Our Clarissa and Mary explains it all

This is a compliation of the funny things Clarissa has said and asked me.
I am also going to start adding stories of Mary's cuteness here.

7/5/11

Clarissa asked me what something was called, while we were at the College for Stephanie to fill out some paper work, and I said "I don't know" she exclaimed "You're the daddy. You're supposed to know anything"..... If only I could get that on tape for later

Clarissa is growing up. She can swim reasonably well without a life jacket and now insists on bathing alone without her younger sister. Mayrann is not happy about the loss of her bathing buddy. She will still bathe with Mary too but for awhile she didn’t want to

6/3/11

Today when Clarissa got up later than usual she said “I slept long. I wanted to finish my dream” When I asked her what her dream was about she said “I forgot”

Clarissa says “I love you one hundred” Something I think she picked up from her Kindergarten Teacher

Clarissa asked me if when she turns six will she have to leave the family. I told her yes she was getting pretty old and it was time for her to move on. She didn’t like the idea. I asked her if she wanted to stay in the family and she said yes. The next day she asked if when she turned seven if she would have to leave. I told her no. She asked if when she turns eight if she would have to leave. I told her no again and then told her she will always be a part of our family. She was happy with that.

1/13/11
Tonight as she was pretending to read her scriptures in bed she said
"The big star was made when Jesus was born. The small ones are for everybody else"

12/10

A game that she and I play involves pretending that we are going to eat the other one's arm. She doesn't let me do it very much but I let he do it to me as she wishes.
I started the idea and she has enjoyed it.
It involves saying:
"I am going to eat your arm"
and then pretending that you are putting condiments and other things on that person's arm.
Such things as ketchup, mustard, relish, pickles, mayo, buns, etc. all the while telling the person what you are putting on their arm to devour with it.
Then whomever is doing it goes through the motions of pretending to eat the arm
by going "nibble nibble, num num num" and all of that.
The person who had their arm eaten off must then put it behind their body or pull it out of their sleeve and put it inside their shirt and it must remain there until (usually Clarissa) helps put it back in place. Its fun and we sometimes take turns.

I saw Clarissa sucking on her thumb. I asked her if it tasted good. She said "yes"
I asked her what it tasted like and she exclaimed "ME!"

My mother, her grandmother has an extensive collection of nativity scenes. One is toylike and she lets the kids play with it. When she wants to play with it she will ask her grandmother "May I play with your Jesus Toy?"

She wanted to see my belly as I was laying on the couch so I oblidged her. She laughed and said she wanted a hairy belly too. When she gets old enough to date I might want her to have one too. Not that I'm too worried about that kind of thing. I am sure we will raise her right... and the bear traps I set outside her window and the guns I will clean on the table in front of whomever she brings over will help with that too.
This same night she told me she wished she was a boy, I asked her why, then she changed her mind. Then she said she wished she had a boy's name so I asked her what name she wanted. She said "I wish my name was Zane. Zane Preston" The next day I found out there is a boy in her class named Zane. Now I wonder why she said this.
When I asked her about being a boy later she said she was glad she was a girl

11/28/10
Today she told me I was the best daddy in the whole world

November 2010
One morning Clarissa asked me, as she has once before, "Daddy, where is your smile?" I think she was trying to cheer me up or something but I said "I don't know" Then she laughed and said "Its right here! I"m sitting on it!" She was hiding it from me she told me. That did help to cheer me up. Then she told me we should play hide and seek with it and that now it was in the "Fridgerator"

One night she told me "Daddy, I love you with my brain"

Clarissa loves to go to school and her Kindergarten teacher (Mrs. Shella Brubaker) loves how expressive and imaginative Clarissa can be.
Clarissa got in trouble for scribbling on a classmate's chair and desk. When told to go to timeout or to no-man's land as it is called in class Clarissa went and covered her face and was upset. When Mrs. Brubaker came to talk to her about what she did and asked Clarissa why she was so upset Clarssia said "I don't want to be in Snowman's land"

Clarissa also likes to play with "Narbles" (marbles) and "Maganets" (Magnets)


Some time ago I introduced the "got you on the bum last game" which is a form of tag that my brother Brian and I played when we were very young. It consists of smacking the other person on the bum when they aren't looking and annoucing "got you on the bum"
Clarissa took this to the next level on her own and one day while we were outside she pointed at a red car and said "Daddy, what's that?" I turned to look, thinking she really wanted to know and thats when she smacked me on my bum. Once I realized what she had done I turned back to look at her in shock but she just laughed and ran away from me. She continued to do this from time to time and would only rarely slip up and let me get her on it.

