No pants

I tried to tell this little girl that she might not need to wear her coat in the house if she, say, wore her pants instead. Maybe even her shirt, too. She responded by dancing around the kitchen, singing, "No pants! No pants! No pants!"

Cute and not so cute

Dear twins,

It is not super cute when you (specifically A2) decide to take two shelves of books and dump them on the floor. Every. Single. Day. As someone who dabbles in OCD, sometimes I don't mind organizing the books again. But every day? That's just mean. And while we're on the subject, it seems sad that the amount of toys you can play with in the basement has dwindled significantly, due to your (again, pretty much A2) desire to dump out the toy bins so you can use the empty, overturned bins to reach forbidden items on the bookshelf.

It was, however, super cute to find the two of you the other day, snuggled together on pillows in the little room under the stairs, "sleeping."

You guys are lucky that the cute things you do usually outweigh the not-so-cute ones.

The state of education today

As someone who cares deeply about grammar (deeply, people—deeply), I'm always depressed when I see grammar mistakes out and about in my community. But the ones that really get me are the ones I see in schools. I especially love it when my kids bring home notes from their teachers that include incorrect grammar. Really gives me a lot of confidence in their abilities, you know?

I've also become rather grouchy in my old age about things that aren't necessarily incorrect, but just overdone—like using exclamation points in every sentence, capping every word in a tagline, and other annoyances.

The other night, S and I attended a PTA awards ceremony in which my sister-in-law was being honored. She's a sixth grade teacher and was chosen as "Teacher of the Year" for her school. Pretty cool, huh? The event was held at my husband's old high school, which has been completely overhauled in recent years. Painted on the wall in the main lobby was this message: "Welcome to THE (school name) HIGH SCHOOL."

Really? "THE"? I told my husband about it and we decided it should have been "AN" since technically, there are three high schools in that town.

Also, on one of the PowerPoint slides during the award presentation, an elementary school "principle" was honored.

Depressing. Just depressing, I tell you.