Grandma teaches beginning shop class. Her students are rapt.

Akiva realizes he does not have the proper skill set to complete the assigned project.

Iris insisted I sew her a Purple People Eater hat.

Soon thereafter, she became a penguin and will no longer wear the hat.

Martin’s everyday hat needed to be washed, so I put the purple one to good use.

Iris was tired.

When the fridge broke for good, we had to move a lot of things out of the way. In case you’re wondering, that was about a week ago now. The new one should be here on Thursday if all goes well. Ho, hum. We’re pretty happy when the weather outside stays in the single digits, but that’s not what this story’s about.

There’d been a slightly vacant spot in the living room that got there when we moved the stuffed chair into the bedroom. That was after Akiva was born. I vetoed the gliding rocker in the bedroom because I didn’t like the texture of the fabric and besides which, the rocker was kinda narrow. Well, what I mean to say is, Akiva had to move out of the bed because even at just a few weeks he was a big baby and growing so fast that if you lay down too close to him at night he might grow over you by morning, which was an uncomfortable fact. But he couldn’t go into the little side-car bed we had by our bed, because that’s where Iris slept when she came in at night. So we had to relocate Iris. We had a nice little bed for Iris, but the only other location in the room was taken up by my “office,” which is what the room once was, before these children started happening and whatnot. But we couldn’t get the office out of the room until we built a shed. Because the only feasible place in the house to put an office was the corner where we stored all the bicycles. So Martin & the Fourniers built a shed and the Shanahans helped, too. The bicycles and a lot of other loot left the house. The office went downstairs, the single bed came home from Quebec to occupy the spot where the office once was in what had become the main bedroom, Akiva occasionally moved from our bed into the side-car bed, and the stuffed chair came in from the living room to occupy the corner between the single bed and the closet. Supposedly I was supposed to nurse the baby there; mostly it’s covered in clean diapers. Anyhow. All this musical house-ness left a small vacant spot in the corner of the living room that was quickly filled by Akiva’s high chair. This was not convenient, as the high chair had to be carried across the living room and into the kitchen any time I wanted to use it. And by “living room” what I mean to say is “upstairs living space generally covered with toys.” But when the fridge broke for good, we had to move a bunch of stuff to get behind it and listen to the last dying gasps of the compressor clicking feebly in it’s dark corner. One of the things we had to move was the easel. Because it’s rather a pain-in-the-butt to move a high-chair above a sea of toys, the chair had pretty much just remained in its in-the-way place in the kitchen ever since Akiva started eating solid food in a manner like John Henry would have eaten just after he beat the steam shovel, if he hadn’t laid down and died first. So because the high chair wasn’t in its proper place in the corner of the living room, I put the easel there. And that’s how Iris’ easel ended up in the corner of the living room. Which is what this story’s really all about.

As it turns out, the light in that corner of the living room is just delicious. Iris painted an elevator. I think it was a really hot elivator. Maybe it went all the way to the sun. Probably not.