whether or not my kids were nerds, let me share this: the other night, as i chased a naked MonkeyBeef down to slather him with lotion and throw pajamas on him, the twits sat down at the laptop. as i threw MB in bed, i heard them cackling nonstop. i figured they had either bought some more godawful blinged-out lawn ornaments for PositiveRoleModel’s fishville tank, done a youtube search for footage of newscasters throwing up on live tv, or found the latest japanese porn fad. in fact, they were laughing at, i shit you not, a page entitled “FACTS ABOUT STRONTIUM.” and it wasn’t even the fact that strontium is used in fireworks that tickled them… apparently, strontium’s melting point is in the “hilarious” range.
