Leg over leg, as the dog went to Dover

When he came to a stile
Jump! he went over.


Hangman, stay thy hand
Stay it for a while
For I fancy I see my father
Coming over a stile.


Doggy won't bite pig, pig won't go over the stile, and I shan't get home tonight.


Do you have any idea how many years I languished, reading nursery rhymes and fairy tales, until I gave in and looked up the word stile? Never seen one myself, and still kinda think it's silly - why not just make "leaving the gate open" a hanging offense and be done with it?

Lately, I've been reading a lot of jump rope and clapping rhymes

Now, everything I read and remember about clapping games says that, usually, they're a girl thing. Boys either don't know them, or refuse to acknowledge they know them, or only admit they know them when coerced, or (at the very least) refuse to initiate these games.

So I was interested on the boat to see four kids - two girls, two boys - playing a game. The hands were the same as when I used to play "Oh little playmate" as a kid, but they weren't saying anything. Looked like the girls and one of the boys knew it, and they were trying to teach it to the fourth, but he was clumsy and (as the girls said, while refusing to themselves stop and show this kid properly) the other boy was teaching it "too fast", making it hard to see what to do.

This is a random commentary from my life. Gosh I'm tired.

Ana wants me to post about this

We've been playing around on the computer a lot. I've been typing things (a lot of nursery rhymes - I said that the dog jumped and went over when he got to the wall) up, and she's been sounding them out. Then she takes a turn typing. Sometimes she just has fun, sometimes she tries to spell things.

She was going through the alphabet, and I was introducing her to the terminology for the various rows - a is on the homerow, b is on the bottom row, e is on the top row (NOT the real top row, Ana!), backspace gets rid of letters (she already knew that).

She got a little frustrated, though, because she sings "H-I-K-K" first, and even though she had a J there... well...

So she decided she'd go play on Starfall. She deftly opened up a Firefox window from the taskbar, and started to work sounding out Starfall in the address bar.

So she goes sssss - s. She skipped the T (she's been doing that a lot lately) and went s-ar. Sar... hm... Well, we talk a lot about how "o usually makes the ah sound", so she put an o there. (She clearly types with a British accent, all that r-dropping!). F was no problem, then o-says-ah for "all", and an L to round it out. (She can read -all words, but clearly her input and output aren't the same.)

This left us with sofal, which seems not to be inhabited.

So I'm typing this up, and after I'm done we'll go on the real starfall.com site.

Ana may have a few words:

i luv yu

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I have one very good piece of advice from my father.

Ten words:

Never Let The Cops Into Your House Without A Warrant.

In that vein, there's two videos here about talking to the cops: One Two

(Hint: After 50 minutes of talk, the advice can be boiled down to five words - Never Talk To The Cops)

So, next time there's a crime committed in your vicinity (or you commit a crime), save yourself a few thousand dollars in legal fees and just start not talking to the police from the start.

We have a lot of games.

(We actually ordered some more to be delivered to California so we'll have something new to play there!)

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I love my nieces, I don't know if I say that often enough when posting about them. I say it to them, of course, but I don't say it to other people.

Let me say it again - I love my nieces. I love the people they are, and the people they are becoming, and the little babies they used to be.