October 2010.
Clarissa told me she can't wait to grow up so that she can spank everyone's butts.
Maybe we all deserve it.

Often when trying something new for the first time she will exclaim "I love it! Its my favorite!" Sometimes before even trying it or watching it.

She likes to sing and make up her own songs. One she has done is, as far as I can tell, called "I'm a gummi bear" much to the tune of "I'm a Barbie Girl" (for those who remember it)
and it consists of singing "I'm a gummi bear, a gummi gummi bear. I'm a gummi bear, a gummi gummi bear"
Incedentally, and perphaps I shouldn't so readily admit it, her favorite song right now is Lady GaGa's "Pokerface" which she calls "Cocopace"

Her older brother Pearce recieved a remote control car for his birthday. Clarissa loves to play with it and she calls it a "troller car" (controller car)

When we went Trick or Treating this year we told her to go up to a house and say
"Trick or Treat" and that the people would give you candy.
She did as we instructed and afterward exclaimed "IT WORKED!"

I was playing a game that isn't designed for little kids. She asked if she could play it, I told her
it was a "Daddy's game" and she said "Does that mean I need to be older to play it?" I told her
yes. She asked me "How do I get older?" I told her it just happens and be patient. She watched
me for about a half hour and then said "Am I old enough now?"
The next morning she asked me if she was older now and I said yes you are one day older. Again she asked if she was old enough now and my heart warmed. She is quite the charmer.

I was carrying her across my parents front yard this past winter. My dad had the let the horses out to munch on what grass remained. As we walked past the black horse named "Bandit", Clarissa pointed at its posterior and said to me "That horse has a butt!" (who taught her that word?)
A few months ago (early 2010) I was sitting and reading a book. Clarissa comes up to me with a monster puppet on her hand. She holds it towards me and then she says to me in a low monster voice "Hello Kirk" I looked up at her and said "I'm daddy. You're supposed to call me daddy." She moves the monster puppet aside and says in her own voice "No, I call you daddy." she moves the puppet back in front of her and again in the monster voice says "But the monster calls you Kirk" I asked her "Who told you to call me that?" She replied in her own voice again "Thats what mommy calls you"
A couple nights ago (early May 2010) Clarissa was set to go to bed along with her sister (they share a room) but she was very upset and distraught. I came to investigate and told her to calm down and to go to sleep. She sobbingly told me "But daddy!! Mary has two blankets (she held up 2 fingers) but the red one is missing! " She insisted that I go find it and restore it to her proper owner, her sister Mary. My heart melted.
One night as I put her to bed she said she didn't want to go to sleep because of the monsters. I told her that I had gotten rid of them all. She asked me"Did you put them in the garbage?"I had a good laugh and told her that yes I did just that.
Again a couple months ago I was sitting and reading a book or something and she comes up to me "Daddy, I want some ice cream please" I thought about it and said "Riska (her nickname) we don't have any. Its all gone" She put her hand on her hip and in her best exasperated or "duh" tone said "Daddy, go to Wal-Mart"
I couldn't help but laugh
When she saw a rainbow one time she told me that she saw a unicorn climbing it and that must be where it lives.


