Claire has been pretty into making a “heart” shape with her hands like this lately.
She’ll spring it on you. Suddenly there’s just this heart-shaped hand in front of you, and it’s like “whoa!” and she wants you to complete the heart. 😆 Apparently I’m the worst at it. Claire’s like “That’s so ugly, Dad!” 😂
With Claire off at a camp, I had Molly to myself tonight. We stopped by Wataburger at her special request and took it for a picnic on the way home.
At the Whataburger, Molly launched two riddles at me.
The first was “Are there more wheels or doors?” I asked, “Do you mean, like, in the whole world?”. “Yep!” she said.
Looking out at the parking lot and street, I initially said, “It’s got to be wheels.” But Molly pointed out that while every car has four wheels, it has four doors too. And the office building across the streets easily had hundreds of doors. And cabinets. Also, something about legos. 🤷🏻♂️
I was convinced. Doors it is!
At the park, Molly asked if water is wet.
Again, my initial instinct was wrong. 😆. “Of course it’s wet. It’s water.” After some discussion and demonstrations on the picnic table and sidewalk, we decided that water is not wet because “wet” describes a liquid sticking to a solid. Since water is already a liquid, it cannot be wet.
We googled it and found that “Liquid water is not itself wet, but can make other solid materials wet.” 🤯
Finally, I attempted to “get” Molly with the Dichotomy Paradox, which basically says that in theory, you can never walk from one point to another because no matter how far you go, you always still have halfway to go. 🤷🏻♂️ Real-world experiments showed that this is obviously false in the real world but true in math. Hmm. 🤔
Anyways, it was fun goofing around talking philosophical 💩 with Molly on this beautiful spring evening.
Here’s a picture of Claire and Molly at an evening picnic we had the other day.
Check the thoughtful looks on their faces. They must have been having a deep moment. 🤓
Eeyore’s Birthday Party is a festival that takes place every spring at Pease Park. The festival includes live music, costumes, food, and drum circles — lots of drum circles. It is a longstanding “Keep Austin Weird” type of event, starting way back in 1963, and it benefits local nonprofits.
This year we finally decided to go check out Eeyore’s Birthday Party since it is right in our neighborhood. People literally park their cars in front of our house to walk to the party. So we decided to walk down ourselves to Pease Park, a place we have long gone to play on the swings, explore in the woods, and play soccer. The park has even entered our family lexicon.
When we got there, Claire was shocked. Her nice, quiet neighborhood park was suddenly loud, smokey, and full of hippies. Claire hated it. She wanted to leave almost immediately. What did these people do to our nice park? She declared that it was “weird and hot” and “hot and weird.” I told her that the hippies were keeping Austin weird and that they were all about peace and love, which Claire is also all about. Claire said they are not about peace and love. They are ruining her nice, peaceful park.
“This is the opposite of Pease Park. It’s loud and smelly. Can we leave now?”
We made the rounds, enjoying some drum circles and a cold drink. We watched the police ignore all the pot smoking. Molly, for her part, seemed to enjoy the festival. We assured a concerned Claire that the park was not ruined forever, and that it would be restored to its original state within a couple of days.
Next week at this time, Molly will be back to playing soccer right where the may pole is now, and Claire can come along and enjoy the peace and quiet. But not today. Let the hippies have their fun for a day.
McG Kids 