Call It What You Want...

Oh when the six
Go Marching Eight
Oh when the six go marching eight
Oh I don't know the number
When the six go marching eight

Is it a surprise to say that Mark has become an expert at manipulating his brother?

Adam has a toy that Mark would really like to play with. Adam isn't interested in parting with it -- until...

Mark offers another toy, often something that is special to him in some way (example: Doggy). "Here you go," he tells Adam in a super-sugary voice.

Adam accepts the offered toy, sometimes (but not always) setting down the original item. Sometimes Adam even offers the wanted item to Mark.

Mark accepts the toy graciously and goes off to play with his new acquisition.

Adam thinks he really scored a deal with whatever he now has.

How long until Mark learns to say, "Trade-able?"

This is borrowed from Heather in law's blog... enjoy...

The Big Read is an NEA program designed to encourage community reading initiatives. They've come up with this list of the top 100 books, using criteria they don't explain, and they estimate that the average adult has only read 6 of these. (See below) So, we are encouraged to:

1) Look at the list and bold those we have read.
2) Italicize those we intend to read.
3) Underline the books we LOVE
4) Reprint this list in our own blogs

I fear that my family -- and that reaches to include Heather-in-law, and just about everyone else who reads this blog -- has read many more than the "average" six. (I've read 37, I think, if I counted correctly.) How about you? You can comment here how many you've read, and which ones I should plan to read next...

Updated: A comment on friend Mary Beth's blog filled us in on the actual origin of this list:

"This list appears to have come from England, in 2007, as part of a survey they do for 'World Book Day' (I didn't know there was such a thing. I want the day off for it next year. It's March 5th in England next year, 4/23 everywhere else?) It was from a British survey of 'Top 100 Books You Can't Live Without.'

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare -- well, not complete ...
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveler's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

(Sung to the tune of "I Have Decided to Follow Jesus")

Simple Simon, Don't you worry
Simple Simon, Don't you worry
Simple Simon, Don't you worry.
No Turning back, no turning back

The curb machine came through on Thursday, extruding perfectly shaped curbs right along the way. The boys watched. You can see Adam's construction equipment; Mark also had machinery in hand.

Snacks in hand make waiting for the equipment to arrive much more exciting.

Friday morning the concrete mixers were back to pour the base of the driveway, bright and early, as you can tell from the shadows. Adam stood close enough to them at the driveway a couple doors down that he had some tiny splatters of concrete on his t-shirt.

Yeah, Mom, all this construction is fun stuff!

I mean, really, could it be more exciting? (This is down the block.)

Actually, it could be more exciting.

Adam didn't manage a smile because he had an arm around his neck. But it was very very exciting. And fun.

These construction guys are super!

Who says having your driveway closed and the curb torn up in front of your house is an inconvenience?

I mean, having all the roads except one twisty dark isolated road between here and the Prairie closed, that's inconvenient. But our own street? Now that's just stinkin' exciting.

Today we watched the milling machine tear out a little more curb and a little roller exactly the size of the ditch the milling machine cut roll out the rest, and then we saw them load both onto a giant flatbed truck. We sat outside for about an hour before breakfast even.

I just don't understand why everyone groans when they hear "road construction" on our street.

As if the earlier pictures from today weren't enough...

Yep, that's Mark, though he told me later, rather regretfully, that the driver didn't start the engine for him.

Adam got a turn, too.

This was the backhoe that was tearing out the last two feet of our driveway for the new curb to come in. We watched the whole job. And Mark and Adam got to "help". This was only after the backhoe driver offered. And I wasn't loudly saying, "Boy it sure would be nice if they would let you sit in their construction equipment..."

by the way, to the right of the cab in Mark's picture you can see where we're parking our cars for now... That's our van waaaaaay off in the distance...

This week I got a hit on my blog for "Buttonwood Drive Noblesville Construction", so, just in case you try again, let me oblige.

Last week, the boys set up camp on the porch with snacks to watch while the crews did curbs on the other side of the street.

Now it's our turn. Bright and early this morning (they started just next door), they were tearing out the curbs right in front of our house! Naturally, we let the boys get up early to see it.

(Did I mention it was right here where we could stand and watch?)

The boys were very excited to see the machine tearing up the curb and dumping the pieces into the dump truck. The dump truck backed up, too, beeping as it did. That, too, was exciting!

What an exciting way to start the day (even for Doggy)!

Please, someone, tell me what you get if you dial "0044" from your home phone in Noblesville, IN?

It was this morning; the boys had finished breakfast and were playing nicely while I quickly checked email and blogs and stuff before we made a little trip to the Prairie.

Some idiot had left the phone on the end table. (That would be me, I'm afraid.) I didn't remember it was there; I try to put them back in the chargers when I'm done with them.

Suddenly, I heard Mark giggle very loudly. Then I heard a woman's recorded voice speaking in another language. Maybe Spanish. I didn't listen long enough to try to translate.

Not only had Adam retrieved the phone, he had dialed numbers (0044, to be exact) and pressed the "Speaker" button for maximum fun.

Military school?

A very large box?

I'm open to suggestions (beyond the obvious, which is, idiot, put the phone away!).

U.K. readers, can you enlighten me? I found this website which might answer the question... or not...