It's not funny!

Sometimes Rachel thinks she's hilarious but, very much like my little brother Patrick, these are often the times she's not very funny at all. For example, she thinks bonking her head into my collarbone is gut-wrenchingly comical. She'll do it over and over again and expect me to laugh. The only thing is, I don't find it funny.

She also thinks that pretending to burp or cough is funny. Sometimes it is, sometimes it isn't.

When she's really funny, though, is when she isn't trying to be cute or funny. She's really funny when she's just being herself (which is when Patrick is also his best comedian-self).

Yesterday we were at the Lewis' still and we made macaroni and cheese for dinner. The kids were all rather excited. I think this was only Rachel's first or second exposure to mac'n'cheese, at least the boxed kind, and she loved it. The only problem was, we only made one box.

We should have known better, but in our defense it was family-sized.

We scooped some out for each of the kids, some of whom voraciously gobbled their helping and ignored their carrots (and later learned they should have eaten their vegetables first), and others who nibbled on theirs between bites of carrots saving the "best" for last (that's what we call smart). Rachel didn't get carrots because she chews them up and spits them out, which I find exceedingly nasty. I let her try one every now and then just to see if she has changed her mind about them, but she always just does the same thing: chews it to a pulp and then spits it out.

She never swallows her carrots and I don't understand why because if she can keep one in her mouth long enough to chew it to a pulp then obviously the taste/texture can't be that offensive to her so why doesn't she just finish the job and swallow already?

Anyway, soon everyone had finished their noodles and were vying for more, so Andrew went to make another box. Rachel kept asking for more and asking for more and asking for more and my answer was always the same,

"Just wait. Daddy's making more."

Eventually the need for cheese got to her. She picked up her plate and started licking it, which is kind of a traditional thing to do in the house I grew up in. It was a pink plastic plate and translucent enough that we could see her face through the dish. And she wasn't really holding the dish still and methodically licking it clean with her tongue. Oh, no.

She plastered the plate to her face, her two little hands smashing it up against her nose. She was smearing it all around, the whole time her tongue lolling out of her mouth. And she was making little noises like, "Ahhhllllaaallllaaahhhaalllahhh."

I don't know what happened, but suddenly everything else stopped and all 12 eyes in the room (mine and 5 other kids) were on Rachel. We stared at her for a minute and simultaneously cracked up laughing.

If Rachel could talk in complete sentences she would have wailed, "It's not funny!" And if she could have gotten off the chair by herself she probably would have stormed out of the room. But she was stuck in her chair and she can't really talk in complete sentences yet. So, struggling to communicate with words, what with the tremendous pressure of a whole room laughing at her, instead of talking, she growled.

"Grrrrrrrrraaaawr!"

And then she screamed.

"WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA!!!"

And she was pretty much broken for the next hour or two. Her pride was seriously injured, poor girl, but it was just so funny!