"Duty is my new favorite word!"

In the past few days, Charlie Dot has fallen in love with the word "Duty". At first we thought she thought it was a funny way to refer to bathroom habits, but no, she just seems to like the word (as we have only used it in the sense of obligation). We have a collection of funny sounding words. My family will recognize that our list started with "rutabaga" and "kumquat". I don't think the girls exactly realize those are real words. Our list also includes "didgeridoo" and "heeby jeebies". Sammy at some point added "green dumpster". I think she just thought the list was arbitrary, but she still laughs when she hears the word. And now we have "duty". Peter told the girls a make-up story involving a man in the army (Johny) who was no good at anything (except marching... you can guess where that went), so he kept getting "duties" Kitchen duty, hole digging duty, hole filling duty... Charlie was delighted.
Charlotte also loves the song "Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious", though of course has considerable trouble with the words. The interlude between verses includes some nonsense "humdeedle dee dee Hum diddle eye..." Since it was nonsense anyway, Charlie just stuck in the word "Duty" for the heck of it.

On a completely unrelated note, here it is almost midnight, and instead of going to bed here I am. I blame the summer. While I have classes starting at 8 over the summer, but not until nine usually during the year, we have been letting the girls stay up a bit later. Their schedules are not so rigid. So by the time they are down for the night, and I can pick up some work or knitting in peace, I really ought to be going to bed. But I need my kid free time to unwind! What'll I do when their bed-times are later just because they are older?

Church today was interesting. I was helping serve communion, when we ran out. That's right, we ran out of communion. Now, for those not familiar with communion in the Lutheran church there are two important features I should note. We take bread and wine, but the bread is supposed to be unleavened (flat) because that was what was eaten at the passover. Secondly, unlike in other protestant churches, the communion is not seen as a symbolic gesture, but rather the bread and wine become holy after being properly blessed. With about a dozen people to go, there was no more bread, and dwindling wine. Someone ran off to find bread while the rest of us stood there for what seemed like forever. I thought perhaps there was a supply of unleavened bread that we had. No, apparently it is made each week. We couldn't just grab a few slices of sandwich bread. So when the person returned it was with... wait for it... apricot pound cake ( I think, but some kind of shortbread). Then the pastor did the VERY abbreviated blessing over the pound cake, and the last few people had probably the tastiest communion of their lives. (And we just barely stretched the wine). Too bad we weren't working with loaves and fishes!