Nutella and the Exercise Ball

Today's picture is another special guest appearance by Sparkle Girl.

Mr. Doobins believes in starting his day with a treat. Many days, that is milk with Ovaltine, or Ovaltine Milk, as he calls it. (He calls plain milk Pure White Milk.)

If the cupboard has other treat possibilities, he may choose something more extravagant, such as M&M's topped with a Hershey's Kiss.

Recently, Garnet rediscovered the hazelnut-and-chocolate spread that goes by the name of Nutella. So, these days, that is often one of the possibilities.

Mr. Doobins likes Nutella quite a bit.

The other morning, he came into the kitchen and said to Garnet, "I want some Nutella. Nutella would make me happy."

Garnet, who told me the story later, said that something about the way he said it struck her the wrong way, and she embarked on a lecture that included such memorable lines as "We eat food to support our bodies, not to support our emotions."

Mind you, this is a woman who routinely starts her day by taking a spoon laden with Nutella, dipping it into her morning coffee, licking away the outer layer, sighing contentedly and repeating the process until the spoon is bare.

Garnet freely admits that she got carried away. As she confessed later, "I gassed off for a good long while."

To no avail apparently. Garnet said that, when she was done, Doobins looked at her and said, "Momma, I don't know what you're talking about. Could I have some Nutella?"

She gave it to him.

I, too, have been doing a bit of bootless lecturing.

After Garnet's back went out, we got her one of those exercise balls so that she could sit on it and do gentle movements designed to make things better.

The kids treat it like a toy. They like to roll across the top of it and do assorted stunts. Where they see fun, I see reckless maneuvers that could mean cracked heads.

So, time and again, I have been calling a stop to the action to issue a stern lecture about the importance of taking care when playing on the ball. The time that Sparkle Girl's head came within inches of the edge of a desk that could have smashed her front teeth prompted a particularly heated one.

I'm not reaching my audience.

When I checked in on Garnet from work the other day, she said that, after playing on the ball for quite some time, Sparkle Girl had said, "I like to play on the ball as much as I possibly can when Kim is not here because he doesn't yell at me nearly as much when he's not here."

Blueberries

For today's picture, we have a special guest appearance by Sparkle Girl. She drew this picture of fruit as a present for her teacher in the summer-enrichment program in Spanish that she took.

And today's post is a special guest appearance by Tom Krissak. He sent this in after reading a story about picking blueberries that I wrote for the "Winston-Salem Journal."

Here's Mr. Krissak:

"When our daughter was born, she was only 4.5 lbs. She was so small that one of our friends suggested we use Cabbage Patch Kids outfits for her until she got a little bigger."

"She was only about two weeks old when we went blueberry picking, and took her with us. She fell asleep just as we got to the fields. We discussed various options, and wound up with me hooking my bucket to my belt and holding my daughter (who didn't wake up when taken out of her car seat) in one arm while I picked with the other."

"We had put a large floppy hat on her to protect her from the sun. Since we were after two varieties of berries, my wife went one way and I went another. Shortly after I started picking, two older women came down the path and started picking near me."

Suddenly they moved past me and went quite a ways down the row, away from me. I noticed that they continued to look in my direction frequently, and didn't pay much attention to it until my daughter woke up and let out a little cry."

"As I moved her around to put her against my shoulder, I heard one of the women say 'Oh my gosh!! That's a real baby!! I thought he was holding a Cabbage Patch doll!!'"

"I can't think about blueberry picking without wondering what kind of weirdo those women must have thought I was!"