Quick Hitters

I. Apple Droppings
Every once the kids gross me out more than usual. I've become accustomed to wiping bottoms, sweeping cereal crumbs out from underneath the table, and stepping in tracked-in puddles of melted snow.
It's hard to handle Owen's apples, though.
He LOVES apples. The child is constantly cutting new teeth, and also growing about an inch a week. There isn't anything that feels better on his gums than a cold, crisp, red apple. If he sees one, he'll make the following reasoned argument with you until you wash it and hand it over:
"Unh! Unnnhh! Unh-unh-unh! Unhhh! UNNNNNNNNHHHHH!!!!!! UNH! UNH! UNH! unh-huhn uhn uhnuhnuhnuhn! UNNNNNNNNNHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"
You take a single bite out of it to start it for him, and then he happily takes it in hand and walks off with it. And that's when the droppings start to fall.
He uses his six little teeth to gnaw off tiny shards of apple, and they fall out his mouth as he tracks about everywhere in the house. There are soggy apple shards in the living room, in the kitchen, up the stairs, in the bathroom. They are in the blankets on the couch. They are in his high chair. They are in the grown up chairs. They are at my desk and under the piano. They are too small to be seen, but large enough to be extraordinarily unpleasant when you step on them.
Occasionally he'll get a bigger chunk of apple off, and for a moment he has a pleased expression. He'll suck on it for a few seconds, then say "BLEH" and let it all dribble out of his mouth, still warm with spit, onto the floor, at which point he walks away and continues to manufacture the tiny shards. Because he is constantly running into things and attempting to steal his brother's toys, the apple doesn't always stay in his hands. He regularly drops it on the floor, and into the dust bunnies underneath the couch or the console table, or into the cold snow-puddles in the front foyer. This doesn't bother him in the slightest. He just gets down on his hands and knees, thrusts a little arm under the couch, then pulls it back off and starts eating it again. It's only slightly hairy.
This is why dirty diapers don't seem so gross any more.

II. Sfingi
If you didn't already know, we live down the street from a great Italian bakery. The sidewalks are still covered in snow today, so I took my morning run at about 1:30 in the afternoon and went up to Culver Road by running on the side of the street. The street was pretty icy too, but I managed to stay upright all the way to the bakery. You start to smell the place about a block away, and today it smelled like fried dough and citrus. I didn't have either of the kids with me, so I took a good long look through the cakes. I ended up bringing back a Sfogiatelle, some biscotti, and a sfingi. Apparently the sfingi are only out during the Easter season, and it's kind of like a doughnut stuffed full of cannoli filling. It was incredible. I know that shoe pastry isn't J's favorite, but I could eat one of those with a cup of coffee anytime. For anyone who knows the Garrison Keillor sketch that I'm thinking of, be impressed that I interacted with a zeppole and a Cuisnart within the same hour.

III. Monopoly Junior
James is sick. He has some kind of cold and mild fever, and he spent the entire morning watching Curious George episodes in a daze on the couch. J must have felt bad for him (or perhaps really wanted to relive part of her childhood) so she picked him up a new board game when she arrived back from the grocery store at lunch. It's Monopoly Junior. James has been into regular Monopoly ever since he discovered it with the babysitter a few weeks ago, but it isn't very much fun to play with him. For one thing, you can't play with the real rules. For another, it takes forever even when you're playing with modified rules. But the biggest disincentive is his need to have every monopoly bill properly stacked and organized before the game can begin. I think that he secretly only wants to play the game to watch the money being sorted. I came up with the great idea after organizing the money for the the third or fourth time of paper-clipping it all together so that this wouldn't be a required ritual every time we got the game out. During the game I stepped into the kitchen for something, and when I came back into the living room all six stacks of bills had been unclipped and mixed into one another again.
"There was an accident." explained James.
Monopoly Junior is much more age appropriate. James still messes up the money (he insists on dropping it from the sky when he's paying the bank) but there are considerably fewer bills to deal with.