I spent many years as a wee little one on the student side, of course. Parents’ Night was a big deal at our tiny little neighborhood school. We spent most of the day creating artwork to display and cleaning our classrooms, and especially neatening our desks. I was always the last to finish cleaning my desk. In fact, my teacher usually made an example of my desk. Seems I was always a bit of a packrat. Other than the desk cleaning, I adored Parents’ Night. I knew I was brilliant, I knew every single teacher in that school thought I hung the moon(s)(because there are two of them, thank you QI), and bottom line – I knew I had everything to gain and nothing to fear. Plus, my mom wrote me wonderful little notes and hid them in my desk for me to find.

My turn as The Parent for Parents’ Night was a bit different. Turns out that they don’t make such a big production. For one of the biggest elementary schools in our city, there weren’t very many parents. I was the sole parent in each classroom. Bee’s teacher – the one I most wanted to talk to, because Bee (bless her heart) is just keeping up with her peers – kept things pretty business-like. She went over test scores, assured me Bee already knew everything she needed to know in order to pass kindergarten, and said that she was a wonderfully adapted, perfectly normal little girl. She didn’t even tell me Bee was a fidgeter. Which – hello! She is. I’ve read the comments in her folder each week. Gracie’s teacher conference was on the other side of the spectrum. I had spent a good bit of time visiting with Ms. G. before, so it was very informal. She said that Gracie’s reading was beyond the school’s testing capabilities, that she is an absolute delight in class (she actually called her mellow. What kid has she confused my daughter with?!) and said the only problem Gracie has is that she rushes through her work. It’s a flaw Gracie’s been working on, so I wasn’t surprised. Then we chatted about nothing at all for 15 minutes and that was that.

There were no desks to leave notes in, no artwork to admire, and no fuss to be made. I was in and out in less than 30 minutes.

Of course, after I came home and went over each report card with the girls, they got in trouble for drawing on each other’s bellies with highlighters, had meltdowns, and were general crankybutts. Because it’s impossible for me to have an all-around good evening in which nothing goes wrong. Such is the joys of parenting. But that’s okay. The marker will wash off (eventually) and the girls are headed to their dad’s for the weekend. And one day I will invent a cure-all for whining and I will be a cajillionnaire. Now THAT is a happy thought for the weekend!

For instance, Bee used to be famous for what we called her alien gag reflex – even baby cereal had too much texture for her for the longest time. Any hint of texture and BLERGH – up it came. Gradually she worked her way into a very narrow selection of table foods. Then she went through a bland phase. There was that time when she wouldn’t eat hot dogs. She was what I would call a calm and predictable eater: traditional foods only, please. She left the daring and adventurous eating (or testing, at least) to her sister. And that was fine.

Then one day, I’m not sure when, Bee became my veggie eater. She will eat probably 10 times the variety of veggies than her sister. She clears her plate when I make curry stir frys. Gracie will pick at it, but she prefers hot wings or chips and salsa if we’re doing spicy foods. Bee was peer-pressured into liking hot dogs at a school party. Gracie started eating soups, too. In other words: their palettes had expanded, but predictably so.

And then. Then my little darlings decided to give up nearly all the stand-bys. If I don’t have fresh veggies on hand (usually by the end of the week when we’re staving off a grocery run), I could always rely on cherry tomatoes to fulfill Bee’s veggie requirement. Yesterday, Bee told me she doesn’t like tomatoes. ?!  She who had to be prevented from eating an entire tub of cherry tomatoes in one sitting. Oooookay. A few weeks ago, the girls informed me (and by informed, I mean whined loudly and most annoyingly over dinner) that they don’t like baked potatoes. Or mashed potatoes. Or potatoes in any form. My children who would gorge themselves on their potatoes before eating anything else. Insert inflated mama-sigh here. And then a few weeks before that, these same “predictable” eaters refused to eat macaroni (said repulsion does not apply to mac&cheese, mind you). Oh no, now they’ll only eat spaghetti. The better to splatter sauce all over the place, of course.

I’m really hoping this is a phase. I don’t mind the idea of cutting back on carbs and starches and unhealthy, filling foods. But a mama’s gotta have some sort of fall back for those rainy nights when she needs an easy dinner. On the other hand, maybe the pod-people who have taken over my children will take away their sweet tooth (teeth?) next. Now that I could live with!

