GOOGLE CHEESE

My friend's daughter 9-year old Isabelle turns on the computer, then gets a puzzled look on her face. "Dad, Mozzarella Firefox doesn't work." Her dad goes, "Sweetheart, you said Mozzarella." She does a double-take, then guffaws "Hahahaha, I said Mozzarella...! Mozzarella Firefox...! hahaha...!!...sigh..."

TOUGH HEELS

Nicolas remarked that he did not want to transfer to another school next year. I told him that his girl classmates will all be going to all-girls schools. I kidded him that he can join them as long as he wears a skirt as his school uniform. He reacted by saying, "Nah. I don't want to be a girl." And added, "I hate high heels."

HEAVEN & FIRE

Nicolas quote: "I don't want to die alone and go up to heaven. I want to die with my whole family."

- o -

During bedtime, the kids played a role-playing game of fireman. They used jackets and caps and got up from bed 7 times and pretended to put out fires around the house. Both kids experienced the hardship of getting up, putting on the jackets and caps and rushing to the pretend-fires every time the pretend-fire alarm went off. At the post-play discussion on the lives of firemen, 7-year old Savion asked, "What will happen if the fireman doesn't get up when the alarm goes off?" I answered that the fireman will probably get FIRED and probably lose his job. I explained that it was part of their job to get up and do their duties no matter how tired they were. Most workers who don't do their jobs usually get fired. The kids acknowledged that indeed, firemen are heroes. And after a few more questions, 4-year old Nicolas then asked, "Why do they BURN the fireman when he doesn't get up?"

NOW

I started jotting down short notes on my small notebook (the one with the paper with lines kept together by a white coil spring) sometime in 1996. And on April 8, 1996 I started jotting down these notes on my computer. The entry: "April 8, '96 Monday Back in shop. A lollipop. U2's "Stay" song." Nothing interesting there. Just things I considered as gifts or blessings or just something I wanted to remember. And everyday for the next decade I jotted down notes I felt was important to me for the day. I still used a notebook to jot down on the fly daily stuff since it is hard to remember at day’s end all the things that happened during the day. Then I ended up using a Palm II. Then I lost, on a system crash, a week’s worth of files. I went back to my small coil-held notebook for the next couple of years. Then a cell phone feature arrives, “Notes”. I have used this ever since to jot down my daily “ipisnippets”. IPIS for Insignificant Pieces of Information and Stories. SNIPPETS for snippets. By the way, Ipis means cockroach too. We don’t care for them yet they disrupt our lives once they make themselves aware to us. And as I heard somewhere, they’re the only creatures that will survive a nuclear holocaust. I’m blogging now to hopefully make my ipisnippets survive from system crashes and other modern digital disasters via the protection of Google Inc. Almighty.

NOW, I commit to “posting” / jotting down snippets, that I hope will, at the minimum, elicit a smile from my dearly beloved. I am particularly inclined to post children quips because these are the purest, funniest and loveliest. I will be sharing my children’s quips from this day onward. Occasionally, I will pull snippets from my decade worth of files where nephews’, nieces’, friend’s children’s quips, quotes, questions and stories have been graciously shared to me. I was planning to share these quips still years from now when the children are all grown up. But I guess NOW is the time to celebrate their youth. It is time to appreciate them today.

A wise philosopher once said, “To be truly a man (woman) we have to go back to our child’s heart.” Children’s thoughts, insights, questions and quotes will help us rediscover ours. From their purity we will rediscover and then recover.