After what seems like a lot of years, I am almost finished
writing the memoir about our family when our children were young. I have
collected material which I did not use in the book and saved it in a file named
“Memoir Notes Leavings.” That doesn’t sound very appetizing, but I’ll share some
with you.
February 23, 1999: Last night, Sarah was with me in my
room, and I was lying on the bed. She asked, "Why do you lay around all
the time? I think you're the lazy one." Then she redeemed herself by
saying, "But I guess you're just tired from doing all that
housework."
Rebecca just read me a story about a slave girl. The girl
was washing potatoes, and it said that she washed them as carefully as if she
were washing a newborn baby. Then it said that she cut out the eyes with a knife,
and Rebecca said, "But you wouldn't do that with a newborn."
March 11, 1999: Last night, Sarah stopped Murray as he
was walking through the house and said, "Hug me! You never stop to hug
me!" So he did.
March 15, 1999: This evening Murray was talking to Sarah about
the (artificial) flowers she gave her long-term substitute teacher. He asked if
she liked them, and Sarah said yes. "She said she'll keep them forever. Maybe
they'll be some of the flowers they put on her grave."
March 16, 1999: The other day Sarah looked out the back
door and saw one of the shoes we have out on the deck. "That must be a
shoe," she said, "but it sure looks like a frog."
March 18, 1999: I was reading to the kids this morning,
and we came across the word lunatic. They asked what that meant, and I said it
meant someone who's crazy. Caleb said, "I thought it meant someone who's
in the government."
March 26, 1999: We have told Benjie not to throw down his
cup or to throw his toys out of his bed so much that any time we ask him where
anything is, he says, "No, no, no." Yesterday morning I couldn't find
Sarah, so I asked, "Benjie, where's big Sissy?" He answered,
"No, no, no." I wondered what he'd done with her.
The other day we were eating lunch at Grandma Mumberger's
house when suddenly Sarah said, "I wish we could turn our brain off
sometimes; it hurts to think all the time."
We passed by some statues made of junk by the road the
other day that we've passed before, a tin man, a dinosaur, and so-on. Murray
said written on the dinosaur was: "I love people." One of the
children, probably Sarah, asked, "To eat, or visit?"
April 12, 1999: Murray took some of the kids to Walmart
the other day. When they'd been gone a long time Sarah asked if she could sit outside
and wait for them. "I have a mind that keeps me from being bored, so don't
worry," she told me.
April 16, 1999: The other day I told Ping-Hwei we were
buying bagels from the bread store, not Walmart. He said, "Walmart is too
expensive."
Sarah was eating something the other day, and she said,
"When we eat something, does Jesus taste it too? And if we don't like it,
does He think it tastes bad, and if we do like it, does He think it tastes
good?"
Last week, Ping-Hwei saw a golf equipment commercial on
TV, and he asked if there would be golf in Heaven. Murray told him to ask Nick, so we did. (Nick
is a golf enthusiast at church.)
