Monday.

     We watched the Sunday Family Movie last night and it happened to be Gnomeo and Juliet, the old story of star-crossed lovers from feuding families of ...ceramic garden gnomes.   Red hats.  Blue hats.  The kids were laughing at all the funny parts but missing all the classic references to the most famous piece of writing in the English language.   I told them that on Monday we'd read the real thing  (a Charles and Mary Lamb retold for kids' version).  "Is it funny?" asks Isaac.  "Hilarious" is my reply.   So after breakfast as the kids worked on their new Rainbow loom stitches as seen on Youtube, we meet Romeo who ditches Rosaline, hooks up with Juliet, peeps in her bedroom windows and marries her within the first two pages.   "This isn't funny."  notes Isaac.   Nope.  Dripping with impulsive romance and really difficult to understand.  We had fun comparing and contrasting with the lawn ornament movie though, and the kids are being good sports about finishing in the next few days.
     Blogger is going fritzy on me so I'll continue tomorrow.   The rest of today was just the usual anyway.  Piano lessons, playing, multiplication drill computer challenge thingy, hockey on the ice, writing grateful list entries, chores and kijiji.  Always kijiji with the Tobin boy.  He met a man with two St. Bernards on the way home from piano lessons who stopped and talked to him about the breed and let Tobin pet his dogs.   Tobin opens Google after he tells me this and I think that he's going to research more about the breed but no, he's going to Kijiji to see if there are any enormous dogs available for sale and for how much.  Then, he and Anneke count their combined life savings including Ruby's six dollars and change.   Didn't take long to talk him down, out of the crazy tree, though.  Just had to remind him of what puppies are like from the time we dog-sat for a friend during the summer.  He's an impulsive boy but he is learning already, by experience, that the thrill of buying things that you want only lasts a very short while and costs you months of allowance.   His new scheme is to buy Lord of the Rings lego sets on clearance, sit on them for a while and then sell when they are no longer available in stores.  ("Why would you sit on them? You'd smush the box and ruin it."  --Isaac)  He worked out the rules of buy low, sell high, price caps, and supply and demand all by his little self in his quietly whirring mind.  Might be a fun business experiment and would put his kijiji "skills" to work.