I'll shimmer and I'll shimmer and I'll blow your house up

I have to work today but because I work from home and my children are now 11 and 8 1/2, I don't have to make provisions for them. They do their own thing. Every little while I assemble a snack for them and remind them to eat, eat like a good mother -- then run back upstairs to sit at my desk and think and type like a good employee.

My son is singing. He's playing Minecraft and watching YouTube videos of other people playing Minecraft and he also must be watching the Minecraft parody for the song DJ Got Us Falling in Love Again, or else he's watched it often enough that he can belt out the song without a prompt: Baby tonight the creeper's going to steal our stuff again...

The YouTube parodies are funny. My son didn't know they were parodies until he asked me to watch the videos with him and I noticed the flag in the title and then we went around listening to the originals, both of us declaring the parodies much better. The other night he (with assistance from his little sister) invented his own parody, not of a song but of a certain well-known fairy tale, which begins, "Once upon a time there were three little Steves. The first little Steve made a house of mud. The second little Steve made a house of wood. The third little Steve made a house of bedrock. One day the creeper came along and said, 'I'll shimmer and I'll shimmer and I'll...'"

My daughter is making bracelets. She made one for her best friend and one for me and now she's down by the TV, listening to the Kratt Brothers with half an ear as she makes another. The bracelet kit was a gift from my mother, and it includes enough parts that Sasha believes she can make a bracelet for every female she knows. She's generous that way: always making things for other people. Two days after Christmas we had some friends over for dinner, and while Blake played with their three boys, Sasha -- who found the boys too rowdy for her taste, I think -- made their mother a little purse from felt and yarn. 

Well, well. I am supposed to be working, not blogging. I need to validate a fix that one of the programmers made this morning. So, ok! Off I go!