Also, there’s this growing idea that I had last night that the protagonist – war journalist Marika Vecera – is our modern version of Austen’s Elizabeth Bennett. It’s quite intriguing, actually, but I’m afraid the discussion would be awfully spoilerific for those of you who haven’t read The White Mary. And while I do sometimes enjoy prattling on in order to hear (read?) the sound of my own voice, the point of my book reviews is to convince you to pick a book up (or not) and to go read it straight away (or not).  If I tell you everything that happens, your reading experience just won’t be the same.

And you should go read this book. At least, you should if you love writing. If you love strong, nuanced characters who smack of authenticity – despite being from different gender and cultural pools. If you love setting: Salak was called “the gutsiest woman adventurer of our day” by Book Magazine and not just for the sweeping motions she sets her characters to acting out. Salak is a real-life travel journalist for National Geographic Adventure magazine. She was the first known woman from a developed country to cross Papa New Guinea. This woman knows what she’s writing about and you can feel that in the setting of her novel.  If you love plot – or even if you love philosophical books that center more around intellectual debates. Salak somehow balances this book between adventurous plot and the roaring philosophical turmoil we debate with friends and ourselves about relationships, loss, religion, and the possibility (and cost) of redemption. Characters, plot, setting…what more could you ask for?

Passion? White Mary has it – and not in a bodice-ripping sense either. I mean in a ‘call your sister as soon as you’re through reading because ohmygod that was intense!’ sort of reading experience. While I was reading The White Mary, I was living for my lunch hours when I could curl up with my book, to find out what happened next. I spent my afternoons pondering what I would do in similar situations and marveling over how realistic everything seemed, from the far-fetched adventure that sets the novel in motion to the absolute pitch-perfect ending that was both down-to-the-toes satisfying and left me aching for something different. (Even though I knew that any other course of action would have been the first time the characters lost their incredible fidelity to self that they employed all the way through.) Clearly Salak cared about her novel and believed in every scene she created…except for one point where I think Salak lost her voice for just one scene, which I think is obviously because it was the only point she disagreed with the actions of her characters. But I’m not allowed to talk about that yet, am I? Ahem. As I was saying, such intensity in a novel can only come across if it flows directly from the author’s fingers.

So go. Go read The White Mary. Find out why the dedicated young war journalist Marika Vecera abandons everything – her first serious relationship, her next overseas reporting assignment, and the biography she’s writing about the recently deceased war correspondent whom she idolized – in order to trek through the life-threatening jungle of Papa New Guinea to investigate claims that the man she idolized is not really dead. Go explore the novel…and then come back here and talk. There’s so much I want to discuss.

My friend Corrie had convinced me to try a hot yoga class that she used to attend. It was a new year, darn it, and she was going to start again. It was very casual, she assured me. A woman who was neighbors with her doctor ran a yoga class out of her garage three nights a week. And not just any yoga – hot yoga. I didn’t pay much attention to that part until I started telling people what I was up to.

“Hot yoga? Yikes. Let me know how that goes.”

“Ohgod. Good luck with that!”

“…..” That was the jaw of several other non-commentators hitting the floor. Kinda like they almost wanted to throw up. Which, coincidentally, was how I was starting to feel now that the consensus was starting to be that I was going to keel over and die.

Thank god I had Corrie to reassure me. “Don’t worry. It’ll get better. It’s intense at first - I threw up my first time.”

By this point I was having serious reservations, but the thought of getting out of the house and passing out hanging out with grown-ups once a week sounded good enough to me. Also? Time spent with my partner-in-crime is never wasted.

So, off we went. The instructor – whose name I’ve forgotten, but who seemed really nice and peppy, just like half the class I went to school with at Holy Cross – greeted another girl (really – girl; as in, maybe 17ish) who was starting yoga that night. I was all, “Oh! Yay! Me, too!” and the instructor told us to take a time out any time we needed, not to worry if we couldn’t keep up or match the poses exactly – we’d get the hang of it. I barely bit back that I was planning on faking it if I had no idea what I was doing – that fallback position had helped me through plenty of other jams in my life. But I’d try just to glance around me to see what everyone else was writing on their quiz…er, or how they were contorting their bodies.

And then we started. I did so flippin’ much better than I thought I would. I think part of it was that my imagination had distorted my expectations so much that there was no way I’d fail that badly; part of it was that Jillian’s 30-day Shred had prepared me to some degree. I wasn’t the skinniest or the bendiest or the girl with the most stamina, but I held my own. Only one did I feel like maybe I might throw up if I didn’t throttle it back. I took a sip of water and sat down on my mat. I noticed a few others (the class was packed – there were maybe 12 of us in there) had sat down as well. But then they moved into a bendy twisty tree thing and I know I can bend my leg like that…I wanted to see if I could do the rest of it too. Turns out I can.

