For Miss Maya

Better late than never...

Project Conceal and Discard:

Today it backfired. In addition to his electric toothbrush (which was temporarily taken away a couple months ago due to misuse), Jacob has a manual toothbrush with a Crayola theme. They came as a two pack. He used Crayola toothbrush #1 for a couple months before I decided it was appropriately worn down and I replaced it with Crayola toothbrush #2. Jacob was pleased to have this new crayon toothbrush, but I guess he assumed his former crayon toothbrush was just gonna hang out here forever. I hid it, of course, in the spot I'm using these days (tucked away in that corner on the counter) and let the issue sit for about a week. Then a couple days ago, in a fit of cleaning, I threw it out.

Boy was that dumb.

Today, the day the garbage goes out, Jacob opened the toothbrush holder he had apparently believed the old toothbrush was waiting in and discovered it was empty. He calmly asked me where it was, and since I knew there was no way around it, I told him I threw it out. I'll tell you, the theatrics that ensued could rival any teenage drama queen.

I actually felt really bad because I should have known better. I should have known because that's the sort of thing I am known to freak out about, and Jacob is me in miniature form. I should have known a week was not long enough. Items need at least, at least, a month before a decision can be made as to what their fate will be. And even then it would not be entirely safe because, as any parent knows, these kids have really, really good memories. I told Jacob I was sorry, and I really was. I was pissed he waited until garbage day to discover it because I am not beyond going through the big can, tearing through bags, touching old snot and coffee grounds. I totally would have done that if it hadn't been picked up just a mere two hours prior.

I was eventually able to draw his attention elsewhere, but it's going to come up again and when it does I'm sure I'll be on a major hunt to find another double pack of Crayola-themed toothbrushes.

They can't tell us apart

I kind of have a very young voice and throughout my entire adult life I've been answering the phone to telemarketers asking to speak with my mother or father. So it wasn't surprising tonight when the lady from the American Legion called.

I've had this bad headache for a few days so I was resting on the couch while Zach was getting ready to leave for his yoga class. I guess the phone rang sometime during this period but I couldn't hear it over the noise in my head so Jacob answered it (as he often does these days). When I turned over and opened my eyes to say goodbye to Zach as he was walking out the door, Jacob was there with the phone to my face. I think I yelled something like, "Bye sweetie, be careful driving!" right into the phone. Oops. So I answered the call and the poor old lady on the other end asked me if she could talk to my daddy.

"uh...haha...no."
"Is your daddy there?"
"No."
"Well is there a veteran at your house?"
"No, but you are speaking with an adult (alerting her to the idea that she could stop talking to me like I was a five year old)."
"OK then, is Zach (pronounced like hatch with a Z) there?"
"Who??"
"ZaCH" she emphasized the 'ch' sound again
"You mean Zach? (as in 'ck')"
"Well, yes, ok."
"No, he's not."
"OK then let me tell you a little about the American Legion-"
"Ma'am? I'm kind of in the middle of something and I need to get going."
"OK, well, fine then." CLICK

Zach was waiting at the door to hear the outcome. He laughed and told me Jacob had been talking to the lady for like five minutes and he just kept repeating his name to her more clearly. Poor lady. But seriously, that's the way it goes all the time. If I answer the phone people get the idea that I'm an adult. But if Jacob answers it first and then hands it off to me at some point, they can't tell the phone has switched ownership. Even people I know really well in real life will respond to my hellos with a "Can you put your mommy on the phone?"

Yeah, so we went to see Bob

We didn't tell Jacob ahead of time that we were going there. On Saturday we had a birthday party to go to which sort of acted as the decoy. On Sunday we 'headed home' but then 'made a stop' at the museum and went in. Jacob still didn't know anything about the Bob exhibit. Then we approached it and the excitement was almost too much for Jacob to bear. He flitted about from station to station, making bee lines and then cutting them short to cut a sharp turn in a completely different direction. It reminded me of my brother's rat terrier on a car ride.

So here are the pictures if you're interested. If you have private access to my flickr photos you can see all 50 of them. Yippee.

MasterCard Contender?

Round trip drive in the van: 12 hours






Museum admission for 2 adults and 1 child: $22






3 tanks of gas: $135






Seeing your son live out his lifelong dream:

Priceless.