Mary's Section
Mary has a very different personality than Clarissa sometimes and a very different way of speaking.
I think hers is more akin to "clustering" that is assigning secret, grouped, or even coded meanings to things.
One example is that to her any animal that has four legs that is not a dog or a cat is in fact a cow and that to attempt to correct her is to make her very upset and she will defiantly deny that what you say is true.
The horses that her Grandpa Preston keeps are to her, cows and she is adamant that they are cows and not horses.
If she tells you she wants a cup, she doesn't want something to drink, she instead wants to go play in the bathtub. She says this because when she is in the tub getting washed up she gets to play with a cup and a cup is used to rinse out her hair so by association she says "cup" when she means bathtub.
Because she has watched (repeatedly) a "Barbie" movie where Barbie is a surfer girl that gets turned into a mermaid she has used the phrase (and I do mean phrase in her case) "Barbie Doll" to mean a wide range of things.
During the summer when the girls went swimming they used inflatable whales. Mary called hers a "Barbie Doll" because there was a whale in said Barbie movie.
If she asks for a "Barbie Doll" while inside she isn't asking you for a toy, she is asking you for a drink. A "Capri-Sun" specifically because the ones we had at the time had scenes of the beach on them (sand, beach towels, umbrellas, etc) and by association again she called them "Barbie Dolls" so you can see how this can be frustrating because certain code phrases that she uses that have nothing to do with the item or thing in question but to her that is how she identifies what she wants and goes about requesting them. She becomes very frustrated and upset when a grownup doesn't understand what she wants.


One time, this Christmas time in 2010 I took her with me to check the mail. We have a large Santa Claus on our mailbox. She saw it and said "Look Daddy, a Ho Ho!"

1/12/11
Mary got something on her arm at dinner tonight (ketchup I presume) so she came to tell me she had a "yucky" and when I didn't move fast enough to resolve her issue she decided to take the sleeve of my shirt and try to wipe it off herself. I guess she thought daddy could take care of her problem. One way or another.

I like Laura Ingraham

The title says it all.
Despite what people say about her I still do.

What this guy here says about her seems to be an attempt to discredit her, but to me it only endeers her all the more to me.
There are a couple exceptions, such as what she did in college. But remember she was young and in college and lots of people do dumb things there.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rory-oconnor/laura-ingraham-right-wing_b_106034.html