So my curiosity, my need to prove myself, and my inner rockstar carried me through the evening. It was amazing, to tell you the truth. The incredibly intense heat might be a problem in summer when it’s already 140 in the garage, but I tolerated it fairly easily. Thanks to everyone who built this horrible picture in my head beforehand! Heh. Honestly, the entire experience was amazing. It was the most interesting  together/alone feeling. I was conscious of everyone around me most of the time, but you spend the entire 90 minutes inside your head, focusing on your body and forcing the stress out and away.

A pretty cool way to spend an evening if you ask me. Having a friend to hold you accountable, to drag and be dragged by, well that not only makes it more fun and more likely that I’ll return, but increases the odds of some off-the-wall adventures along the way.

This weekend, not only did J. remind me of my own children, but she and the girls reminded me of alllll the sleepovers I use to have as a child. On Friday night, Gracie and J. played Super Mario Brothers on the wii. It was more of a mishmash of all Super Mario worlds, combined with Yoshi – I mean, it certainly looked different from the old school games. But the sounds, oh the sound effects were so similar at times. I had flashbacks to the first sleepover my friends and I had at Denise’s house when she first received her Nintendo. We stayed up all hours of the night – literally – taking turns killing ourselves and trying to get part that darn castle level. It made me think, too, of all the times my friend Pickles would sleep over at my house and how hard we tried to beat the original, Super Mario 2 (that was impossible!) and Super Mario 3. Seriously, the Mario Brothers ditty would end up on the soundtrack of our childhood. All of those scenes flashed through my head as I listened to the girls giggling and yelling “Press 1! No! The other button! Quick, jump!” from the other room. It was awesomeness.

Also awesome: the girls were so quiet the next morning, that when I woke up and found their abandoned sleeping backs in the next room, I wondered if they had all pigpiled into Bee’s bed at some point to finish sleeping. Yeah, keep dreaming Mom. Instead, they had moved their energetic little selves into the front room where they created a Barbie city. Alllll the Barbie furniture and Barbies were set up into several different…villas? general heaps of furntiure?…across the room. Listening to the girls sweet falsettos as they played  Barbie took me back to all those times our cousin Shayne had slept over. One summer when my dad was finishing the attic floor, my sister and I had set up a permanent Barbie village in our playroom where we were sleeping downstairs. That village was left intact all summer, making it so much easier for Kim, Shayne and I to pick up where our Barbie sagas had left off. We would play for an hour when Shayne came with her parents to visit, or more likely for hours on end when Shayne came to spend the night. (That summer I think Shayne was at our house almost as often as we were!) It was good to learn that while the Barbie fashions and accessories might change, the storylines never will.

Later, after (most of) the Barbies were picked up, J. and Gracie decided to play with the spy gear that Gracie got for Christmas while Bee set up the Polly Pockets. (I can only imagine the hostage situations they were planning with Bee’s toys.) The girls shot secret messages out of Gracie’s wrist dart-launcher, created code names, and spied on an oblivious Bee – sort of like what my cousin Hoot and I would play when I was at his house. Only when I was younger, we were usually playing spy in the woods, or using our spy skills to torment his brother Andrew.  At least Gracie and J. seemed to be benevolent spies!

It really was a trip down memory lane, listening to the kiddos play together so nicely. I think John and Corrie will finally start believing me that it really is easier for me with J. over when I start having sleepovers every Friday!

Reason #2, and I’m sure most people – the nice, well-behaved people – would have listed this reason first, was because Bee had spiked a fever of 102° the night before and had supposedly thrown up. Twice. She was rather warm and had that glazed over look when she came home from her dad’s house on Tuesday, and she is one of those dreaded snifflers, so I’m sure she did have a fever and I’m sure her stomach did eventually (twice, in fact) reject the contents of all those sniffles. It’s just that I didn’t see it yesterday.

At least, not for most of the day.

Promptly at 2:45, when I thought for sure I had burned a sick day for the same head cold her sister and I had shouldered our way through, Bee burst into tears and said her ear hurt. “Take me to the doctor’s RIGHT NOW,” she wailed. The doctor’s office was nice enough not to laugh at me when I asked if they had room for us before they closed. I was lucky to get in to see the junior doctor we see nearly as often as our real doctor. (The universe, for all it’s fun at my expense, at least knows when I’m about to call “UNCLE!” Ear infections are serious, yo. As is missing a second day of work because your five-year-old didn’t think to mention her earache earlier in the day. Ahem.)