In Waiting:

A while back I posted about the things I'm not allowed to throw out. We have so much crap laying around and all of it is so sentimental to a four year old, so occasionally I take to hiding little things for a few weeks to make sure they will be forgotten before I get rid of them. This is a tough job for someone who is a recovering hoard-aholic, but someone's got to do it. Currently in waiting are the following:

Looks innocent enough, right?

Ahh...but shift the crock to the left,
the knife block to the right...

Item number one: Dysfunctional Halloween
piece-o-crap toy.

Item(s) number two: Old plastic spoons which
Jacob brought home from my mother's house
after his other ones mysteriously disappeared.

Ugly water absorbing seahorse that expands to
five times its size. We used it, it expanded, we
took it out and it shrunk back. Youthful logic
dictates we now must KEEP IT FOREVER. My
logic: Hide it long enough to be forgotten like the
orange fish Mango ate the last round of "Things I'm
not allowed to get rid of."

Two can play that game

"Mommy! They will fire me and I'll lose my job if you keep making me go to all these playgroups! I can't go to playgroups anymore because I have to go to job sites. I won't have a job anymore."

"Jacob, there might be someone at the playgroup who can help me fix my computer, so if you don't come with me right now, then you won't be able to check your e-mail to find out when and where the jobs are to begin with, and then, you will surely be fired for not showing up!"

And that was the rationale that finally got him out the door today...

The Here and Now

I just went upstairs to get something and saw Jacob sitting up in bed, asleep. How can I not love this life when each day the two boys I share it with provide me with many, many opportunities to laugh at them? Come to think of it, most of the funny stuff happens during the sleeping hours. Man, I would be missing some serious comedy if I wasn't a chronic insomniac.

Sunday we forced ourselves out of the house and took a little hike/walk (I guess one's level of fitness would determine the hike-to-walk ratio) with the dogs on a nature trail that runs through the woods behind the college. After that we brought the dogs into the college and headed to the weight room to work out. Something funny must have happened then because I remember noting to myself that I wanted to write about it. But now it's simply morphed into a boring account of 'how we spent our weekend'. Blah.

Monday we went to story hour at the library where we made a craft.
Tuesday we went to a playgroup where we made a craft.
Wednesday we went to the children's museum for a new class my mom signed us up for. We made a craft. Jacob finally likes making crafts, but I never complained when he didn't because I have trouble deciding what to do with crafts that Jacob makes, aka, 'masterpieces'. I can't just throw them out, but I can't keep them all forever. My two methods for getting rid of them are giving them away to grandparents and 'forgetting' to pick them up when they fall on the floor, where Mango will find them and eat them.

Mango is something else altogether lately. All day long she sits by the back door just staring out into the backyard. Eventually she'll see The Squirrel and go nuts. If Zach lets her out he'll say, "Go get 'em, Mango! Catch that squirrel!" And if I let her out, I call out a warning to the squirrel first and then as Mango is chasing it, I yell for the squirrel to run. That squirrel runs so fast up the tree, Mango doesn't even have a chance. In the past few days though, she barks to go out at odd times when I don't even see any rodents. I'll open the door and she goes tearing out in the direction of the tree that is the safe haven of all tree-climbing animals but there's nothing racing up it. I think she's depressed about never catching it and has started to play a game in her head where she actually walks away with the prize in hand - or clenched in her jaw.

Also this week Zach is getting over a really bad case of the flu. I was really scared I was going to get it because he had the same thing last year and then I got it. And I wasn't particularly sympathetic to Zach this time around because I was just coming off of my own illness and no one took care of me then.

Anyway, everytime Zach coughs, Jacob looks at him in horror and prepares to run away. This is because last week when Zach was first getting sick, he had come home from work early because he puked in the bathroom. At the dinner table that night I told Jacob Daddy had thrown up at work. Jacob just thought this was the funniest thing, and I thought it was funny too because I was picturing the bathroom closest to his new office (which is now in a building where they have classes) and the vent in the bottom of the door, wondering if the students walking by could actually hear him puking the bathroom. We laughed a little bit too long to be really sympathetic, and now Jacob just keeps waiting for him to puke again. "Are you gonna frow up?!" he asks. I think he wants to see Zach puke. I kind of want Zach to toss his cookies just to see Jacob's reaction - even though that means I'll have to clean it up.

Which brings me to the highlight of today: I clipped the rabbits' nails, and while I was doing that, I noticed that Nutmeg needed his 'glands' cleaned out. So I did that too. And if you don't know what that means, believe me, you're better off.

