July 2 – Daniel: “A long time ago I lost a balloon. I thought it was funny” Me: “I’m so glad you thought it was funny. I thought it was sad.” Daniel: “The reason I thought it was funny is I laughed so hard it made me cry.”

July 3 – Daniel hiding under the covers on our bed: “I went that way. I’m not here. Pa said that.”

July 3 – Tried to talk Daniel into watching some Gilliagan’s Island. “No, I don’t want to. Maybe when I’m 40…  or 7 or 5 or 6.”

July 6 – Daniel playing restaurant: “”They have the wrong kind of corn. It’s not organic. It’s French.”

July 6 – “I learned how to speak in Spanish. See I can count in Spanish. Cinco, mayo, twenty, tango!!”

July 8 – Me: “King David wrote a lot of songs and they have a lot of them in the Bible.” Daniel: “Did he write Jesus Loves Me?”

July 9 – “You! Tickle Pa rather than me.”

July 10 – Daniel was pushing a mini cart at Kroger. I was in a near run behind him. He says, “Why do you keep grabbing things?”

July 10 – Today at lunch: “The peas are yummier than you can imagine.”

July 11 – “Do you never get tired of loving on me?”

July 13 – At Starbucks

July 16 – I love Daniel’s mixed metaphors, especially since I’ve been known to mix a few myself. This morning’s was so cute: “hot as a whistle”.

July 18 – Daniel can always ask some pretty interesting questions, but he was in particularly high form tonight, leaving me mentally exhausted. Topics included naming my maternal lineage as far as I could, how did Adam and Eve live without a refrigerator, do bad people like pretty things in nature, why does Poppy not have Facebook, and are men sad that they can’t have babies. There were so many others I just can’t remember. Somewhere in it he had us pray that God help him not pick at his lips.

July 19 – Daniel had his annual checkup. When we got back from the doctor he promptly called everyone he knew and told them his blood pressure was zero.

July 23 – “When Jesus was a baby was God a grown up everywhere else?”

July 25 – Yesterday Daniel used his gift card from Aunt Christina to buy a light sabre. Despite all of Poppy’s efforts to convince him otherwise, he’s still calling it a light “saver”. My son hasn’t really used it as a sabre, but it has so far been a cell phone, remote control, microphone, vacuum cleaner, weed eater and a giant pen.

July 26 – at Harris Teeter

July 27 – “When I was a lima bean, was all I could say was ‘waa waa’?”

July 28 – Daniel to Papa: “You be the princess. I’m the king.”

July 31 – Daniel talking about his secret spy wrist communicator: “I can talk to people through their TVs. I talk into this and that weather thing pops up on their TV and I talk about the weather.”