One that Hailey frequently uses (I think it started when we told her to include more in her prayer than blessing the food) is to pray for our house. Now, this in itself is fine, but the thing I find amusing is how she says it:

“Please bless our house so we can live in it.”

I guess that’s the purpose of our house though so it’s hard to argue with it.

Mallory, on the other hand, has adopted a phrase that we’re not quite sure what it means. Initially this came out of some confusion as to what we were instructing her to say. Early in her praying career, we were leading her in a prayer one day and told her to say “thank you for this day”, but what she heard was something else. She now knows to say “thank you for this day” but she still uses the “incorrect” phrase quite often. But I suppose there’s nothing wrong with saying:

“We thank you for this pray.”

I suppose the opportunity to pray is indeed something to be thankful for. Silly kids.

Mallory had obviously deduced that gas came from trees because there were trees on the sign.  I chuckled to myself and then tried to think of the easiest way to explain where gas comes from without getting into an incredibly long and frustrating conversation with a 4 year old.  I decided to oversimplify a bit and said “well…  gas comes from petroleum that comes out of the ground and petroleum is made from dead dinosaurs.”  There was a little bit of discussion about how dinosaurs could turn into oil, but once the girls were satisfied with my explanation, Hailey’s mad deductive reasoning skills kicked in and she made the following observation…

“So that means when we jump over the oil spots on the garage floor, we’re really jumping over dinosaurs.”

Hard to argue with that.

After a bit of blowing into carts, I got Mario Bros up and running for them. It took them a good half an hour to really get the hang of it, and even then neither of them made it to the end of world 1-1, but they had fun. We played a little Excite Bike, some Wild Gunman, some Duck Hunt, and we tried to play some Rad Racer as well with some pretty sad results. The only game they really “get” at this point is Duck Hunt, but they had a blast blowing ducks out of the sky. They’ll need some more practice before they’re really any good at Mario, but at least it’s an activity I can get excited about. I know it’s wrong and I know I should be happy just to spend time with them, but I just have a really hard time getting excited about playing Barbies.

In the past, snow has been somewhat troublesome for us because it turned our whole yard into a gigantic mud pit. However, this year we have grass. This is good for a couple reasons… first, the yard won’t be a vat of muddy sinkhole ready to claim any victim dumb enough to leave the sidewalk, and second, because the girls can now go out and play in the snow. Hailey and Mallory have been a little deprived the last few years because they couldn’t really go out and enjoy the snow because we were worried they’d get stuck in the mud and, much like the dinosaurs, would never be seen again. So to celebrate this occasion of being able to play in our yard now, we went out and made a snowman.