7 Quick Takes about Responsible Purchasing Decisions, Playing with Wikki Stix, and Four Minutes of Creativity

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

—1—

One of my 16-year-old’s sandals went missing on his church kayaking trip a few weeks ago, and apparently someone found it and brought it back to church to reunite it with its owner. 

I saw it in the church foyer on Sunday and asked the 16-year-old, “Is that your shoe?”

“Yeah,” he said, and continued walking past it to go sit down in the chapel. Stopping and picking it up didn’t appear to cross his mind at any point.

This is what I’m dealing with, people.

—2—

The laundry hamper that my 8- and 10-year-old share is getting a little ragged, and the other day they decided to pool their spending money to buy a new one. I was on the periphery, listening to their deliberations and wondering if I should step in or not. 

It felt like my kids shouldn’t be using their own money for household necessities like 19th-century chimney sweeps, but on the other hand, their old hamper was still perfectly serviceable so I didn’t feel like I needed to jump in and offer to buy it myself. (I literally heard the 8-year-old tell his brother "Mom and Dad buy us things we need, and this is just something we want", and was that really a lesson I wanted to undermine right now?)

In the end, I decided to keep quiet. Who am I to tell them what’s the “right” thing to spend their money on if they found something they want and are excited about, and It turned out to be a fantastic exercise in teamwork and making smart purchases. Together they went on Amazon, comparison shopped the results, and checked the dimensions against their old one. And I guess now I just have to dispose of a beaten-up laundry hamper that no one else will want.

—3—

I recently learned that Paul Reubens died last year, after a mini-documentary about Pee-Wee Herman popped up in my YouTube feed.

And because I watched it, random episodes of Pee-Wee's Playhouse and clips from the movie Pee-Wee's Big Aventure started showing up, too.

Talk about nostalgia. If you never watched Pee-Wee's Big Adventure in the late 80s then this will probably make little sense to you, but if you did then enjoy this final scene from the movie. It is way more hilarious and wholesome than you remember it being as a kid.

—4—

Last week when my 12-year-old realized she was going to lose her Duolingo streak while at camp, she called home to ask Phillip to do a daily lesson for her. He told her that she "owed him one," which she took as an invitation to bake him a dessert from scratch at the earliest possible opportunity.

He greatly appreciated coming home after a long day at work to a homemade strawberry shortcake waiting for him on the counter. She's very gifted at finding reasons to bake something unhealthy, and I guess sometimes it comes in handy.

—5—

My 8-year-old turned up his nose at a pack of Wikki Stix that someone gave us, claiming that it "didn't look very fun."

They came with a little dot-to-dot of a moose, so hoping to get him interested I pulled it out and started working on it (of course humming "Connect the dots, la-la-la-la" like Pee-Wee Herman because YouTube). 

"Are you going to play with that?" my 8-year-old asked me incredulously.

"Yes, I am."

"Well, I guess you and I have different preferences," he said, pointedly ignoring me and my moose.

He was probably just jealous. This moose looked great.

After I finished, he did get interested and wanted to do the dot-to-dot, and then we started writing words in cursive with the Wikki Stix so it looks like maybe I’m not so dumb after all.

—6—

We spent a day boating with family and had a great day on the lake.

The 10-year-old learned how to drive a boat, the 8-year-old went tubing and on this little wakeboard called a Zup, and my husband hurt his arm climbing a tree near the shore and jumping off on a rope swing into the water.

This was the debut of Phillip’s new bathing suit. He's so tall I've been looking for a while for swim trunks that don't fit him like Daisy Dukes, and I finally found these on Amazon from a brand called Beautiful Giant. He will never let me forget that.

—7—

My 20-year-old just had me take the Divergent Association Task, which is supposedly a quick way to measure verbal creativity.

I got a 94%, which good because as a writer that's supposed to be what I'm good at in life. My daughter got a 96%, but as a neuroscience major I'm not sure how much that helps her.

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