A few weeks ago, we went up to Storyland for the weekend of Jacob's birthday. We brought along Emma, a friend of Emily's, so that they would play and sort of cancel each other out, leaving us able to focus a little more on Jacob. They played, they frolicked, it was a lovely time to be had by all.

Inevitably, Emma's parents act and speak differently than we do, and of course every family has its own set of rules by which it operates. And apparently Emma had never previously heard of our standing rule about wildlife: "If you catch it, you can keep it." (The codicil to this, by the way, is, "If you can catch it in your mouth, you can have two.")

So while we were at Storyland, the kids discovered the duck pond. And Emma tried so hard to enforce that rule. I even tried to help her get a little closer to the duck (I love that children giggle while yet wholeheartedly believing that you actually would toss them bodily into a duck pond). I'm happy she failed, only because a duck in the minivan for the two-hour drive home would have been unpleasant, I bet.