Evan and Sage are big now, but they're still saying things.

Sage: "Eating these grapes is quenching both my hunger and my thirst."

Eric: "Hunger can't really be 'quenched.' It can be sated, or satiated."

Sage: "My need for English lessons has been quenched."

with the bathwater

Eric: "You were a good big brother from the beginning, Evan. I have a picture of you holding your new sister Sage on the day she was born."

Evan: "Yeah, but I was kind of tempted to throw her out the window."

Sage: "That is both offensive and funny."

egg hunt

Evan: "Who do you think will be the first woman president?"

Eric: "I don't know. Maybe Hillary Clinton."

Evan: "Do you think Bill Clinton will have a lot of power?"

Eric: "Probably not a lot of power."

Sonja: "But he'll certainly enjoy being back in the White House."

Evan: "Yeah, like, 'Here's where I hid that deviled egg at that party. Man, that was a terrible deviled egg. Hey, it's still here!'"

coddling criminals

"I'm taking out the lava pits and putting in a playground." -- Evan, redesigning his prison on the computer game Minecraft

highlight reel

Sage scored twice in this morning's b-ball game. Here she is moving well without the ball and knocking down the open jumper. (Warning: if you're not a blood relative of Sage's, this is 39 seconds of your life you'll never have back.)

fighting for peace

Evan: "Here's what a hippie-crite says: 'If you don't use non-violent methods, I'll kill you.'"

noise complaint

Evan: "Will you please make Sage stop singing not-very-good gibberish?"

the most dangerous game

Evan: "If I score a goal on a header, you're going to have a smile so big it's going to split your face."

the trouble with self-evaluations

"It's perfectly perfect." —Sage, when asked to assess the job she'd done cleaning her room.

keeping up our front

Evan: "Man, Sage left crud all over this front porch."

Eric: "She certainly did."

Evan: "You should tell her that any toys she leaves out on the porch are going to get thrown away."

Eric: "I'm not sure you should be talking. You leave stuff lying around all the time."

Evan: "Yeah, but I leave it lying around inside, not out here where all of society can see it."

i believe him

Eric: "Did you shampoo, Evan?"

Evan: "Yes, with Ocean Breeze shampoo scented with sea algae extract."

and he approved this message

Evan (overheard playing with Legos by himself): "So today, kids, we learned a valuable lesson: Always wear pants." "That's a totally worthless lesson!" "Fine. Today we learned a valuable lesson: You should never travel through other dimensions. But if you do, always make sure to improve a dimension before you leave it."

fall fashions

The ultimate nightgown: Daddy's t-shirt.

Evan in his element.

pony tales

Sage: "... And then one of the ghost investigators got slapped by an unseeable horse!"

Evan (sighing): "No he didn't. He got slapped by an unseen force."

it occurred to me

that one reason I'm posting less frequently is that the things Evan now says tend to sound like this: "Want to hear the list of things I need? At the top is an infrared illuminator. Then I need a four-pin-by-six-pin firewire cable. And then I need, probably, a good external microphone. And I'm NOT waiting until Christmas."

straight and narrow

Evan: "If cars ran on railroad tracks, high-speed police chases would be a lot less interesting."

me too

Evan: "I feel kind of sorry for balloons that people let go of."

job description

Eric: "Did Grandma Sue get you a new Lego set?"

Evan (assembling a new Lego set): "Yep. She's a grandma. And that's pretty much the classic grandma personality: love you and get you stuff."

is it too much to ask?

Evan: "Here's something else that I want from the future: underwear that puts itself on."

my horoscope

Sage: "Tomorrow you're going to get pelted with eggs."

Eric: "Oh no."

Sage: "The only problem is, that's true."