Dinner with Jenny, Les and Aaron

We got to have a lovely local farm dinner with my oldest sister Jenny, her husband Les, and our six-year-old nephew Aaron. Their African Grey parrot Ashley joined the conversation, but didn't creep Biff out this time by asking "Do you know how to whisper?" in the dark. The whole time I was watching Aaron, thinking about what having a boy of that age will be like. It seems we are in for some hilarity. When we arrived he was super excited to show us some fish that he had caught that day fishing with his dad. As we were leaving, he invited Biff to go fishing, including in the details that "the boat holds three people. My dad sits in the front and I sit in middle, so you can sit in the back." We had brought him for his birthday (which was in February-oops we were late) some of these crystals that grow when you add a powder to warm water. We were pleased to find out that he was really into them, so much so that he coupled it with another favorite activity, calling people on the cellphone. He called his brother Ben in California to tell him "Ben! We have some rocks and they're growing!" before tearing back off to watch them again. Later in the conversation, I prodded him to talk about his new future cousin, which would make six. He told us, "Yeah, six cousins, but only two of them are good at Super Mario!" My all-time favorite Aaron story is from a year ago when I pointed out an old baby picture of him and asked rhetorically (which I guess doesn't work with a five-year-old?) "How cute were you?" His response: "REALLY cute. At the baseball game everyone was trying to talk to me." Loved it.

The other big success of the night was discovering crewel, which is this crazy embroidery from the 70's that comes in kits. It's totally awesome and I thought it would be easy to track down on eBay. Not the case, the (few) ones that aren't kittens, religious and/or Thomas Kinkade-esque are snatched up. And there is only one contemporary kit and it makes only 3x3 squares. Jenny found hers at the thrift shop, but she has that kind of luck. I'm still searching though.