Lights

I tend to prefer fairly sleek styles without a lot of frills

(except for my socks, which tend to run more towards glow-in-the-dark patterns; I used to wear gaudy earrings, too, but discovered that babies tend to be fascinated by 4 inch long skeletons that dance on your shoulders and little twinkly stars that have battery-powered blinker lights in them, so those were put into storage)

so the kids were astounded that I had anything to do with the purchase of our new dining room light:



I simply pointed out that it does NOT have any little electronic sounds or voices (I hate things that have little electronic voices or music or whatever) (except for maybe in a pair of socks).

In the meantime, we gave the kids permission to dismantle the old chandelier, and discovered that once you take all of the prisms off it looks like a space station for Polly Pocket dolls:



"Hey, it's like Deep Space 9!"

"Nu-huh! Deep Space 9 is a Cardassian design. This obviously isn't Cardassian."

"Okay, so some OTHER Federation space station. Gees."

And the prisms are now some sort of pod the dolls fly around in. I don't quite understand it all. I do realize, though, that I have a massive new mess in the middle of the family room, and we have a deep need for the little Star Trek dolls that are about the size of a Polly Pocket.