And that is how the three of us girls happened to be sitting in the room at the doctor’s office, two of us with books in hand. Bee had abandoned her Pinkalicious book to play with the cars in the toybox; Gracie was reading The Secret Garden at breakneck speed to find out if Colin made it out to the garden; I was reading The White Mary, hoping Marika and her photographer made it out of Congo intact. I think Gracie and I might have sighed with resignation when Dr. I walked in: it always happens during the good bits.

My disappointment barely lasted ten second, however. “What are you reading?” Dr. I. asked in a tone only a fellow Reader will recognize as a need for a fix. I handed her the book and told her what it was. “Is it good?” she asked. “Incredibly good!” I assured her, and described it a little before practically interrupting myself with: “But have you read The Tiger’s Wife?” I described it a little before Dr. I. picked up finished the summary for me – she had just finished it. We started trading titles we had read recently, trying to come up with recommendations for each other. My fellow addict even scooted out to the standing desk the doctors use in the hallway to get her Kindle. “Cutting for Stone!” she exclaimed as she walked in, stepping over Bee who was still happily playing with the cars. “That’s the one you need to read next!” “By Abraham Verghese! Yes, I have that on my list!” I answered, brandishing my little black book of books that I keep in my purse. “I’ll move him up to the top.”

Eventually we stopped laughing and we ended our impromptu book club meeting so she could examine Bee. Dr. I wrote out a scrip for Bee’s massive ear infection and stopped to talk to Gracie about The Secret Garden on her way out. (She’s reading Charlotte’s Web with her son.) Gracie beamed at being included in the adults’ conversation, like she’d been given a free hit by a new dealer. And then she read all the way to Walgreen’s, at Walgreen’s, and all the way home. For the win!

It was a short 20-minute interlude, but the brightest part of my day - all because Gracie and I were reading when the doctor walked in. Book addictions – it’s like the coolest not-so-secret society ever.

I was sick, so sick, with the Plague: SuperBonusRound. The girls were being so tremendously good and were, for most of this day in particular, pretending they were puppies. (Awwww! Puppies!) I was indulging them, which mostly involved ignoring the annoying, high-pitched yelps, yips and barks echoing across the house. I think it paid off, because all I had to do for lunch was pour two bowls of dry cereal and one bowl of water for them to eat off the floor.

Preparing lunch: 30 seconds. Clean-up: none. Healthiness factor: fiberific. The look in Bee and Gracie’s eyes when they saw what I was letting them do: priceless.

Being an awesome mom kind of rocks sometimes.

Last time she was here – for an entire month, if you remember - we redid the guest Kim’s room/my craft room. Since I only got to steal Kim for two weeks this time, we decided to take on a smaller project: the girls’ bathroom.

The decor in the girls’ bathroom centered around the shower curtain, a serviceable but completely outdated green and tan country monstrosity. I argued against replacing it for the longest time because while it wasn’t my style, it was still good. It’s hard for me to “waste” money on a want instead of a need. But Kim’s been talking me into a bathroom redo for years and I finally decided to splurge.

Before shots:

White walls that have been unpainted since we moved in ten years ago. I told you I was unmotivated. Hunter green towels that were the Ex’s since he moved back after his time in the military. (I’m pretty sure I can retire those to the rag pile without feeling guilty. That’s a lot of use.) And more clutter than I know what to do with. That basket of towels? There because I thought it was a law of the universe that you need at least one decorative item on the sink at all times. And since it’s right next to the girls toothbrushes, the extra hand towels were usually minty fresh. Yes, indeed.

So I decided on a color scheme: happy, tropical colors. Something that is completely different from the rest of my house, but I thought if I was going to pull it off anywhere, the kids’ bathroom is an excellent venue to contain an 180° difference: it’s small, it’s separate, and if we don’t like it, we could always change it up. Since we were going bright, Kim advised that we probably needed a neutral wall color, and the type of neutral would depend entirely on the shower curtain.  So Kim spent her work breaks (yes, she was working on vacation; she had to) sending me links to shower curtains. I finally picked one at Ikea that was in stock – only they lied. Yes, we irritated Grandma by keeping the kids home from church (hey! they wanted to go!) and made a 2-hour round trip for a $10 shower curtain that wasn’t even in stock. Rather than waste a trip, I grabbed one that Kim really liked, but I thought was way too form-less. I figured it had the same colors as the other shower curtain and it was only $10, so I could always swap it out later. I only had a week left of Kim at that point and we had to get a move on it or my pretty, pretty bathroom wouldn’t happen.

