Guns and Mocktails

I'm watching the election results roll in after a long day of voting, some election-related activities, and too much togetherness. After we dropped off the Baby at school, I took the Boy and the Girl with me to our new polling place. The parking lot was pretty empty, so I thought we'd timed it well. What I failed to notice was that a bus from a local retirement home was unloading some dedicated senior citizen voters. Now, I hope that I will live long enough to join the ranks of senior citizens one day, but I have to say that they gummed up the works a bit. Slow as Christmas, as the K says.

When we finished voting I was sure to tell the Boy and the Girl that they were "great Americans." To which the Boy responded, "I'm the most American in the family. Because I look the most American." I had to laugh, because, on the one hand he's kind of right. The Boy has dark blonde hair, freckles, blue eyes, and is missing a front tooth. So, at the moment, he does look like the kind of kid pictured in a Norman Rockwell painting. But, no matter, I launched into a big lecture about how no one can "look American" except for the Native Americans. I'm sure they tuned me out before I even opened my mouth to explain.

When we got home from voting, I was doing my usual multitasking (which means I did a lot of things badly) and was not watching the Boy and the Girl very carefully. When I went into the Girl's room to make her bed, I saw that they had been creating some crazy structures out of Dado Cubes. Of course they abandoned the project and left the remains all over the Girl's bedroom floor. Then I saw this sign taped to the wall:

Let me translate: Guns ex Introducing Super Sales! (our address) from November 6th to tenth. Then there's a picture of a gun and the arrow with Below are Sales written above the arrow. So, apparently I am raising two junior arms dealers. At least the sign didn't say, "no background check necessary." I guess someone's been telling them about their second amendment rights.

I am not sure where this fascination with guns came from, but, I'm not entirely surprised. The Girl has long expressed her feeling that the Girl Scout are inferior to the Boy Scouts because "the Girl Scouts just sell cookies, while the Boy Scouts get weapons." I'm not sure she's got the full story on the armed Boy Scouts. And because the Boy doesn't know the difference between toilet paper and paper towels, the thought of a whole bunch of similarly observant fully armed boys seems like an incredibly bad idea. But, the Girl seems to handle firearms pretty handily. Here she is this past summer, getting in some target practice in Maine:

That's not a bad picture. Maybe I should go back to Instagram. Should I worry about any of this? Should I wait until she says that she wants to be a defense contractor when she grows up or gets a "from my cold dead hands" bumper sticker for her scooter?

Moving on, after we picked up the baby at school we decided to make our red, white, and blue mocktail. I saw this through a link on the Dixie Delights blog and we decided to give it a try. So, the idea is that you have fruit punch (we used cran-raspberry juice because that's what I have), blue Gatorade, and diet Sprite. Fill a glass about 1/3 with ice cubes and pour in the juice. Fill the next 1/3 with ice cubes and slowly pour in the Gatorade, finally, fill the last 1/3 with ice and pour in the diet Sprite. It should look like this:

It actually worked pretty well (back pat). The liquids stay separate because they're different densities and the sugar content is different in all three - the juice has the most sugar and the diet Sprite, of course, has the least.

We were pretty proud of ourselves because I warned them to expect a nice shade of lavender.

From the looks of things, I will be going to bed before this election is called for either candidate, which is just fine by me. I'm sure many of you will agree with me that the best part of a vicious election is being finished. Happy Election Night!