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Giuwels begins a sentence to me one morning with the words, "Fifteen years ago when I was four...." She is currently 5.

Giuwels asks me, "You know what's scary?" What? "The house of a nudist!" (She is trying to say The House of Anubis, which is a teen thriller TV show on Nickelodeon that she's seen commercials for, and has scared her half to death.)

Michael runs upstairs wearing socks, gym shorts, no shirt but a thick red flannel jacket, a beanie, and carry an Indiana Jones style whip that he has just discovered in the vast caverns of stuff that fill his room. He spends the next 15 minutes violently whipping the air for the entertainment of me and Vinny (and trying not to accidentally whip himself in the face, which, unfortunately, happens a few times. Michael informs us, "Now you can see why the job of whipping would be dangerous!").

Later, Recycle Boy makes an appearance. Recycle Boy fights pollution, runs in slow motion, and can even levitate--which provides no end of laughter for much of the evening.

One day, while leaving the park, Vinny threw his shoe into someone's backyard. He was trying to knock a pine cone out of a tree for Giuwels, but that didn't happen. We knocked at the front door for a few afternoons, hoping they'd let us go out back and get the shoe. No one was ever home, so finally, Cheryl suggested we jump the fence. Vinny had arrived home that day with a canister of neon yellow slime called "Atomic Goo" which he had made in school. He fitted this into the front of a rolled up old pizza box, and we stormed the backyard with an Atomic Goo Gun! Sadly, the shoe was gone. We left a note on the man's door, and later he called and told me in an exasperated voice that he'd thrown the shoe away and that he found all kinds of stuff thrown into his backyard by kids, and could he really be expected to keep all of it??? I suppose not.

Last Friday, the two fish died. Squirt and Shamu, may the rest in peace. The circumstances of their death are, forgive the pun, fishy. It is believed that Giuliana accidentally killed them by either transferring them into chlorine water or flooding them with Ammo-lock (a solution that, in small amounts, makes tap water safer for them but, in large amounts, may prove fatal). We literally watched the fish die, as they slowly turned on their backs, fought less and less vigorously for life, and eventually sank to the bottom of their tank. Horrified, I changed their water as soon as we realized what was happening, did everything I could think of to save them, but it was too late. I was devastated; took it far worse than the kids did. Vinny said, with the wisdom and resignation of someone much older than 8, "Well, fish don't last forever, Carolyn." Ah, not much lasts forever, but thank God for the few, precious things that do.

Hopefully, we will buy new fish soon.