After we had the shower curtain, our next trial presented itself: wall color. Kim picked up paint samples of three taupe-like neutrals and painted squares one day while I was at work. None of them worked. Not only did we have to find a color that worked with the shower curtain, someone ::cough:cough:: picked a warm-colored crappy linoleum for the floor when the house was built and it was complicating everything. Four paint-samples later, we finally found the perfect color: Behr’s Chocolate Froth. I kid you not. And what’s almost as cool as the name is the fact that we overestimated how much paint we needed (a fifth of a gallon), so we also painted the hallway and the w.c. in my master bath. For the win!

After the walls, there was just the matter of picking up towels, toothbrush holder, and floor mats (Target), a soap dispenser (Bed, Bath & Beyond), frames (Target and Garden Ridge) and cubes for the wall (Garden Ridge). Oh! And I splurged on bins for the closet because they were prettttttty sitting there on shelf at the store. Wait til you see how desperately I needed them. (Seriously.)

Okay, time for the big reveal:

Peeking in, you can’t even tell the walls are painted. It’s a very subtle color that is not friends with bright sunlight and flashes – it makes it go into hiding. But it’s there.

A word about that toilet lid cover and contour rug: I HATE YOU, Target. They had them in every color of the rainbow, except the darker sky blue that’s in the shower curtain. They had towels in that color. But mats? Nope. Not even online. Not even in other stores. It was the only color that did that towel-but-no-rug thing. Stupid store. But I wanted to be done, so I compromised and went for the light sky chrome blue or whatever the heck it’s called.

Here are the cubes up close, getting the sparkle treatment from my flash. How easy does my sister make decorating look? Two curvy glass votive holders that I had lying around hold tropical-colored barrettes and hair elastics. (Note to self: remind the girls they have to ask Mom to get those down.) Face cloths in the medium cube. And pink Q-tips in the bottom one. Not a bad $15 investment.

For the art, we decided to go with scrapbook paper. Kim is working on a fancy reproduction of an art piece we saw on Etsy. Meanwhile, I have pretty, pretty art on my wall that cost us less than $20.

And then there was the closet: a project unto itself. Before:

And after:

Those bins were the costliest items. The larger ones were $10 and the small ones $6. The girls’ new caboodles they got for Christmas certainly helped. And Kim gets a bin all to herself for items she doesn’t take back and forth: shampoo, conditioner, facemask cream stuff, a razor, etc.

We – and I use that term very loosely because all I did was make final decisions and foot the bill – did all of that for under $100 if you don’t include the bins (a want, not a need). Including the bins, it was $160. One hundred and sixty dollars. !!!  I wouldn’t have believed it could really be done – and so quickly! – if I hadn’t been there myself.

I would let you all have a turn with my sister’s mad genius, but we already have plans for my kitchen and finishing my master bathroom. In other words: back off – she’s mine!

So there I was, just after Christmas, opening a book promising to be full of snark, wit, satire, interesting format, and my genre-kryptonite: a survival story. I cracked it open as soon as I finished the book I was reading and…yep, that’s when the disappointment first set in.

The voice. I knew this was going to be a Young Adult novel; I guess I just didn’t realize that Young Adult was synonymous with keeping the narrator’s voice light, simplistic, and as airy as the blonde on the cover. But perhaps it just took a bit for the story and the narrator settle down. The sarcasm did step up – and that’s always a good thing. But after a quarter of the novel leaked by, I realized that the sarcasm and the snark were surface only. Libba Bray seems to have such potential, and while I haven’t read her other novels, I’ve heard nothing except how edgy and fun and screw-the-rules she is. Either she forgot that the funny only lasts so long, or else she got a little over-confidence. Yes, you need a whole lotta cheeky to make this kind of satire work, but there’s gotta be other layers underneath the cheek.

Keep it simple, stupid? In fact, the irony of the novel was that Bray didn’t intend wade further than skin-deep in any of the areas she examined. She discussed the evils of pageantry in that it presented One Acceptable Beauty Standard to women, but then Ms. Bray refused to flesh out her idea. If pageant queens are people too, then how come all of Bray’s characters were uncomplicated and very stereotyped? It was like reading the Seven Dwarfs Act of Miss Congeniality on the Set of Lost. If the message was that you don’t need a boyfriend (or a girlfriend) to make you whole, why enter a completely random boatload of sexy, cardboard, emo pirates (!) who all are conveniently paired off with the beauty queens in a fashion so heavy-handed I saw stars in front of my eyes. The ideas were all there – but Bray waded shin deep into the kiddie pool of discussion and no further.

