Where's Daaaaddy?

This afternoon we we talking about different fabrics because Miriam has become obsessed with textiles. She is constantly inspecting what everyone's wearing and declaring whether it's stockinette or garter or cable or jersey or satin or woven or...

She happened to have on a satin skirt and was telling us about how the weave is looped over the weft in a certain way and...things like that. Satin feels silky, but is not silk. 

This led to Andrew explaining what he'd recently learned about silkworm factories. Apparently they boil/kill the silkworms in order to harvest the silk without damaging the fibers (because the silkworms chew a hole through their cocoon in order to exit). It's a little controversial these days (though, to be fair, silkworm soup is a...byproduct...so it's not as if all the silkworms go to waste...I guess). Enough silkworms are left alive to mate, and then the process starts all over again (since silkworms have evolved to be 100% dependent on humans for their survival—they can't find food, they can't fly, their only instinct is to mate, and then they die).

Sharing all of this sparked Andrew's knowledge about shrimp eyestalk ablation. Apparently farming shrimp in high density tanks leads to delayed sexual maturation of female shrimp, but breeders found out that female shrimp that had an injured eye developed their ovaries more quickly than their eyeball-intact counterparts. So...they started blinding these poor shrimp in one eye to force them into reproducing earlier than they would have otherwise. This increases the yield of the shrimp, in theory driving down the price of shrimp, which I guess is an okay thing (not that I eat shrimp). Recent research has shown, however, that eye ablation is not necessary to increase reproduction—a change in diet and/or male to female ratio can also hasten maturity—and may, in fact, lead to more diseased offspring. 

Anyway, we spent a few minutes in the kitchen joking around with one eye closed and talking like pirate shrimp...because that's sometimes what parenting teenage kids is like, right? 

Fast forward to dinner and then through dinner to the point where we're mostly finished eating but are still chatting away about our usual topics of conversation that stem from (1) what did you learn (in church and/or in school) today? and (2) what was your favourite part of the day? We hear a lot of weird and wonderful things this way. 

Phoebe—painted from head to toe in guacamole—was beginning to feel restless in her highchair, so I started making faces at her and she started laughing at me (because I'm hilarious). And then Andrew joined in from across the table. She wasn't laughing at him (because he's not funny). 

Just kidding.

She wasn't laughing at him because although he was opening his mouth wide at her, he wasn't closing his eyes first. See, I had been closing my eyes and pinching my mouth shut and then opening my eyes and mouth wide at the same time. This is funny. 

Andrew was just...randomly opening his mouth at her. Not funny.

So he decided to escalate things by hiding from her.

He scooched his chair back a little ways and then bent down to hide. I thought he was going to crouch right below the horizon of the table, but he didn't. He stopped with his head still clearly visible...and then he closed one eye.

"Where's Daddy?" he asked. 

Phoebe stared at him. 

"Wheeeeeere's Daddy?" he asked again.

Phoebe, completely unimpressed by his game, gave a little *blink, blink.*

"Where's Daaaaaadddy?" he tried again.

"Ummm...honey," I said. "Do you...do you think you're hiding from her because you're closing one eye? Because you're not. She can totally see you...so..."

The man just about fell out of his chair laughing at himself. 

"Yeah, I guess she can see me!" he agreed once he'd opened up both his eyes. "I thought I was hiding behind the salsa jar...but I just shifted my vision so that she was hidden by the salsa jar! I..."

We'll never know what else he had to say because we were all too busy laughing at him (with him).

"Maybe that's why half-blinded shrimp reproduce so prolifically!" I said. Then I closed one eye and said in a passionate tone (at least, I said it in a tone passing enough for passionate that it embarrassed my children), "Finally! We're all alone!!"

We spent the rest of our evening closing one eye and pretending that we either couldn't see certain things or couldn't be seen by certain things and...we'll just add this to the list of things that Andrew will never live down.