My Kids Are Weird

This morning I noticed Wren had a purple bruise on his foot.

"Oh, look, you hurt your foot! How did you do that?" I asked.

"When I was a baby I trod on a dead beaver and it had a spike in back and it hurt my foot but I am alright now," he told me.

I mean, what do you say to that one?

Wren is also clever at reading 'signs'. He can read the green walking figure to tell me when we can cross the street (but fights me holding his hand while I insist). He saw this sign at the coffee shop we like near Frost's school and told me it said "DOESNT STAND ON ONE FOOT HERE."

We really like that coffee shop because they will make kidicino's - foam filled little espresso cups with a sprinkle of chocolate - for only 50c. As any good Seattelite, Wren takes his 'coffee' very seriously.

Meanwhile, Frost is in the kitchen unpacking the kitchen cupboards to find products "past their expiration date".

Since I poisoned him with rancid peanut butter a few months ago (he had a horrible bout of food poisoning from peanut butter I found in the Emergency Supplies Cupboard and fed him before checking its use-by date which was 3 years prior) Frost is very invested in checking food is not expired. He is also distrustful and routinely looks on boxes and cans before he eats things. The stuff he found in the cupboard today has raised his level of vigilance:

1) A bag of soy flour expired in 2005.

2) A cup of noodles in a flavor none of us eat. When opened it erupted in a purple dust of [probably toxic] mould spores leaving a few undecomposed noodles like the bones of an oracle. At least I would not have FED him that one.

3) Various grains eaten by weavils.

4) Packaged tofu that was EAT BY last year.

See, I tend not to think that expiration dates are very important with dry goods. By contrast, with meat I am quite careful and so those sardines that expired in August 2009 had to go.

For breakfast, I am eating the sardines which expire in a few months. Yum.

Frost and Wren dumped all the expired foods into a bowl and mixed them up. Frost pretended that the tapioca was snail eyeballs and the prunes were something else yucky.

Even though its early we have already been doing gardening and now its time for tea and sardines.