Laura Ingraham: Right-Wing Radio's High Priestess of Hate
"The following is an excerpt from Shock Jocks: Hate Speech and Talk Radio by Rory O'Connor with Aaron Cutler (AlterNet Books, 2008).
Laura Ingraham is ... different. Not only is Ingraham younger than many other conservative radio personalities (at 45, she's more than a decade from Limbaugh's cohort), and the only female among them, but she also brings to the airwaves a snarky brand of aggressive humor fused with an attack-dog sensibility that she expresses with a chalk-on-gravel voice. Her goal is not to assert her own glory, but to rip apart her enemies, which include everyone from liberals and "elites" to, from time to time, even President George W. Bush and presidential hopeful John McCain. Her style of argumentation is bare-bones simple; in a 1997 piece for Salon.com, Eric Alterman wrote that Ingraham just laughed in response to a position he took on television during the 1996 election. How could he counter that?
Ingraham often uses laughter as a weapon. One of her show's most popular parodies, "But ... Monkey," interposes the sound of a screeching monkey over a sound bite from a political figure. Victims have included Democratic senators Harry Reid and Barbara Boxer as well as conservative gurus like columnist Charles Krauthammer. Other regular segments include "Deep Thought of the Day" and "Lie of the Day." Ingraham also makes great use of pop culture clips (she plays the theme song from the television show "Flipper" when discussing John Kerry), and her production values are generally superb. Like many other successful hosts, she is often very funny, and her rapid-fire pacing and easy banter with her younger male producers (all three are in their early 20s) has more in common with the liberal "Stephanie Miller Show" than the hard-line commentary sometimes heard on conservative talk shows. At a deeper level, however, despite the comedy, Ingraham takes what she does quite seriously.
The rabid nature of her assault against immigration reform is a good example. Ingraham has perhaps been more strongly anti-immigration than any other talk personality except Michael Savage. Her show even features a regular segment called "The Illegal Immigration Sob Story" alert, in which she reads news pieces she feels are biased toward illegal immigrants. When she had White House spokesman Tony Snow on her program, she began by asking him why the Bush administration was dragging its heels on immigration reform. After sarcastically apologizing for interrupting his talking points, she said, "69 percent of Americans, 85 percent of the GOP, 55 percent of the Democrats want the border enforced. Does that affect you guys, or do you guys just blow it off?"
In the two-for-one combination that all too often serves conservative radio well, Ingraham once claimed that the immigration bill was an attempt by the mainstream media to make more people liberals. Anyone who still wonders whether talk radio had an influence on the bill's defeat should look at Ingraham's numbers; with more than 5 million weekly listeners, she is tied with Glenn Beck as the fourth most listened to radio talk show host in America. Alterman wrote that Ingraham's popularity is due to her having "something more important than knowledge or experience. ... She has star quality." She is also fearless: She once confronted CNN host John Roberts for calling her "outspoken," saying, "Do you guys introduce liberal commentators that way?"
She's more aggressive than Limbaugh, more blatant than Hannity, and more rational than Beck or Savage, and although she often supports many of them (erroneously stating, for example, that Limbaugh never claimed the Clintons murdered Vince Foster), she is equally willing to call them out. She walked out of a "Hannity & Colmes" installment after the Don Imus "nappy-headed ho's" controversy was twisted into a discussion of Democratic vices, and once asked on her radio program after an appearance on "The O'Reilly Factor," "Why is Bill O'Reilly afraid of George Soros?" (In the same broadcast, Ingraham accused columnist Helen Thomas of working for Hezbollah, which has been identified by the U.S. government as a terrorist group.)
Ingraham was born and raised among the wealthy in Glastonbury, Conn., one of the state's richest suburbs, although her mother worked as a maid to support the family. She went to Dartmouth University and became the first female editor of the conservative Dartmouth Review, where conservative author Dinesh D'Souza, a former boyfriend, also worked. While there, she secretly sent a reporter with a tape recorder to a campus gay students association meeting; she then outed the students in print and sent tapes of the meetings to the students' parents. In the magazine she called association members "cheerleaders for latent campus sodomites." (In 1997, more than a decade later, she wrote an article in the Washington Post detailing how she had changed her views in light of her brother Curtis' coming out as gay.)
After graduating from Dartmouth, she went to work for the White House as a speechwriter; like her peers, conservative radio talkers Mark Levin and Hugh Hewitt, Ingraham began her professional career as a Reagan employee. She also obtained a law degree from the University of Virginia and clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas. In 1995 she appeared on the cover of the New York Times Magazine -- wearing a friend's hip, leopard-print miniskirt -- to illustrate an article about rising young conservatives. She then became both a regular MSNBC pundit and a commentator on the "CBS Evening News," where she once asked Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres if the United States should bomb Libya or Syria in retaliation for a TWA flight explosion whose cause was unknown. Ingraham argues politics the way lawyers argue cases, as if there can be no possible interpretation other than her own. She is a class-A schmoozer who understands and exploits her verbal gifts to the fullest. Her skill for networking, along with her willingness to go for the jugular, has allowed her to break into the boys' club of conservative radio.
