Yesterday, my parents and I took the kids to see Ratatouille, and then we headed to my parents' house to play for a bit before heading home to dinner. The kids did their usual run around the house, laller laller lallering, and while my mom and I compared notes on our most recent weight loss attempts: she's doing the Abs Diet for Women, while I'm on day 7 of a Leslie Sansone Walk Slim Challenge (heh - I love the names of these things...I guess calling something "small portions of natural foods and copious amounts of sweat" isn't a good idea) - what a tangent...this is becoming a miracle of misplaced punctuation, superfluous parenthesis and I think has ceased to make sense entirely. I'm just going to start a new paragraph, and we'll pretend this made sense, okay?

So! The kids were playing, and we were comparing diet tips, and then my oldest came shuffling out onto the patio. She was wearing her new strapless smocked-top swim coverup with tights and her fake crocs. She's been wearing this stupid strapless dress-thing for two straight days, and as a result the elastic needs to be washed back into shape a bit. She kept tugging it up and then jutting her lower lip out, blowing her hair out of her face. I will say it is quite the fetching color of hot pink, but practical? Not so much.

She returned to the house, and then emerged with two pinwheels, each taped to a flat pad made from taped-together popsicle sticks. She handed one to my mom.

"Its a wind-powered cell phone," she explained. My mom gamely played along, while I sat back and pondered how awesome it would be to have a cell phone that charged itself based on how long you talked...gathering strength the more you gab, from the power of your breath. That is a great idea. Hello? Inventors? Get on that.

After Grandma grew tired of that game, my daughter jumped on her old tricycle and began riding around the patio. I looked up and noticed that she had shoved the two wind-powered cell phones into the smocked top of her dress, so that she had two pinwheels jutting up in front of her shoulders. If she leaned back enough while she pedaled, she could get both merrily turning while she whooped and hollered her way around the patio.

Watching her, I told my mom that she is just like my sister sometimes.

"Wooo!" shouted my daughter. "You see 'em spinning?" She rode by, the metallic paper making a thwacking noise, the wheels of the trike squeaking, her body at an awkward angle, a giant grin on her face.

I silently added "and she's just like me."