His turn

My son turned the table on us tonight.

Instead of me reading to him, he read to us -- two stories: "A List" and "Dragons and Giants" out of Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad Together.

Happy birthday MLK

"Mom. Did you know..." my son said from the backseat of our car. From the tone in his voice, I could sense what he was going to tell me was important.

"...that they used to have signs on the water fountains that said for whites only? And only white people could drink the water?" We reflected, in 6-year-old terms, how silly that was.

"And they didn't have enough seats on the buses and white people took all of the seats and black people had to sit in back?" my son continued. "...And there was this one woman, I forgot her name, who was really really tired and she sat down?"

"Rosa Parks," I said, helping him remember the Martin Luther King lesson he had learned in school.

Horse parts

"Horse parts," the manifest read on the box from Japan.

"I hope it's not the head," I joked with my husband as he opened the box. Images of the Godfather played through my head, while my son eagerly helped unwrap the contents.

"I think he uses a translator program," my husband said of his benefactor. Inside was a pair of stirrups a Samurai had used.