The oddly bland fruits of his labor

A couple of days ago, Pete brought the materials from an Olympics-inspired day care project in which he was making his own flags. He held one of them up to me and said, "Papa, I worked hard on these flags, and that was like one of your students or one of Mama's students!"

I love that comment--love that he's valuing his own hard work, love that he admires college students for theirs.

After he said it, however, I did notice that the flag in question was a slightly rumpled piece of blank white paper. Does that transform the cute story into an inscrutable parable?

Pete goes coastal

We went to San Francisco a couple of weeks ago. It was a working trip for me, but we all went. When we took a taxi from the airport into the city, Pete saw the bay and said, "Oh, a flood!" Ah, Iowa boy.

Other quotations from San Francisco:

In the hotel room, after seeing a cartoon kid singing cheerfully about going to school, I looked for a way to reinforce any positive feelings Pete has about education and said to him, "Hey, you go to school, too!" Pete gazed lovingly at the TV and replied, "Not in this world."

On seeing murals in the Mission District, many of them violent or sad, one with a prominent crying figure, and having Carolyn explain that they represent the way some people see the world, Pete mused, "If I saw that, I'd cry too."

Pete defines the sublime

from Carolyn

We've been walking on campus with Pete most evenings, and we regularly stop in the art gallery in the JRC. We're big fans of the work in there right now (which is part of the draw), but I'm also curious about Pete's reaction, which, every day, is "I scared [of] art." He doesn't really act scared and I can't tell what would be scaring him. I keep hoping he'll elaborate.