WID

I say this to Nik and Sarah several times a week.  Write it down.  If you don't, you will never remember exactly how it went because the wording is what made it so cute in the first place.

For example, here are some Teddisms from the past year:

I was eating some jello with whipped cream on it. He had two bites of it without the whipped cream and came back for another bite.  I offered him some with whipped cream.  He put up his hand in a "hold off" position and said, "No, I need it clean!"

I just playing. Playing is fun.

Watching Frozen.  Anna is left in a cold room. Teddy looked at me and said, "That's a problem."

Papa, can we eat a pupcake?

Teddy, lie down and have a nap.  "I don't want to turn my eyes off."

While watching the bug zapper: "Watch that sound!"

Flying his toy satellite into the air, "See ya later, Earf."

Playing the Star-Warry parent game, Nik said: "This is my boy. I am his father." Teddy replied: "Excuse me. We can all share this boy."

The washer beeps over and over when the cycle ends.  We removed the clothes but it kept beeping.  Teddy said, "We already taked it out, Washer!"

Where is your airplane going to sleep?  "He won't sleep. Pointing to it eyes, he said, "These are just stickers."

I'm playing hide and go seek.  Where's me?

Teddy, did you take a nap?  "Almost."

Sliding across the floor, "Excuse me, but my socks are very slipperdy."

Cottage cheese is disgusting for my mouth.

Nik was talking to Teddy about the real meaning of Christmas.  He asked him, "Do you know who the real King of the world is?"  And Teddy didn't miss a beat yelling, "Captain America!"

Mama went into the bathroom.  Teddy said, "You locked the door? But you're leaving me behind!"

Part 2

My sisters were better gift idea people.

Pauline gave my dad the gift-to-end-all-gifts once, a Polaroid land camera!  It was about the size of a bread box and weighed a good 5 pounds.  The magical thing about it was that it would develop a black and white photo in only 60 seconds, almost as unbelievable as a vehicle ever going 40 miles per hour.  I cannot find a good picture of it, but this gives you the idea:  
It took something like five or six steps from start to finish. A roll of film took 8 pictures and ran something like $1.00 a photo, a shocking price even in these days. Hopefully that camera is in a museum somewhere.  It was an amazing gift and could have been used as a dandy weapon if needed.

Another very nice gift Pauline gave my parents was a complete set of Cutco knives, circa 1960-ish. They were used several times a week for decades and looked as good as new after my parents passed.  I hope Pauline inherited them. They came in a dark brown color and were encased in a nice wooden case. Pauline knew how to buy good stuff and I think she was as happy about giving as the recipient was about getting, maybe even more.

Lorraine was more the artist giver.  She even painted a picture of Old Blue that hung in the "orange" bedroom for years.  My parents treasured a neat glass bird window hanging she gave them that shined beautifully in the sun on the west window.  It was very appropriate as that window was the one by the birdhouse my dad tended so faithfully.

Betty was the unique gift giver. I can't imagine how many hours she spent searching for near-one-of-a-kind gifts like the sand art in oil that gently followed gravity into an endless array of swishes.  It was as mesmerizing as watching a cobra dance, maybe more because there was no fear of dying painfully and immediately.

Another gift she gave them was an aqua-colored thing that had some aqua-colored oil essence in it.  You turned it upside down and big blue aqua bubbles dropped from the top, bubbles getting smaller and smaller and smaller as it shifted to the bottom.  We probably spent 100 hours of our lives studying that thing.  

On the table in the living room sat the piece de resistance, a temperature thing with more bubbles inside...kind of like this, only much fancier in recollection: 
I bought them a clock once, a white ship perched on the top, with an entire day's wages from substituting kindergarten.  As far as I know, none of us had ever been on a ship, but it had a wistfulness about it.  The only other ship thing in the house was a puzzle of a ship I put together that my parents framed and hung in their room. This from a girl who kept her eyes shut the entire time during the Perfect Storm movie and still had to stop on the way home to throw up.

The dumbest gift I probably ever gave them was a holstein cow toy. You put in some batteries under its stomach (yes, I know there are actually 4 stomachs in a cow and you would not believe how many times that has come up in trivia situations over the years), the cow would take four steps, stop, raise its head and MOO.  I can only imagine how excited my dad must have been to get a cow toy that actually talked.  I mean, seriously, he probably had tears in his eyes.

(The cow now sits in my curio but hasn't moo'd since the batteries died in the late 20th century.)

Gift Ideas

I've written before about my dad's monikered cows and his expertise with the flipper. What I've not mentioned is how gracious he was about gifts I gave him over the years.

Once as a kid, short on creativity, I asked my mother for a gift idea for Dad. She suggested handkerchiefs or carpenter pencils. Cowboys called them neckerchiefs. Motorcycle riders called them bandanas. Farmers called them handkerchiefs, and Dad was surely a farmer.

For probably ten years in a row my dad got either a blue or red handkerchief or a carpenter pencil from me for his birthday and Christmas, sometimes both. I remember wrapping the pencil inside a handkerchief even.  He always acted so surprised and so delighted, like he didn't have a stache of them all over the house and like he actually needed one that very day! Handkerchiefs lasted quite a long time even through weekly washing and ironing of the laundry. Sometimes they were even starched, though I can't think now why.

BUT, even if somebody went crazy with the knife used to sharpen those carpenter pencils by hand, they must have lasted virtually forever to a farmer. He might have found ways to use them twice a month tops. No doubt more time was spent sharpening them than using them to mark lines.  If he'd had time to think about it, he would probably have designed a small picket fence out of them.

Sorry, Dad, but thanks for being such a good sport.

But It Looks So Pretty in the Picture!

One of the banes of our existence on the farm in Clifton were thistles.  We hated few things more.  I never stepped on any but they pained me nonetheless.

Few things are less romantic than hearing your dad say, "Girls, grab a shovel; it's thistle-killin time!"  (He didn't have to mention it if there happened to be a random thistle here or there in the lawn or the yard. We just knew instinctively to go dig those up.  Chances were pretty high he'd already cleared up most of them, anyway.)  Kosha weeds, voles, rattlesnakes, scorpions, hailstorms, thistles...all four-letter words and all spoken of in the same tone of voice on the farm.

We would grab our shovels and head out to the pastures, walking like human horizontal stripes in a search party which, in fact, we were.  We walked about 8-10 feet apart, just far enough to be able to spot everything between and swing a step or two to dig it out hopefully to include the roots.  They didn't get too high but were fairly prolific.  You dug them out, flipped over the shovel and lay the plant upside down, root to the sun, so hopefully it would die-die. My suspicions are that the roots just laughed at us and shot out another tentacle, but that didn't stop us from trying.

I once wrote my parents a poem about thistles, but it would take me hours to find.

This morning I discovered that Scotland is partial to thistles.  In fact, they revere them much as Utah does Seagulls. There is even a chivalrous honor called "Order of the Thistle".  Apparently, centuries ago the notorious Vikings were trying to sneak up on the sleeping Scots and had to go barefoot due to the terrain.  The Scots may have been able to sleep due to the fact they had inside intelligence, i.e. the hills were alive with thistles which caused the sounds of musical Viking screams as they traversed thistle-covered mountain sides.  Not a bad ploy.