Shingles, Power Tools, Cowboys, and Pirates

My kids are at the perfect ages to mix up words and basically do the cutest darned things EVER! Here are a few of our latest:
Cute-ism#1
I'm sitting in the other room putting the binding on a quilt I'm making (yes, folks, that is no typo, I actually crafted something),when I hear Micky gasping and screaming out in fake pain. Then she yells in her 'irritated' voice. "I can't do it! I don't know how anyone does it!"
I answer her with, "What? What is wrong? What can't you do?"
She comes stalking in, "I can't do the shingles."
"The what now?" I ask.
"The shingles," she whines.
"What are the shingles?"
"This." And she goes down into the straddles on the ground.
Whew, I've never heard of anyone upset about not getting the shingles.

Cute-ism #2
I'm watching some t.v., just chillin with my two year old AJ, and Micky comes in with brush and hair dilly-dallies in hand. "Hey mom, want me to fix your hair?" she asks.
"Of course," I say. (because I love having my hair combed)
She climbs up next to me and starts brushing and coifing to her hearts delight. I notice AJ watching and taking it all in. Then he turns to me, "I fix hair mom?"
"Okay!"
He runs into his bedroom and I'm wondering what he could possibly be doing when he runs out with all of his play powertools, a huge smile on his face. "I fix."
He climbs up and starts sawing, hammering, and drilling my head.
Moral of the story: You're not a man's man until you 'fix' your hair with power tools.

Cute-ism #3
I had just picked AJ up from the babysitters and I'm in a hurry to get home, so I'm driving pretty fast. Suddenly I hit a huge pothole and the car bottoms out and scrapes on the pavement. I look in my rearview and see there are no car parts left on the road, so I figure it's all good. I'm worried though because I hear AJ whimpering in the back. To cheer him up, I yell "YEEEE HAAAAAW" as loud as I can.
He covers his ears and says. "Cowboys Yee Haw mom. You no cowboy. You no Yee Haw."

Last One
Over Fall Break Jerry and I took the kids to the new themed restaurant in Orem, Pirate Island. We had a lot of fun, making the menus into pirate hats, getting balloon animals, eating pizza and coconut shrimp, and playing lame arcade games to win enough tickets to buy a tootsie roll. Fast forward about five days.
I'm running late for work (as usual)so I run in and wake up AJ, trying to get him to hurry. He rolls over, stretches, and says something, but I don't catch it.
"Hurry, buddy, get up," I say as I bustle around his room.
He lays there, then says, "I go pirate ship now?"
"Pirate ship?"
"Yeeeeeep." (You have to hear him say this. He never says yeah or yes, it's always yeeeeeep.)
"Did you dream about pirates buddy?"
"Yeeeeeep"
"Were they mean pirates?"
"Nooooooo"
"So you dreamed about nice pirates?"
"Yeeeeeep"
"So you want to go to their pirate ship?"
"Yeeeeeeep, I need more cannie (candy)."

What Chew Talkin' Abou' Dan Brown or My Review of The Lost Symbol

Let me just begin with an excerpt from the book:(if you can't get through it, don't worry I had to skip over half of it myself)
"So tell me, Kate," her brother had asked while she was home on vacation during her sophomore year at Yale. "What are Elis reading these days in theoretical physics?"
Katherine had stood in her family's book-filled library and recited her demanding reading list.
"Impressive," her brother replied. "Einstein, Bohr, and Hawking are modern geniuses. But are you reading anything older?"
Katherine scratched her head. "You mean like...Newton?"
He smiled. "Keep going." At twenty-seven, Peter had already made a name for himself in the academic world, and he and Ketherine had grown to savor this kind of playful intellectual sparring.

What follows after this is a rousing debate with a few words like...entanglement theory, Subatomic research, Dharmakaya, 'at-one-ment', polarity, Kybalion, binary systems, superstring theory, and multidimensional cosmological models.
Hahaha...what fun! I always love these kind of physiological debates about the origin of man with my brother too.

Okay, I'm not saying the book is wordy per-se, but frankly, the book is wordy. I have enjoyed Dan Brown novels in the past and have always felt a little awestruck by the amount of information I learned through reading them. However, subatomic theory is a little over my head, and no one told me I needed to hold a Doctorate degree in order to know all these scientific and religious texts and people it mentions off-hand. I usually feel like a fairly smart individual, but for the first time when reading a novel, I felt like a complete moron.
I started to get bugged by comments like "I am standing in the sublevel basement of the U.S. Capitol Building" or "The room felt like a tomb" from the main character. And comments like "I am perfect" by the 'bad guy' as he stared at himself naked in the mirror.
There were other minor inconsistencies as well. For instance, if you had just been knocked unconsious and drowned could you honestly "run" somewhere right after this? Is it possible to have an appendage cut off, be shaved head to toe, see a loved one die, and still want to explain the inner dimensions of the masonic order in a very casual way, even 'laughing' over the cute way a person doesn't undertand what you are saying? I didn't think so either.
My last complaint has to do with Robert Langdon himself. As far as I know, this book is supposed to have taken place after 'Angels and Demons' and 'Da Vinci Code', yet the main character acts like everything he sees is a 'shock' he just can't believe. Honestly, how many times does he have to be trapped in a deep, dark, tiny space before he just gets over is claustrophia for heavens sake? How many times does he have to see something that was considered legend be true before he just kind of starts to believe in things before he sees them? Langdon really sort of drove me nuts in this story.

All of this being said...I would still recommend this book to other people, and no, its not because I want other people to be miserable. I like the underlying message of the book. I love the idea of 'science' and 'religion' co-existing without wanting to tear each other's eyes out. The information about the Masonic Brotherhood was also very interesting, and I did want to go to the places it mentions that are right in downtown Washington D.C. and see them for myself. There is also a very interesting twist right there at the end that is almost a 'Sixth Sense' kind of moment.

Overall... I give it 3 1/2 stars. Three stars for the things in the paragraph prior to this and a half star for character development and dialogue.

P.S. It took me four times longer to read this than any of the other Dan Brown books, so leave yourself plenty of time if you happen to read this for a book club or something.