In 1.5 Hours I'll Be Married 11 Years

Wow. That's all I can say. Rod and I will be celebrating our 11 year wedding anniversary on Friday, July 27th. Time truly flies. In the same amount of time that Kenneth has been with us already, he'll be leaving us for college. Amazing.


Tonight I read a book to both kids. Usually Kenneth reads by himself but he wanted to listen tonight. Their personalities are so evident in everything we do, even in the simplicity of reading a book. Evelyn is a born attorney. She remembers everything and can find feasible, logical, counter-suggestions to anything. She also knows everything already. Her most common phrase these days is "I know, but...". Kenneth takes everything in stride and gets frustrated with this growing conversational force from Evelyn, but he is still a patient big brother. I selected the books for the evening, one of which was one of probably hundreds of books written in the 70s with the Sesame Street characters. This particular book was narrated by The Count, who you may remember speaks in a Romanian accent. In typical Sesame Street fashion, they deal with current social issues by acting out stories (example: some books from that time period purposely switch traditional gender roles, such as making Betty Lou the tow truck driver, and Herry Monster as a lover of ballet and kittens.) The Count was describing a story about how Big Bird was taken away from Sesame Street because "somebody" determined that he shouldn't be living by himself and would be better off with a family of four dodo birds. Big Bird ran away from the dodo family and was making his way back to Sesame Street. A mission critical search for Big Bird occurred with 10 Sesame Street friends as part of the search party. When I read on behalf of The Count, I used my version of his voice (instead of "one beautiful haystack" I read it as "Von bee-u-tee-ful haystack). Of course Evelyn was greatly displeased with this deviation from the reality of the words on the page. "I don't like it when you change the book Mom. I don't like it when you use that voice Mom. Mom, stop it! I don't like that guy! I don't like The Count!" Kenneth is giggling on the other side of me during her whole exasperated speech. Gotta love it.