Beautiful Bugs

I was at the computer this weekend and Jen and Lily were picking out clothing to wear. Lily couldn't find what she wanted. I heard her voice float over. Words in all caps indicate whining:  I WISH you would SORT my clothes by ITEM!
Later on, she was ticking off which fantasy characters are real. "Belle, Ariel, Cinderella," (because she had met women playing the princesses at Disney)  "...and Elmo." because apparently she saw him at a restaurant or something. That's terrifying. I don't want to live in a world where Elmo is real!
Also, we were outside last night and she saw something she thought was a bee.

Lily: Ah! What's that?!

Me: A fly.

Lily: What do they do?

Me: They fly

Lily: Are you sure they don't bite?

Me: No, they're just a little gross.

Lily: (thinks) I think they're beautiful, with their fluttering wings and little black bodies.

Me: Uhh...

Lily: I think they're cuter than Baby Bear.

She is definitely her mother's daughter. The reason we were outside was because she was collecting materials for her "bug nest."

She was reading a Winnie the pooh choose your own adventure which they had borrowed from preschool for last night's bedtime story. I had never even imagined that such a thing existed, but how cool is that?

This is what Josh thinks is cool

I loved CYOA books when I was a kid! The guy on this page mapped all the possible outcomes for the books and provides some really interesting insights into the books and how they evolved.

Wikipedia has a list of all the CYOA type books and it is huge!

The List

And one more thing. I often listen to podcasts of different NPR shows when walking (like other cool people do) and yesterday, I'd been listening to an episode of This American Life. The topic was "The Fine Print", and the Ira Glass opened the show by talking about the famous clause in Van Halen's contract, that they were to be provided with a bowl of M&M's with all the brown ones removed. If you've heard the story, you probably reacted the same way I did, "I'm not sure it that's really true, but if it is, what a bunch of assholes."

However, when talking to John Flansburgh of They Might Be Giants, and he explained to Ira that he was reading the rider all wrong. It was because they played in a lot of sketchy venues, and they had some pretty specific demands for power supplies and load bearing capacity. Per Wikipedia: According to David Lee Roth, this was listed in the technical portion of the contract not because the band wanted to make capricious demands of the venue, but rather as a test of whether the venue had actually read and honored the terms of the contract, as it contained other requirements involving legitimate safety concerns. On earlier tours, inadequate compliance by local organizers to the safety requirements of the rider had placed members of Van Halen's road crew in danger which was occasionally life-threatening. Because of these incidents, the band developed the M&M's demand as a means of checking whether the venue was properly honoring the terms of the contract to their satisfaction. Subsequently, if the bowl was missing, or if there were brown M&M's present, they had reason to suspect that the venue might not have honored legitimate technical and safety concerns within the contract. As a result, the band would be within their rights to inspect the technical side of the performance prior to going on stage, and/or request the venue redo their work properly

(Snopes also has an amusing anecdote about it in their article.)

We're all looking forward to Easter and I'll be sure to blog about that when it's done.