This morning I was getting Jenny ready for school- the usual sheepdog-nipping-at-the-heels stuff of trying to leave on time. I raced out to the car, and Jenny tossed one of her hundreds of questions a day at me. “Can we repaint our house?’ she wanted to know.

“No sweetie,” I answered. “We have vinyl siding and the paint won’t stick.” “Well, can we just paint spots on it, like the house down the road?”

“No, honey. People don’t paint spots on their houses.” “Yes, they do.” “No, they don’t.”

It was about this time when she pointed and said, “Yes they do- LOOK!” And it was about this time that I nearly drove off of the road, because there, right in front of me, I saw

This isn’t a photoshopped picture- this is exactly what we saw. Jenny, at 10, had several different theories as to why the house looked the way it did. “The grandchildren were visiting, and they asked their grandparents if they could paint spots on the house, and the grandparents didn’t want to say no, so they did.”

“Or maybe the kids each wanted to paint the house a different color, and this is how they solved the problem.”

Each scenario described the children wanting to add sparkle to their lives, and the grandparents (all of Jenny’s have died) begrudgingly helping. The parents were not called on to act.

So what does that mean? Maybe it’s time for me to dust off my bubble wand. Or run through the sprinkler on the next warm day. Or spend 3 days hot-glue-gunning Mentos to dental floss so we could re-create the eepy-bird fountains:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RX4_OrRZa1g]

We never had so much fun before with diet soda, and I doubt we ever will again.

And that’s the thing: this moment you have now- that’s where you need to be happy, because you want to say, “I never had so much fun before, and I doubt I ever will again,” and mean it.

I wonder if paint CAN stick to vinyl siding?

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