The characters. I mentioned the seven dwarfs, right? Because we had a gun-toting Miss Popular, take-you-down leader from Texas; a smarter-than-thou snarkster from New Hampshire; a girl-next-door from the Midwest; a southern beauty who wanted so! hard! to be smart, yo; a black girl and an Indian girl who competed for the Most Marginalized Minority; a deaf girl; a delinquent…are you catching my drift? While everyone has minor epiphanies, most characters turn around the next chapter and undo any incremental character development that occurred. (Yes, you will bang your head against any nearby surface.) Only Taylor – Miss Texas that was – seems to bother embracing change. And when I say embrace, I mean she hopped on the crazy train and never got off. Not that I was complaining at that point. She was actually interesting.

The plot. There was so much promise: the plane wrecked. Everyone pretends they’re Project Runway-meets-Lost. There’s a looney-toons dictator trying to take over the world. The Corporation (think a kinder, more soothing Big Brother) really has taking over the world – or at least the entertainment portion of it. All of that works. But then there are plot-baffling pirates with no bearing on the story. An eco-terrorist who elicited a WTF? from me. And then there was the black-shirted baddies who, honestly, didn’t make any sense. In other words, Bray should have kept the skeleton from the opening of the book and Chosen a Different Adventure.

Good concept, painfully disappointing execution. 2 of 5 stars.

I shamelessly borrowed this pic from the manufacturer, but since I'm schlepping their product, they can live with it.

If you are a parent and you haven’t heard of story cubes, you pretty much need to stop reading right now, open a tab for Amazon, and buy those guys right this minute. I promise you they are well worth the investment. It’s important I tell you that, because when you see they want to charge just over $7 for 9 dice and an easy open storage box, you might raise an eyebrow. Trust me: it’s worth even the $10 manufacturer’s suggested retail price. You will never spend $10 so wisely.

So here’s how they work: you gather around a flat surface where everyone can see what’s rolled. Someone rolls the dice onto the table, revealing 9 different pictures. In this picture you can see the sheep, the turtle, a book, a speech bubble, an airplane, a question mark, a tent, a fish, and a lightning bolt. Whoever is starting the story choose a die and starts the story: “Once upon a time [this is always how our start], there was a sheep named Moe. And Moe was very sad because….” And then that person points to someone who chooses another die and uses the picture to continue the story.

Simple. Easy. Wildly creative. No batteries needed. And, at our house, full of pee-my-pants, snot-hanging-from-my-nose, crack-a-rib hilarity.

Our stories, as I’ve said, always started with “Once upon a time…” and usually included a princess as the protagonist. The lightning bolt usually meant there was a mean witch who started a storm to scare someone. Jesus was frequently used to move the plot along, or just to be a wandering dude (not even kidding), and we frequently ended up with either the key or the lock, so there was frequently a locked treasure chest, a rainbow granting wishes, or a secret path through a locked closet door. Some of the tropes Auntie Kim and I introduced (the secret world on the other side of the closet door), but some the kids came up with entirely on their own (see: Jesus). My very favorite? Apparently my kids are into amputees. No lie. One story started with Gracie informing us, “Once upon a time, there was a girl with only one hand.” The heck?! Then, a few stories later, Bee jumped on the bandwagon: “Once upon a time, there was a girl with no feet!” Footless girl found the Turtle of Lud, a friendly giant bumblebee who gave her a ride so she could find her feet by flying along the path that appeared on the other side of her locked closet door. Eventually, Jesus sang her a song, she found a rainbow, dodged a lightning bolt from the very! mean! witch! [oh, how dramatically Gracie reveals every phrase coming out of her mouth, like we were middle schoolers telling scary stories in front of a fire], and finally found her feet in a locked treasure chest underneath said rainbow.

Kim and I were laughing so hard, Bee told us we were being “silly stisters.” Yeah, because we’re the one lopping off limbs and body parts from innocent little story victims!

You can see why the story cubes are going with us on every plane ride from now until the end of time. And possibly my digital movie camera, because these are the sorts of things you want on hand when you need to blackmail your children’s future little selves.