Agreeable

Things that have made me grin recently:

• Watching the movie Wordplay with John. What good, nerdy fun. I try my hand at the occasional crossword puzzle, but I've never invested any time in becoming any good at solving them. (I'm a big fan of Will Shortz's puzzle on Weekend Edition though.) I especially enjoyed the bits about how the crosswords are made and found myself just grinning with delight at the whole thing.

• Hannah telling me at breakfast: "I'm just not a cereal person, mom." Because neither am I.

• Knowing that we are going to get to spend a day in San Francisco with our dear friends and their sweet little boy who can count to nine (or is it six?) at the end of the week. And knowing that Jonah, who is working on another of his darn colds will be all better by then.
  

• Hannah's teacher showing me a spelling "test" where Hannah spelled every single word correctly except for her own name (which she has been able to spell and write perfectly since she was 2.5 years old, by the way).

• Speaking of spelling, I kind of grinned at the argument Hannah and I had recently over how to spell letters. How do you spell "D" anyway? And why does "W" start with a d sound if you don't spell it that way? (More good, nerdy fun.)

• Happening to be listening to the radio when Elizabeth Crane's story "Football" was on Selected Shorts. I dug around and found it so that I could share it with John; it's the second story on the show.

• The way Jonah said of his imaginary friends: "They're going to the ocean desert for a picnic". Some of us might call it a beach, but I find that ocean desert has a certain undeniable allure (though I don't know whether this turn of phrase originates in my young son's awareness of how much global warming might change the planet during his lifetime).