This Life

Saturday night after Jacob went to bed - yes, there is an 'after Jacob went to bed' in our current lives - Zach agreed to go through some photos I've been bugging him to get to for a few months. It drives me crazy me that something in our house is not organized, and mostly I wanted the cooler back that he had been using to store them for the past few years. I have no idea why he choose a picnic-variety cooler to store his photos in, but now it belongs to the kitchen again.

I had actually finally gone through the photos myself about a month ago because, well, what's his is mine (but not vice versa). After a while though it sort of felt like an intrusion. Most of the photos were from his college years, which is pre-Me because I was too busy being in middle school. I've always been quite jealous of Zach's college years because his were full of partying and good times with the others runners. I didn't have college years like that because all but the first year of college involved driving home to see Zach on most weekends. In a strange way I feel like that should give me leverage in our current relationship.

But anyway, there I was looking over his pictures of all the good times - the old girlfriend, the keg stands, the travel races - and I suddenly felt like an outsider. Like the person I'm married to is not the person in those pictures. I can never know that person. Weird. Well I have my own secrets from college that will never show up in a picture, so I guess we are kind of even.

We eventually got to the post-college running years, the years Zach spent as a top runner in our area. Sometimes I forget that even happened. I tagged along on the road trips to all the different races (on my weekends home from college), I started running myself, and I even roller-bladed beside him for 23 miles for his last long run the weekend before a marathon. We had a thing and it was cool. We both miss that time. Now we are parents and live in a house with bills to pay and dinner to cook, and unending laundry, all of which causes us to be at each others' throats 24/7. We have a great life but it's so sad to have to give up what keeps you going for a different kind of happy.

Zach told me, "It all feels like a dream, like it never really happened." And that's exactly the way I feel about those precious college years when I was constantly on the brink of having freedom. But now the photos are all tucked safely away in that album purchased half a dozen years ago, and only the echoes of distant college memories can be heard bouncing around the cooler that's back in my kitchen. And I don't regret exchanging one life for another.

Saturday Night

Today was slow. We didn't get anything done, but we had a lot of fun with Jacob. Zach and I took him to a local children's museum that he got a membership to for his birthday. Without the membership we would have spent $18 on the three of us. I am way too cheap for that, so it's a good thing we've got the membership now. After letting Jacob run around exploring and touching all kinds of live creatures for an hour, we left to get some essentials at Target.

I had taken all these portraits of Jacob this year instead of going to Sears and paying $100. I finally ordered prints and we were picking them up today. I don't know what happened between the photo center and the check-out aisle, but the pictures were gone. They must have dropped out of the cart somewhere, and even a trip back to Target didn't yield any pictures. Boooo.

But anyway, at Target Jacob saw a Bob the Builder video like three aisles away. I don't know how he saw it, he must have kid radar. So we headed over to take a peek. Jacob was looking over a copy of it and I noticed on my that this video features a new character, 'R-Vee'. We weren't going to get it because we just don't do things like that, make unplanned purchases, but the R-Vee thing kind of sold us on it because of our recent RV experience. Jacob saw me put my copy back and started to set up his 'resistance mode'. You know what I mean, every kid has one of their very own perfected methods. So we told him that it's ok, he didn't have to cry, we were buying it. Well Jacob just didn't know what to do with that. He stopped the contortions of his face and the whining and just kind of stared at us like, "What do you mean I can have it? I do not understand. Is this a trick?"

The funny thing is Zach and I were just as excited about the video as Jacob was. We talked about what we'd do when we got home and then how after all the stuff was out of the way we could sit down on the couch to watch Scrambler to the Rescue. So this is our Saturday night: The three of us snuggled on the couch with Bob the Builder, popcorn, and plenty of blankets. It couldn't be more perfect.

Procrastinator's Luck?

Jacob told me months ago that he wanted to be Spud for Halloween. I started planning early in September, but they don't exactly sell Spud costumes and some of the elements of the costume were more difficult than others. I guess I just need the pressure of a deadline anyway. At midnight (the time I finished it), as the day was turning over into Halloween, the costume looked pretty crappy and I thought people would laugh at us, but with a fresh eye in the morning I decided it didn't look half-bad. I got lots of compliments on it at the party on Wednesday; I don't know how sincere they were, but I was pretty proud of the job. At some of the houses later on while we were trick-or-treating, the families with sons knew who he was right away. The families with girls just nodded their heads and said, "Uh-huh, that's nice."



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