(no subject)

[which_chick]

I had a busy and wholesome day with brother-the-younger and his kids (ages 3 and 6) yesterday. We visited (my) grandma, took short rides on a pony, went to a cave, did grocery shopping (where the kids rode in the cart and I made it "go fast" if they were quiet), and went swimming after dinner. It was a good day -- the kids were perky, in good moods, and largely on board with the day's activities.

Duncan likes to play "Dam" at the beach. He digs a hole reservoir and builds a dam around it and then pours water in until the water pretty much overtops the dam. It's a wonderful game and I play with him if I'm around. (Dam is also one of my more favorite beach games.) Anyway, yesterday we set up a river to flow into the reservoir, with dikes (?) alongside the river banks to help contain the water. Then, we poured water (using a five-gallon bucket so there would be fewer trips to the lake to fetch more water, a spectacular innovation from the mind of brother-the-younger) into the top of the river and watched the water flow downstream into the reservoir. Because the river was twisty, there was erosion at the turns and the "silt" (it's all sand) settled in the reservoir, filling it in. (This is a real problem for real dams in the real world. Realism in the Dam game is important to Duncan -- he puts lumpy pieces of sand, not-smoothed-out, along the dikes so that they're like rip-rap on real dams and retaining walls. The only reason we don't have spillways on the dam is that the sand won't hold up to having water running over it.) Anyway, the point here is to pour the water until it overtops the dam and the reservoir empties out. (After that, we rebuild the dam and start over. In this, we are very like the Army Corps of Engineers.) It was fun.

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[fooliv.livejournal.com]

We had a family reunion this weekend. I irritated my sister by inserting random half-remembered chunks of Animal Farm into the barnyard-animals picture-book reading session with her son. She was convinced that hearing about the false consciousness of milchcows and pigly ambition to slaughter the farmer and his wife capitalist rent-seeking class would warp his little mind.

I don't know, I wouldn't think that one-year-olds would absorb the *meaning* of satirical Marxist drivel. Mischa's still working on getting beyond "ma-ma" in the linguistic arena. Anyways, there was a "hey! you're reading it wrong!" passage in the actual book, which I figure gives license to depart from the text from time to time.

[alycewilson.livejournal.com]

My brother and I used to make similar beach creations. I used to wonder what it looked like as the tide came in, slowly filling up all the channels we'd made with water.