Me: Where is your niceness?

C: I left it in the car.

*

Me: (during a lecture on behavior) Do you have manners?

C: Not a lot of them.

*

Me: What happened to all the brownies?

D: Um, I had to feed them to the super-Carnotaurus.

C: Raaaar.

*

C spent about half an hour tonight cutting up construction paper into small pieces, and informed me he was going to leave them under his pillow so the Tooth Fairy would think they were teeth and leave him “lots and lots of quarters”. D was gung-ho for this plan, although he did try to convince C that he needed to cut in tooth-shaped pieces instead of the efficient squares and rectangles he was making, but C was unconcerned. Apparently he doesn’t think much of the Tooth Fairy’s powers of observation.

Totally looks like teeth, right? Right?

I told my mom about this scheme, and she said, laughing, “They have larceny in their hearts!”

*

They also spent most of the afternoon with one of them on the top bunk in their bedroom and the other on the floor, trying to make a “Shamu rocket ship” (a toy orca in a cup) fly to Pluto (one of the remaining planets in the solar system that hangs from their ceiling. Neptune died a sad death a few months ago, and Mercury is pretty banged up). D was very exasperated that the rocket ship didn’t make it past Saturn and kept bouncing off the closet door.