Portrait of the artist as a birthday girl

So she's nine. N-I-N-E. And as precocious as ever. The night after her birthday she was reading her Cricket magazine and discovered that they had a poetry contest. Twenty minutes later she came downstairs and presented me with the following, which is even more striking when you see it in her little girl handwriting. I'm punctuating just as she did (except the italics):

The opposite of armadillo.
Why couldn't it be worm?
The opposite of still.
One answer could be squirm.
The opposite of acknowledge.
It could be learn.
The opposite of give away.
Why, that could be earn.
What's the opposite of opposite?
It could be synonym.
What's the opposite of walk?
If you wanted, swim.
Most things have opposites.
Why don't you look around?
Opposites are antonyms
Dark and bright, silence and sound.

I mean, really. How am I supposed to raise a child who can write better than I can at the age of nine? I love the illustrations she did the next day, too...

Emerging from hibernation

Yeah yeah, so there's been a little hiatus. Look, it's just started to get light enough for us to uncurl from our fetal positions in our dark Dutch grotto long enough to consider eating, much less blogging. Here's to the vernal equinox -- huzzah!

Living the life of leisure

We're staying at Grandma Barbara and Grandpa Bill's house on Van Bibber Lake for the holiday along with a fair complement of the family, and as always, we're managing to occupy our time. After getting showered with baby gifts yesterday (thanks so much everybody!!) and eating all the festive American holiday foods we could stand (mm, watermelon), today it was time to really relax. Jason brought his fishing gear and was kind enough to offer to teach his niece how to use it, so while Mom and Dad sat around chewing the fat with the relatives, Uncle Jason, Aunt Jennifer, and Aisie went down to the pond to try their hands at fishing the behemoths of the deep that reside in the pond over the dam.

I wasn't there to witness it, but Aislin was apparently a downright natural, casting well enough to put the adults to shame and catching a fish almost every time she tossed her line into the water. Here she demonstrates her form:

Good thing we've got uncles around to teach her the really important stuff.