Snow Day

Well, here we are, home for another snow day.  Julia has spent much of the day doing Gallop Time and thinking about the imaginary Mintz family.  I started to wonder if the Mintz children had also swam at New Englands, and how they did.  After all, they have a tendency to do all of the same things that the Rowe family does (with some extras, like going to Hawaii.)

ME: Julia, how did the Mintz do at New Englands?
JULIA: (smiling self-consciously) Goooood.
ME: Who did the best?
JULIA: (irritated at my ignorance) They're all in different AGE groups!
ME: Oh.  Well, did Lilly Mintz win any medals?
JULIA: She won EVERYTHING.  She ALWAYS wins everything.

To clarify, I wanted to understand if Lilly literally won everything, or just won every event she swam in.

ME: So what did Lilly Mintz swim?
JULIA: She swam: the 200 freestyle, the freestyle relay, she swam the butterfly in the medley relay, she swam the 50 butterfly, and the 100 butterfly.

For an imaginary scenario, Julia sure sticks to some real-life rules.  At the championship events, swimmers are allowed to swim a maximum of three individual events and two relays.  If Lilly Mintz is as good as she sounds like she is, she undoubtedly qualified in many more events than the above listed.  Julia made sure not to take any liberties with the championship rules of her imaginary swimmers.

So while Julia is busy galloping and constructing new narratives for the Mintz, Madeleine is finding surprising new ways to completely weird me out.


MADELEINE: Mommy?  I *know* how...well, I wouldn't ever really DO this...but I *know*...well, I wouldn't do it because it's DISGUSTING, and...a little creepy...but I *know* how to make a DISCONNECTED brain get connected again.
ME: Oh yeah?  You do?  How?
MADELEINE: You just make this little TUBE things, and you put them back together.


Maybe she's destined to be a brain surgeon.  Or a pathologist, performing autopsies to study disconnected brains.  Or the first ever human to bring a living being back from brain-death by simply making these little tube thingies and putting them back together.