7 Quick Takes about Things We're Thankful For, Sweatshirt Justice, and Something I Never Noticed About the Little Mermaid

It's 7 Quick Takes Friday! How was your week?

—1—

One of the kids asked me why there aren't any Thanksgiving songs, so we looked online a little and we did find one. It's called "Gobble, Gobble" by Matthew West:

My 7-year-old, however, preferred this one and thought it was the funniest thing he'd ever heard:

It's got promise, but something about the sing-songiness and the voice and the way-too-excited trumpet makes it a little annoying. But after seeing that it was by the same guy who did the one about the duck walking up to the lemonade stand, I realized that it could have been WAY worse.

—2—

I woke up on Thanksgiving morning with a pounding headache and a case of strep throat. After a while, my 12-year-old skipped in and said, "Today's Thanksgiving!"

I moaned affirmatively from the bed and she added with a grimace, "Oh... I guess I'm thankful I'm not you."

But she said it jokingly so I didn't mind. The 7-year-old took pity on me and made me breakfast in bed, and even though he forgot to salt the eggs or put the bread in the toaster, I appreciated the effort immensely.

I was actually the last of the family to get strep. This week has revolved around taking kids to the doctor, juggling who's home from school and what attendance line we needed to call each day, and sorting out prescriptions since the pharmacy had certain concentrations of amoxacillin on backorder. (Eventually I just started bringing in a picture of an Rx bottle and telling the doctor "This is the one they have, please prescribe this.")

—3—

At Thanksgiving dinner we went around and said what we were thankful for, but we did it in the style of the game "I'm Going on a Picnic and I'm Bringing _______." 

Basically, the first person says something that starts with A, then the next person repeats it and adds something that starts with B, and so on through the alphabet until you get to Z.

When we reached 'F,' my daughter said she was thankful for "Fergie singing the national anthem." Five years after Fergie's disastrous rendition of the Star Spangled Banner at an NBA game, and it is still making my daughter's day. Who knew?

—4—

Phillip was going to work on finishing the basement stairs, but when he went down to his workshop he found it was too messy to do anything. While cleaning it up, he came across a box of doorknobs, which he'd bought a few months ago to replace some of the original ones around the house. So he took a slight detour and spent the morning changing out doorknobs. 

Little did he know how much bigger this if-you-give-a-mouse-a-cookie scenario was about to become.

Soon after that, our daughter somehow jammed the door and got stuck in her room, necessitating Phillip taking off the doorknob he'd just installed and then removing the entire door altogether, because the problem was actually that the door was hanging crooked and he needed to get at the hinges to really fix it. 

One minute, he was just replacing a doorknob and the next, he was yelling downstairs, "How mad would you be if the paint on the wall happened to get dinged up a little?"

"Why would the paint on the walls get dinged up?" I yelled back, alarmed.

"Uh... from trying to pry the doorframe off," he answered.

Turns out it wasn't just the hinges or the door; the entire doorframe was sagging and it all needed to be removed. Luckily Phillip was able to take it off and fix the problem, but it took all day and he has still made no progress on the basement stairs whatsoever.

—5—

During intermission at a recent school play, my daughter pulled out her phone but she wasn't getting any service so she started playing the game embedded in Google Chrome for just those situations. 

Watching her little dinosaur avatar jump over the cacti in the landscape, I realized I didn't know how it worked. "How can you play the no-Internet game without Internet?" I asked her.

"I don't know," she said, not looking up from her game. "That's the kind of thing I would Google if I had Internet."

—6—

One morning, the 17-year-old appeared in the kitchen wearing a very oversized sweatshirt and saying, "Dad, I got this from your side of the closet, is it okay if I steal this?"

Phillip just looked at me and I looked back at him, because I'd actually bought that sweatshirt for myself  while I was in college. Fast-forward about 10 years, and he eventually stole it from me because it was so oversized it fit him perfectly.

Well, with that history he couldn't really say no to my daughter's request, so he let her have it and now neither of us have a sweatshirt.

—7—

Completely out of nowhere, I realized something about The Little Mermaid. I've seen the movie dozens of times over the last 35 years, and I just now found out that the song Ariel sings when she gives her voice to Ursula is just a wordless "Part of Your World." 

Think about that. If I can go 35 years without figuring that out, what other obvious facts of life am I missing?

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