In the late 1990s, she briefly hosted her own MSNBC cable television show, "Watch It!" (17 months and three time slots later, she joked that it should have been called "Watch It Get Canceled!"), and then, in 2001, launched "The Laura Ingraham Show" on radio. Ingraham's particular blend of humor and argument apparently translated more effectively on radio than on television, and the Talk Radio Network now syndicates her show on nearly 325 terrestrial stations (it's also available on Sirius and XM satellite radio). She has survived both a breast cancer scare and a broken wedding engagement, and continues to mock the establishment sardonically for three hours daily.
Ingraham has made more than her share of controversial comments, with frequent guest appearances on television affording her as much prominence as her radio work (for someone whose own television show was relatively short-lived, she spends a tremendous amount of time on other people's programs). She's no Neal Boortz, but she's certainly more outrageous than, say, Hugh Hewitt. In one of her most famous incidents, on Election Day 2006 Ingraham encouraged listeners to jam the phone line of a toll-free Democratic Party service for reporting voting problems. No tangible consequences came of it (the Democrats won anyway), but it did put Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy up in arms.
Perhaps the greatest controversy of Ingraham's career, however, came from comments she made about the Iraq War. In March of 2006, Ingraham went on a six-day tour of Iraq, visiting hospitals, orphanages and Iraqi villages. Upon returning to the United States, she appeared on NBC's "Today Show" to criticize the mainstream American media for its unwillingness to report "the truth" of the Iraq situation. She said that NBC had focused on programming "Where in the World is Matt Lauer?" and that "to do a show from Iraq means to talk to the Iraqi military, to go out with the Iraqi military, to actually have a conversation with the people instead of reporting from hotel balconies about the latest IEDs going off."
Washington Post writer Jonathan Finer later reported that Ingraham "rarely, if ever, spent a moment outside the protection of U.S. forces or a night outside a military base." Finer compared her experience with that of the Iraq-stationed journalists she criticized, "almost all of whom operate without military protection." While the National Review's Tim Graham applauded Ingraham for bringing out the "facts the media self-defense teams ignore," MSNBC host Keith Olbermann said on his show Countdown that Ingraham had dishonored the memory of the 80 American journalists killed and others kidnapped in Iraq, and that her comment "was not only unforgivable of her, it was desperate and it was stupid."
Ingraham's stance on women's issues is divided at best; around the time of Clarence Thomas' Supreme Court appointment, she joined with a conservative group called Independent Women's Forum that formed a committee to attack and discredit Anita Hill's sexual harassment testimony against Thomas. (Independent Women's Forum's other activities included testifying in Congress for defunding the Violence Against Women Act and against affirmative action.) While she has criticized Fox for gratuitous, sexually explicit programming and helped lead a media campaign against the misogynistic rapper Akon, she also co-hosted a three-part PBS special on "the gender wars," which explored "whether the advancement of women in virtually all areas of society can be achieved without a retreat, in some way, on the part of men." One need not guess where Ingraham, a convert to Roman Catholicism, stands on a woman's right to choose.
Among prominent female political figures, Hillary Clinton in particular provokes Ingraham's ire. Her first book, The Hillary Trap, tried hard to make the case that Clinton was actually setting women's rights back by arguing for special status for them. "The complaints of Western feminists look like petty self-absorption when you line them up against human rights abuses in Third World military dictatorships," Ingraham wrote.
Ingraham also argues that a vocal minority -- the "elites" -- is threatening American values, and they should pipe down for the majority's sake. Elites include anti-war demonstrators and university professors ("It's well known that in the 1960s, leftists conquered the academies"). There is also no love lost between Ingraham and Europeans, who she believes fail to understand and appreciate America's love for "God, guns and the death penalty."
Ingraham's third book, Power to the People, was released on Sept. 11, 2007. The patriotic timing was deliberate; the book is partly memoir but is mostly devoted to annihilating what she calls the "pornification" of America, an increasing cultural tendency toward flaunted sexuality and the loss of traditional values. She calls the book "a rallying cry for common sense and good old-fashioned American ideals of patriotism, family, faith and country," one that encourages people to take matters into their own hands. In its first week, the book ranked third on the Amazon.com best-seller list.
"We are the government," Ingraham said in an interview promoting the book. Controlling people by telling them how to think for themselves is a nice piece of demagogic trickery, though hardly original among the conservative bloc that crowds talk radio today. Ingraham has proved to be a master at such trickery -- and like her or not, she's every bit as funny, as appealing and as dangerous as each of her male peers and friends."

Now back to my thoughts. The guy above called her "The Highpriestess of Hate"
but she has adopted a girl from Guatemala.
Does that sound hate inspired?
http://www.prolifeblogs.com/articles/archives/2008/05/laura_ingraham.php
"Laura Ingraham is a radio talk host worth listening to with her sharp insights intot he state of politics, culture and faith. She is an outspoken Roman Catholic and defender of the pro-life movement. Also a survivor of breast cancer. After years of waiting for the Guatemala adoption process - which her listeners did not know of - she is now a mother"

I think that people misunderstand moral outrage and call it "hate"
I am opposed to illegal immigration and people might take that to mean I hate Mexicans. They are wrong.
I am opposed to gay marriage and people might take that to mean I hate homosexuals. They are wrong.
I am opposed to people voting for (or against) someone based solely on the color of their skin and or religious background and people could take that to mean I am full of hate.
Again, they would be wrong.
--Note I'm not done writing this but for the moment I'm out of time.