Question seven: What the...?

Wednesday night at the dinner table we decided to teach Emily the game of 20 Questions. She is big into games now and actually she has been playing an informal version of this very game for months now, making Eric guess some detail about her day over dinner.

She is learning to write now and so usually he has to guess from phonics, “It’s starts with duh, duh, duh. What do you think it is Daddy? It has four legs. Duh, duh, duh.” Then Eric spends the next 20 minutes throwing out more and more outrageous answers until Emily has collapsed with laughter.

“Donut!” He’ll yell enthusiastically.

“No Daddy. Donuts don’t have four legs!”

“Dump truck!” And on and on like this until the end when the answers don’t even begin with the right letter anymore and I imagine that Emily can hardly believe just how dumb her parents are. My god people, it’s a dog for goodness sakes!

So, Wednesday we explained the rules to her and she picked the stray dog that we saw in the yard that day as the answer. By the way, should you ever find yourself in our house at dinnertime playing this game and what starts with “duh” and has four legs just isn’t coming to you, let me give you this hint: the first round is almost always a dog. Wednesday was no different.

Eric asked a few questions, narrowed it down to a four-legged domesticated animal that barks, and then asked what I think was supposed to be the outrageous question: “Can you eat it?”

“No,” Emily said quickly. Then she paused and clarified, “Well, we don’t here. But in some other countries they do.”

At our weekend home

Here the girls try horseback riding while weekending at Grandma and Grandpa's house.

For some reason, the weekends don't seem to be all that relaxing for Eric. I can't imagine why.

Proof that the political process works

Eric was reelected by a landslide in November and it was thanks in no small part to this little campaign worker and her Simonson for County Attorney button.

Or, maybe it was because he ran unopposed, it's really hard to say for certain.

Emily Simonson, photographer?

Here is a series of photos that Emily took of Claudia with our digital camera. I love the last one especially. She takes better pictures at four than my mother-in-law does at 64.

What you didn't see...

This is our Christmas card as it was sent out this year (by which, of course I mean last year.) We got a lot of comments about how cute it turned out.

What you didn't see was the rest of our little homemade photo session. I can tell you it was a real toss up over which one to use.